You know, I keep thinking about this - we want to stop the outsourcing of jobs abroad. It diminishes our power and ability to pay our own people well, even if it comes at the cost of cheaper goods.
In the 90's when this was brought to my attention, the most oft quotes response was that "we are turning into a service economy". As nations advance from subsistence living - to agricultural - to industrial - to technology and beyond - they relinquish (I believe, at their peril) its ability to produce the previous items they depended on for trade and survival. Many industrialized nations in this world simply do not produce enough food at all to sustain their burgeoning populations. They just don't. They do make enough food and other items to trade, but it's not a balance I'd be comfortable with.
My argument in response to the idea that the United States has to relinquish the mantel of being at the forefront of manufacturing to be part of a new industry reliant on technology is - well, who IS it that leads the world in manufacturing? By their argument, it should be the up and coming industrial societies with massive sources of cheap labor but otherwise - still developing nations. Like say, India.
But who leads the world, other than China? Japan. Germany. South Korea. France, Italy, UK. And some of these are STILL that way, because they've done the thing that the United States MUST do, to continue to be competitive. Innovate manufacturing with robotics and technology.
Make no mistake - the U.S. is still up there. But China leads, and partly because we're enabling them.
To the reason I wrote this ---
We now have a slow market in producing jobs. We have WAY MORE JOBS than people want to take, and the idea of making new jobs seems slightly pointless. How useful is creating jobs and promising jobs, when there's way more jobs and people just don't take them? The argument is easily made that it's because of pandemic fears and disincentives to work. You get a job, you interview for jobs, you stand in line for jobs - because you really, REALLY need one. People don't. They've adjusted. They don't need to. The pandemic forced people to re-think their positions and situation. They did with less. They managed. Now they don't want to go back. Sadly, we just don't have enough GOOD JOBS for these folks to return to, and we don't have enough new skilled labor to usher in many of the new ones.
I don't know if we NEED new jobs. We need different jobs.
In the 90's when this was brought to my attention, the most oft quotes response was that "we are turning into a service economy". As nations advance from subsistence living - to agricultural - to industrial - to technology and beyond - they relinquish (I believe, at their peril) its ability to produce the previous items they depended on for trade and survival. Many industrialized nations in this world simply do not produce enough food at all to sustain their burgeoning populations. They just don't. They do make enough food and other items to trade, but it's not a balance I'd be comfortable with.
My argument in response to the idea that the United States has to relinquish the mantel of being at the forefront of manufacturing to be part of a new industry reliant on technology is - well, who IS it that leads the world in manufacturing? By their argument, it should be the up and coming industrial societies with massive sources of cheap labor but otherwise - still developing nations. Like say, India.
But who leads the world, other than China? Japan. Germany. South Korea. France, Italy, UK. And some of these are STILL that way, because they've done the thing that the United States MUST do, to continue to be competitive. Innovate manufacturing with robotics and technology.
Make no mistake - the U.S. is still up there. But China leads, and partly because we're enabling them.
To the reason I wrote this ---
We now have a slow market in producing jobs. We have WAY MORE JOBS than people want to take, and the idea of making new jobs seems slightly pointless. How useful is creating jobs and promising jobs, when there's way more jobs and people just don't take them? The argument is easily made that it's because of pandemic fears and disincentives to work. You get a job, you interview for jobs, you stand in line for jobs - because you really, REALLY need one. People don't. They've adjusted. They don't need to. The pandemic forced people to re-think their positions and situation. They did with less. They managed. Now they don't want to go back. Sadly, we just don't have enough GOOD JOBS for these folks to return to, and we don't have enough new skilled labor to usher in many of the new ones.
I don't know if we NEED new jobs. We need different jobs.
