198 replies to this topic

[Sister Midnight]

Never mind. I'm avoiding participation.

[Lysistrata]

My point is that none of these people effected are interested in stupid graphs to explain why they can't take care of their families... it does nothing to solve the problem. Ask Democrats and they just say the jobs are gone forever, and they are not coming back... apply for welfare and keep voting for us. The new unemployment rate came out today... it's 4.6%!!! Great right? But they don't tell you that another 500,000 American taxpayers that are able to work and continue to pay taxes... fell out of the workforce. A new record of 95,055,000... that's 95 million... Americans are not working, or not even looking for a job anymore. The real unemployment rate is 9.5%... it's been worse, but we can't stay this way.

 

http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx

Just backing that up with some data

 

So no one cares about graphs. Donald Trump offered a change, and that's why he won. Hillary Clinton offered nothing. Democrats want to blame everyone, and everything else, for losing... except their own candidate. How it all works out is still up in the air, but right now it's looking pretty damn promising... except for terrorists, illegals, and the remaining Democrats in red states.

[Niels]

Lys, this is a good example why people give up trying to reason with you. Niels made a good point and he supported it with data.

 
Thank you ccabal - I appreciate the support from another member of the community that values evidence-based reasoning and analysis.

 

My point is that none of these people effected are interested in stupid graphs to explain why they can't take care of their families... it does nothing to solve the problem.

 

 

1: The graph was not directed at the multitudes of people, it was directed at you and your points.  I have taken the time to address your comments specifically, and wish you would extend the same courtesy.

2: They would not have been in this bind had they occasionally checked the world around them, and planned to make adjustments accordingly.

There are many different types of jobs requiring no, or minimal, higher-education that are relatively offshoring- and automation-proof.  For example, nurses, electricians, and plumbers.  There may come a day when these can be automated, but the fact that they are so dispersed and require access to "odd" locations (it is hard to imagine a plumber robot entering a crawl space to reach a corner behind a water heater) makes them more resilient.  Small equipment operators (e.g. little backhoes used at construction sites) are also possible, since the constantly changing terrain of construction sites and the finesse needed for their operation are hard to program.

Praying that the government will help your particular factory (again, Carrier, but not other factories in the same town) to save your particular job (again, many of the Carrier jobs are still going to Mexico), is not a viable strategy.  And Trump's "plan" to "make deals" is bad precedent: today the Wall Street Journal and even Sarah Palin came out against it as "crony capitalism," a "hallmark of corruption," and "socialism."

Maybe a systemic lowering of corporate taxes, which Trump does also support, will make a difference.  However, I am skeptical of this too.  Reagan lowered corporate and personal income taxes significantly in the 1980s, and threw a lot of defense contracts out to be handled by US manufacturers.  Yet, the blue line in the graph I posted still went down in the 1980s at the same rate it did in the 1970s and would in the 1990s.  That speaks to the fact that regulations and taxes are not the primary problem with maintaining manufacturing employment.  Since we've eliminated them, and free trade deals, we really are back to having to assign the blame to automation.

I'll quote myself now:

Increasing automation did this. And I don't see anyone lining up to smash computers and robots like the Luddites of old did with early industrial weaving technologies.

 

[Canik]

2: They would not have been in this bind had they
occasionally checked the world around them, and planned to make
adjustments accordingly.


There are many different types of jobs requiring no, or minimal,
higher-education that are relatively offshoring- and automation-proof.
 For example, nurses, electricians, and plumbers.

Although it is good advice to try to focus on jobs that can't be easily out-sourced or automated, are there enough of those types of jobs for everybody? From what I'm looking up, it looks like even including all jobs we are short somewhere around maybe 15-25 million jobs. Depending on true population and stuff. However nothing you can find online is absolute proof, you have to have faith the numbers were competently gathered and presented honestly. But my gut tells me that is probably true.

Thus, even if everyone did focus on those types of jobs as you suggest - they may still have ended up in the bind they are in.

Also if it's just automation that's the problem. Why are factories moving to overseas? Just to have robots and robots only do stuff over there instead of here? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Free trade and offshoring jobs is probably a bigger issue than you give it credit for.

[Niels]

Although it is good advice to try to focus on jobs that can't be easily out-sourced or automated, are there enough of those types of jobs for everybody? From what I'm looking up, it looks like even including all jobs we are short somewhere around maybe 15-25 million jobs. Depending on true population and stuff. However nothing you can find online is absolute proof, you have to have faith the numbers were competently gathered and presented honestly. But my gut tells me that is probably true.

