There seems to be an erroneous consensus on the Left that offshoring/outsourcing explains this phenomenon. About a third of all manufacturing work, some 6 million jobs, has been lost since 2000. But the exporting of jobs fails to explain most of this. “[W]hile many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers.” (Adam Davidson, “Skills Don’t Pay the Bills”, The New York Times, Nov. 20, 2012) This is permanent job loss, and contributes to the inequality endemic to labor-market polarization: “Those jobs are not coming back, but many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly skilled manufacturing jobs – the ones that require people who know how to run the computer that runs the machine.”
A great read. I will also point the reader to my discussion of the movie
I, Robot.
Specifically I was struck by the displacement of humans in many jobs. I, robot takes place in 2035, when yours truly will be in his 60's. at that time it appears that robots are rubbish collectors, babysitters, cooks, janitors even bartenders. My question was, what happened to the people who usually do these jobs?
