There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't.
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement).
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue.
In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".
To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.
There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.
If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].
Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
I agree that a big part of the solution lies in retraining -- as a new way of life. In the future, no job will last long. We all must retrain continuously.
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.
What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most.
Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.
This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.
I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing.
This completely misses my point as I'm only using IQ as a stand in for cognitive abilities, cognitive abilities that are required to retrain and function in non-repetitive occupations.
By that argument my IQ is 100 because I have the median score of the population consisting of myself. Of course, when using an IQ test calibrated for a larger population, my IQ is something different. Similarly, it makes perfect sense for the average IQ of a country to be different from 100 when using a test calibrated for a population that is a superset of the country's population.
"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..."
Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look into alternative booming industries? Healthcare and therapists for example. With aging population, people would require more health therapists and similar service oriented jobs.
elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue.
there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy.
It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.
Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders.
It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.
You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.
Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...
Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.
Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?
>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it
Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).
>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.
I don't understand the reasoning here, like, at all. For decades now researchers have been pointing out the demographic issues of aging populations and the workforces required to care for them. I don't know the specific numbers, but they're doubtless enormous. Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?
If those 'elders' lives can be meanginfdly improved with care, than the resulting GDP from their payment to service providers is as 'productive' to society than anything else.
What the hell is the economy for otherwise?
Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..
And for a welding operator to become a physical therapist is an even larger leap.
Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side.
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.
You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (shower, etc.) vs full nursing ....
You can't pay a high school graduate the same as a CPRN, and they have different skills/applications.
The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it.
I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.
Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.
The current demand for healthcare is just phenomenal, with the supply barely meeting it in developed countries, and not so much in developing countries. Automation will most likely make it possible to have better skill division. e.g. a heart surgeon from the US could operate on a patient in Gambia, remotely. It seems unlikely that AI/automation would replace the surgeon altogether, at least in the next couple of decades (perhaps in the next 100 years, if we don't manage to kill of our species).
I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...
I am in a degree for bio-medical engineering (best of both, or worst?). Job prospects are about equal to many of my peers in non-engineering and non-medical fields: MS (or MD) or bust, and then you have to know who is hiring, when, and how they like their mochas.
Same basic trend we saw with industrial revolution. People lost their somewhat skilled (for the time) jobs to steam powered machines. As the recent election also put front and center, we're also competing with the entire planet for jobs. How do we compete with the Terminator and the foreigner bogeyman? You don't directly. Nations build a social safety net that cushions the churn of jobs, universal healthcare so that the stress of loosing your job and healthcare doesn't kill productivity, cheaper (or free) access to entry level college education (community college), and lastly nations need to provide geographic mobility (getting from the place without jobs to one with jobs isn't easy when your bank account balance is -$40 USD). The net effect of all these suggestions would likely be a good bump in long term national GDP and growth...we could likely implement most of them using less than 1/4 of our $600 billion yearly defense budget.
Cutting a defence budget is never going to be helpful especially by such a large amount - you're going to lose jobs, lives, security, and given how widely US troops are deployed you're going to lose even more stability in many parts of the world.
Welding machine operators are a drop in the bucket compared with the biggest looming job shift on the horizon: truck drivers. It's the most commonly listed job in 29 states and there are millions of them across the US. And most will be replaced by automated driving systems within the next couple decades. Yes, there will be service jobs within trucking, but that will be a small fraction of the 'routine' jobs that automation will replace.
Don't forget the jobs providing services to the people that drive the trucks. Many of those are going to be lost like those old rail and highway towns that built up and then bust when the popular routes changed.
"The paper, called “Disappearing Routine Jobs,” provides more evidence that the transformation of work in the U.S.—from an industrial economy to a digital one where routine work is automated or outsourced and the remaining jobs are concentrated in low-paid service work or high-skilled knowledge work"
Note the "or outsourced" piece. If the prevailing wage in the US is $20+ an hour vs a 3rd or quarter of that in the developing world there is no way the average US worker can compete. While I get the automation argument, that still doesn't explain the large (seemingly majority) of retail goods in the United States are that manufactured in lower labor cost countries. Not everyone is cut out to be a knowledge worker. As much as I personally like tech, this is not going to be the great job creator for Middle America.
There are still a lot of jobs that can't be automated and/or won't be for a long time. If it was possible to automate as much as some would have you believe in the short term straight up there are some robotics companies that would have not closed down (Willow Garage), and you would be seeing a lot more traction with others doing more interesting things instead of telepresence robots and clunky household devices such as the Roomba.
The actual research finds that this is a phenomenon associated with every jobless recovery (there have been 3 in the last 40 years or so): each time there's a recession that ends without restoring pre-recession jobs, the routine manual job market appears to take a permanent hit.