My list wasn't meant to be inclusive of all possibilities, and I don't know if overall there is demand for everyone who has stopped working in manufacturing.  I will still stand by my statement that praying for the government to save one's particular factory and one's particular job in it is a losing strategy.

I did find the figure below (Lysistrata will probably yell about the color scheme, but I can't do anything about that), which details the percentages of the economy in each of a variety of job categories, and how they changed from 1947 to 2009.  For instance finance, insurance, and real estate grew from 10.5% to 21.4%, government grew from 12.5% to 13.6%, manufacturing fell from 25.6% to 11.0%, and agriculture essentially disappeared (8.2% to 1.0%).

[Hey, why is no one focused on the displaced farmer?  Probably because he actually moved and made a new life for himself.]

Things that gained over the last 60 years probably will continue to gain, things that lost will probably continue to lose.  Persons at risk of displacement should give attention to the blue wedges.

 

Also if it's just automation that's the problem. Why are factories moving to overseas? Just to have robots and robots only do stuff over there instead of here?

 
A very astute question.  You are right that if automation was the only component to the changes in the job market, we would not see factories move overseas, but there are issues of labor costs, availability of capital, etc.  What is happening is that companies are faced with a choice:

(1) Move the job overseas, manufacture without automation, but taking advantage of cheaper labor.  (Think $3 pack of shirts from Vietnam)
(2) Keep the job in the US, manufacture with automation, because Americans demand higher pay.  (Think highly-automated BMW factory in South Carolina)

I've bolded the parts that bring about job losses to the US, and you can see that either option has that result.  If "free trade" was ended, companies would choose #2 exclusively.  Since they are allowed a choice, the one that lowers labor+capital costs the most at this given time wins.  In the long run, we can expect other countries to get richer, and for more factories to return to the US in order to lower their transportation costs, but that these factories will be automated.

[Niels]

Also if it's just automation that's the problem. Why are factories moving to overseas? Just to have robots and robots only do stuff over there instead of here? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Free trade and offshoring jobs is probably a bigger issue than you give it credit for.

 

 

Hey Canik,
I wanted to see if I could find some additional evidence in support of my position, and I found the following data that might be of interest.

First, here is absolute manufacturing employment from 1994-2016 (and because it is absolute numbers, and not as a percentage of the overall workforce, there are some periods of increase that were negative in the first graph I posted on the previous page of this thread).
Interestingly, there was a modest increase in manufacturing employment from 1994-1998, which were exactly the years immediately after the passage of NAFTA.  When mass job losses occurred in 2001, it was not associated with the passage of a new trade act, but rather with an overall economic recession.

So if NAFTA was so bad, why did it take more than 8 years for supposed effects to take place, and why can the effects not be deconvoluted from a broader economic downturn that affected the rest of the economy?

Second, here is the change in manufacturing output and manufacturing employment since the end of the Great Recession.
Once again, we have an increase in absolute number of manufacturing jobs (by about 6% from mid-2009 to mid-2015), but of course, overall employment grew by >6% during that timeframe, so the manufacturing share of all jobs still declined.
However, at the same time as manufacturing employment grew 6%, manufacturing output grew 21%.

That is automation in action.

It is data like these that lead to my conclusions that (1) manufacturing jobs should not be expected to grow as a share of employment, and trying to make them do so by any means is a fool's errand,* and (2) the main reason** for (1) is that automation has made many manufacturing positions obsolete.

 

I welcome any further comments you have!

* - Some would say we have elected a fool though.
** - Though not the only reason.

[onbekende]

So Trump wants France's socialism, check.

 

That said, I will state so when I feel so: Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, I have no real qualms with him. Not even his nickname really phazes me, he seems both qualified and with good attitude I would link with such a post.

[Lysistrata]

Time for a word from my alter-ego

[Niels]

Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, I have no real qualms with him. Not even his nickname really phazes me, he seems both qualified and with good attitude I would link with such a post.

 

General Mattis does seem to be a well-qualified, and well-chosen pick.

I found the quotes collected in this Scientific American article to be particularly interesting and illuminating.

[Lysistrata]

Dr. Ben Carson has been chosen for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This is the very same job that Kiefer Sutherland has in that stupid new show called "Designated Survivor", before he is vaulted to President after a bomb kills everyone else. I quit watching that show after 2 episodes because I knew what direction it was going. Hollywood is so predictable.

