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Guest Post: Global Reality - Surplus Of Labor, Scarcity Of Paid Work
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
Global Reality: Surplus Of Labor, Scarcity Of Paid Work
The industries that are increasing productivity do so by eliminating entire industries and entire job categories.
The global economy is facing a structural surplus of labor and a scarcity of paid work. Here is the critical backdrop for the global recession that is unfolding and the stated desire of central banks and states everywhere for "economic growth": most of the so-called "growth" since the 2008 global financial meltdown was funded by sovereign debt and "free money" spun by central banks, not organic growth based on rising earned incomes.
Take away the speculation dependent on "free money" and the global stimulus dependent on massive quantities of fresh debt, and how much "growth" would be left?
What policy makers and pundits dare not admit is that the global economy is entering the "end of paid work" foreseen by Jeremy Rifkin. I have covered this topic in depth many times, starting with End of Work, End of Affluence (December 5, 2008).
The industries that are rapidly increasing productivity and profits are doing so by eliminating jobs and the need for labor. The Web is chewing up industry after industry, wiping out entire sectors that once supported hundreds of thousands of jobs while creating a few thousand new jobs that require high-level skills and mobility.
Robotics are replacing factory labor throughout the world--yes, even in "low-wage" China. When I first toured a variety of factories in China in 2000, many were little more than simple warehouses filled with long tables where workers assembled and packaged cheap light fixtures, etc. by hand. Others had robotic machines stamping out circuit boards that were then hand-assembled into monitors, etc.
The defect rate was high in these settings. Machines are increasingly replacing hand labor in China. Much is made of "labor shortages" in certain southern cities, but what that actually means is a shortage of young workers (overwhelmingly preferred over older workers by manufacturers) willing to work for low wages.
Machines don't go on strike, their wages don't rise by government mandate, they don't call in sick, and they don't need supervision. In effect, workers are replaced by capital invested in robotics and software.
China is already built out. Airports, railway stations, rail lines, subways, highways, stadiums, giant malls, tens of millions of flats--they're already over-built. Nobody dare admit it, but China is already to the point that new construction is either "bridges to nowhere" i.e. redundant or marginal and only funded as a jobs program, or replacement of buildings that are often less than 25 years old, or speculative buildings that are mostly empty and will stay that way.
The Internet has enabled enormous reductions of labor input. A mere 15 years ago when I first learned HTML (1997), you had to code your own site or learn some fairly sophisticated website creation/management software packages, and you needed to set up a server or pay a host. Now anyone can set up a Blogspot or equivalent blog for free in a few minutes with few (if any) technical skills, and the site is free.
A staggering range of complex business services are available for low cost, enabling one person to perform work that a mere 15 years ago required a half-dozen people. Everyone talks about offshoring as the primary cause of jobs being scarce in the U.S., but the much larger force is technology in the form of Web-enabled software.
A mere decade ago publishing a book was a time-consuming, costly venture that required substantial capital and labor inputs. Now it takes less than an hour to publish a book on Kindle and the cost is zero other than the hour of labor. Not only that, but the cost of distributing that book is also near-zero, and the cost to the consumer is a fraction of the cost of print books a decade ago.
That is simply one example of many. Here's another: a tax preparation program that costs $60 can (for the common conventional tax situations) typically replace an accountant that charged $500 or more.
The other trend is the cost of labor in the developed West is rising as systemic friction adds cost without adding productivity. Workers in the U.S. only see their wages stagnate, but their employers see total labor costs rising as healthcare costs rise year after year. In effect, the U.S. pays an 8% VAT tax to support a bloated, paperwork-pushing, inefficient and fraud-laced healthcare system that costs twice as much as a percentage of GDP as other advanced democracies.
A worker making $60,000 a year costs the employer $90,000 a year. No wonder employers are shifting to contract labor (no exposure to skyrocketing healthcare) and part-time flex-labor. No wonder many entrepreneurs are selling their high-overhead businesses and becoming flexible, low-cost one-person enterprises.
When it costs a lot to hire someone, the risk of hiring them rises, too. That is the unspoken context of high-cost economies. The productivity increases enabled by web-based software and services eliminate entire swaths of labor--not for this season or this business cycle, but forever.
If we train 30 million software engineers, will that create 30 million paid positions for these skills? No, it won't. The dynamics of creating jobs is not the same as that of training people to do a job.
I will write more about these trends in the coming days.
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Where you would prefer that we all spend our lives digging and filling in ditches.
Go smash some machines, Luddite.
What, you think the machines are going to use all the goods they produce? A computer program is going to waltz about in a tophat and monocle laughing at all the humans starving in the streets? Will the next generation of iPads stuff themselves with with the food that people can't afford to buy because it is produced in such abundance that no human can afford it (lol).
Come on, this is super basic supply and demand. Sure, some people can suffer from a loss of job when they are replaced with a machine, but we have a huge system of social support for that. If production comes so easily, then those goods will be very cheap, and those people can afford it with their unemployment.
People have this weird idea that money is the same thing as goods or capital, rather than a claim on goods or capital. If no-one has any money, then supply and demand kicks in and everything gets cheaper, until it costs nothing. If these machines are capable of providing an infinite bounty at that price, then that is what will happen. That is how economics works. I'm sorry if reality and the concept of infinite prosperity offends you.
What I am saying is that "value" has "evolved" between human beings over time as an agreement of trade between themselves. Whether it is trading 2 coconuts for 1 fish on your theoretical island or exchanging your labor for fantasy digits in some banksters computer it is a relative concensus between human beings. What you are saying is that value is an absolute determined by production and that production of an unlimited amount of goods by machines will add unlimited value to the human race.
