The thought that maybe some of them don't understand that is what scares me the most.
Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable.
In any case, the service based jobs are just as vulnerable to automation. There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
That doesn't help either. If you are increasing population without that population having wealth (and generally the wealthier you are the fewer kids you have) you dilute the distributed wealth of the poor to the point where they no longer have the economic influence to warrant hiring shelf stockers or burger flippers because they have no money.
> There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
The automation of service is not coming in the form of robots doing a service workers job, its computers obsoleting the service. It is the same thing trying to make the "perfect" veggie burger vs learning to love naturally vegan dishes.
It is companies like Amazon that are displacing service workers by the thousands. There is so much potential revenue to be made and costs to be saved by having a wholly automated supply chain, and eventually you are having your burgers air dropped on demand by drone rather than having to go anywhere in a self driving taxi to get the burger. The logistics of service will... are... changing fundamentally, constantly, every day, progressing towards those eventualities.
It is not a problem tax rates or "American grit" solve. It requires a rethinking of your economic system when you finally accept reality that swathes of productive gains are not being made by the sweat of a single human being, at which point the fruits of those labors are no longer compatible with traditional laissez faire capitalism.
That's even before you consider service industries that create intellectual property which scale with global laziness and boredom, or the finance industry which provides services that scale with global economic activity, rather than local population.
Would they do it every single year if the furniture and appliances got cheap enough? IMO, yes.
I'm not sure the quantity of goods is limited either. Looking at a supermarket today, the diversity of goods for so many niche purposes is incredible. And the internet has increased it an order of magnitude more.
There absolutely is a finite number of factories.
There's probably even a finite, though perhaps quite large, limit on the number of factories that can exist (at least, within Earth's future light cone.)
It may be a generational thing, but I just don't see people owning or wanting to own as much stuff as the generation before. A desk full of organization tools like a rolodex, card holder, pencils and notebooks just doesn't exist anymore.
These items are also harder to produce and have, at least in my eyes, shorter product life
Monitors are newer, but you still see analog VGA ports and in TV, composite connectors.
It is the new digital interfaces that face obsolescence.
Not sure I agree. At the moment, I'm buying all the goods I reasonably want. Sure I might want to replace some of my cheap goods with expensive goods or some of my old goods new goods, but on the whole I don't really want to consume more goods.
On the other hand, I can easily think of dozens of services I would either start consuming, or would consume a lot more of, if they existed at an acceptable convenience and price point. The problem, as I can tell from my phrasing, is creating service jobs at a salary level that people can live on.
there aren't a finite number of factories
They both share the same limitation at the end of the day. At the end, the human being is relatively static. You can sell widget and services that free more of his time, and then you can sell widget and services that occupy that free time, maybe at a stretch you can sell him something to free the time occupied by other stuff he bought, but there is a limit at 24 hours attention span per human.
More importantly, manufactured goods can be exported much more easily to a growing global consumer base than services (other than software) that are almost always limited locally or regionally.
Not really. It's built on manufacturing base. You need to 'service' something.
I'm pretty sure that people who aren't members of the "rich upper classes" do make use of most of those services. To take just one as an example, nail salons are actually more common in the poorer parts of town in most cities I've been in.
Fireworks booths, Halloween shops, frozen yogurt franchises, "escape game" franchises, "curves" gyms targeted towards women, edible fruit arranged like flowers...a lot of service jobs have very short shelf lives, and can really only have one or two in a town.
Anyway, a 'service economy' doesn't mean unskilled drones working in back-of-house. It means having a substantial professional class.
You only have to look at their opinions on "right to work" laws to see whose side they're batting for (not employees).
Automation is simply being used as a scapegoat and a political justification for keeping trade policies that export jobs in place.
>Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance,
Manufacturing ecosystems take decades to fully destroy and decades to fully rebuild. The flow of goods on container ships can be halted overnight - which has happened before and will happen again.
There's a country that begins with Z and a country that begins with V that enacted policies that deliberately sabotaged their local industrial and agricultural base and assumed they could always just import what they needed. Spoiler alert: it didn't end well for either of them.
You need to back up statements like this. Contradicting actual evidence with figures pulled from your ass isn't going to fly here.
This is the bottom line on American manufacturing:
> From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.
> American factories produced more goods last year than ever, by many indications. Yet they did so while employing about 12.3 million workers — roughly the same number as in 2009, when production was roughly three-fourths what it is today.
Most of the jobs that left are never coming back. They didn't go to Mexico or China; they simply disappeared because automation and productivity increases rendered them unnecessary.
If the US sheltered its manufacturing sector from foreign competition, a small number of jobs might come back, but the increased cost of manufacturing things in the US would strongly incentivize companies to automate those jobs away as quickly as possible.
Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance, both in terms of the imagery of hardworking middle-class factory workers and national pride, e.g. "Why don't we make things in this country anymore?" However, I suspect that most politicians who talk about a manufacturing revival understand that it won't really happen.