‘Rise of the Machines: America’s Jobs Challenge’
October 20th, 2011Via: Reuters:
For decades, American workers and their machines advanced in tandem. As companies invested in technology, more workers were needed to operate machines.
That relationship is now looking unsteady.
Since 1999, business investment in equipment and software has surged 33 percent while the total number of people employed by private firms has changed little.
The gap between man and machine widened even further after the 2008-09 recession, helping explain why the United States is struggling to bring down an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.
The revolution in information technologies is taking a deeper and deeper hold in the U.S. economy.
Throughout history, technology revolutions have paved the way to forms of employment: Britain’s 19th century industrial revolution threw artisans out of work but eventually created mass employment in factories.
But a decade-long drought in jobs in the United States is raising questions whether there is a fundamental shift in the structure of the labor market.
How many machines does it take to change a lightbulb?
I look at the physical decay stateside, in terms of basic infrastructure and upkeep, and I wonder how the conversation about organizations like the old WPA and CCC can be held underwater so long.
It’s SO 20th Century, and I’m assuming dead of asphyxiation by now. And we can’t have any of that sort of “communist” thinking in the 21st Century USSA.
That it has clearly shuffled the mortal coil due to lack of air, especially with a “democratic” leader ostensibly at the helm, only reinforces the absurdity of the entire socio-political charade and cult of personality preening and posturing to anyone with a more jaundiced eyed, historically speaking.
As ever, just the fact that the word “conspiracy” has been successfully rendered persona non grata in nearly ALL public and most personal discourse is perhaps the scariest victory of all for the Mighty Wurlitzer.
There are lots of jobs that need doing in America, it’s just that no one in the positions with authority over such things are actually empowered to do anything about it. They are political creatures, not practical ones.
Because the act of empowering others is by it’s very nature anathema to the ruling paradigm: focusing and centralizing power structures to the aims of stewards operating within key structural elements and at critical junctions.
Not a static force, power in all its forms ebbs and flows like air or water. Like electrons along a copper conductor. Like dragon lines encircling the planet. Meanwhile, people who GENUINELY want to serve a greater good are few and far between.
Can’t go empowering that sort. Or there’ll be a whole bunch of new little fiefdoms not playing for the home team popping up all over the place.
And lest we forget one of history’s more poignant lessons on the subject, demagogues and jobs go together like O.J. and designer leather.