Ponce
4th January 2016, 05:30 PM
In business...what's so good about knowing what is going on?...more important, number one...why is happening. And number two...doing something "before" it happen...........by the time they tell you about it THEY already made their money...V
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The public’s confidence in economists was rightly shaken by the fact that almost no economists recognized the housing bubble and the damage that would be caused by its collapse. We still don’t know the full cost of this failure, but the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply lost output of more than $17 trillion (at $50,000 per person) through 2025. And that is apart from the lives that have been ruined due to unemployment and the loss of homes.
Given this track record, it is not surprising to find economists spinning tales of robots and the development of technology that don’t make sense. An often repeated story from economists is that technology is displacing jobs that had paid a middle-class wage. In this story, we see fewer middle-class jobs, and therefore a shrinking middle class. Most workers are left to compete for low-end jobs, driving down the wages in already low-paying occupations. This leads to a redistribution of income from workers to the people who own the technology.
There is both a small and big problem with this story. The smaller problem is that the “hollowing out of the middle” story doesn’t seem to fit the data. The only occupations that have been seeing a substantial growth in their share of the labor market have been those at bottom end. Occupations at both the middle and top end of the labor market have seen a decline in their share of total employment in this century.
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The public’s confidence in economists was rightly shaken by the fact that almost no economists recognized the housing bubble and the damage that would be caused by its collapse. We still don’t know the full cost of this failure, but the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply lost output of more than $17 trillion (at $50,000 per person) through 2025. And that is apart from the lives that have been ruined due to unemployment and the loss of homes.
Given this track record, it is not surprising to find economists spinning tales of robots and the development of technology that don’t make sense. An often repeated story from economists is that technology is displacing jobs that had paid a middle-class wage. In this story, we see fewer middle-class jobs, and therefore a shrinking middle class. Most workers are left to compete for low-end jobs, driving down the wages in already low-paying occupations. This leads to a redistribution of income from workers to the people who own the technology.
There is both a small and big problem with this story. The smaller problem is that the “hollowing out of the middle” story doesn’t seem to fit the data. The only occupations that have been seeing a substantial growth in their share of the labor market have been those at bottom end. Occupations at both the middle and top end of the labor market have seen a decline in their share of total employment in this century.