Here's the chart from an earlier paper by the same authors:
So a big question here is about causality. It's possible (maybe probable) that the phenomenon of long term declines in routine manual jobs is in fact the cause of jobless recoveries: it creates a ratcheting effect at each recession.
My understanding has been that it was due to stickiness in both wages and labor demand. That is, a recession is an excuse to cut wages/benefits/hours/headcount that managers either didn't care to cut or were afraid to cut in good times.
That, or it spurs managers to actually innovate and figure out how to do more with less.
If that understanding is even partially correct, it's ironic that labor laws designed to protect employees might actually be contributing to over-corrections in the labor market that directly hurt employees.
From this job description it seems like a job that is very easily automated, as you're not doing anything interesting, just feeding the machine and making small adjustments.
I agree that what remains of welding work isn't a routine job for sure.
I think the article is discussing the repetitive, low to medium skill welding and machine babysitting that has been automated or is just plain unnecessary with new manufacturing processes. What's left is the higher skill and un-automatable welding work.
Routine doesn't necessarily mean low skill or low pay, it just means that you do pretty much the same thing from day to day. There are probably surgeons out there who have fairly routine jobs, make half a million dollars a year doing it, and earn every penny.
Be a little careful with the terminology here. If you drill down into the research, they're referring to the cognitive/manual routine/non-routine quadrants. Typical illustrative examples would be:
Routine/Manual: Factory line work
Routine/Cognitive: Retail clerk
Non-Routine/Manual: Truck driver
Non-Routine/Cognitive: Software developer
In this scheme, every job falls into one of those four quadrants.
I agree, welding (probably most of the "trades") are "non-routine/manual".
That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Welders make decent money, 35-60k on average for bog standard fabrication work. Easy to double those figures working for the oil and gas industries. Welders that can cert to Nuclear industry standards can easily triple those figure, and underwater welders can make over $300k in a year.
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Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
[1] https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country#
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".
To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.
There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
[1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
Do you have any answers?
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
so, where to begin in the rats nest of problems?
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.
This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.
I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
[1] https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22
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there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy.
It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.
It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.
You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.
Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...
Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.
Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?
Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).
>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.
This is word soup.
What the hell is the economy for otherwise?
Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..
Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it.
I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.
there is huge efforts underway to replace Doctors, Nurses, etc with AI.
This has been brought up previously in HN discussions. It's an artifact of arbitrary binning choices.
Note the "or outsourced" piece. If the prevailing wage in the US is $20+ an hour vs a 3rd or quarter of that in the developing world there is no way the average US worker can compete. While I get the automation argument, that still doesn't explain the large (seemingly majority) of retail goods in the United States are that manufactured in lower labor cost countries. Not everyone is cut out to be a knowledge worker. As much as I personally like tech, this is not going to be the great job creator for Middle America.
There are still a lot of jobs that can't be automated and/or won't be for a long time. If it was possible to automate as much as some would have you believe in the short term straight up there are some robotics companies that would have not closed down (Willow Garage), and you would be seeing a lot more traction with others doing more interesting things instead of telepresence robots and clunky household devices such as the Roomba.
Here's the chart from an earlier paper by the same authors:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/782zelpi8r2nwua/Screenshot%202017-...
So a big question here is about causality. It's possible (maybe probable) that the phenomenon of long term declines in routine manual jobs is in fact the cause of jobless recoveries: it creates a ratcheting effect at each recession.
My understanding has been that it was due to stickiness in both wages and labor demand. That is, a recession is an excuse to cut wages/benefits/hours/headcount that managers either didn't care to cut or were afraid to cut in good times.
That, or it spurs managers to actually innovate and figure out how to do more with less.
If that understanding is even partially correct, it's ironic that labor laws designed to protect employees might actually be contributing to over-corrections in the labor market that directly hurt employees.
So it may have nothing to do with 'ups or downs' - just a long term secular trend in those areas.
Recessions just exacerbate the problems a little, possibly.
https://job-descriptions.careerplanner.com/Welding-Machine-O...
From this job description it seems like a job that is very easily automated, as you're not doing anything interesting, just feeding the machine and making small adjustments.
I think the article is discussing the repetitive, low to medium skill welding and machine babysitting that has been automated or is just plain unnecessary with new manufacturing processes. What's left is the higher skill and un-automatable welding work.
Routine/Manual: Factory line work
Routine/Cognitive: Retail clerk
Non-Routine/Manual: Truck driver
Non-Routine/Cognitive: Software developer
In this scheme, every job falls into one of those four quadrants.
I agree, welding (probably most of the "trades") are "non-routine/manual".