Faced with this catastrophe, the Progressive mind can only echo Samuel Gompers’ cry for “More!†But the cry is doomed to be fruitless. The only thing that will help is more subsidies: aid to universities and to students to allow the unsustainable education bubbles to continue to rise; aid to states and local governments to pay spiraling wage and pension bills; aid to home buyers to stave off price collapses; and most crucially, massive aid to both health care providers and consumers.
Wrong. We need to reduce the ‘friction’ in American society: the costs of our legal, health, educational and other government services. Some of this will come through the use of exactly those abilities of the computer that Paul Krugman dreads: their ability to replace human beings for much routine office work. Making government (and private sector) bureaucratic payrolls massively smaller is what the general interest requires.
Bonus points to him for quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Wonderful One Hoss Shay”, to which I’ve alluded here from time to time. It isn’t merely a feature or two of the Fordist system that’s in need of repair: all of its pieces are collapsing at once under the pressures of scale, globalization, technological innovation, and the sheer rate of change. Today’s world is too big, too fast moving, and has too many moving parts for central planning.
These things have a way of sneaking up on you. Attorneys initially resisted then embraced dictaphones, xerography, word processors, answering machines, personal computers, optical character recognition, databases, and automated text search. However, those technologies, sometimes in combination with off-shoring, mean that large law firms no longer need armies of associates. There is a danger here that I suspect the practice of law will not identify (since most other businesses have failed to recognize the analogous situations in their own business areas): senior partners were once associates and reducing the pool of associates necessarily narrows the field from which tomorrow’s partners will be drawn. Inbreeding and ossification are inevitable (not to mention consolidating power and income into far too few hands). It’s not merely that large law firms need fewer lawyers today. It’s that a single lawyer can do the work that might have required a hundred a few decades ago. Large law firms only exist to do serve the needs of large companies (and enormously wealthy individuals). Why do companies that outgrew their economies of scale hundreds of billions of dollars ago exist?
Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.†Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.
And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.
And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range.
and stumbles as he nears the finish line:
We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages.
Can he really believe that unions will be able, in the long term, to garner wages for their members above the market clearing price? Unions work by limiting membership; those able to perform the work and willing to perform it for a wage below the union wage become unemployed. That’s how the system works. Even a 100% unionized workforce would just drive jobs overseas faster or make automation that much more attractive.
My solution is don’t raise the bridge, lower the water. Strip the subsidies from those who are getting them now. Examples: our current banking laws constitute an enormous subsidy to bankers. They are not laws of nature.
My wife and I are now completely season-to-date with the second season of Who Do You Think You Are?, NBC’s family history program. So far this season they’ve followed Vanessa Williams, Tim McGraw, Rosie O’Donnell, Kim Cattrall, and Lionel Richie’s searches for answers to family mysteries, in some cases family skeletons.
As a committed amateur geneaologist (and my family’s historian) myself, I find the show pretty interesting. Vanessa Williams’s and Lionel Richie’s episodes were particularly interesting. I wonder if some of the messages of their families’ history leap out to others as it does to me? Interestingly, both of their ancestries go back to blacks free before the Civil War. Other things that leap out: education goes way back in both their families; marriage records going back 140 years; race and racial identity are different things. The phenomenon of black kids being raised by single mothers (or grandmothers) is a relatively recent one and one that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about even as it was developing. I continue to be stunned by how little informed even intelligent, educated African Americans are about Jim Crow.
Something I learned: there was a smallpox epidemic in Tennessee in the winter of 1882-1883. I had known about the epidemics in various places around the country during and immediately following the Civil War but I hadn’t known about the later one in Tennessee.
On a light note I’ve started corresponding with a distant cousin (I mean distant—I haven’t established the precise relationship but it can be no closer than 6th cousin, just this side of completely unrelated) who, based on the info from last season, is convinced that we’re distantly related to Brooke Shields. It would have to be pretty darned distant since by my reckoning our last mutual common ancestor could be little later than the 13th century.
The ceremonial start of the 2011 Iditarod was yesterday (Saturday) and the “the restart”, the actual start of the race, has just completed. For the next nine days it’s pretty likely to be all-Iditarod all the the time in this household.
Of course, we watched both starts streaming over the Internet. So far we’ve been disappointed in the streaming this year. I don’t know if they’re doing something differently this year than last or if they’re getting more traffic or what but the quality has been significantly worse this year than last. Last year we didn’t have a smidgeon of difficulty. Yesterday the video frame rate was awful—it varied between six and twelve frames per minute for most of the broadcast. Today was a bit better but their server crashed at one point.
I have my theories as to what caused the problems but I think I’ll prowl around a bit to see if I can find confirmation of my suspicions.
Stay tuned! I’ll have periodic coverage from now until the end of the race.
Where’s the evidence of a recent trend toward jobless recoveries? What I see isn’t jobless recoveries, but three consecutive recessions where the first 6 quarters saw no recovery at all (relative to trend.) We fell into three deep holes, and started digging sideways.
So yes, the last three recessions have been quite different, but the difference was that during the first 6 quarters of “recovery†there was no recovery at all. And 1983 is not an outlier. We can’t do 1980, because the entire recovery lasted much less than 6 quarters, but previous postwar recessions saw RGDP rise at 5% to 10% rates during the first 6 quarters of recovery.
The real question is why did RGDP rise so slowly during the three most recent recoveries. If you haven’t guessed yet, you’re obviously new to my blog.
There’s no jobless recovery, there’s a jobless lack of recovery, or more accurately a M*V-less lack of recovery.
He continues on for several paragraphs and then closes with something to contemplate:
Perhaps inflation targeting (rather than level targeting) also plays a role. Price level targeting leads to V-shaped recoveries and inflation targeting leads to L-shaped “recoveries.â€
Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.
A spokesman for [ed. California] State Senate President Darrell Steinberg told me after the election that the heavy lifting had already been done by Schwarzenegger. “The S.B. 400 thing was passed as part of the budget,†he said. “The important thing now is to grow the economy, in particular to regenerate the stock market. The single best thing we can do to address pension and retirement problems would be to grow the stock market.â€
It’s getting so you can’t tell the progressives from the money-grubbing capitalist oppressors.
Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 192,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in manufacturing, construction, professional and business services, health care, and transportation and warehousing.
I expect that over the next several hours or days we’ll see some furious efforts to put lipstick on that pig. The labor force participation rate continues to be at a 25 year low cf. here.
We need to increase employment by at least 150,000 just to keep up with the natural increase. Between 7 and 8 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the Great Recession. At the present rate it would take nearly 200 months to bring those people back to work. That’s 16 years, folks.
I will gleefully accept a bet that we will have experienced another economic downturn (and, consequently, a decrease in hiring) between now and then.
The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week. First place in the Council category was Joshuapundit’s 
