Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(12-28-2016, 05:03 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: My father doesn't have a college degree, and learned how to program on uninterpolated punch cars after injuring himself in a trucking accident.  He works for Microsoft.  I have a history degree, and a programming job, using a skill I developed less than year before.  We're managing.  And this is only talking about people working in the tech sector.  Think of the job categories that exist now, that would have seemed exceedingly odd 10 or 20 years ago.  This is less the end of work that you're talking about than it is the end of work as it existed in your memory.

Actually, the argument I make is the one you made here. Sure, some people are able to survive disruption and even thrive, but others fall by the wayside. As the pace of change continues to increase, the number in the second group will grow, because even capable people are not infinitely capable.

SomeGuy Wrote:So no, you did not bother to look at the info showing that even in the most technologically sophisticated and wealthy countries, manufacturing employment as a share of the population has not collapsed the way it has here.  You're just going to repeat "But they've all been automated away" because you heard it somewhere.  Right.

... and we still have places on earth that are primitive and need to be modernized. Others are held back by political or social systems that retard growth, but if we learned nothing else from the Chinese experience, transformation can be rapid. And yes, manufacturing jobs are disappearing everywhere.

SomeGuy Wrote:Has the demand for legal services gone down?  Recent issues in job placement for new graduates seem to have less to do with the inevitability of technological obsolescence as they do the issues and rigidities in the way we train and fund new lawyers, and the restrictions placed on them.

It's the worst job market for new lawyers ever, and a large part of that has to do with the work many young lawyers have always done in the past: legal research. Computers do it faster and better. Why pay some young lawyer six figures to it less well.

SomeGuy Wrote:Has employment in the health industry declined while I wasn't looking?  Do manufacturing and logistics jobs to support goods consumed in the US not count as requiring human labor just because it isn't American labor doing it?  Do you have any idea how many people it takes to build and ship an Ipod?

The health industry is one area of growth, but we Boomers are a huge part of the reason why. We'll die-off, and many of the jobs will die with us. Not surprising, the jobs with the best long term demand are ones that involve directly caring for the infirm like CNAs -- not a great paying job by any measure.

SomeGuy Wrote:Yes, the world has changed over 50 years.  How amazing!
I am missing the bit where you actually, you know, provided evidence that ALL JOBS WILL VANISH in the next 20 years, as opposed to merely asserting that it MUST because PROGRESS!  DO you understand the difference between the two?

The tilt in the job market will track AGW as a model. Greenhouse gases were insignificant until they weren't. Technology penetration will be similar. There is no need to eliminate all jobs, or even a large minority of them. All that has to happen is to make work less valuable by making the amount of work to be done less than the supply of labor needing work ... something that is already happening. That pushes the wage and salary structure lower, and that either lowers workforce penetration or it creates downward mobility. Neither is good. In fact, we don't have a good model for an economy operating that way.