That ain't gunna happen.

Where did all of the farmers go?

Or closer to home where did all the cabinetmakers go?

They are doing something else because the machinery replaced them or their jobs got off shored. But I don't hear anybody saying their are too many cabinetmakers. Because the division of labor creates more jobs albeit different jobs.

Pat,

If you don't need to own a car anymore then we don't need to manufacture cars anymore.

The butcher, baker & candlestick maker all depend on something to be manufactured.

We can't all be economists or baristas.

I can't remember is this Tim or someone else?

How would you explain current job openings to someone 75 years ago?

Website designer, CNC operator, Cabinet Vision engineer, programmer, SEO optimizer, etc

If what you are saying is true then why does unemployment keep going down?

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Pat,

A graph by itself means nothing.
It's the interpretation that we need to pay attention to.

If you were to make a graph of income distribution, what would it look like?

If you were to trend this graph out one more generation, what would it look like?

What would our communities look like as a reflection of that graph? What do communities in other countries look like that also share similar income distribution graphs?

In South Africa you know your children are always safe because wherever they are it's usually behind at least two rows of electric fence. Does this mean the future employment will be in electrical engineering?

There is a better chance of those charts stating the facts than your stories.

Income equality is meaningless all anyone cares about is are they doing better or not.

The charts say they are doing better.

Here is another chart.

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I think we would see a vastly different unemployment chart if the same criteria and parameters were used as were used in 1980, throughout the entire timeline represented.

Long term unemployed drop completely off the chart with the calculations as they are currently done. this has not always been the case.

I believe if I use this chart showing total employment numbers that will circumvent any problem you are talking about.

Which would mean that there are way more employed people.

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Here is another one.

The doom gloom is a narrative that is hard to prove.

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It's not gloom and doom, nor is it Skittles and rainbows.

I don't know that you should be getting a check from a government unemployment agency to be considered unemployed, that's all I mean to say.

U5, U6, and official unemployment since 1995

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It is a lot closer to the later than the prior.

One of the reasons for your U6 number may be that the government pays them to be unemployed.

My chart shows the U3 at below 5% which is pretty much full employment.

This article is looking in the rearview mirror. Automation has already drastically changed the workforce. Total employment may not have changed much at all, but the types of jobs have. Middle class jobs have been replaced with lower class jobs, while the owners of capital walk away with the profit and stash it on the sidelines.

Americans for the most part don't fully understand the dynamic of how technology has made this happen. Ask a coal miner and he will blame liberal politicians rather than robots running the mine. Ask a woodworker and he'll blame immigrants rather than CNC machines, cabinet vision, etc.

But the younger generation knows that they are getting the shaft, even if they don't know why. They see their student debt mount while their parents hardly paid anything for college. They see housing prices out of reach for them, while they were totally within reach for their parents generation. And they have crappy job prospects that don't pay much, unlike the job market of their parents.

Automation will force us to make a choice: continue in our capitalist tradition and become an oligarchy like Russia, or embrace European socialism. A tipping point will come when the number of people with crappy low paying jobs outnumbers the lucky ones and the trust fund babies. I'd give it 1 or 2 more election cycles.

If you look at the windshield you haven't seen anything yet. Blaine could speak to this as that is his specialty.

As far as the lower standard of living goes I think you are right. But not for everybody. If you have a college education or a trade you will be all right. See the chart below Unemployment amongst college graduates has remained very low.

I think a bigger consideration regarding this is the dearth of unions.

Technology is the hallmark of higher salaries. Wages are a percentage of production, you can pay the running the backhoe more than you can pay the guy running the shovel.

Point being that capitalism is what created our current economy. More accurately the free market created a higher standard of living. To think otherwise is to ignore the obvious facts.

Trouble is you have to get some education to operate the back hoe instead of the shovel.

The younger generation is hip to this fact and are way more educated than us.

The very definition of inflation is when more money chases fewer goods. Government's solution to everything is to throw money at it and regulate it which means the prices go up on healthcare, college education, military, etc.

Government spending has created much/if not all of the income inequality that some of you like to complain about.

Government is not the solution, shrinking government is the right direction.

