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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (15718)	11/9/2003 11:24:31 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793648

Not like we haven't had time to think about this issue. I remember a classic "Twighlight Zone" episode from about 1960 in which a factory owner automated his factory and fired all the people. It's like we've been talking about it for so long, we can't quite believe it's coming true. The issue we really ought to be talking is what jobs Americans, and everyone else, will be able to find when machines are able to do just about everything

To: LindyBill who wrote (15718)	11/9/2003 11:37:52 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793648

This guy doubts Reich's premise: Kaus; Robert Reich; Drezner; Wall Street Journal; these are some of the blogger and non-blogger names linking to a new story that is either a laughable economic urban legend, or most important of the year. Employment in manufacturing, goes the story, is falling worldwide. Manufacturing jobs are not disappearing "here" only to re-appear "elsewhere." Rather, they are vanishing everywhere. Lags in technology transfer and simple "stage" theories of economic development make it easy to imagine models explaining the phenomenon. We can visualize a kind of neo-Arthur Lewis "early third-world industrializing process" which first gets out of the pre-industrial stage by taking maximum advantage of international wage differentials and then, only second, improves productivity by adopting the always rapidly-improving first-world information technology. This process would have a first, or "job transfer" stage in which the US and Europe apparently lose manufacturing jobs to worldwide newly-industrialized trade-oriented economies. But in its second or "technology transfer" stage, the newly-industrialized economies would appear to lose manufacturing jobs faster than their counterparts in the older-industrialized world the more their initial industrialization ignored techology and based itself on wage differentials alone. So, all this "oh-I'm-so-smart-I-invented-a-model!" theorizing aside, is it true? Are manufacturing jobs disappearing everywhere? The reason I worry this is merely an urban legend is everyone -- from this Robert Reich NPR commentary, to this WSJ article -- cites a report or studies (e.g. from Glenn Hubbard) that can't be found (or that can't be found on the internet at least). This, via Drezner, is the closest I can come to the original document, purportedly an author's summary. The political implications of this story can't be ignored. "Manufacturing job loss" is all that remains of the Democratic worst-economy-since-Herbert-Hoover image. If credible statistics show global manufacturing job loss, the new slogan will be: -- "It's not the economy, stupid!" econopundit.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (15718)	11/9/2003 3:17:40 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793648

Quick, tell the Unions, including the teachers unions...HIGHER Productivity is the key!!! The Democrats won't like this information, and therefore their base won't. >>>>>What’s going on? In two words: Higher productivity! <<< America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite. It turns out that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing all over the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management in New York took a close look at employment trends in 20 large economies recently, and found that since 1995 more than 22 million factory jobs have disppeared.