In order to believe that statement, I would need to see a study. My
anecdotal experience working with retailers is that most of the jobs that
people are losing are low skill, manual labor jobs which have been around
for a very long time. COBOL programmers will have no problem finding new
work. 5,000,000 cotton pickers [displaced by automatic cotton picking
machines in the mid-1950s?60s?] *will*.
Think systems: it's not the LEVELS that matter. The number of people in or
out of work is less relevant than the RATES of flow. As long as more
people are being displaced than jobs are being created, we have a long
term unstable situation. The claim of the book 'The end of work" (Rifkin)
that I'm reading is that, in fact, there's a substantial imbalance right
now.
> and on a broader scale, thousands of jobs begin to open up
> that are nowhere near as "high-tech" in reality as they appear to be in
> the Sunday help-wanteds.
The problem is that we may need MILLIONS of jobs for displaced workers.
And remember: in America, at least, the illiteracy rate is approaching 50
percent for high school graduates (the New York Times had an article on
this in 1991). It isn't at all clear where or how the retraining for these
people will or can happen.
You can trivially convince me of your point of view, however, by providing
some hard numbers documenting rough rates of job loss and rough rates of
new job creation. I don't have those numbers so can't substantiate my
point of view with anything but hearsay (they may be in the book I'm
reading, but I haven't gotten that far, yet).
-- Stever
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Stever Robbins stever@mit.edu stever@verstek.com
Accept no substitutes! http://www.nlp.com/NLP/stever.html
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."