What I am doing is making observations of history, what you are doing is assuming that machines will add value to society by eliminating the human function of creating a produced good. Your assumption is conjecture, it is no better than a thousand banksters selling snake oil debt to individuals and governments on the expectation that the future will be much, much bigger and therefore service the current excessive largesse.
I am basing my thinking on observation of past fact you are basing your thinking on conjecture.
Conjecture? I guess the industrial revolution only made a few robber barons and made everyone else poorer than they were, and that is how we have a middle class now.
Magical thinking. Classic component of Luddite theory.
You claim you are making observations based on past fact, but I have NEVER heard of an instance were increases in production of ANY good (except for materials of war) did any harm. No, any nation that increases their production increases their wealth. The correlation is 1:1. You can hand wave all you like, but it won't change the fundamentals of supply and demand.
No, what you are doing is abusing the argument by putting it in terms of absolutes. TM never says this. He does say that increases in production add value to an economy- big difference. That value is relative, subject to marginal utility.
Even machines are replaced by better machines.
Which history you are observing is never provided. You assume some unknown story of history as if it is the same for everybody. You need specifics please. Whereas, TM has provided a reference point (the industrial age) that we can work with. From this reference point, his statements have a basis in fact, although that fact may be challenged.
You are the one using conjecture. You provide no reference point nor citation.
Your observations are rather narrow.Specialization in a given field does not insure value- having something that someone else is willing to give value for does. As any entreprenuer, if the market for your special value changes, you must adjust if you want to receive more value.
Worse, it ignores value that is not created by labor. Whether by intellectual property, resource recovery or the organization of labor for some end.
People have always created machinery that has put people out of work. Yet, abundance continues to form where productivity is rewarded.
Abundance does not form. Abundance is tapped.
And just exactly what natural resource was "tapped" that resulted in today's 1.3 billion Chinese citizens?
Or are you saying that this same number of Chinese citizens has always existed?
Or are you, as usual, saying two (or more) contradictory things at the same time, like a gibbering roadside-shitting baboon-man?
On the side of the road where AnAnonymous lives, abundance is crapped.
Labor inputs shift from tedious low skill assembly jobs that are replaced by machines to higher skilled robotics manufacturing jobs. The bottlenecks occur with labor re-education/ relocation and with capital expenditures in an unfriedly business climate to stunt the transition to higher value labor inputs and wages.
Malinvestment by fiat printing/ high taxes and regulation distorts the mechanism by which the market would adjust these static inefficiencies to higher net productions of real wealth from both robotic assembly and the subsequent industry to build/support those robotics.
Low tech assembly jobs become high tech robotics build/support jobs in the same way farriers and blacksmiths became auto mechanics with the advent of cars in place of horses.
Austrian economics accounts for these transitions in tech because in the end it is people that move the markets and not the reverse construct of central planning.
Pretty basic stuff if you take the time to read it.
You start with a premise that is unfounded since 'tedious' is purely subjective. Tedious to whom? If there are individuals willing to do the work, perhaps even find it rewarding then you need to check which perspective this is coming from. I'll give you a clue, it ain't the working laborer. It's the Captains of Industry who write a huge portion of the literature to allow for justification of cruelty and exploitation as has been accelerating since the industrial revolution.
You're correct to call it basic as in synonymous with essential. Essential it isn't, maybe forceful but only for those who are poor reasoners. Like tmosley you need to find new literature.
I'm currently working a job many people would find "tedious." I personally find it dull, but not tedious. It permits me ample time to exercise my brain recreationally while I work.
Most people are more than happy to do "tedious" work. They don't derive a lot of satisfaction from the basic essentials of surviving, but hey, that's our condition.
So why aren't you out smashing cotton gins to provide work for your fellow man? Greedy asshole. If only we didn't have any machines, we would all have jobs, and jobs provide the same amount of income, no matter the amount of capital leverage involved, so a world without machines is by default ultra-wealthy, full of happy, healthy people who live to the ripe old age of 19.
banks wants to live in a cave. He might pull some cruel and exploitive tricks to get the bear out of there first.
The indoctrination is strong with this character.
Still skills going down for all laborers all the way, quality goods being made abundant by cheap replacements, crafts reduced to production output residue...
Some welath or value is derived from from human labor, but not all value. Machines cannot replace the imagination or problem solving, nor resources.
Machines have always increased efficiency, bringing down unit costs and changing values. People have always found new labors to commence and be paid for.
appreciate the post tmosley, but I disagree about "that", what you describe is obviously a major factor however there are others. Consider the stat another poster above posted above about 75% of the population being agrarian in 1870 and its only 3% today. Humanity has lost touch, we have lost touch with manufacturing, with the land, we have lost touch spiritually and instinctively. If everybody was living off the land and had healthy instincts, we'd just let Timmay and the Bernank go hungry until they started acting reasonable again, printing money or no printing money.
I don't give one whit about spirituality or "losing touch" with anything other than reality. The reality of the situation is that we have an economic depression that is clearly caused 100% by central bank strategy, and we are blaming the results on the only thing that has kept us from starvation--the technology that has improved our productivity so much that we can support a government that spends more than 40% of GDP, much of it on the salaries of people who prevent productive people from being productive. We are so productive thanks to these technological advances that 10% of us produce enough for everyone else to live comfortably even as the other 90% do little more than busywork, or just get in the way of the productive people.
