On September 6, 2013, Dylan Matthews writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
Parsing the monthly jobs numbers is a lot harder than it looks. On the surface, the decline in the unemployment rate to 7.3 percent is good news — but as we’ve notedhere before, a lot of that rate’s decline is attributable to declining participation in the labor force. And figuring out what exactly is behind that is its own tough project. Some of it’s that the population is aging, which reduces labor force participation for reasons unrelated to the economic downturn; some of it is that people are waiting to enter the labor force due to the poor job market; and some of it is that people who were once in the labor force are dropping out.
So it’s good to check in with the employment-to-population ratio — which is exactly what it sounds like — as well as the unemployment numbers. Like the labor force participation rate, that ratio is sensitive to changes in the age composition of the population, and so can be expected to fall when the population is aging irrespective of changes in the economy. But you can get around that by looking at participation ratesby age group. That provides a lot of clues as to how many middle-aged people are unemployed or dropped out of work, how many young people are delaying joining the workforce or have dropped out shortly after entering, and how many retirees are holding onto their jobs longer versus taking an early retirement:
This tells a pretty clear story. The share of young people working — especially in their late teens, but up until their mid-20s too — is down pretty dramatically. There have been sizable (around 5 percent) reductions in the share of people ages 25 to 55 working. And older workers — especially women — are hanging onto their jobs for much longer than they did during boom times.
What never gets addressed in articles about the jobs crisis in America is the reality that jobs are being destroyed and the worth of labor is being devalued due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production resulting in less opportunity for good-paying jobs growth.
The reality is that human productivity has not advanced, but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input. While the greatest impact of technological revolution has occurred in the manufacturing private sector, the other sectors, now functioning with low-paid human workers, will experience the job destruction and further wage degradation as companies never cease to produce products and services at less cost––and saving labor costs is ALWAYS part of that prescription.
The critical question becomes who should own productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics, as well as authors such as Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and much more. What does this mean for the future of work?
With increasing punditry, scholars and others are writing about the impact of the Second Industrial Revolution where tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are destroying and degrading jobs due to the shift from labor worker input to the non-human factor––human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computer operations, etc.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
Solutions are to be found in the platform of the Capital Homestead Act. Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624
