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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (47360)	12/4/2017 11:47:43 AM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361894

<<<<middle class blue collar jobs have been clobbered and not by immigration. It was automation that did it>>>> Poppy cock! Yes some jobs have gone away. Duh! That has always happened - did you know they don't make buggy whips anymore? . Yet somehow we have unemployment at close to four and with no infrastructure spending stimulus. You are pushing fear mongering - nothing more. If you were digging coal or making Edsels - ya, you better go into other work. Go into health care or service jobs or any of the other many MANY new growth areas.

To: neolib who wrote (47360)	12/4/2017 1:04:40 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361894

Exactly so. When the weavers lost to the power loom, their lives were disrupted, but more jobs were created for people to make use of all that cloth. When John Henry lost to the steam hammer, more jobs were created by all the America that steam hammer opened up. It's not at all clear what happens when the accountant loses to AI, or the doctor or surgeon loses to it, or any other high skill profession loses out. It's very unlikely that they'll find new jobs created that pay anywhere near what their former job did, and they'll find themselves competing with low skill workers for a shrinking number of jobs. No illegal aliens needed. We've never had competition with our brains before - a competition we're bound to lose. I've already lived through it. As a chessplayer, I competed with and beat or drew chess programs in tournaments in the 1980's. Until I couldn't, because they improved much faster than I could ever have. Now, I wouldn't even try.

To: neolib who wrote (47360)	12/4/2017 2:41:00 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 361894

A good example would be computers, actually. Ignoring the other aspects of automation, desktop computers wiped out a mainstay of the middle class, middle management. Pre-PC, it was very possible to start in the mail room and work your way up to a solidly middle class life, if not higher. Much of middle management was devoted to moving pieces of paper around and generating reports. And there was a significant secretarial pool to support that. Much of that went away starting in the Reagan administration due to the desktop computer. Now, if you start in the mail room, you might be able to move into sales, which does have a remnant of the old hierarchy. But that is about it, everything else is fragmented into various areas with no real path of advancement. There were massive layoffs of middle management and most of those workers, who tended to be older, were left high and dry and unemployable because their only skills were obsolete. There were lots of stories of people who suddenly had no marketable skills and were too young to retire. Downwardly mobility became a reality.