In The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever, nytimes.com Economics Editor, Catherine Rampell, points out that a major obstacle for job growth is that jobs in certain industries have completely disappeared. In addition, because of the housing market decline, many job seekers will find it impossible to move for better work. While I agree that those factors are significant, it concerns me that technological change is rarely mentioned as a critical factor in labor market analysis. Further many of the reader comments pointed the finger at illegal immigration. Several readers even commented that the problem is foreign competition - more "efficient" factories abroad. Perhaps they're not aware of many of the things Naomi Klein discusses in No Logo - the corporate tax holidays and cruelly exploitative conditions of the workers. Another comment was from a reader in Berlin, who thought it was crazy that the American government wouldn't take on the retraining of its citizens. All in all, my feeling is that until we really begin to incorporate the issues related to changing technology and resultant changes to our political economy into our dialogue, we will not be able to find solutions that address the true underlying problems. In other words, we'll just be chasing our tails.
I posted the following comment to the Economix Blog:
"This is likely to be an extremely unpopular comment, but I feel it needs to be said. Either we turn our backs on the unfortunate who have permanently lost their livelihoods and develop something in the neighborhood of 40% poverty rates (like many of the countries that have instituted similar neoliberal economic policies - see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine) or we will have no choice but to develop social programs that may need to include "basic income" or similar ideas (to increase consumption). The global trend is toward reduction of work opportunities, as productivity has increased exponentially due to changing technology. From an historical perspective, each time human beings have undergone a major technological revolution, a new political economy has formed. (Consider the printing press and capitalism...) It concerns me that technological change as a critical factor in labor markets is not being discussed in the media. It seems to me that many of the ideas as to how to impact unemployment rest on incorrect assumptions that weigh past performance too heavily in a fundamentally changed economy."
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