I'm sorry, I should have given the source for my observation about the
return of high-wage and low-wage jobs in the US, compared to the
devastating loss of mid-wage jobs. It is here:
http://bigstory.ap.org/interactive/interactive-great-reset
It's an amazing little animated graph, dated 2013. What you have to do
is click on "replay recoveries" and then on the arrow below. You will
see that 42 months after the "recovery" of 2009, only 85,380 mid-wage
jobs were regained, out of 3,764,120 mid-wage jobs lost during the
so-called "great recession" of 2007-09. The net job loss in the mid-wage
range was 3,678,740. A very big number.
In the high-wage sector, 908,990 jobs were lost, but 1,011,210 were
created: that's a net gain for high-wage earners.
In the low-wage sector, 2,803,390 were lost, and 2,421,010 were gained.
There you had a net loss of 382,380 low-wage jobs. But that's only 10%
of the net loss of mid-wage jobs.
The failure of mid-wage jobs to come back is absolutely staggering.
Jarod Lanier sees this through the lens (indeed) of Kodak vs. Instagram,
or music file-sharing etc. Yet he's basically right, you just have to
amplify his explanation. As the video included with the graphic
explains, both mid-wage manufacturing jobs and a host of white-collar
service jobs have either been outsourced or automated (or both, for that
matter: there is a lot of partial automation, so that one worker in
China or India can do what ten used to do in the US). Web 2.0 functions
have indeed made many white-collar workers redundant. It's technological
unemployment with a vengeance.
This heralds a major change in US society, and undoubtedly the same
applies to European societies after austerity is over (if ever). I
believe that what happened - why we didn't see this coming - is that the
stagnation of mid-wage earnings was compensated by credit and rising
home equity for a generation, from the mid-1980s to 2007. Then the Great
Recession (or Depression, or Repression, or whatever you wanna call it)
came and choked back all that credit and middle-class wealth-effects.
The entire economy of the mid-wage jobs then collapsed: no profit margin
for those companies anymore, because sales plunged. It was necessary to
implement the automation and outsouring in order for those kinds of
businesses to stay afloat. So you still have many of the businesses:
just not the jobs.
Somebody should research this further, to verify if the Reuteurs article
was right, what the comparable situations are in the different "advanced
economies," etc. I will do so when I have time. Right now I am headed to
Spain to look at the future up close.
all the best, Brian
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