 

Well none the less, Dr. Carson is a solid choice to guide Trump's vision for inner cities, and to make good on his promise. Another promise that must see significant action if the Donald wants re-election. We shall see.

[onbekende]

So we got the "token black guy" out of the way, someone who he himself stated he was unfit for duty as a "Secretary of X". Jokes are already flung around about Trump picking "a black dude" to go "parlay" with "the hood" in "the urban" he knows little about. Perhaps he got a little 1-on-1 with Trump Uni (was about houses no? )? Atleast someone got his money's worth...

 

So basically Carson is just the face to the Trump strategem I guess. What is this "strategem"?

 

Unsure if this could be worse or better, what does it even entail this "Secretary of Housing and Urban Development"? Apart from the obvious "socialist" slant to it with subsidized housing?

[Niels]

Jokes are already flung around about Trump picking "a black dude" to go "parlay" with "the hood" in "the urban" he knows little about.

 

To be fair, there are a lot of things that Ben Carson knows little about.

For example, he correctly identifies that The Pyramids exist, then goes off the rails:

 

But at least people can have some fun with it:

 

Maybe he can use his authority at HUD to build grain silos in major cities.

[onbekende]

Massive solid stone pyramids with little to no place to actually store stuff. >_>

 

I could go for a "other usage for ancient artifact/building" if it had some good logic, the darns things are solid stone with some small chambers and connecting tunnels left open. What were they protecting the grain from, a meteorite strike?

[Lysistrata]

The CEO of SoftBank, and he also controls Sprint, had a 45 minute meeting with Donald Trump today. After the short meeting, the dude has pledged to invest 50 billion dollars and create 50,000 new jobs, right here in the good old USA. Not bad for a days work... and he isn't even President yet.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-says-softbank-pledges-to-invest-50-billion-in-u-s-1481053732

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/trump-japanese-mogul-pledges-50-billion-us-investment-214229797.html

[Niels]

The CEO of SoftBank, and he also controls Sprint, had a 45 minute meeting with Donald Trump today. After the short meeting, the dude has pledged to invest 50 billion dollars and create 50,000 new jobs, right here in the good old USA. Not bad for a days work... and he isn't even President yet.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-says-softbank-pledges-to-invest-50-billion-in-u-s-1481053732

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/trump-japanese-mogul-pledges-50-billion-us-investment-214229797.html

 

And meanwhile 1/3 of Trump's supposed saved jobs at Carrier from last week have disappeared.

Quoting from Indianapolis' NBC affiliate:

 "We found out today that more jobs are leaving than what we originally thought," Bray said. "It seemed like since Thursday, it was 1,100, then it was maybe 900, and then now we're at 700. So I'm hoping it doesn't go any lower than that."

 

Union workers got a letter at the plant saying Trump's deal with Carrier will save only 730 factory jobs in Indianapolis ...

(emphasis mine)

I'm sure there is a perfectly innocent explanation for why Trump's numbers on 11/29 don't match actual numbers on 12/05.  (The non-innocent one quoted in the article is that he was claiming to have "saved" R&D jobs that were never at risk of moving.)

Maybe he can spin a great headline out of the the ~400 people who thought their jobs were saved last Tuesday, and who were then put on the chopping block anyway this Monday.  Or more likely, since the stunt is over, no one will particularly care except little local news organizations.

Don't blame me for being pessimistic - I said one could not attempt to fight the actual economic realities.

[onbekende]

Well the Softbank numbers were already pledged in Oktober and would probably have happended anyway seeing they are Silicon Valley heavy investment plans.

 

Talking about that, those 50k people would the no doubt put a multiple of them out of jobs as they are doing alot of technology advancements. Thought you didn't want that?

[Niels]

Well the Softbank numbers were already pledged in Oktober and would probably have happended anyway seeing they are Silicon Valley heavy investment plans.

Yes, that is correct, and here is a reference for anyone interested:
"SoftBank and Saudi Arabia plan $100 billion tech fund" - October 13, 2016
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/13/softbank-saudi-arabia-plan-100-billion-tech-vision-fund-based-in-london.html

[Lysistrata]

Boom! Who didn't see this coming? An exclusive trade deal between the US and the UK... gotta love Brexit. Rand Paul loves it.

http://thehill.com/policy/international/global-trade-economy/309547-brexit-leader-im-pushing-us-uk-trade-deal-to-trump

[Canik]

It is data like these that lead to my conclusions that (1) manufacturing jobs should not be expected to grow as a share of employment, and trying to make them do so by any means is a fool's errand,* and (2) the main reason** for (1) is that automation has made many manufacturing positions obsolete.

