Economic Vampirism--how the boomers are robbing GenX (and Millenials)

[pbrower2a]

(06-13-2016, 11:54 PM)Galen Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 07:52 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(05-22-2016, 09:59 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-22-2016, 03:03 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: You mean like the idea that if you got in a job in a good company and did everything you were supposed to do, you were most often set for life? And usually you only got fired if you did something pretty awful, and even if that did happen, you usually could recover more quickly than is the case today? And everything you did was not tracked so heavily like it is now? And before the days when office politics and political correctness trumped reason?

Pretty much.

This process was well underway in the mid-eighties when I started working.  This sort of crap tended to come from over eager Boomer middle management.  Welcome to my world as it has always been.  This too will probably pass but too late to do me any good.

It's been slow in passing, and today seems to be even worse than it was at that time. Will probably not pass until the vast majority gets fed up enough to take to the streets. Most now are too self-absorbed to do so. It began on a small scale with the "Fight for 15" crusade along with the Occupy thing.

I would expect that increasing the minimum wage will cause many more low skilled jobs to be automated away.  It seems unlikely that unions will make much of a comeback under those conditions.

Low-skilled manufacturing and even service jobs are being automated out of existence as soon as a machine or a computer program can be found to replace them. So it is for welding and painting on assembly lines for vehicles and appliances; so it is becoming for counter people in fast-food places. Finding people who can show delight in working for a near-minimum wage despite a miserable life off the job (poverty is incompatible with human happiness) is far tougher than it seems.

The model for employment could easily become that of energy production: the productive sector creates relatively few well-paid jobs and a huge flow of income for owners and an administrative elite. Governments having few other streams of income to tax effectively will tax machine-based production heavily and spread the income as the politics allow. Thus graft (Venezuela) that creates an economic nightmare or show projects and missionary efforts (Saudi Arabia). A Venezuelan official once called petroleum la mierda del diablo -- the shit of the Devil -- for the effects of an economy based upon the extraction of oil as a source of income. The costs of energy production are real, yet the revenue of oil production do not spread to the People.

So it could be with a heavily-automated activity that creates a huge stream of revenue but few jobs. Even traditional peasant-based farming might have been more capable of solving the connection between toil and pay than the post-modern models of economic production.