Honestly, if you want to get back in touch with the land, go buy a farm and try to work it. After you have broken your back at it, be thankful that the shelves are full thanks to the productive class, and get pissed at those assholes who hold them back while producing nothing of value.
I agree with most of your post, I just don't believe it comes down to any one single thing or issue, the causes are deep. Consider that productive people can still sell their ideas and labour with or without fiat money. The central bankers only have control of it because we allow them to have it, because we're captivated and prisoner to it. If every single human being saw money as I think you do, as a means of exchange and or savings, money could be whatever we decided it to be. If one currency was being mis-managed, we'd very quickly adapt another, all the technology in the world can't save a population that is beholden to one currency (usd).
To put it another way, we're part of the problem because we have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by these smooth talking suit wearing banksters for generation after generation and after generation and very few people outside of ZH have caught on to the fact that these guys just print some paper and then charge us interest for the right to use it. We fall for it every generation and the paybacks that come with it are getting deadlier and deadlier.
You might want to consider legal tender laws and the effects they have on exchange alternatives.
Humanity has lost touch and so have some long time long appreciated posters that are still hooked on to progress of some sort, what seems to be increasingly outdated.
The rules of the original game have long been changed.
the problem is close to everyone is a debt slave, needing fiat to pay off the debts
or
they are a serf who must pay the locale taxes to keep their property
reducing costs of living isnt enough, we have to hook onto the spigot somehow to get the freshly printed paper
That is true, but that has, again, been caused by the bankers and the politicians, NOT by the increases in productivity!
No-one seems to understand that without these increases in productivity, our standard of living would have fallen through the floor, and we would be looking enviously at nations in Central Africa for their reletively high standards of living.
Only if the productivity gains are equally distributed ... if they are distributed only to the owners of the means of production (;) and the workers are just left with no job ... well ...
Look at a chart of worker pay and efficiency. It was a nearly 1:1 correlation until we went off the gold standard, when it promptly stopped rising. Clearly it is the fault of the increase of efficiency.
The problem is that Nixon took the US off the gold standard at the exact same time something else happened ... peak US oil.
So, more expensive oil caused wages to break from productivity gains, rather than simply increasing prices?
Cart before horse.
Please show the relationship between the two. This will be great.
You might want to consider the effects of unbacked fiat currency and credit creation after 1971, the use of the petro dollar and dollar inflation over the 40 year period.
Why would producrtivity gains be equally distributed? Are the risks of production equally distributed?
If the elites keep all the gains, who buys and uses the products?
Labor costs are subject to laws of supply and demand just like any other input. Your brain seems to be asphixiated by socialism.
Remember, all producers are consumers. If markets are allowed to diminish in variety, the Elites suffer as well. All the money in the world will not buy you water in a desert. (of course, if there is any, you will have first dibs)
They don't need to be ... but if they are not then with increasing automation the value of labour will keep dropping (while natural resource limits ensure costs can not not keep dropping).
As for variety ... they will sponsor an artisan class big enough to supply them, it's what they have always done.
Please provide an example. Automation has been increasing for over two hundred years. Wages increased during this timeframe until 1971. Automation is not the problem.
If you wish to make the argument that increased efficiencies in production created a huge population increase that has flooded the labor market and globalization has allowed producers to make use of it- then I will give you a gold star.
Sponsor an artisan class? They already have, but it will be a little difficult if the barbarians are at the gates, so to speak. That is the purpose of the welfare state.
I don't think automation is a problem, I think natural resource limits on growth is a problem with our current economic system and population growth ... it has introduced a deflationary bias, a bias we have only countered with debt.
Surplus of labor, scarcity of work. Put people to work killing people. The problem solves itself.
isnt that the plan? DHS didnt order 450 million rounds of hollowpoint ammo to shoot paper targets
Waffen
DHS didnt order 450 million rounds of hollowpoint ammo to shoot paper targets
Dont forget the 175 million rounds of 5.56.
Vests are available for sale to anyone (except felons,or where their illegal in your state)who wants them online to stop .40cal, easily,any handgun rd up to .44 mag. At reasonable prices.
5.56 is a new game, and vests to stop those are not as easy to come by.Nor as inexpensive.
Anyone know WHAT all the branches are, that make up the DHS?.That contract is for five years.....................in that light thats not a lot(as a lot will be used for training).
They are preparing for what may be coming when the ball drops, and are preparing for civil war,bringing in foreign troops and training them to do the dirty work.
Derr Hans will have no issues bustin a cap in Henry.
I wanna know where our military comes down on illegally issued orders.................tough to shoot Dad, or a bro, sister,or watch Hanns do it also.
Sooner or later they will have to make a choice of what side they are on..............the Constitution, and the Oaths they swore, or go with the flow.
Unlike most in our .gub, most of them are honorable, and believe in what they swore to.
Hope and pray to God it does not come to this,because there will NO winner.
The vast majority of the U.S. military will not think twice before opening fire on U.S. citizens. It is a myth that they would refuse such orders as "illegal." And history has demonstrated dozens of examples where the U.S. military has fired on U.S. citizens.
Hope is not a strategy. Your plan is to hope that they won't blow up your house with an aerial death drone. The plan of the elite is to do exactly that should you oppose their will.
My money's on the elite and their overwhelmingly powerful police state and military. Stay long fascism.
I keep hearing about DHS and their ammo order and I smile.
Legions of my finest rednecks await then in the tractless wilds of flyover country.
"If we train 30 million software engineers, will that create 30 million paid positions for these skills?"
Answer: No because the goal of the 30 million software engineers will be to design software/systems that will eventually put most of them out of work. That is the unstated goal of a technologically based economy.
