Unions

[TuffaloDeac10]

And what fills the void of those jobs here? And I mean realistically given our current situation, not in some pipe-dream world where we re-tool our educational system to suddenly produce a plethora of scientific reseach PhDs, computer programmers, and machine techs.

What do you mean? Where do the workers go or what traded activities take the place of manufacturing? For the former, I believe the workers generally go into services, construction, or non-traded/artisan manufacturing. For the latter, traded sector jobs are generally in higher value-added manufacturing (e.g. aerospace instead of I-beams), high-tech/software, chemical, and bio-medical fields (of course we also export a lot of capital goods).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0547750110

In the long-run, of course, we need to invest more ($$, effort, creativity) in education to improve performance in STEM fields so we don't end up with all native born Americans working service jobs supporting wealthy immigrant engineers. We're going to have to live in that "pipe-dream world," and I'm hopeful that someone's going to come along with a good plan to have the Laboratories of Democracy[SUP]TM[/SUP] set themselves upon finding the best way to educate 21st Century workers.

Would you prefer autarky? Because that's what it would take to get the steel mills back.

 

[2&2 Slider To Leyritz]

Perhaps it is just two different ways of looking at how it plays out over the next few decades, but I am approaching from the viewpoing that we do not have, and are not going to have at any point in the near future (i.e. next 100 years), the workforce to attract the higher level jobs to the extent necessary to fix our current problems. So it is either have lower-level completely unskilled jobs (the ones we are shipping overseas), or have nothing for a large portion of the population. I think we need to recognize the role we have unfortunately put ourselves in, and it is not one where we can pick and choose what industries to support. The US' economic success has been nothing more than a pimple on the ass of human history, yet we act with an economic entitlement that is completely removed from reality.

 

[TuffaloDeac10]

It's not like manufacturing ever made up a majority of employment. Per Moretti, the peak was somewhere below 30% of the workforce (FRED gives somewhat different results, but WWII and Korea might explain the discrepancy). So it's not like the high-skill jobs need to employ most workers. I think at the higher levels of pay, we "need" fewer high-skilled workers to replace the economic activity of the former manufacturers.

 

[2&2 Slider To Leyritz]

I would imagine we had a large number of unskilled people working in agriculture during those prior times. The agriculture jobs are even less likely to come back than the manufacturing jobs. Currently, we have virtually nothing in the unskilled market except internal service jobs like Burger King. Those jobs export nothing and therefore do nothing to help the economy as a whole except shuffle money internally.

 

[TuffaloDeac10]

Mercantilism is not the answer

 

[TuffaloDeac10]

I would imagine we had a large number of unskilled people working in agriculture during those prior times. The agriculture jobs are even less likely to come back than the manufacturing jobs. Currently, we have virtually nothing in the unskilled market except internal service jobs like Burger King. Those jobs export nothing and therefore do nothing to help the economy as a whole except shuffle money internally.

We might have. There's no way to know without looking it up on FRED.

 

[TuffaloDeac10]

I'm not sure the series goes back far enough, but the 12month average has moved by just a little more than 200k employees from peak to trough. And these jobs are highly seasonal, so I don't think increasing mechanization in farming is the source of labor market woes.