[governance] The coming job apocalypse

Fri Mar 28 12:22:44 EDT 2014

thanks  MG

The article says - "They offer no particular policy suggestions to 
remedy this cataclysm, save that “high-skill and high-wage” jobs are the 
least likely to be swept away and that workers, accordingly, need “to 
acquire creative and social skills” that computers are unlikely to 
master until a more distant time".

However I am doubtful if the number of such high skilled or creative 
jobs will anywhere increase to offset the decrease in the other jobs... 
this is a serious issue

Of course automation was thought of at sometime also as a blessing - 
that we all can work lesser...but whether it will actually bring about 
that happy situation where we all get more time for 'leisure' pursuits 
or a situation where many are fighting for economic survival (while the 
rich get richer and richer) is something for society to decide...only by 
perhaps democratic processes...

Guru

On 03/28/2014 09:40 PM, michael gurstein wrote:
>
> While this article is highly focused on the situation in the US, these 
> are among the issues which will very soon (or even now) need to be 
> discussed in the context of Global (Internet) Governance. The question 
> is, is MSism an appropriate method for responding to issues of social 
> justice such as this.
>
> *//*
>
> M
>
> Harold Meyerson
>
> Harold Meyerson 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/harold-meyerson/2011/02/24/ABvsvmP_page.html>
>
> Opinion Writer
>
>
>   The coming job apocalypse
>
>   * *By **Harold Meyerson
>     <http://www.washingtonpost.com/harold-meyerson/2011/02/24/ABvsvmP_page.html>**,
>     **Published: March 26****E-mail the writer*
>     <mailto:meyersonh at washpost.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27The%20coming%20job%20apocalypse%20%27>
>
> As a general rule, more Americans work than do the citizens of other 
> advanced economies. Since the late 1970s, when the number of women in 
> the workforce ballooned, the share of Americans who either had jobs or 
> were trying to get one was greater than the share of comparable 
> Europeans. For reasons good and bad — the higher availability of jobs, 
> the need to bolster stagnating incomes, the linkage of jobs to health 
> insurance — Americans worked like the dickens.
>
> But that general rule may be changing. The percentage of working-age 
> adults in the U.S. labor force began to decline in 2000, when it 
> reached a peak of 67 percent. As of last month, it was down to 63 
> percent <http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000>, which is lower 
> than the level in the United Kingdom 
> <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4c2993c6-b342-11e3-b891-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2x5pFuXbK>. 
> Not since the late 1970s has Britain had a higher share of workforce 
> participants than the United States.
>
> Part of this decline is because of the retirement of aging boomers, 
> but that explanation goes only so far. It doesn’t explain, for 
> instance, why the workforce participation of Americans ages 25 to 34 
> has declined from 83.3 percent to 81.8 percent since 2007, as the 
> Financial Times reported this week. Worse yet, the number of hours 
> that working Americans are on the job is in decline, too. In the past 
> six months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the average 
> workweek has shrunk 
> <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304250204579433442474053878> from 
> 34.5 hours to 34.2 hours —even as the official unemployment rate has 
> dropped.
>
> Anti-Obama partisans blame the president and his policies for the 
> dwindling workforce, but the decline began in the last year of Bill 
> Clinton’s presidency and continued through much of the presidency of 
> George W. Bush. Clearly, either bipartisan public policy or something 
> more fundamental than public policy is to blame.
>
> The bipartisan public policy that should raise the most suspicion is 
> trade policy, which fostered the offshoring of more than 2 million 
> manufacturing jobs 
> <http://www.epi.org/publication/bp345-china-growing-trade-deficit-cost/> after 
> Congress normalized trade relations with China in 2000. But an even 
> more fundamental factor in the declining share of working Americans is 
> the technological automation that has eliminated millions of jobs and 
> is poised to eliminate millions more.
>
> The mechanization of work has already taken a toll in the nation’s 
> ports (where cranes have reduced the longshore workforce 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-averted-port-strike-holds-lessons-for-all-workers/2013/01/01/3befd548-5393-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_story.html> to 
> roughly 10 percent of its size 60 years ago), factories (where 
> machines and computers have substituted for millions of workers), 
> construction sites (where the prefabrication of parts hasreduced the 
> number of construction workers 
> <http://prospect.org/article/work-history-0> ) and offices (whatever 
> became of secretaries?). And with increasing computing capacity 
> steadily expanding the abilities of machines, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
>
> In a paper 
> <http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf> they 
> wrote last year, Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford University’s Program on 
> the Impacts of Future Technology, and Michael A. Osborn, an Oxford 
> engineering professor, broke down the U.S. economy into 702 distinct 
> occupations and classified those occupations by the probability of 
> their computerization over the next few decades. They concluded that 
> 47 percent of U.S. workers have a high probability of seeing their 
> jobs automated over the next 20 years, including in transportation 
> (where the driverless car has become a reality 
> <http://www.google.com/about/careers/lifeatgoogle/self-driving-car-test-steve-mahan.html>), 
> manufacturing and retail sales. They offer no particular policy 
> suggestions to remedy this cataclysm, save that “high-skill and 
> high-wage” jobs are the least likely to be swept away and that 
> workers, accordingly, need “to acquire creative and social skills” 
> that computers are unlikely to master until a more distant time.
>
> Frey and Osborne acknowledge that there is a lot of speculation 
> encoded in their equations. But even if they’re half right, or just a 
> third right, that would mean that 23.5 percent or 15.7 percent, 
> respectively, of U.S. workers face a future of employment 
> extermination. I doubt that the mass acquisition of creative and 
> social skills is sufficient to meet this challenge. The way to deal 
> with such a job apocalypse would begin with the very measures that we 
> have failed to enact to combat the cyclical downturn that began in 
> 2008: a massive government program to build and repair our 
> infrastructure and to provide the preschool education and elder care 
> that the nation needs, which would increase consumption and economic 
> activity generally.
>
> Eventually, however, as computers pick up more and more skills, we 
> will have to embrace the necessity of redistributing wealth and income 
> from the shrinking number of Americans who have sizable incomes from 
> their investments or their work to the growing number of Americans who 
> want work but can’t find it. That may or may not be socialism; 
> certainly, it’s survival.
>
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