Same with professions like engineering as for decades engineers strived to develop standards and codes that replaced their professional judgment and skill. Engineers now do not do engineering designers do engineering using software. An engineer then only has liability (in form). Same thing will happen to the medical industry and every other "profession" out there.
LOL, so true.
Prostitutes will still do their clients though. You are forgetting the service industry. Also, leisure! Let them play golf.
I can only speak from experience in the non-professional sector: standards are dropping fast and furious, along with the "barriers of entry" . Some chick picked up some hay and feed for her horses the other day and suggested to me to waive the balance and insisted of making up in kind...she did not come back on the day specified but showed up the day after.
Should have taken the cash. :-)
Kind of like our exports. About all we actually send to other countries is the technology they use to put us out of business faster.
Sure, because all those engineers will only create software that eliminates their positions. None will produce new software that will create new opportunities. Perhaps there are just too many software engineers? Maybe they need to become mechanical engineers?
Learning a skill is not a guarantee of a position. It has NEVER been a gurantee of a position. There is a whole generation that has grown up thinking things would be a worker heaven forever. The best worker gets the job (or best connected).
The technological based economy has no idea what its' goal is beyond making a profit. It is the goal of all industries that are able to sustain themselves.
A worker heaven is a sign things are going right; you think that it is an aberration that must not be allowed to rise again. The balances and guarantees can be restored by voluntary means, or the government will restore it in a very painful and brutish manner. A lot of us would prefer the voluntary means, but you're part of why it is not likely to go that direction.
The "technological based economy" you speak of has taken a step backward with its sociopathic devotion to sacrifice balance for profit - much like the foolish practice of eating one's seed corn.
Ample workforce leads to lower and lower wages. Cheaper and cheaper labor. People have to eat.
Slave labor in abundance for the globalist!
Want a scientist with a PhD? So many to choose from. One from the US, expensive, another from India, even cheaper, China real cheap.
A flood of guest workers for them to compete with US top students. Drive down wages and increased profits. Get used to it!
Small businesses are where all new jobs are created and where all innovation takes place. Until there is a climate where small businesses can flourish, the economy will not recover and democracy will suffer. The playing field between corporations and small business must be "leveled" by some means. A good start would be to remove all government subsidies to corporations and remove corporate "personhood". Intellectual property laws need to be reformed. What am I thinking about? Google ''George B. Selden". But more is needed, I suspect.
A really good place to start is to remove both corporations and unions from the political process by passing a law that only registered voters can make campaign contributions in elections. This would become a much different country if suddenly elections ere affordable, and politicians actually had to get out and prove themselves to their constituents, instead of just relying on negative ad campaigns to slime any opposition.
Just think, we might start attracting the kind of public servant who was actually concerned with serving the public, not the money masters.
I agree about limiting corporations and unions $ in the political process. However, I am greatly in favor of the workers at large corporations being unionized. It is a necessary counter-balance. Government unions, however, should be disbanded.
A better place to start is the destruction of the corporate veil, and stripping the unions of any and all special priviledges. They shouldn't be given any more rights than the local Lion's Club.
I foresee a boom in self sufficiency tools and knowhow.
I read and love Zero Hedge because I can get a fully unvarnished look at global finance and economics, to which I don't otherwise have a lot of access.
I do, however, have a lot of access to political information and this article nails a piece, but failed to do as clearly as normal.
Let me help: when Tyler wrote "systemic friction adds cost without adding productivity" he ought to have said the political class IS THE PROBLEM. Systemic friction is a barrier to your growth and prosperity put in place by those leaders who you've elected (and those who they appoint) and pay to help make your life better. Their laws, rules and regulation are causing friction - as in slowing down what would otherwise be happening - in your name. For your own good, of course.
Here's a policy making pro tip:
Any idea which equation is more descriptive of reality?
I just wish that people who read ZH read the simple bits, like who wrote this article, it wasn't Tyler. Here's a clue who wrote it:
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from of Two Minds
Plus- Have you seen the profit margin on Labor? Eeesh! Cut the shit!
All I got out of this is that the healthcare system is a rip. No SHit.. Really?...
Oh.. And that only the people who can afford factories should expect profit for their time.
Jobs Few, Grads Flock to Unpaid Internships
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/business/unpaid-internships-dont-always-deliver.html?_r=1
Unpaid work! Waiting tables at Night! It's the "Recovery of 2012"!!!!!!1111
Outlaw Robots. One hundred or so years ago about 40% of the population worked in agriculture or related fields, that has dropped to 2.5% and mechanization has enabled the 2.5% to produce enough for domestic use as well as export. Manufacturing is also fallen prey to technology. Even receptionists are gone..
We don't like physical work and are getting fat and lazy. Even planes are self flying nowadays and Google's driverless vehicles bodes an end to truck, cab, bus drivers.
I don't know about you, but too much technology is not necessarily good for the human race. We just don't know what to do with the unemployed and many of them end up in the guttter, starving.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read in these forums.
You act as if thanks to ag mechanization, we now have 40%-2.5%=37.5% unemployed, as though those people didn't willingly leave their lives of backbreaking labor to go leverage those labor saving machines to produce more and improve everyone's quality of life.
I knew I would get this kind of reaction, but it isn't as dumb as you think.
I have been around enough years to see what is happening, from warfare, where much of it is removed from soldiers to the push of a button, to photography which no loner requires anything to mom and pop print shops.
What's left?
Advisors, service people and those who push buttons and click.
Oh, I forgot, the burger flipper is still alive and well. Even garbagemen are losing out to automated garbage pickup trucks. We have not yet been able to adapt.
