12-29-2016, 05:16 PM
Some Guy, Dave has a point. In my illustration of your point I showed how productivity rose in our plant while employment did not fall. However I noted that the number of people who put product in a barrel has been cut in half. Production operator is a responsible job (some batches can have close to a million dollars of value tied up with it) and you to have to be responsible and have above-average intelligence to do it. So these above average guys who were working when I started tended to have above-average kids who went on to get degrees and now have comparable jobs to their fathers except they work in an office instead of the plant floor.
In the old industrial parlance those who made the product, delivered and sold it to customers were the "functional" employees as there work product was directly related to each unit sold. The rest of the employees like you and me were "the burden". What has been happening over the past half century was the fraction of people who are functional has declined while the burden has risen, which is why this terminology was dropped long ago.
In the old Soviet Union full employment was maintained, e.g. elevator operators were retained in buildings with automatic elevators. Here employment has been maintained by offsetting declining numbers of functional employees with increased burden. Burden activities are typically performed by above-average folks, while functional tasks can be done by below average folks. The shift from function to burden has maintained job opportunities for those with intelligence above rising threshold. For example, the software company EPIC is hiring like gangbusters, but they only hire very bright people (I believe they use IQ tests to ascertain this). So if you aren't above average (half the population) you are SOL. This, in a nutshell is the problem of the white working class. It is not so acute for the black working class because they largely were excluded from the high-paid jobs that many low-average (white) folks did back in the day.
As automation gets more and more sophisticated it will be possible to reduce the numbers needed for an increasing number of high-paid jobs and so reduce good jobs for folks in the third quartile, and then anyone below the top decile and so on. As employment falls so will aggregate demand and firms will simply have to cut back on the burden, so they will use the new tech to do so, just as they have for half a century with functional tasks.
The end result is the platform company model everywhere.
In the old industrial parlance those who made the product, delivered and sold it to customers were the "functional" employees as there work product was directly related to each unit sold. The rest of the employees like you and me were "the burden". What has been happening over the past half century was the fraction of people who are functional has declined while the burden has risen, which is why this terminology was dropped long ago.
In the old Soviet Union full employment was maintained, e.g. elevator operators were retained in buildings with automatic elevators. Here employment has been maintained by offsetting declining numbers of functional employees with increased burden. Burden activities are typically performed by above-average folks, while functional tasks can be done by below average folks. The shift from function to burden has maintained job opportunities for those with intelligence above rising threshold. For example, the software company EPIC is hiring like gangbusters, but they only hire very bright people (I believe they use IQ tests to ascertain this). So if you aren't above average (half the population) you are SOL. This, in a nutshell is the problem of the white working class. It is not so acute for the black working class because they largely were excluded from the high-paid jobs that many low-average (white) folks did back in the day.
As automation gets more and more sophisticated it will be possible to reduce the numbers needed for an increasing number of high-paid jobs and so reduce good jobs for folks in the third quartile, and then anyone below the top decile and so on. As employment falls so will aggregate demand and firms will simply have to cut back on the burden, so they will use the new tech to do so, just as they have for half a century with functional tasks.
The end result is the platform company model everywhere.