Report Card for Donald Trump

[Warren Dew]

(12-28-2016, 05:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Health care jobs are rising. I suspect it may be because of the American lifestyle and diet.

While "SAD" - Standard American Diet - has caused health problems, it's not directly related to health care jobs; it is related to longevity declines in some groups, but since those are declines, obviously health care hasn't been able to fully compensate.

The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

[Ragnarök_62]

(12-28-2016, 10:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 02:48 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am losing posts or something.  I clearly recall an exchange with Warren about his concept of deflationary stimulus that still makes no sense to me.  I made a post and never got a response. I can't find it now, so I wonder if it got lost and never appeared.  The idea was if you cut a plumbers tax rate he would be incented to cut his rates which would drum up more business expanding his output.

I think it was in another thread.  I have it in a browser tab and on my list to provide a serious answer to, as I have one other post.  Serious answers don't fit into the few seconds I typically have to write most of my posts, though.

Y'all need a place to stash your replies instead of browser tabs. Web browsers are complicated software and are therefore, crash prone. You can also lose your work if you accidentally close the relevant tab. See.... web browsers are complicated, complicated software, which also means y'all can get user errors. Yes, user errors are more likely on complicated software.  "I have it in a browser tab and on my list to provide a serious answer to, as I have one other post. " is bad mojo. You will close the wrong tab in the future. It's guaranteed. 

[Ragnarök_62]

Eric the Green Wrote: Health care jobs are rising. I suspect it may be because of the American lifestyle and diet.

Yes, Eric's the blind squirrel that found a nut again! 

* Squirrel award for Eric

Quote:While "SAD" - Standard American Diet - has caused health problems,...

Wow, Eric and Warren agree on something.

Warren Wrote:it's not directly related to health care jobs; it is related to longevity declines in some groups, but since those are declines, obviously health care hasn't been able to fully compensate.

Wadda bout all those A1C testers, bariatric care, nurse, jobs?

Quote:=Warren
The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

VAT tax + single payer set up. [I deserve the same health plan as my Congress critters.]  They are to serve Rags, not the other way.  I'm paying part of their salaries.  Fold all DC Cadillac plans into the same plan Rags has.  Eric's already on Medicare so not much would change for him.  Warren and Rags would have the same plan as Eric and the Congress Critters. Now

You still need regulations or perhaps some law already on the books for this nonsense>
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/martin-shkre...verywhere/

Now... here's where free trade would do wonders. Yes it would. People should be allowed to import drugs from where that drug is marketed and passes safety. If some Big Pharma practices extortion, I think that's a crime and the CEO's of the offending company(s) need to go to prison. In the meantime to trial, see if the same drug can be imported at a much cheaper price.

[Eric the Green]

(12-28-2016, 10:36 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 05:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Health care jobs are rising. I suspect it may be because of the American lifestyle and diet.

While "SAD" - Standard American Diet - has caused health problems, it's not directly related to health care jobs; it is related to longevity declines in some groups, but since those are declines, obviously health care hasn't been able to fully compensate.

The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

Individuals do not benefit from insurance companies that jack up their cost beyond all conceivable justification, and refuse to cover people when they need it. No, health insurance must be regulated at the least, and preferably put out of business and the government taken it over in the form of fair medicare for all. (of course even medicare doesn't put insurance companies out of business, since they supply advantage plans to seniors)

But with Drumpf in charge, Warren, who knows? The GOP may take all the health insurance reform that has been done and throw it all away, and give all the power back to the insurance companies. We'll see how far they get, and how well it (doesn't) work. The reason we had Obamacare at all, you remember, is because the previous approach of unregulated private enterprise and voluntary employer coverage indeed didn't work, and business asked for reform.

But then they got it, and they decided they didn't want it after all. And the predominant neo-liberalism went into high gear, as it always does whenever this essential reform is tried.

[Mikebert]

(12-28-2016, 10:36 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

No.  At your age I am surprised you don't know this.  Health care has gone up for two reasons.  Increases in price and volume.  I will address the later in this post.  Physicians can do more today than in the past.  Since there is more to do, more is done (i.e.  volume rises).  

Back in the 1970's there was little that could be done when someone had a heart attack. They either lived or died. Afterward you could they could try to improve their diet and exercise, but there was nothing medical science to do and so if you had bad genes you'd be a goner in short order.