Where are the jobs?
Machines have them.
You have already forgotten that the politicians and central bankers stole ~100% of the efficiency gains we have seen. That is THEIR fault, not the fault of the gains in efficiency.
Without them, we would have our current standard of living for at most half the current real price. This is quite apparent when one examines the fact that the government accounts for more than 40% of GDP. That money goes to salaries for employees who produce nothing, and worse, those who regulate productive people. On the other side, we have whole industries that are responsible for handling those government employees. These people are also unproductive. If those people were to all lose their jobs, and be forced to take on productive jobs, the amount of goods and services available would double AT LEAST. That means lower prices for everyone.
I don't understand where all this Luddite sentiment is coming from all of a sudden. As a philosophy, the followers of Ludd have been proven time and again to be comletely and totally WRONG, yet people still hate and fear machines.
actually removing robots isnt a bad thing.
going to an aggrarian lifestyle is not only good for your health but also for your soul
everyone should make their own food, live off their own land.
whats the point in our current system? spending shitty lives working to only die of cancer and spend all our savings trying to live another year, all while propping up a system that sucks all the money out to pay for peoples unhealthy lifestyles?
What if you only had to work 1/4th as much to maintain your current lifestyle?
That is the approximate cost of our transfer payments and regulatory destruction.
The fact that you think that subsistence farming is preferable to our current way of life speaks to the degree of oppression we suffer in the economic sphere.
work 1/4 as much?
when have we ever seen a reduction in work? certainly not in my lifetime.
I would dare say that we have had to increase work by atleast 100% in the last 50 years, considering that both in a household must work to maintain previous lifestyle.
I would rather we work less for fiat and more for life by farming our own food/fixing our own cars/raising our children(rather then handing them over to the state for 12 years) etc etc
I would not be touting making our own food, if it wasnt completly corrupted with toxic chemicals.
removed
Toxic chemicals like sugars and starches.
I would dare say that we have had to increase work by atleast 100% in the last 50 years, considering that both in a household must work to maintain previous lifestyle.
Not only that, but now when someone gets fired,laid off, their work load is simply transferred to who is left.So, in essence one is working for what used to be two.
Dont like it?.......haul ass, they will either hire someone for less, or pass it on and make it one doing the work of three.(same pay of course).
Of course you haven't! It has been STOLEN from you by the central bankers and the politicians! That is the whole point!
Increases in efficiency by definition mean you have to work LESS, not MORE. If you are working more after an increase in efficency, then there is something TERRIBLY WRONG. Given the 1:1 correlation between increases in purchasing power and efficiency gains prior to 1971, and the total decoupling after 1971, I think it is clear that something happened in 1971 that has caused all this.
Hmmm, what happened in that time frame?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock
you want real productivity increases or just increase in churn?
more churn "productivity"
- build products with built in obselescence that must be replaced regurly MORE WIDGETS
-make food that is unhealthy and makes people eat more and get sick MORE FOOD MORE SICKNESS
-sick people must take lots of drugs MORE SICKNESS MORE DRUGS
-schools churn out criminals making prisons more productive MORE IGNORANCE MORE CRIME MORE PRISONS
all this is "producivity"
instead lets have real productivty gains
-build products that last a lifetime and can be maintained by the owner
-grow locally - less energy -more healthy
-less sickness less need for healthcare
-homeschool, smarter kids, less burden on community, less cost, less energy etc
going to an aggrarian lifestyle is not only good for your health but also for your soul
They were doing that in Rwanda, the great majority of them, on any square inch of land, at the time of the, ah, unpleasantries.
dont compare people with an avg IQ of 70 to those of 100
Right, and peasant farm laborers in feudal times had it SOOOOOOO much better.
lol
Peasants were serfs not sovereign men who owned their labor and products of their labor.
Which would mean that lords were taxing themselves and not their serfs...
Which could imply that lords had lower than 60 IQ or something.
But hey who cares? US citizenism does not bother for facts only to propagate so...
Which would mean blah blah blah...
But hey, blah blah blah ... US citizenism blah blah blah...
Blah blah blah eternal nature blah blah blah...
Failure to break new ground, post generated by template, same idiotic trite phrases.
AnAnonymous fails the Turing test once again.
We pay a higher percentage in taxes of our incomes than they ever did.
Not to mention that those soveriegn farmers you envy so much were dumb as dogshit due to lack of education, and had short miserable lives, which is why they left the farms at the first opportunity during the Industrial Revolution.
tmosely, ID hijacking ? Who got hold onto your nick ? Cheap password ?
Deleted
I don't know about you, but too much technology is not necessarily good for the human race.
Yep, and you can see it at work, in the wrong hands now. Because of the MISUSE, and ABUSE of it, we are all under surveillance 24-7-365.We the workers, are now the enemy.
We have invented the very things the evil ones will use to realign the population numbers with.........they are already nearly through redistributing the middle classes wealth.
Why we even discuss any economic turnaround, is laughable and pitiful at the same time, THIS deal is going down exactly as planned.
If you believe otherwise your a fool.
I was just on a flight and told my wife that the most uncomfortable parts of the flight are during the takeoff and landing are because that is the only time the pilot is actually flying the plane. Technology makes products cheaper, Imagine the price of a car if had to be handmade by 25 UAW goons. A lot of the receptionists are gone because of the unions, they have priced themselves out of the labor market. The work rules in thier contracts are designed to prevent higher productivity. In some union shops you cant even pick up a piece of garbage on the floor. "HEY! thats MY job"
do you need a new iphone every year? do you need a new car every 3-5 years? do you need a new appliance every few years? what about the crap I have to buy every year because the crap I bought last year broke? I cant buy a damn garden tool that will last a few months let alone a year.
