how does one findwork? i give up completely. in my fathers day,

>>35559933
>where did it all go?
Well for one the advance of technology has meant that the market price for unskilled labor crashed through the floor in the decades since your dad's time. That's before a few billion unskilled laborers started competing against first-worlders in China and India. Once upon a time you needed ten thousand people to run a factory, and offices needed armies of secretaries, typists, and file clerks. Now machines do all that work.

Back when everything you needed to know for many jobs could be taught to anyone in a week, anyone who looked like an upstanding fellow who'd show up on time was a valuable worker, and businesses needed the labor if they wanted to increase output. Now its not worth the money and bother to employ someone unless that someone has some special skill. Companies don't need the labor very badly, they can afford to wait until someone superlative comes along, or they can invest in automation.

In a way this is just reversion to the mean. Boomers just happened to grow up in a very highly unusual period of history where all the stars aligned to favor labor over capital, and now the world is going back to normal.

left or right, you'll never hear a pundit or politician of any stripe say that manufacturing has any chance of coming back to this country. and that's the common ground between parties. it makes me feel like the people who rule over us are just riding the whirlwind, trying to get as many crumbs together for the day everything crumbles. we're nothing if not hopeless now. prepare for something awful.

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>>35560295
>left or right, you'll never hear a pundit or politician of any stripe say that manufacturing has any chance of coming back to this country. and that's the common ground between parties
Maybe that's not because they're deceiving you. Maybe that's because it's true, despite how much everyone doesn't want it to be true.

>>35560388
I never implied that. Like I said, the future is not hopeful.

"Bring back manufacturing" is as genius an idea as trying to bring back horses as a transportation industry. Have we forgotten how technology works?

>>35559933
I see what you did derr

>>35560447
anyone who says this has never worked in a factory. you have this image in your head of robot arms moving around like in the assembly line in ep 2 of star wars. technology has very little to do with it. the jobs used to be here and now they're somewhere else. that's all that happened.

>>35560538
Output has gone way up though. Way back when the only way to double output was to double the labor force. Not anymore. If output had been held constant there'd be far less jobs in manufacturing than the ones that remain.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-output-has-doubled-in-three-decades-2016-03-28
>Technology and new ways of organizing work have revolutionized the American factory since the Golden Age of the 1980s. Today, U.S. factories produce twice as much stuff as they did in 1984, but with one-third fewer workers.

>>35560538
...right, because technology allowed for globalization which means that it's cheaper to manufacture things in china instead of here.

America used to be a nation of manufacturing, but now our biggest industry is information. All the silicon valley companies aren't worth billions for nothing.

We should be preparing the labor force for the new reality but half the country seems hell bent on working at a steel mill for $22/hr.

>>35561283
maybe because they aren't too keen on living off welfare like niggers. are you suggesting that the information industry can employ the same number of people that the manufacturing industry used to be able to?

The need for low skill labour, which is what most of our grandparents did back then, has almost completely evaporated. The jobs have either been moved to the East, automated to a point where a lot less people are needed in the process, or just plain eliminated. Education is more important than ever before, and the minimum level required to not be a working poor keeps increasing. Everyone and their mother has a BA now, so that is skill floor. Now you gotta have a Masters to be considered, but soon everyone will have that as well.

>>35561423
what do you think is going to happen to america's rapidly growing population?