Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(12-28-2016, 03:11 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 02:01 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I understand it is fashionable to say such things, but this claim has been made many times over the past 200 years and has yet to come to fruition.  Did you actually take a look at the info I had posted earlier, showing that the top 3 countries by number of workers per 10,000 manufacturing workers (the US is 7) had twice the number of manufacturing workers as a percentage of the labor force than does the US today?  The Luddites (the orginal ones, mind you) feared that textile machinery would put them out of work, and yet as the Industrial Revolution ground on the number of textile workers soared.  I am presently employed writing automation scripts for data processing (ETL) and reporting, and yet every time I automate one task, the number of tasks soars.  Take one report for one client that was previously generated once a month by hand, write a script for it, and pretty soon they want it once a week, and then daily, then other clients start clamoring for it, and the net amount of work I do remains much the same, even as the output grows.

SomeGuy has hit on the key that has kept people employed--inefficiency and make work. He works to automate tasks, but it has no net improvement in productivity.  Instead of producing an end output (monthly report) more efficiently, the output is redefined (weekly, then daily, then hourly, then real time?) reports so that the same resources spent on report generation years ago continue to be expended today. Does the greater frequency of report generation create value?  No because everybody else is doing it. It  becomes something you have to do to stay in business (i.e. be competitive) and so really functions like a tax.  Advertising and marketing is the same sort of thing.  About 2% of GDP is spent on advertising and has been for 70 years. New technology requiring massive investments is constantly be applied to task all paid for by this 2% "tax". 

I've seen this at my own work.  As result of guys like me, our production operators are phenomenally more productive in terms of the value of the output they physically produce that they were when I started my career.  As a result there are far fewer of them. Yet employment hasn't fallen. What has happened is they have been replaced by college-educated workers involved in QA, IT, "right first time", safety & environmental, "business excellence", and other functions that either did not exist or were much smaller 30 years ago.  So as when I came here, around 60% of the employees were (smart) guys out of high school who put product in the drum, today maybe 30% are.  Thee kids of the guys 30 years ago got college degrees and work in cubicles and probably have about the same standard of living as their parents.

OK, but this is not an unknown situation.  Even before I retired, those faux functions were coming under serious scrutiny, and being "downsized" ... some all the way to zero.  There are a few emerging fields that really add value, like IT security for example, but they are the exception.  The real benefit is flattening, with organizational layers stripped out and manager-like duties added to non-managers through the use of digital nannies.

We just don't need all the people any longer.  Most companies use that to add "shareholder value".  When I was hired to the company where I retired, the headcount was just shy of 2,200.  When I retire, it was roughly 600, with some functions outsourced .  Call that an additional 100.  That's still a loss of 1,500 jobs, and the amount of work was roughly the same.