I would rather I had a car I can work on myself, tools that will last a lifetime, land enough to grow my own food and animals and energy enough to light/cool/warm my house.
most all else is superfulous crap that we dont need. We dont need education(with the internet all is accesible) we shouldnt need crap food if we can make it ourselves.
we dont need higher productivity, what we need is stuff that lasts and time with our family, food and friends
We'll wear leather loin cloths that will last us the rest of our lives.... Reminds one of a certain film's nighlistic central character.
funny was everyone wearing loin cloths 100 years ago?
The Industrial Revolution started quite some time before 1912.
Glad you did not tell your wife that fight club episode where the oxygen mask is just supposed to put you into euphoria while you are all going down...
You havent seen anything yet. Backoffice operations of many companies/governments can be outsourced or automated at least 50%. You've mainly seen impacts on manufacturing.
Snarc aside, revolutions always occur for one of two reasons. 1) lack of food. 2) Unfair/corrupt taxation (not taxation itself). If Timmah giethner is a tax cheat, he should either be removed from office, or the system that caused his major fail should be eliminated. If mitt romney wants to keep his money offshore and pay a lesser tax rate than the average single mom -- thats great !!!! -- but he needs to either advocate that everyone enjoys his tax rate or he should not and will not be SEC-TRES 's boss.
I'd rather retrain some accountants than force the millionth violent revolution when we know exactly what causes them.
There is never a scarcity of work. Just like no one leaves a hundred dollar bill on the ground, all productive assets will be used unless there are excessive restrictions such as barriers to entry. For example certification, regulation of labor and capital, and other barriers to employment and labor and capital flows
Work is so overrated. Work? What for? Consumption and debt is what we need, say the economists, the media, the politicians and most of the voters. No one needs to work (except maybe the Chinese and a couple of engineers at Apple and Google and Facebook).
Work has been replaced by central banking.
The way "productivity" is viewed in the U.S., throwing me in jail would boost the local economy by around 50k a year and create jobs.
"productivity" and a "healthy economy" is just spending these days. A big mysterous corporophony company here in town apparently DIED during the crash but got bailed out and now its back in business.
Paying employees and helping out local businesses. What changed?
Why not just follow this business model.
Set up big impressive office buildings and herd middle class consumers in there and pay them to sit at a desk all day. I doubt the locals will even figure it out.
Fuck shovel ready jobs, we need more cubicle ready ones. That's where the "recovery" went wrong, we were not creating enough high paying bullshit jobs, and too many minimum wage shovel ready bullshit jobs.
Spot on assessment of the future of the global economy.
THE LUDDITES WERE RIGHT!!!
The next wave is applications like Siri replacing the contact center farms. Why have a building with hundreds of people reading contact center scripts to customers when you can have a single machine handle all of the calls instead.
The bottom line is that if injecting a human into the process does not add any value, one should just automate the process. Again, examining contact centers, if the employee is just reading off a script, a computer can do that. Now if the contact center employee is actually adding intelligence into the process (understanding the customer and properly handling the situation as opposed to just reading off a card), then they are adding value that cannot be easily automated.
Automation is accelerating at a ridiculous pace. We are soon going to have to face that there are only millions of jobs for billions of people. How we solve this issue will greatly shape our future.
Great Article!
Now if the contact center employee is actually adding intelligence into the process (understanding the customer and properly handling the situation as opposed to just reading off a card), then they are adding value that cannot be easily automated.
You're taking that "value" concept too far. If the cost of losing X customers per day (because automation of the process doesn't permit complex issues to be addressed) is lower than the gain from increased volume, it's bad business to permit the employee to "add intelligence" to the system.
Better customer service *itself* is not really a goal of a business, and it never has been.
Maybe I'm stupid, but if we have labor and the problem has to do with a lack of money, would going back to bartering or alternate currencies (whiskey, guns, etc.) help?
"Of TwoDumb Minds' always comes up with something that is naively illogical. If work is becoming obsolete and few can provide for the many, than who needs work other than the rich. The rich should do all the work and distribute the profits to the leisure class, that's is going to collect unemployment benefits for ever.
There will always be more jobs. You just don't know what they are yet. The problem is government interference in the economy via taxes, regulations, bailouts, interventions, and ignorant central planning that stop people from creating new companies and industries.
Imagine this. What if the big three automakers all had failed like they really did. Suddenly Tesla Motors becomes huge and a whole new industry of electric cars that people actually want gets funding, development and buildout. But no. We had to rescue failure in a dying oil based car industry. Who knows what would happen if we had put money into better battery development. We might all be throwing solar panels up right now.
You just don't know what can happen when the government gets out of the way. But we have socialism and central planning. Unfortunately, that makes this article true.
There will always be more jobs
Uh, yeah, there are hundreds available in my area for $8-$11.00 per hour.
And no one applies.
Class of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and now 2012 are all waiting for your "there will be always more jobs"...there are no jobs or temp jobs with shitty pay. They need jobs NOW, not 20 years from now.
Human civilization is going to have to embrace robotization one way or another.
The only way this will be beneficial to the average human being is if we utilize technology to bring about a society of abundance.
It's completely logical for a factory owner to convert his facotry into one where the goods are manufactured by robots when it's efficient to do so.
Phillip K. Dick's short story, Autofac, is one scenario that I could see happening...
The only way this will be beneficial to the average human being is if we utilize technology to bring about a society of abundance.