Today we have an array of well-tolerated medications that can address many of the factors leading to heart attack so if you have bad genes you aren't necessarily a goner. If you get a heart attack, a cardiac catheterization can often stop it in its tracks.  This happened to my wife in 2010, I watched on the video how they just stopped the heart attack in its tracks not 40 minutes after the onset of serious symptoms.  She got out with zero damage, lost weight, and pulled herself out of nascent diabetes, and now is likely to have decades more to live.  The medications she takes control her hereditary blood chemistry issues, just as the ones I take control my hereditary high BP.  None of this existed forty years ago so the drugs we take and the treatments she got (that are part of this increased volume) were not things available to her father (who died of a heart attack at 55).  Had we been living in the 1970's she would have died from that 2010 heart attack--at 55, just like her father.

Same thing is true for cancer. When I was a kid, cancer was a death sentence.  You got cancer, you died, unless you got lucky.  Now lots of people get cancer and get cured of it (my wife is one).  Others don't but manage to live on for a decade or more with the cancer before it finally gets them. In this sense, if you develop cancer at 69, and die of a stroke at 75, you can say you survived cancer.  We all are going to die of something.  The opportunity to die 6  years later of something other than cancer is surely worth something, right?  How much is that worth to you?

[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.

[David Horn]

(12-28-2016, 05:40 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 05:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: If automation has collapsed jobs in the USA, it will collapse then in Europe and China too in time. If manufacturing is done by machines, fewer people are needed.

Yes, Eric, if Japan and South Korea and Germany have vastly higher levels of factory automation than the US, and yet higher rates of employment in the same sectors, then they must inevitably be behind the US and must collapse in their turn (as they catch up to US automation?).  Because, after all, if manufacturing employment in the US didn't collapse because of automation, it must have collapsed for some other reason, one which might be amenable to policy shifts, which means that something would have to be done (or at least an explanation tendered as to why those who set policy choose not to).  And we can't have that, now, can we?

I mean, there is only so much work to be done, isn't there?

You cite three countries that have manipulated their currencies to make them unusually competitive, although Japan is slowly exiting that group.   Is this the best you've got?

[David Horn]

(12-28-2016, 10:36 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 05:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Health care jobs are rising. I suspect it may be because of the American lifestyle and diet.

While "SAD" - Standard American Diet - has caused health problems, it's not directly related to health care jobs; it is related to longevity declines in some groups, but since those are declines, obviously health care hasn't been able to fully compensate.

The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

A simpler reason: the population is aging.  Also, insurance that supports healthcare is more readily available ... at least for now.

[SomeGuy]

Quote: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.

Do you honestly think the pace of change is greater today in the US than it was at the same time last saeculum?  We went from horse-and-buggies to jetplanes and automobiles.  And what of new jobs in the service sector?  The extent to which automation allows one to do more with same, rather than the same with less.  I have given actual examples, perhaps you might be willing to respond with something other than platitudes and statements of faith.

Quote:... 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.

In what way was this a response to me?  I stated that it is perfectly possible to have both a higher level of automation and greater levels of manufacturing employment, and provided examples, and this is what you respond with?  How does this affect the price of rice in China?

Quote:And yes, manufacturing jobs are disappearing everywhere.

You respond to criticism of the belief that automation is going to get rid of all jobs with an article about how people are continuing to find more and better jobs even in the face of it?  Did you actually read it or just grab the first thing off of a Google search?

Quote: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.

And they require those salaries to pay their exhorbitant debt incurred to pay for a legal education (mandated by law and what is in essence a guild) that still requires practical legal training at the end of it in order for them to work.  Meanwhile, the majority of demand for legal services goes unfulfilled.  This seems less of a problem of automation as it does a poorly designed training pipeline.   

Quote: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.

You're right.  Just as you boomers were the first people to be young, you'll be the last ones to be old.  What was I thinking?

Quote: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.

Ah, the good old lump of labor fallacy!  No new work will become possible with greater technology.  Labor prices won't shift to compensate.  Automation and mechanization will continue in a straight line without the least impact from, say, AGW or resource shortages.  Everything will be exactly the way it is now, except more so.

Got it.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:You cite three countries that have manipulated their currencies to make them unusually competitive, although Japan is slowly exiting that group.   Is this the best you've got?

