Posted on 12/18/2003 3:32:00 PM PST by sly671
Jobs come and go Walter E. Williams
In 1970, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 switchboard operators. In the same year, Americans made 9.8 billion long distance calls. Today, the telecommunications industry employs only 78,000 operators. That's a tremendous 80 percent job loss.
What should Congress have done to save those jobs? Congress could have taken a page from India's history. In 1924, Mahatma Gandhi attacked machinery, saying it "helps a few to ride on the backs of millions" and warned, "The machine should not make atrophies the limbs of man." With that kind of support, Indian textile workers were able to politically block the introduction of labor-saving textile machines. As a result, in 1970 India's textile industry had the level of productivity of ours in the 1920s.
Michael Cox, chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and author Richard Alms tell the rest of the telecommunications story in their Nov. 17 New York Times article, "The Great Job Machine." Spectacular technological advances made it possible for the telecommunications industry to cut its manpower needs down to 78,000 to handle not the annual 9.8 billion long distance calls in 1970, but today's over 98 billion calls.
One forgotten beneficiary in today's job loss demagoguery is the consumer. Long distance calls are a tiny fraction of their cost in 1970. Just since 1984, long distance costs have fallen by 60 percent. Using 1970s technology, to make today's 98 billion calls would require 4.2 million operators. That's 3 percent of our labor force. Moreover, a long distance call would cost 40 times more than it does today.
Finding cheaper ways to produce goods and services frees up labor to produce other things. If productivity gains aren't made, where in the world would we find workers to produce all those goods that weren't even around in the 1970s?
It's my guess that the average anti-free-trade person wouldn't protest, much less argue that Congress should have done something about the job loss in the telecommunications industry. He'd reveal himself an idiot. But there's no significant economic difference between an industry using technology to reduce production costs and using cheaper labor to do the same. In either case, there's no question that the worker who finds himself out of a job because of the use of technology or cheaper labor might encounter hardships. The political difference is that it's easier to organize resentment against India and China than against technology.
Both Republican and Democratic interventionist like to focus on job losses as they call for trade restrictions, but let us look at what was happening in the 1990s. Cox and Alm report that recent Bureau of Labor Statistics show an annual job loss from a low of 27 million in 1993 to a high of 35.4 million in 2001. In 2000, when unemployment reached its lowest level, 33 million jobs were lost. That's the loss side. However, annual jobs created ranged from 29.6 million in 1993 to a high of 35.6 million in 1999.
These are signs of a healthy economy, where businesses start up, fail, downsize and upsize, and workers are fired and workers are hired all in the process of adapting to changing technological, economic and global conditions. Societies become richer when this process is allowed to occur. Indeed, because our nation has a history of allowing this process to occur goes a long way toward explaining why we are richer than the rest of the world.
Those Americans calling for government restrictions that would deny companies and ultimately consumers to benefit from cheaper methods of production are asking us to accept lower wealth in order to protect special interests. Of course, they don't cloak their agenda that way. It's always "national security," "level playing fields" and "protecting jobs". Don't fall for it -- we'll all become losers.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The problem with the medical industry jobs is that too much of that money is supplied by the government --- Medicare, Medicaid. They aren't wealth producing jobs but wealth consuming jobs. Insurance premiums keep rising and rising ---- and the population of insured is dropping.
Fewer people could afford to buy things back then.
Stock crash aftermath, by Thomas Sowell
The fact that the first government efforts to get the country out of a depression -- by both Hoover and FDR -- were followed by the longest depression in our history has also not been lost on some. Quite aside from the specific harm done by specific programs, the general uncertainty generated by unpredictable government interventions made investors reluctant to make the long-term commitments needed to generate more jobs, more output, and more purchasing power.Not only the Federal Reserve and two presidents managed to make the Great Depression worse, so did Congress. When it passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930, it contributed to a worldwide contraction in international trade, as country after country tried to "save jobs" by protectionism.
