
The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever - robg
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/the-growing-underclass-jobs-gone-forever/
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yummyfajitas
This article suggests that perhaps the way to get out of the recession is to
force people to accept reality:

"Workers whose entire occupations...are disappearing (think: auto workers)
will need to start over and find a new career path. But the new skills they
will need take a long time to acquire."

Reality: auto work was not highly skilled labor, and it just paid as if it was
skilled due to union coercion. This turned out to be unsustainable. Former
auto workers must now accept low skill pay.

"...some workers may need to move to new places in order to start a different
career....Homeowners who are “underwater” ...may not be able to sell their
house for enough money to enable them to buy a home in a new area."

Reality: you speculated on real estate and lost. You can not afford to own a
home anymore. Rent.

~~~
fnid2
_Reality: you speculated on real estate and lost. You can not afford to own a
home anymore. Rent._

Look at the silver lining. Due to ridiculous cultural issues in the U.S., you
got to live well beyond your means for quite a long time.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
cultural? Please explain. The trickle-down of Wall Street irrationality,
perhaps.

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drewr
One thing Congress could do immediately is cut the minimum wage. It is now at
$7.25 per hour. This is a price control on labor. You can't make a worker's
$5.00/hour skills magically worth $7.25.

They could also make it cheaper for small businesses to hire people. That
$7.25/hour labor really costs $14.50.

~~~
flatline
Nobody's labor is worth as little as $5/hour. That's not a living wage
anywhere in the US, and as a result it borders on slave labor to hire people
for that little. The high price for small businesses is, however, a more
realistic problem.

~~~
ewanmcteagle
By what process do you come to the conclusion that no labor is worth as little
as $5/hour?

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flatline
By virtue of the fact that it's not possible to make enough to provide food
and shelter on that amount (an untested hypothesis on my own part,
admittedly). If someone is not trying to make a living then there well may be
labor that is worth that little, but I'm not sure how you would make a
meaningful distinction to avoid exploitation without a ton of other, more
onerous regulations.

~~~
fnid2
sure you can, here's how $5/day on food $10/day rent $5/day utilities +
entertainment $2.50/day transportation

$22.50/day or $8,218.13 per year in expenses. At $5/hr, you are making $10k a
year for a full time job w/ 2 weeks vacation.

~~~
psranga
$300/mo for rent and $2.50/day for transportation? Sign me up.

FYI a single ride on the bus/light rail in the Bay Area (VTA) costs $3.75.

~~~
fnid2
That's your issue. You want to live in the bay area. Many cities have monthly
passes for under $60.

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msluyter
_Or maybe the culprit is a corollary of Moore’s Law, the idea of exponential
advances in technology over time. That might suggest that innovation and
automation displace more and more workers by the time each recession rolls
around._

This is also Marshall Brain's thesis in Robotic Nation:

<http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

In the broadest terms, automation and computerization increase productivity,
which means fewer people are needed to do the same amount of work.
Conventional wisdom holds that new jobs will be created for displaced workers,
but it's as yet unclear what those new jobs might be.

~~~
rleisti
In a more general sense, increased productivity means more value is created
per unit cost. This could mean the same value with less jobs; it could also
mean the same amount of jobs with more value.

A growing pool of displaced labour is also a growing un-tapped resource (or a
growing revolution, depending on how well society manages it).

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stuff4ben
This makes me wonder what may end up being the "auto worker" job in 2035?
Software/web development? University teachers? How do you even prepare for
such an eventuality?

~~~
jerf
"Web development" quite possibly. However, one of the reasons I chose my
career in programming oh-so-long-ago is that I don't forsee the end of
_programming_ coming for a long time. Or, if you prefer, "automation".

Our level of abstraction that we operate at may rise ever higher and someday
we may all be programming nanobots instead of "computers", but until full and
true human-level AI comes along there will always be a need for programmers to
be programming something, and while I doubt the nanobots will be programmed in
Java there will still be significant carry-over from current skills. And sort
of tying into the recent discussion about how the iPad is for "everybody else"
who isn't a programmer, the idea that everybody will want to be programmers or
will be programmers is clearly false. The iPad is apparently forcing some
people to face up to that.

And since "full and true human-level AI" is basically the Singularity, I
haven't tried to plan my career past that on the grounds that it's totally
impossible to make plans.

~~~
clistctrl
There was a story yesterday about using genetic programming for automated
debugging. Granted, its probably not putting out the best code in the world
but if it works isn't that what business is going to truly care about (maybe
its the sliced bread of software development, in that it sucks compared to
bread from a bakery but you can still make an edible sandwich from it)

While debugging is only a part of the software development process, it seems
like it creates an evolutionary path for automated development.

~~~
jerf
"Running the evolutionary process" has a small chance of being one of the ways
I referred to that might involve us moving up the abstraction chain.

However, someone will have to know how to tweak the genetic algorithms and
feed them the right data. If you think it will _ever_ be "just specify the
problem and run the GA/GP", you are _gravely_ mistaken. It is not that simple,
and there will be ways of phrasing the problem that will make it easy for the
GA and ways that are hard, and problems that GA will not be able to deal with
at all. There will still be programmers.

As I recently said in another post, the gulf between GP hype and GP reality is
pretty much the largest I know of in the realm of computer science. There's a
lot of very tricky theory, and my expectation is that this will never be a
practical way to program (as opposed to fixing bugs), and even if it is, it
will take a _lot_ more knowledge and skill than a current programming job,
which also means that fewer people will be able to do it. In my estimation, it
will just plain be harder than writing it conventionally and thus never be
practical.

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danteembermage
It is commonly accepted wisdom that the higher quality job you pursue the
longer your job search will be; this makes sense as the matching problem
becomes much more difficult.

Therefore the more skilled the labor force the longer time "between jobs" is
going to be optimal from the job seekers perspective; it's worth it to get the
match right.

I'll let you make your own conclusions on what this implies for the percentage
unemployment rate after recessions.

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Towle_
Jobs gone forever? That's depressing news.

If only there were a way to make more. I mean actually make more, not just tax
the people with jobs so you can hire and pay the people who don't have jobs to
do work nobody really needs them to do. You know... jobs the employer can
afford to pay for not because the employer forced earned money out of
everyone's wallets, but because free-willed participants in a fair market
agreed to pay for those services without being threatened with jail time.

Wouldn't that just be the bee's knees! If the government could create more
jobs out of thin air like that? Well, for the government it'd be thin air
anyway. For everyone else involved, it'd be blood, sweat, and tears. Almost
makes you think it's unfair who gets the credit for job creation.

Maybe that's why the government makes it harder than it needs to be by getting
in the way a little: because government leaders know they don't deserve the
credit but there's no way avoid it, so they decided the only way to receive
less undeserved credit for job creation would be to make it harder for people
to create jobs. Sure, those people might have to bleed, sweat, and cry a
little more to create those jobs for others, but in the end our noble
government leaders know that sacrifice is worth being able to maintain their
humility. Being a politician is a hard job, you know.

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regularfry
And there was me thinking this would be yet another Apple story...

