Not really, I think companies had a glut of employees due to the excess credit. Now companies have incentive to unload the driftwood and excesses of yesteryear. So you will no longer see departments with 15 layers of managers,meeting directors,etc... glut of non productive people just eating up time and producing little if any output. The future is Lean and mean, cost cutting to survive the new less easy credit less leveraged world. Less humans, lower lifespan is the only solution. Nothing else can change the fact that we just need less humans to produce output.
Not necessarily lower lifespan, but we do have a structural excess of labor. What does that mean? 1. The days of "graduating high school and getting a good job at the local plant" are gone. 2. Most well-paying jobs in manufacturing and service must first pass the "cheap labor in Asia" test. 3. If one wants a well-paying job today, he'd better be highly educated and ambitious... 'cause there ain't that many such jobs. 4. As a result... many, MANY displaced workers will find jobs which pay minimum wage or only slightly better... if they can find any job at all (many won't)... What's to be done about/for them?? Better get used to it... 'cause that's the way it is... All the Obama speeches about "hope and change'... all the stimulus... none of that is going to change things.
Oh no! I guess this means we're headed for 80% unemployment!:eek: Productivity gains make products cheaper. Cheaper products increases demand as more people can afford them. There have been productivity gains throughout the entire history of world... The economy evolves and people find work in other areas. Productivity gains are nothing to fear.
Not necessarily. With increased automation, cheap asian labor there is no reason to hire someone back to just sit there and collect a paycheck. A perfect example is our food production, we actually pay farmers to destroy crops because we are so productive at creating food that it would glut the market otherwise. Eventually you will just need one person to control a big ass robot factory pushing out shit day and night, computers doing payroll,Accounting,Purchasing automatically as well using AI tech. People will become obsolete in general. Demand can only grow so much. People are not going to buy a new car every week, or TV sets etc..
Productivity gains may result in cheaper products in a few specific industries. But across the broad economy, won't any productivity gains be inflated away?
I disagree. There will always be a need for people to invent new robots, build robots, maintain robots, etc. etc. etc. There is no possible way people can become obsolete. You are watching too many sci-fi films. Think about what someone 100 years ago was probably thinking. If you told that guy that we'd have the internet, Mars missions, planes that fly themselves and shoot rockets, a computer that you can hold in your hand and take with you wherever you go, etc. etc. That guy would have said you are nuts and people will be obsolete by that time. But obviously that is not the case. My point is technological advances ensure that productivity gains do not make people obsolete. Perhaps some day we will employ millions of people to build cities on Mars? Nobody knows.
This topic was covered pretty well a couple of days ago. Humans are hardly needed in manufacturing or agriculture anymore. When we transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one the shift was painful because people thought we needed that work to survive. Just as the people then didn't know manufacturing was their future we also don't know what the future holds. What we do know is that people are innovative and creative and as they become useless in one area they find new and ingenious ways to be productive. In the end this kind of productivity increase is good, higher standards of living come each person can produce more. Just my two cents.
Yes it will be inflated because people will have to borrow to make up the shortfall which means more printing and more credit. Why do you think the governments solution is always bailouts, more printing of dollars? Our industrial capacity has been hollowed out and sent to communist china. Our white collar workforce is the next target, that is in progress right now with offshoring of jobs to india. Our country is a net exporter of debt.