___________________________________________
We do live in a society of abundance. Already.
When he said "society of abundance", he wasn't talking about the mastodonic piles of human feces along your roadside.
An abundance of Chinese roadside turds and online trolls doesn't count.
It's not easy to reverse what's perceived as "evolution."
Industrial farming is lousy overall. It destroys the soil, pollutes the water, and produces lower-quality food. If there were sufficient competition, "factory farming" might be resistable. Paying a bit more for food that tastes better and is more nutritious is a clearly good idea to many people, but the barriers to entry to becoming a farmer are significant, and getting worse daily. (Primarily because of legal obstacles created by the current agribusiness conglomerates, although recent problems in global finance are a big factor too.)
Returning to labor-intensive farming practices is way too obvious an idea to be considered. It wouldn't help the banks, the lawyers, or the pharmaceutical industry, so obviously it wouldn't be good for America.
The Polyface Farms guy has it right. If we survive long enough, I'm sure his business-model will come back into favor.
Industrial farming produces lots of sugary product, such as corn syrup, cane sugar, and cheap starch.
The industries that convert these things into food for humans paid for lots of research that fed into testimony at George McGovern's nanny state hearings that gave us the Food Pyramid and low-fat diets. The resulting behaviors are at the root of our national obesity epidemic, and guess what degenerative "diseases of civilisation" correlate with obesity? All of them, pretty much. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes(duh), metabolic syndrome, lots of others too.
Michelle Obama is still parotting the nonsense that got us here, whereas eating more fat and oils and less carbs, and almost never eating sugar or sugary drinks is the answer, always was the answer.
Plenty of folks will choose to eat crap no matter what their options are, but there may be enough people concerned about their health to sustain a labor-intensive farming industry, which would be nice, as it would help with the lack of work opportunities and be better for everyone involved.
Michelle Obama is irrelevant.
Then make it costly to do labor on precarious terms and less costly to do it on secure terms. Then make it harder to not hire such that you don't get a drop-off in hiring because of practically inescapable protections. The employer wants to pass on the risk downward while not passing down the reward, and thinks they are holier than anyone else for being a "creator and destroyer of jobs".
It's a shame that it takes such to incentivize employers to base work arrangements on secure terms (that disincentivize backstabbing by workers), but there doesn't seem to be a desire to do it voluntarily. All the excuses thus far express an attitude of arrogance on the part of employers - for they make infinite demands with no desire to adapt to the worker.
The less secure work is, the more there is a desire for the worker to backstab the employer - since there is less of a desire for either party to be honest with each other. Mutual distrust through temporary employment breeds a mutual desire to backstab each other. A focus on secure employment for all lowers this cost, as the incentive to respect each other increases while the incentive to backstab each other decreases.
Socialist twaddle.
Where is there security ANYWHERE in business outside of Govt. Subsidy/ bailouts? Many a time I had to forgo a paycheck and dip into savings to pay employees in order to stay open during lean times. Labor- management is always a symbiotic relationship and not a one way street.
Bad employees cost a fortune in wasted production. The only way to achieve security is to make your labor/ production more valuble than the next guys.
Outside of being the last man standing, job security is a fantasy. Get used to it.
Unlike you, I've seen both profitability and security work well - albeit with somewhat larger companies that have a bit more steady financial footing - to the benefit of company, customer, and employee.
Sounds like you're just seeing it from the perspective of a smaller business that has had to fight for every dollar. I just don't see the point of trying to fit every peg into a round hole, even if it's square.
I was going to respond to this post personally but my computer beat me to it.
wtf???
Worldwide pandemic with 100% mortality. Problem solved.
Plenty of shovel ready jobs now. Lots of fertilizer for sustainable farming.
We can rename the Ebola virus to 'The Malthusian Effect'.
I know you're only kidding but who exactly will do the burying and farming?
Insects!
Me, I guess, and a few others will survive.
I ate a lot of Hostess sno-balls when I was a kid... If I caught the Ebola virus, it would die instead of me.
That shit has a shelf life of 70 years.
The shrinking demand for labour would not have been a problem if people would have had more savings and therefore could get capital incomes rather than work related incomes.
Unfortunately the trend in many countries have been the very opposite. People have reduced their savings and consumed their money. It should have been the other way round.
And at the same time there has been an excessive supply of labour. And in order to cover the consequences of excessive supply of labour many countries have encouraged people to save less and spend more so that aggregate demand in the economy and demand for labour would increase.
Furthermore, it seems to me as if most decision makers overlook the fact that if there is less need for labour people will also make less money and will therefore also buy less goods and services. If people would have other incomes, such as dividends, they could have compensated for lack of work related incomes with other incomes. But now they can´t do that.
I wonder whether it would work to print money, give to the general public and let them invest in stock. If they would buy existing stock I guess that stock prices would increase. But if the companies that would get higher stock prices would also sell more goods and services the p/e ratio would might remain the same. If this would work I guess that this would be the ultimate electoral promise: Give free money to the public so that they don´t have to work (or at least have to work less). :D
I think the problem is that when the post-WW2 boom in production ran its course, industry stared down underutilized productivity. The solution was to build for tomorrow, and next month, and next year to keep production at profitable levels. To accommodate that, demand had to be pulled forward through credit expansion. The intentional inflation caused by the Fed has accommodated this need by making the borrowing of stronger dollars today the better bet than spending weaker dollars later.
maximin thrax:
My comments:
The trend towards reduced savings in the US did not begin until the early 1980s, when the Reagan era had begun, as far as I know. Interest rates and inflation were extremely high circa 1980 when Paul Volcker had raised interest rates sharply in order to fight inflation (or to see to that Carter did not get re-elected).
