Employers do little more than keep pace with the growth of the workforce.
Don Lee, columnist for the Los Angeles Times on May 5, 2012 states:
“The nation’s long, hard ride to recovery went off track in the spring: Job growth slowed for the second straight month, raising fresh fears about the underlying strength of the economy.”
“The unemployment rate inched down to 8.1% — not because more people got jobs but because more discouraged workers dropped out of the labor market.”
“‘They’ve given up looking for work because they don’t think there are jobs for them,’ said Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “That’s a very bad sign.'”
Nowhere in the column does Lee discuss the real cause of deteriorating job opportunities––the reality that the exponential growth of accelerating technology is displacing and eliminating traditional jobs. What remains are jobs in the service sector (short term once technology is full applied) that pay far less than the manufacturing jobs that are being eliminated, because labor workers are being replaced by “machines” and are no longer needed.
The question that Lee and all other journalists and economic pundits should be asking is WHO OWNS THE MACHINES? I use the term “machine” to represent the broad mixture of input contributed by the non-human factor of production––productive capital––embodied in machines, superautomation, automated factories, robotics, computerized processes of all types, etc.
Neither President Obama or Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who called the report “terrible and very disappointing,” and argued that the economy should be creating 500,000 jobs a month after such a deep recession., have a plan that would even come close to that job growth goal.
Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s (the non-human factor) ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Binary economist Louis Kelso was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
The one sure way to close the “jobs gap” is to adopt the scenario where new economic growth is financed with mechanisms that extend pure insured capital credit to ALL citizens to acquire newly issued shares of stock in our major corporations and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings generated by the new productive capital assets (non-human factor of production), and gain greater access to “real” job opportunities that a growth economy generates. And as this new economy takes form with the secondary benefit of creating “real” job opportunities, ALL citizens within a generation or so will have acquired a viable ownership stake in the future economy that will earn them income for the rest of their lives.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs-20120505,0,5285148.story
