Re:‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing
by dv_dt on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @02:42PM
(#13312327)
To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement).
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.