Is that why they are so successful?  Currency manipulation?  I mean, sure, it must be extremely difficult for the other Europeans to compete with the Germans because the Deutsche Mark is so cheap by comparison, to say nothing of how much lower it is than the US Dollar.  I'm sure similar issues play a major role between SK and Japan and their trading partners.  Let's just ignore the bit we were actually talking about whether higher levels of automation automatically lead to lower levels of employment, and let's introduce something new, something so obvious that no citation is necessary.

Good thing the US doesn't engage in manipulating currencies, amirite?  The Federal Reserve wouldn't be caught dead playing around with interest rates, currency swaps, and the like!

[Mikebert]

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.

[SomeGuy]

No, Mike, he does not.  YOU are and have been making a different one, and a silly one if I might add.  A "burden"?  Do you think you or I have a job because our employers are interested in carrying out social policy?  My company is transitioning from being a regular (corporate) travel agency to being a "platform company" because they make more money doing so.  Look at my earlier example of reporting at my job.  They charge for those reports, and so what might look like makework to me or you becomes a new revenue stream for them, because what earlier involved a great deal of work for one client occasionally became feasible to do for many regularly because the marginal cost of generating them came down.  Automation freed up company resources to pursue other revenue opportunities.  

Companies don't hire people if they don't feel they need to.  You're making the same mistake the weavers made in the 19th century, assuming that since everybody made do with one or two pairs of clothes in the past (unless they were very rich) that adding machines that could do the same work very quickly meant that they would no longer have jobs, rather than what actually happened which was that now they sold multiple sets of clothes cheaply to everybody, driving a tremdndous growth in the employment of cotton farmers, coal miners, machinists, factory workers, and the like. Likewise my employer has added programmers and analysts and sales people, even as they farm out more and more of the actual travel agent jobs to partner agencies (increasing the total number of travel agents in the process).

[Eric the Green]

Past isn't always prologue. The amount of fields being computerized and robotomized is unprecedented. It extends to virtually anything, including the design and maintenance of the robots. Machines were supposed to save labor. That is their purpose. We ought to reap the rewards.

That means giving up the precious Reaganoid libertarian economics. Work is not for everyone anymore; it is no longer the excuse to avoid paying taxes to help the poor and the different. We ought to be working less; that's the whole purpose of machines. That means the owners should not reap all the rewards. If they continue to do that, courtesy of Republican voters, there won't be an economy at all.

[Odin]

The development of a consumerist society, driven by marketing creating artificial demand (read up on Edward Bernays), and all the new sectors that evolved from that have absorbed all the previous waves of labor-saving technological change and that has masked technological unemployment in manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction, but that is now coming to an end. Good paying jobs for those incapable of higher education will be rapidly disappearing and low-pay McJobs cannot sustain an economy based on consumerism.

[SomeGuy]

(12-30-2016, 08:21 AM)Odin Wrote: The development of a consumerist society, driven by marketing creating artificial demand (read up on Edward Bernays), and all the new sectors that evolved from that have absorbed all the previous waves of labor-saving technological change and that has masked technological unemployment in manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction, but that is now coming to an end. Good paying jobs for those incapable of higher education will be rapidly disappearing and low-pay McJobs cannot sustain an economy based on consumerism.

Is this like a new part of the progressive catechism now?  Jesus, Odin, I am aware of what the position is, I'd like to see it justified, not merely repeated in different words.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I am as pleased as the next member of the proletariat that the march of progress is bringing about the final triumph of true Communism, it's just that I am a bit of a materialist. I can't get by on faith alone.

[Mikebert]

(12-29-2016, 05:40 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: No, Mike, he does not.  YOU are and have been making a different one, and a silly one if I might add.  A "burden"?  Do you think you or I have a job because our employers are interested in carrying out social policy?  

Not at all. The term burden wasn't about social policy.  It reflects a way of analysis that no longer makes business sense.  Sixty years ago much of what a consumer goods company did were the so-called functional operations that produced the product and put it into the hands of the end consumer.  There were always support functions, management, finance, human resources, which were a small part of the total that were "carried" along by the main (functional) business activity of the firm, hence the term "burden". It's a British term, not sure how much it was used here. It had nothing to do with social policy.

The world has changed.  Today the total value of all the bulk pharmaceuticals produced at Pfizer amounts to 1.5% of sales.  Formulation and packaging adds more but total cost of goods sold is still quite small.  Today what used to be the burden is now the vast majority of what we do.  From a strict profit pov this analysis should be reversed: the old-time functional employees are now the burden and the others are functional. After all, it is the latter which generates the bulk of the profits. This is what the platform model is about.

