Herbert J Gans, The Age of the Superfluous worker

[herbertmarcuse]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/the-age-of-the-superfluous-worker.html

I read this stunning piece by a famous sociologist several months ago and it made me think about what is happening in the job market and for the prospects for future students things look even worse.

Sorry to bring the bad news,

HM

[Humanomics]

Marx's reserve army of unemployed workers didn't work in 1848, and it doesn't work now. Unemployment has stayed relatively stable with more than 90%, and usually closer to 95% of the workforce employed, barring recessionary dips and major technological movements requiring labor frictions where workers must learn and adjust, for at least 150 years of modern economic growth (for instance, the learning curve for computers actually caused productivity slow down in the 70's, at their inception). During that period, where a lingering 5/10 percent of workers (of which many ostensibly left their employments voluntarily) remained unemployed, wages have increased right along with national income -- which has grown exponentially, reliably, since the beginning of the 19th century. The reserve army of unemployed do not perpetually bid down wages until everyone is starving.

Gans fears that machines displace workers are entirely unfounded, and in fact he himself contradicts the argument later in the piece by noting that innovations will indeed create new employment opportunities, new things to be made or services to be produced. If unemployment increased in direct proportion to the number of machines in the world, the long-term trend of unemployment would be growing. It is not the long term trend, regardless again, occasional slumps. Machines open up opportunities for higher-value propositions for workers -- they make workers richer, not poorer. Retail bank employment, for example, has increased and not decreased since the inception of ATM machines.

It's difficult to imagine what "labor-intensive employment" means, or how it would represent an improvement, considering everyone currently operating machines, and providing services for one another, are laboring -- and considering the long-run substitution to those sorts of employments at the hands of technological increase has created on balance exponential gain in income for even and especially the poorest of the world.

[Humanomics]

Oh and all that stuff about there having been formerly ways to kill-off or export reserve workers, as to keep the army at a steady, manageable 5% of the workforce or so, is just ridiculous. Nutrition has increased at such a rate for two hundred years as to have nearly trebled life expectancy, while per capita death rates have fallen precipitously, and while the world's markets have become increasingly global so that there is no longer any effective "exporting workers outside of the economy," and hasn't been for a very long time.