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Originally Posted by BRISK
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Or read the executive summary:
"Outsourcing hasn't killed jobs, or at least not enough to matter. It's just that everyone is doing their jobs so much better now that they don't need you any more, and it's that darned old bad economy what's leaving you out in the street with empty pockets. Shame that you poor unemployed bastard have to be the sacraficial lamb, cuz protectionism would be EVER so much worse and you're a reactionary idiot who ignores statistical evidence if you complain about it. If you hurry, they might toss you one of the greeter jobs at Wal*Mart while you wait on the trickle down. It's the new economy, stupid. New jobs and new industries are just around the corner, then it'll be milk and honey for all. So just sit there and suck it up, cuz if you even DARE try to protect your job, you'll be fucking yourself and your whole country harder."
While the article takes a birds-eye view and tosses in a few statistics to back up the point, noticable are the lack of some vary salient points:
- In the last 5 years, there has been a total gain of a little over 1.4 million jobs. A large portion (around 1/3rd) of those are construction-related, which can't be expected to continue when the white-hot real estate market cools (already happening in many cities).
- The bulk of the rest of the new jobs come in the service and health industries. Service, meaning "Wal*mart" or "McDonalds", are the lowest wages you'll find.
- Massive loses in the manufacturing sector, to the tune of some 6-odd million jobs lost. These are (were) jobs that people who didn't have the chance to get a degree could obtain and have a reasonable expectation of keeping a family alive on.
- In all cases, the median salary of the new positions are substantially lower than the old positions lost. Average salaries increased only 1% (adjusted for base inflation) over the last 5 years and ,edian salaries have sank substantially. This all happened while everyday *real* costs, like gas, medical, insurance, heating fuels have jumped dramatically (like a 130%+ hike in natural gas heating costs this year... yikes! NG heaters better hope for a warm winter this year!)
- Despite the 'unemployment rate' being at or near all time lows, there are fewer people working. "Utilization" is down to its lowest level since the late 80s, meaning more people looking for fewer jobs. "Unemployment rate" is really a misnomer, and a pretty meaningless metric for joe everyman (except when used as a PR technique to 'spin' away other bad economic indicators, like all-time low consumer confidence, increases in loan defaults and personal bankruptcy claims, etc)
In other words, there's little to no recognition that a great swath of the workplace is in serious financial straits, building to a cresendo potentially unlike anything seen since the late 20s (except this time, with no wartime economy and free flowing barrels of cheap energy springing out of the ground everywhere you step).
I used to read the magazine version of Foreign Affairs up until around the start of Gulf II, where there was a never-ending series of hagiographies and best-case scenario predictions that made it obvious, to me at least, that they'd drank the neocon kool-aid and were moving down the inevitable path of being shills first, editorialists second.
I will agree with the points raised about subsidies and their unintended consequences though (ie. sugar, steel, et al) and I've said the same things myself for years. And they did go the extra mile in making a couple suggestions of how to ameliorate some of the pain of the 'displaced worker' (their term), although considering how out-of-character with the rest of the article that little snippit of socialism was, I suspect a copy editor had it wedged in at the last moment.