There is a potential problem with the platform model, however, which can be illustrated with a simple example.  Nike outsources shoe production to manufacturing companies outside the US.  These companies produce the authentic Nike shoes with the swoosh logo and packaged in authentic Nike boxes, which are shipped to America and sold in America stores for many time the price these companies receive for them.  What stops such a manufacturer from selling these shoes as Nike brand shoes in its home market at a fraction the price Nike sells them for but still much more that they get from Nike?  These wouldn't be knockoffs, they are the real deal--the same exact shoe, with the same brand cachet as what people have been buying. This, of course, is brand infringement, which is against US law and so they cannot do this here.  But the only thing that would stop them from doing so in foreign markets would be if their government stopped them, that is, enforced Nike's IP rights.

A platform company is reliant on a government standing up for them.  Its the same for us.  A big chunk of our profits come from the fact that we can sell the exact same product to American consumers for much more than we do the Japanese.  We give a low price to the Japanese because they demand low prices.  They are huge customers and if we don't accommodate their desire for lower prices, we will lose their business, which is still very profitable (just not extremely profitable like the American business).  The big American buyer is forbidden by law from bargaining with us, so we get our preferred price. The smaller American buyers has little market clout and have to take our price. The basis for both of our profits is crony capitalism, yet is presented as pure market capitalism in the case of platform companies. 

The platform model is fundamentally dependent on political acceptance of globalism (free movement of capital between countries) and the concept of free trade (that Ricardo explicitly stated depended on NO movement of capital between countries).  Since these are in contradiction with each other the framework on which this brave new world stands is shaky and it is likely to collapse like it did the last time we were here.

[SomeGuy]

Mike,

Fair enough.  And I am not so far gone to maximalist libertarian rhetoric that I am going to argue against the role of government in supporting much of what passes for "free market capitalism".  That being said, what does this have to do with automation?  You mentioned the shaky political foundations of globalization.  I agree.  But how does that invalidate or even argue against the position I was taking that manufacturing jobs can and should be brought back?  If unskilled labor costs are no longer the determining factor in production costs, why shouldn't those (largely automated) factories be brought back, as is starting to happen with textiles?  Are you arguing that the US government is likely to stop enforcing US patent and copyrights?  How about jobs like mine, wherein the information revolution is changing my company from a travel agency to a manager of travel data?  What is so unstable about that?

Is nobody here willing to consider the extent to which automation may make things feasible that would not have been so before?  Universal recycling, more customized goods, distributed power generation, data management, etc.?


I keep hearing "It's different this time", but I still haven't heard why.

[Odin]

(12-30-2016, 09:35 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 08:21 AM)Odin Wrote: The development of a consumerist society, driven by marketing creating artificial demand (read up on Edward Bernays), and all the new sectors that evolved from that have absorbed all the previous waves of labor-saving technological change and that has masked technological unemployment in manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction, but that is now coming to an end. Good paying jobs for those incapable of higher education will be rapidly disappearing and low-pay McJobs cannot sustain an economy based on consumerism.

Is this like a new part of the progressive catechism now?  Jesus, Odin, I am aware of what the position is, I'd like to see it justified, not merely repeated in different words.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I am as pleased as the next member of the proletariat that the march of progress is bringing about the final triumph of true Communism, it's just that I am a bit of a materialist.  I can't get by on faith alone.

A big reason the Rust Belt is hurting so much is that the good-paying jobs are simply no longer there for folks who are on the shorter end of the stick intellectually, and one of the big issues with the Obama Recovery is that most of the new jobs were lower-pay service industry jobs that did not not pay as much as the old jobs. We are already seeing the process I'm talking about beginning to unfold now, this is WHY it's getting talked about in progressive circles. Hell, even some on the Right like the idea of a Universal Basic Income, because they see what's coming.

[Mikebert]

(12-30-2016, 12:41 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: How about jobs like mine, wherein the information revolution is changing my company from a travel agency to a manager of travel data?  What is so unstable about that?

It all comes down to the end consumer.  GDP is essentially net sales of the economy. It is a small share of total sales, because much of a firms revenues comes from other firms and so serves and inputs into other company's cost structure. You entire firm is such an input, it is a cost entry in another company's books.  You exist because they got ride of some other cost element.  A big chunk of tech is supported by advertising.  As long as advertising remains a fixed percentage of GDP all this sort of tech is a zero sum game, jobs gains by tech workers are offset by job losses elsewhere.  The only way that advertising-linked tech would be a growth center would be in advertising grew as a % of GDP.  But in this case you would have the cost of the stuff being marketed go up with not actual increase in quality or utility.  It would be artificial.