I'm glad you shared this perspective with us Niels but I still think it's better to have those factories here than not. Just because manufacturing jobs are on the decline doesn't mean we should just give what we have left away without a second thought. Plus the factories being here means more jobs for construction workers building factories and things like plumbers, electricians, pest control jobs maintaining the factory. Then those people get paid and buy stuff here, potentially creating more jobs and wealth.

Also I don't think you ever refuted my point that there may not be enough service jobs for us all. As it stands it seems we have a shortage on jobs even with current manufacturing jobs included. So everyone focusing on service industry jobs isn't a solution for everyone. Though, I will say it might be possible.. if we USA got super serious about education so that many more of us were Doctors/Lawyers who could then work for other countries who need Doctors/Lawyers.

So should we have children prepare for a life as a factory worker? No, generally not. Should we let what factory jobs we have go without a fight? I'd say no to that as well. Not until we're sure there are replacement jobs available.
 

[Niels]

 Also I don't think you ever refuted my point that there may not be enough service jobs for us all. 

Indeed, I did not, because I don't know if there are, and explicitly said as much.

As it stands it seems we have a shortage on jobs even with current manufacturing jobs included.

This is true - best I can find is that right now there are 1.4 unemployed pesons for every job opening.  This ratio is the about the lowest it has been since 2000 though, suggesting a reasonably good employment market without too many "surplus" would-be-employees.
For better or worse, we can probably expect significant retirements in the near future (Baby Boomers are reaching Social Security age right now by the hundreds-of-thousands per month).  Their positions may require replacement by younger workers, but their aging will require additional health and home-services positions in the coming years.  That will provide jobs for a number of people.

Should we let what factory jobs we have go without a fight? I'd say no to that as well. Not until we're sure there are replacement jobs available.

Maybe - depends on what the plan is:
Is it going to be giving out local or state tax cuts to specific profitable companies as Trump/Pence did?
Most people like having their town run a police department, fire services, and a school district, etc.  If you cut one company's taxes, the costs of these things need to be raised somewhere else.  Now suddenly the rest of the town has less spending money because we're all subsidizing those factory workers.
The hazard of companies threatening to leave in order to extort favorable tax conditions has not been addressed.
If one plant/company is chosen for tax preference and another is not, the latter will be less-competitive and likely to shed workers.  Result is just a transfer of the pain to different workers in a different town.

Are we going to just raise tariffs?
Yes, this will keep some jobs around, but it is an incentive toward automation, which ultimately will reduce the number of jobs in the future by attrition.  As an aside, the CEO of United Tech has already announced that the jobs kept at the Carrier plant are not going to last: "we're going to make a $16 million investment in that factory in Indianapolis to automate to drive the cost down".
Further, contrary to popular belief, the US has a lot of exports (2nd highest of any country).  Put up a tariff up to protect workers from imports?  Results in other countries establishing their own tariffs that will then decimate our exporting industries.  Again, just a transfer of pain from one set of employees to another.

Specific tariffs/fines for companies that move production overseas?  (A Trump idea as of 4 days ago)
In the short-term this might be better than general tariffs, since it is unlikely to result in retaliation that damages our own exports.
However, without the tariffs being general, a company that has always been foreign and thus isn't subject to these penalties will always be able to undercut the American-based one that would be subject to penalties if it tried to move to a lower labor cost area.  The foreign companies will gain market share and drive the American ones out of business.  This outcome is actually worse than letting the American companies offshore, since a greater proportion of the earnings are likely to end up in the hands of non-American shareholders at the end.

But, just so I can point out that I am not someone only able to criticize.
A good solution would be to make the US more competitive through adjustments to taxes and regulations in a revenue-neutral manner.
Decreasing corporate taxes probably won't have much of a positive effect - as I pointed out, Reagan's 1980s tax cuts were ineffective at changing trends - but they might a little.  The key is that they must not be allowed to explode the federal deficit, since that will make things much worse in the future in terms of decreased budget flexibility and increased need to raise revenue for GDP-sapping interest payments.