The notion that the stock market crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression that ravaged the 1930s has long been popular on the left, since this blames capitalism and casts government in the role of rescuer of the economy. However, Professor Peter Temin of MIT has pointed out that in 1987 the "stock market fell almost exactly the same amount on almost exactly the same days of the year" -- and there was no depression.
The Reagan administration was not the New Deal. The economy kept on growing.
Foreign medical workers have been encouraged to come to the US for at least three decades.
We still need more of them, partly because the baby boomers are aging.
"In the second case, higher paid, higher skilled workers are displaced by low-wage foreign substitutes, which generally forces either a competitive reduction in domestic salaries or a downscaling of employment opportunities."
I am a licensed engineer, and have 11 Mexican engineers working for me in Mexico. They are not as competent at my projects as I, but they only get paid about 1/20 as much as my old salary, too (which to them is a HUGE wage). They are doing the dreariest parts of my old job, while I oversee the whole project far more efficiently. Therefore, I can produce about 3 times as much as before I had them.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, I am producing about 3 times as much and spending only about 1.5 times the money ----> Big Productivity Increase.
The lesson is that you have to be quick on your feet. There is ALWAYS work to be done, sometimes you have to make a change, and you find out it's to your own benefit.
A lot of people today can only afford to buy things now because they get food stamps, a welfare check, Medicaid, government housing etc. What happens if the huge social programs were ever to be cut? We didn't eliminate poverty with those programs and I don't see how programs like the earned income welfare handout is so different than New Deal programs.
In this area, you don't see the NAFTA displaced workers ----- thousands of former garment workers ---- leaving the state to look for jobs ---- they stay here unemployed living off welfare or SSDI. You won't see them picking crops or doing anything else now that their former employment is gone.
Except, it seems, in the countries we are sending our manufacturing, engineering, and IT jobs to, who seem to delight in protectionism and currency manipulation. But lets not confuse the free traitors with any real-world evidence that contradicts their pop-up book theories of economics or distracts them from their circle jerk over copies of "Atlas Shrugged".
Earth to Willie (or is it Tom?):
People earn jobs. Nobody owes anyone a job. Earn it, through humility, hard work, and be greatful for the time you are employed.
Nobody owes anyone a job. Conservatives take responsibility for their lives, and I, for one, have no respect for whiners.
Are you saddened that unemployment is down, and companies are doing well? Deeply saddened?
Pardon me if you interpreted my statements as defining human worth. My bad. I meant to say that I do put a price (my dollars at work) on what certain tasks are worth. Whatever entity (man or machine) pulls levers at a dock side, does not deserve $110,000 per year. That task is not worth that much. There are many entities who would do it better, for much less, but unions lock them out.
Same with clerk tasks.
Nobody pays my contributions, other than me. That said, my dollars go to whoever produces most efficiently. As in, non-union companies.
That is a problem, we will remedy soon. Us producers are sick of paying lever-pullers more than we make.
What a crock. Raynd's entire philosophy is based on morality.
Liar.
And it is is amazing how fast it is, when people want to.
Rush went from a low life sportscaster to close to a billionaire in 15 years. I went from homeless in Detroit to making artificial hearts in 20 years.
The speed limit is self imposed. If you think you can't, you are right. If you think you can, your are right. If you whine about your situation, you are lost, and your ancestors would disown you.
They didn't fight through disease, hardship, frozen feet in rags, watching the death of their kids, fighting hostile natives, just for you to whine.
What gave you that idea that we are headed that way?
Please, please answer. Pleease? (racking data shotgun)
Rush is exceptional --- someday watch the Jerry Springer --- just for the educational value of it --- how many in that audience or panel of guests have any ability to learn fast or slow when they want to? Like it or not --- many are born that way --- they're doing well if they can put simple parts together working in an assembly line. It would be one thing if we could ship them off to China along with their jobs. But we can't --- we're going to be stuck with the less than 100 IQ types --- and you really don't want to have them moved to health care jobs hanging your IV's or programming the machine that gives you your pain meds.
They didn't do all that just to hand the keys to the store over to the Red Chinese either.
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