The Jobs Are Never Coming Back
4th March 2013
We can make all the windmills the world needs, and it won’t bring back the robust jobby-ness of the past, because things just don’t work that way. Economics is not going to change course because it would make it easier for us to structure our world. It would not take that many people to make all the windmills we would ever need, because in modern and efficient businesses it just doesn’t take many people to do things. If these green energy companies really did go on a hiring spree and started employing the numbers that politicians would like to see, they would be (a) unsustainable and (b) replaced by more efficient businesses with less costs.
Taylorism during World War II created ‘good jobs’ for a lot of semi-skilled people — that’s what Tayorism does — but modern industry depends more on skilled labor supporting extensive automation. There isn’t a lot of demand any more for a high-school graduate from the left side of the bell curve putting widgets together on an assembly line, because robots are doing his job at a lower cost and can run 24/7, don’t get benefits or a pension, and can be trusted to do it right every time.
The jobs are never coming back.
Sad but true. People who want ‘good jobs’ need to focus on things that can’t easily be automated. Unfortunately for the populists, many of sad jobs are ‘service’ jobs that require a human brain in a human body … but that’s about all they require, and pretty much anybody can provide that, which means that the labor pool is large, and consequently the wages are small. Not even Barack Obama can change the elementary laws of economics, although he’s giving it the old Harvard try.