Thursday, January 28, 2010

sigh

i posted about this... hrm... before there were blogs...
1995 i think...
said 'this is what's coming'
now - well after the reality and into the 'lets look at the data' phase...
we're finally coming back to the truths -- technology was deskilling... that toffler had it wrong... etc etc...

"There are multiple ways to explain why permanent job-losers represent a higher share of the unemployed this time around. Maybe, as others have suggested, many of the jobs gained in the boom years were built on phantom wealth. Or maybe the culprit is a corollary of Moore’s Law, the idea of exponential advances in technology over time. That might suggest that innovation and automation displace more and more workers by the time each recession rolls around."

Both.
And we haven't really corrected yet - because the banks are allowed to value the cesspools in their books away from market value... the massive wave of govt spending has delayed the reckoning... but a reckoning is coming and it will be a disaster.

"Workers whose entire occupations — not just the previous payroll positions they held — are disappearing (think: auto workers) will need to start over and find a new career path. But the new skills they will need take a long time to acquire."

Wrong. The jobs will take very little time to train for... but i dont know why anyone would pay $60k a year for someone to do them in america when you could pay someone in Mexico $12k. What you're seeing is the reasonably rapid destruction of the middle class - and though you can blame Reagan, it was Clinton and Obama who've dropped the ball correcting.

1 comment:

No One said...

There's a decade-old Dilbert that addresses this subject. Dilbert is waxing poetic about how in the future, there would be a split between those who understood and used technology and those who didn't. And, there would be a word for those people who used computers. At this point, Dogbert chimed in:

"Secretaries."

BTW, I find it amusing that I can't post on a blogger.com site using Chrome. Way to go, Google...