Scarcity Of Paid Work
Surplus Of Labor
And government helping corporations take more money from people every way they can
... like Obamacare for example, a windfall corporate profit program disguised as a healthcare program.
That's why Obama didn't want a nationalized healthcare system funded thru taxes with the government as the single payer.
That's why he wanted to continue the private insurance company system and forcing everyone to buy coverage. It's a windfall profit system for medical insurance companies, who will cut back further on benefits while premiums continue rising.
But then the entire "healthcare" system in America is designed for corportate profits, pharmecutical companies mosly, with doctors playing the role of their legalized government-licensed drug pushers.
The American people are looted by every major institution in America, education, healthcare, law, banking, finance, you name it, and government protects and promotes the looting.
No, Americans have no financial future. Our children and grandchildren have no finanial future. Not when government protects every institution in America looting the people every way possible.
I agree with Mr. Smith's premise that "most of the so-called 'growth' since the 2008 global financial meltdown was funded by sovereign debt and "free money" spun by central banks, not organic growth based on rising earned incomes", but disagree that a major cause of our current economic problems should be attributed to:
"The industries that are rapidly increasing productivity and profits are doing so by eliminating jobs and the need for labor."
Our problems are mitigated by advances in productivity and legitimate profits, not exacerbated by them. Henry Hazlitt did an admirable job of dispelling such economic misunderstandings in his prodigious writings over the years, and quite well in his book, "Economics in One Lesson".
He gave example after example in that book of productivity breakthroughs that were vehemently opposed by workers and economists, that were shown to have been quite misguided. The first he used, if I remember correctly, was some new technology for making pins. People employed in that industry got many supporters in their fight against allowing manufacturers to use this new machinery and it was held back in many areas. But over time the manufacturers won out and the machines were installed... and productivity improved dramatically. Many workers were laid off... initially. But over time prices had dropped enough that demand surged and eventually far more people were employed in that industry than before, and of course prices had dropped, making consumers of those products better off as well. Wages were as high or higher for the workers, and those employed in manufacturing and repairing the machines had quite nice wages. It was a win/win situation for all. That's how most true productivity breakthroughs are. It may disrupt the status quo for awhile, but in the long run it's better for everyone.
An example closer to home for me was related by my father-in-law, a carpenter. When he was young electric drills and hand saws were just coming out. His union opposed them vociferously as it was very obvious to them that it would put many people out of work. Productivity improved a lot, of course, but that meant that a couple of carpenters could complete a home in less time than 4 or more previously.
But as so often happens, even though they eventually lost their battle against these new tools, it turned out that over time their membership grew by leaps and bounds. The great improvement in productivity translated into significantly lower prices for building homes, offices and other buildings and demand grew rapidly. It took fewer workers to complete any given building, but suddenly there were a lot more buildings going up.
The bottom line is that trying to hold back technology as a means of improving employment is misguided and counterproductive to society as a whole.
There is always work to do, our challenge is to identify what work provides the most benefit to the consumers and then figuring out how to provide that benefit most efficiently consistent with societal standards of safety etc. We may have to adapt to changing work flows, but that is far preferable to deliberately hindering economic advances to keep things as they are.
As some have noted, slavery ensured high employment for the slaves, but high employment rates shouldn't be the goal, but rather the end result of a healthy and fair economy.
Our financial system, to wit the central bankings system and the fiat money they spawned, is the root problem here. We shouldn't confuse the results of that system, with the fruits of legitimate advances in productivity, despite the fact that they occur simultaneously. It may seem to be intuitively correct, but ignores some of the results of improvements in productivity, whether that be through robotics, internet & other communication advances, or tools. It is also tempting to fall into the "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, that because things are correlated (high unemployment and gains in productivity), one necessarily causes the other. That isn't always the case, and I would submit that it isn't the case in this particular instance.
Scarcity of paid work...Labour input...
Ah, ah.
US citizen economics is all about consumption.
There is no conservation.
Work consumes resources.
Rise of productivity, myth of hard work, work capacity freed moved elsewhere to increase the overall consumption.
It is quite something to think that it can keep on infinitely. At one moment, the environment is saturated...
Nothing new here, just repetition of trite expressions and Confusian "wisdom".
Breaking no new ground, AnAnonymous fails the Turing test once again.
US citizens repeat the same things over and over.
Repetition has to occur to answer to their repetitions.
Again with the wok calling the kettle black!
Oh the Long March of Chinese Citizenism hypocrisy --- it never ends!
Your boringly repetitious, supremely bigoted and mindlessly collectivist condemnations of EVERY American for the crimes of a tiny sociopathic power elite --- a power elite who we OURSELVES endlessly condemn here on this website, and in this forum --- only demonstrate what a truly brainless and evil troll you really are.
.
Oh, look, the PRC Ministry of Truth gave him an updated word list. He now uses repetition instead of repeation.
Maybe someday they'll give him a list which contains the actual word he thinks he's using when he says offuscation.
And "concurrent".
Not to mention his imaginary bete noire, "citizenism".
sounds like we are entering an amazing future, where we don't live to work, but actually enjoy life, why stop it?
we are living in the end of an era, a new chapter is about to begin
good stuff will come, just because there is no other way
The potential for creative, constructive human work is unlimited. It is government action alone which idles labor, for the call of hunger is irresistable.
This and more over at my blog:
http://jmcaule-whatimlookingatrightnow.blogspot.ca/