Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Actually it was down around 5% and less the whole time. Which is the definition of full employment. Relentless is way off base. That stuff was predicted when I was in highschool in the 1970's and never happened. Matter of fact we were supposed to be out of oil by the 1980's, driving around in flying cars, robots would replace everyone at work, the Earth was on it's way to an Ice Age because of fossil fuels, etc.
Reality is...once the housing market stabilizes, the economy will turn back around and we will be back at around 5% unemployment again. It's only been since the end of 2008/start of 2009 that all this came down and unemployment shot up. And none of that was caused by automation or anything else except the housing market fucking the economy.
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I have no doubt 'employment' will be 5% in the near future. However the jobs will be split into a small fraction of very high paying jobs and a huge glut of low paying jobs. Employment numbers tell you how many people are doing 'something', they don't tell you what people are doing or earning. The middle class is going bye bye because we do not need many middle level employees. We need plenty of unskilled workers who do grunt work cheap and a small number of people capable of managing huge numbers of unskilled workers. The number of unskilled workers needed will continue decreasing thanks to globalization and further automation. More of the 'good jobs' will also be re-classed as low level jobs too... as they get split up and automated. It's a pyramid that becomes thinner and thinner over time until it looks a lot more like a thin straight vertical line.
We automate away anything in the middle, and the pace is accelerating.