The American Worker
I frequently hear that the US has closed its factories or moved them to China and "doesn't make anything anymore". This is not true. Depending on which numbers you pick, The United States makes about as much or more than anyone else in the world, including China. The industrial sector of American GDP is 17% higher than China. The US produces 21% of global manufactured products, while China produces 15%.
One problem with this situation is that we consume our products instead of exporting them. "Buy American" is part of the problem. To misquote an already misquoted George S Patton "You don't strengthen your economy by buying American, you do it by making all the other poor dumb bastards buy American."
Another "problem" with American factories is high productivity. American factories are automated and efficient. The 5.6% of the population employed in factory manufacturing produces 11.2% of US GDP. The average U.S. manufacturing worker earns a respectable $74,447 salary because they're not line workers, they're robotics technicians.
I think that's what might be going on with stagnating wages and rising corporate profits. You could say that capitalists are taking profits without sharing them with workers. You could say that capitalists are replacing workers with robots and pocketing the robots' wages. It's not just factory workers getting replaced with automation - stenographers, security guards, forensic accountants, and image analysts are all being replaced by automation. A couple of my friends work at Cataphora, putting thousands of law grads out of work by automating the legal discovery process. Some of the best jobs these days are in creating automated job eliminators, and things are going to get seriously fucked if someone figures out how to automate that.
This article from Time Magazine, February 1966 looks forward 35 years to imagine what life will be like in the Year 2000:
In automated industry, not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only 10% of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle. This is not as radical a notion as it sounds. Even today, only 40% of the population works, not counting the labor performed by housewives or students. Already, says Tempo's John Fisher, "we are rationing work. By 1984, man will spend the first third of his life, or 25 years, getting an education, only the second one-third working, and the final third enjoying the fruits of his labor. There just won't be enough work to go around.
I'm still trying to understand the problem. What to actually do about it depends a lot on your first principles. At one extreme, some want to divide the wealth of our society by the number of people in it to give everyone a "fair share" and a new definition of the word "fair". At another extreme, free market libertarians will say "if you can't compete with robots or robotrepreneurs then enjoy starving". Somewhere in the middle, pragmatists might suggest that "paying to be idle" (welfare) is cheaper than capturing the externalized costs of a desperate starving population. Optimistic futurists will point out that efficiency and technological advance in years past simply freed people to work better jobs, even though some people didn't and that doesn't seem to be what's happening now. And a few people into 70s Chinese retro might imagine reinventing an economy where everyone is given a job, even if it means dividing a single person's job into a bunch of menial jobs to create an inefficient economy where everyone has to do an equal amount of hardly anything. I don't really know what's going to happen, or what ought to happen, but it's a hard problem that I'd like us to move toward solving.
One problem with this situation is that we consume our products instead of exporting them. "Buy American" is part of the problem. To misquote an already misquoted George S Patton "You don't strengthen your economy by buying American, you do it by making all the other poor dumb bastards buy American."
Another "problem" with American factories is high productivity. American factories are automated and efficient. The 5.6% of the population employed in factory manufacturing produces 11.2% of US GDP. The average U.S. manufacturing worker earns a respectable $74,447 salary because they're not line workers, they're robotics technicians.
I think that's what might be going on with stagnating wages and rising corporate profits. You could say that capitalists are taking profits without sharing them with workers. You could say that capitalists are replacing workers with robots and pocketing the robots' wages. It's not just factory workers getting replaced with automation - stenographers, security guards, forensic accountants, and image analysts are all being replaced by automation. A couple of my friends work at Cataphora, putting thousands of law grads out of work by automating the legal discovery process. Some of the best jobs these days are in creating automated job eliminators, and things are going to get seriously fucked if someone figures out how to automate that.
This article from Time Magazine, February 1966 looks forward 35 years to imagine what life will be like in the Year 2000:
In automated industry, not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only 10% of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle. This is not as radical a notion as it sounds. Even today, only 40% of the population works, not counting the labor performed by housewives or students. Already, says Tempo's John Fisher, "we are rationing work. By 1984, man will spend the first third of his life, or 25 years, getting an education, only the second one-third working, and the final third enjoying the fruits of his labor. There just won't be enough work to go around.
I'm still trying to understand the problem. What to actually do about it depends a lot on your first principles. At one extreme, some want to divide the wealth of our society by the number of people in it to give everyone a "fair share" and a new definition of the word "fair". At another extreme, free market libertarians will say "if you can't compete with robots or robotrepreneurs then enjoy starving". Somewhere in the middle, pragmatists might suggest that "paying to be idle" (welfare) is cheaper than capturing the externalized costs of a desperate starving population. Optimistic futurists will point out that efficiency and technological advance in years past simply freed people to work better jobs, even though some people didn't and that doesn't seem to be what's happening now. And a few people into 70s Chinese retro might imagine reinventing an economy where everyone is given a job, even if it means dividing a single person's job into a bunch of menial jobs to create an inefficient economy where everyone has to do an equal amount of hardly anything. I don't really know what's going to happen, or what ought to happen, but it's a hard problem that I'd like us to move toward solving.