On August 27, 2013, Brad Plumer writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
There are a few broad trends in the U.S. economy getting lots of attention lately. The job market appears to be increasingly polarized, with high-paid and low-paid occupations growing quickly, while middle-class jobs are disappearing. And on top of that, median wages have stagnated over the past decade.
This is worth exploring a bit more in chart form. Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizing Economics has created a graph looking at the industries where job growth has been fastest between 2000 and 2011, breaking it down by income:
That’s one way to see the labor market getting increasingly polarized over the past decade, as industries with low average pay grow significantly and mid-range industries wither — mainly driven by the steep decline in U.S. manufacturing.
We can also focus specifically on the recession and its aftermath. Mark Thoma points to research from Joshua Lerner of the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, looking at specific occupations rather than broad industries. Here the trend is even more pronounced (click to enlarge):
Since 2010, lower-wage jobs like food preparation and personal care have grown fast. So have high-end jobs in management, finance and health care. But a number of middle-class occupations, particularly teaching and construction, have continued to decline.
Here’s Lerner: “Where we have seen slower growth is in the middle. The light blue bars, which I term lower middle-wage jobs account for about 40 percent of all occupations in 2012 yet account for just 26 percent of the growth. The dark blue bars, which I term upper middle-wage jobs, account for another 19 percent of all occupations and 0 percent of the growth. This, by definition, is job polarization.”
So why is this all happening? In the New York Times, David Autor and David Dornrecently argued that labor-saving technological change has, over time, replaced a number of “routine” middle-class jobs like manufacturing, while leaving low-end service jobs and high-end positions largely untouched.
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 Autor and Dorn. 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