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There are always two ways to look @ everything. Fact is technology has improved the lot for most people, even the "poor." I see "homeless" sitting outside of hot spot businesses using their tablet computers (looking for a job? or checking for government (your) $ having been put into their account.) Things brought to the masses by computers and robots: cell phones, better cars, TV, fresh produce year round, on & on. How many of you watched the semi-automated cabinet line run @ the SCM booth? The robot reading the bar codes, feeding the doweling machine and edgebander cost $52K! Cheap!

Larry,

Stop beating up the poor and be thankful for your blessings.

The number of people sleeping in a car or under the bridge next to my cabinetshop has been increasing. There are certainly some who brought them on themselves. Some just merely become unemployed or had their rental home converted to condos.

This judgmental bullshit is just plain pious.

Keep in mind that "the poor" is a statistical group. That group is not flesh and blood people. People move out of this category almost as quickly as people move out of the highest statistical group. You can think of it as a professional sports team, they have many different players every year.

One of the main reasons they don't move out of this group is that they get public transfers (welfare) to be a part of this group and they make money under the table without paying any taxes.

"Point being that capitalism is what created our current economy. More accurately the free market created a higher standard of living. To think otherwise is to ignore the obvious facts."

Well, China is not a free economy. It is state run and has consistently had higher growth than the US for about 3 decades now, and every year their standard of living gets better and better. There's a lot to dislike about China. But China refutes the notion that free markets are "better" than state run economies. In terms of economic growth, it's simply not true.

Pat,

What do you mean by "they make money under the table without paying any taxes"?

You wouldn't be talking about anybody in the construction industry would you? You're just talking about those poor who are really just statistical groups. Right?

Definitely in the construction industry.

In the US 1/3 of the welfare goes to Calif with 1/8 of the population in the US. 33% goes to 13%, what is wrong with this picture?

It gives this group an unfair advantage in the trades as they are subsidized by the government.

You are taking what the Chinese Politburo says at face value?

Or you can believe your lying eyes and notice that they are practicing CAPITALISM.

IIRC they have an apparatchik in every district who's job it is to get as much commerce into his district as possible. They are paid according to the gross so they are benefited by empty cities and the like.

The Chinese cook the books and print money to make the GDP numbers appear much better than they are.

Same as the US right? The US government uses the GDP numbers to prove that our standard of living is rising. Somehow that does not reconcile with Tim's homeless people living under the bridge statistic. Who are you going to believe the government or your lying eyes? But I would question why there has been an increase.

For extra credit you can read about mercantilism and see how that plays into things as well.

For more extra credit you can read about how demographics plays into things as well.

Pat,

What do you think would happen if somehow we were able to eliminate all people in the construction industry who work "under the table"?

Would this cause the price of housing to go up or go down?

If the price of housing went up what do you think would be the effect on how many new housing related projects that would take place?

My hunch is that when prices go up, demand goes down.

Ergo, if we did not have these undocumented workers in the construction industry we would probably not have as many cabinets to build.

So every time you see an undocumented worker on a job site you should walk up and shake his hand, give humble thanks for how his nefarious behavior has improved the quality of your meals (not to mention the lettuce in your sandwich).

Hmmm... the Chinese are are a bunch of apparatchiks with empty cities, cooked books... who are also capitalists. Huh?

You are confused at to what capitalism means. It means that you allow capital to freely move where it gets its highest return on investment. The Chinese have a hybrid system in which they allow a significant amount of unfettered movement of capital. But they also direct massive government spending into infrastructure along with subsidies to support certain industries (the socialism half). And it works. You don't have to believe the government statistics. Nobody does. But their trade balances don't lie. They hold trillions of USD. Trump is right when he says they are winning. And they are winning because they pair up smart socialism with capitalism, just like the US did in the first half of the 20th century when we built the Hoover dam, the highway system, and on and on.

Then people got lazy and selfish and didn't want to invest anymore. They wanted lower taxes. And they got it. So here we are today with crumbling infrastructure and a country full of overweight diabetics while the Chinese are kicking our butts because they have embraced socialism while we abandoned it.

Tim the price would go up in the construction industry. But it is a false price right now as the government subsidizes the low income workers.

I'm not blaming the immigrant worker, if I was in their shoes I would do the exact same thing.

They are not the problem.

Gary I'm not confused about any of this.

You need to look up comparative advantage and look up price discovery.

Comparative Advantage