As far as I know this has not been happening in advertising, growth in online media is offset by decline in old media.  There is one sector in which this HAS been happening: higher education.  The productivity of college instructors (the functional workers in this case) has gone up dramatically even though their has been no change in their tangible output (they still educate the same numbers of students as before) but in dollar terms the price for this education has risen.  Staff aren't getting paid any more, many colleges use the same lecture halls today as they did in the past. Colleges are mostly non-profit so the extra revenue that comes from the higher price isn't flowing into profits.  So where's it going?  Into the burden.  Colleges have many positions that either did not exist or were much smaller 40 years ago.  Some of them are counselors, mental health specialists, and assistance for non-traditional students, but the biggest chunk is IT.  Higher education maintain a lot of IT infrastructure that costs a lot to support. Is this burden increasing the value of the college's product?  No, graduates earn no more relative to per capita GDP than they did a decade or two in past.  So students are paying more for the same value, which generates extra revenue that produces jobs for folks like you.

A similar thing has happened with finance. A certain amount of financial services are need to serve consumers.  Most of it is for business and so in a cost input, as is what you and I do and the rest of the burden.  Some of this is necessary and serves to enhance output, like the work of process improvement specialists (inventors, product/process entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, designers etc) have done over the last century.  Others are not. A level comes where further effort in finance is counterproductive as described here. 

A similar effect (but to a lesser extent) is present in healthcare.

Now, this is not some sort of conspiracy.  It is not intentional, not some sort of welfare for highly educated people.  The same is true of the platform company.  It is simply something that has happened.  But the soaring costs of higher education and healthcare have been revealed as problems.  The costs of excess financialization have become clear. Is further burden expansion is these areas going to be feasible? How long can this continue.  This is what Dave is noticing.  He's not completely right.  You made an excellent point on how burden expansion has prevented much of the job loss so far.  But he's not completely wrong either.

[Mikebert]

Absolutely, all this is true.  Automation will make all sorts of things possible.  But are the worthwhile? How does universal recycling gain the consumer who pays for it a benefit to compensate for the increase cost?  And if there is not increased cost, then it CANNOT grow the economy. Same thing is true for distributed power.  I already HAVE power.  What benefit will distributed power grant me that will compensate me for the greater costs/hassle.  And recall if costs are down then it doesn't grow the economy.

Most people do not understand how the economy grows.  Economic growth over the long term comes from the creation of new categories of demand.  The classic example is personal transportation.  In 1895 very few households budgets had a personal transportation entry. Personal transportation was free, provided by your own two legs.  Sixty years later, most households had such an entry consisting of car payments and insurance, gas, oil and repair expenditures. And then their were the secondary effects, new spending catalyzed by personal transportation.  Having the ability to commute from farther away meant longer commutes were possible allowing people more room to live allowed for bigger houses. As George Carlin noted, a house is a place to store your stuff, and so that meant more stuff and a bigger budget item for furniture, appliance, household goods and other stuff.  All these are the creation of new kinds of demand for things. 

In my own life I say how the information economy created the need for a IT assets and services in consumer households.  In 1980 my dad and I looked as PCs and couldn't find anything with remotely the capability of the dial-up time sharing system we were using then.  In Jan 1983 my dad bought a Commodore 64.  At home one weekend I implemented a stochastic model for the level distribution of retired NPCs in my D&D world I was running then. It worked an I thought I need a PC.  So I got one and have had one ever since although I haven't written a program in more than 25 years.  I strictly use software now and know zero about computers today. By the early 1990's there was a compelling reason to have computing power at your disposal.  GAMES.  There was nothing like it.  These games had long existed in standalone devices but now even non-gamer PC owners could get incredible games.  And the MUDs and their descendents, all of which have huge potential for addiction.  All of this is creation of new demand, leading sectors I call them and also of an unsually old fashioned type.  Just like the tobacco, rum, tea and coffee leading sectors of centuries ago (all of which are recreational drugs and so addictive) the new video game products were too.  And these were new, they did not take away from some former business that did the same thing, so they were like persona; transportation.  But as the IT economy unfolded, too much of it was offered for free, to be supported by advertising and so IT ceased to function as a growth sector.  And this is more or less where we are today.