Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy
what do you think of this piece?
does it describe the economic situation in your geographical area?
has this affected you directly? how are you managing? how are people around you managing who are affected if you are not?
what do you make of the history leading to this "jobless recovery" business?
what do you think can or should be done to generate more work for more people?
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This is an interesting but depressing article. I suspect that the author is right though. Between the offshoring activity of the past few years and what I think will be a fundamentally smaller economy due to the disappearance of easy credit, it's unclear how the economy can support a significant increase in employment in this country.
I think this decline has been going on for decades, and as the author points out, hidden by the boom years with easy credit. There has not been any significant manufacturing in this part of New York in years. Prior to living in New York, I lived in New England and watched the disappearance of manufacturing there. The company I work for closed down one location in New York about 15 years ago and the remaining locations are much smaller in size.
This is somewhat affecting me. My company has been offshoring work for a few years now. The team I lead was reduced by one person, by retirement. That person was replaced with people in India and I then additional people due to added workload. I expect my job will be gone within five years. I suspect sooner, but since the people India are not learning so quickly, maybe not. Currently, my finances are such that if I lost my job, I would be ok. If inflation rises significantly it might be a problem.
I honestly don't know what people around here do to make a living. The area is basically shopping malls and tourism. There's towns in the Catskills and in the area along the NY/PA/NJ border that used to be tourist areas that now have nothing.
What led to this? I think two things. First, the unsustainable expansion of the economy by credit. People and business borrowed heavily, counting on future growth. Like a Ponzi scheme, the economy can't expand forever, and everything blew up.
Second, the cost of labor and government regulations has made US manufacturing much more expensive than in other countries. Reliable transportation that made it cheaper to manufacture offshore and pay shipping costs than to manufacture in the US was a contributor. The same thing happened with the Internet, where anything that can be represented as digital information can be moved around the world in seconds.
What to do about it? Somehow labor and regulatory costs need to be brought in line with the rest of the world. Setting trade barriers to enforce that won't work. Less government regulation and fewer government mandates on businesses might be a good start.