That shows problem with the official number though.
If unemployment is down, wages should be up. But wages are down. That implies the unemployment rate is not accurately reflecting the true supply of labor.
Or, it shows what I believe: demand for labor is decreasing even as the economy grows.
This is wrong. Wages are rising. And as slack continues to be removed from the labor pool, wages will continue to rise.
From a week ago:
"An important measure of household income rose in December by the largest amount in nearly 8 years, signaling a long-overdue rebound in family earning power."
"Data from Sentier Research show that median household income in December rose 3.3% from the year before, the strongest year-over-year reading since October, 2006"
So, incomes were flat or down for 14 years, and have since slightly rebounded to be just 4% less than in 2000, not 8% like they were. Shall I pop the champagne or do you want to?
Of course wages were flat or down, there hasn't been a particularly strong - or sustained strength - labor market since 2000. In the 2005-2007 time frame there was a brief respite, and that of course was not only fake (powered by the housing bubble) but crashed.
Fact is, once enough slack is removed from a labor pool, wages rise. Happens every time.
It's exactly what occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Wages weren't booming in the 1990s until the unemployment rate got to a certain low level toward the last several years of the decade.
I wouldn't expect wages to rise when U3 unemployment is 7% or 8%. I would expect to see it at closer to the 4% to 6% range. That's historically what has been the case, and we're seeing it happen again right now. If we add another ~3 million jobs in 2015, wages will rise at a healthy clip.
>Or, it shows what I believe: demand for labor is decreasing even as the economy grows.
I hope this is the case. Automation should be putting a great deal of workers out of the labor force. The question is how can we deal with it: through workforce education and skill retooling? Through social assistance programs? It will likely be the question of our generation.
Skill retooling would help to an extent, but one programmer today can do more work than 10 programmers could do 15 years ago, or maybe even 10 years ago. That trend isn't going away.
Look at Django. If you include the hundreds of open-source modules with everything from messaging to billing to social media already coded, you can string together web apps in an hour that would take whole teams months and months from scratch.
Within the next decade or two I'd estimate that programming will hit its peak employment and start to decline as more and more work is automated.
Perhaps, but consider how much of the world still isn't digital (entire industries). Most business isn't - way more money flows through meatspace. I also think there is a good chance VR or AR will create another economic boon comparable to the Internet within your time span.
And to be clear, there's still plenty of opportunity. Something like 3 billion people are supposed to come online in the next decade, there will be tremendous opportunities to create solutions for problems we can't fathom. But my point is those solutions can be implemented by a fraction of the programmers that used to be needed.
And while there will lag between VR becoming popular and its design process becoming automated as well, it will still happen.
I also don't think this is necessarily bad, I'm just trying to point out that the conventional wisdom of "if we send people to STEM fields we'll keep the traditional economy intact even with automation" is not a long-term solution. The logical end-result of current tech trends is you imagine something and it appears in front of you almost instantaneously, no coding required.
As others have said, raw creativity will take precedence over technical skills, and most realistically we'll need a basic income and severely reduced workweeks.
If unemployment is down, wages should be up. But wages are down. That implies the unemployment rate is not accurately reflecting the true supply of labor.
Or, it shows what I believe: demand for labor is decreasing even as the economy grows.