Where did the Jobs Go?

Where did the Jobs Go? I have been reading on Kindle lately: "Race Against the Machine" that studiously explores the causes of all the job losses in the U.S. and the Western World.

I won't be able to give you exact page numbers because I am enlarging the print for easier reading on my eyes using kindle. But, likely I can give you the Chapter numbers of the points I'm interested in sharing with you here:

There appear to be three explanations, cyclicality, stagnation and "the end of work".

The first explanation:
begin quote:
The cyclical explanation holds that there's nothing new or mysterious going on: unemployment in America reamins so high simply because the economy is not growing quickly enough to put people back to work.  Paul Krugman is one of the prime advocates of this explanation. As he writes: "All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand--full stop."

end quote from Chapter 1 "Race against the Machine"

The second explanation

begin quote:

In the cyclical explanation, an especially deep drop in demand like the Great Recession is bound to be followed by a long and frustratingly slow recovery. What America has been experiencing since 2007, in short, is another case of the business cycle in action, albeit a particularly painful one.
end quote from Chapter 1.

The third explanation:

Stagnation in this current context means a long term decline in America's ability to innovate and increase productivity. Economist Tyler Cowen articulates this view in his 2010 book "The Great Stagnation":
We are failing to understand why we all are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least 300 years... Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That's what has gone wrong.

To support his view, Cowen cites the declining median income of American families. Median income is a halfway point; there are as many families making less than this amount as there are making more. The growth of median income slowed down significantly at least 30 years ago, and actually declined during the first decade of this century; the average family in America earned less in 2009 than it did in 1999. Cawen attributes this slowdown to the fact that the economy has reached a "technological plateau."

----Leo Telman and the Nobel prize winning economist Edmund Phelps agreed with this stagnation: "America's dynamism--its ability and proclivity to innovate-- has brought economic inclusion by creating numerous jobs. It has also brought real prosperity--engaging challenging jobs and careers of self-relaization and self-discovery..... but dynamism has been in decline over the past decade.

This stagnation argument doesn't ignore the Great recession, but also doesn't believe that it's the principle cause of the current slow recovery and high joblessness. end quote from Chapter 1.

Begin quote:

A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up. In a global economy, American Businesses and workers can't earn a premium if they don't have greater productivity than their counterparts in other nations. end quote form Chapter 1.

Another explanation:

America's current job creation problems flips the stagnation argument on it's head, seeing not too little recent technological progress, but instead too much. We'll call this the "end of work" argument, after Jeremy Rifkin's 1995 book of the same title. In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that "we are entering a new phase in world history---one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

end quote from Chapter 1 of Race against the Machine.

I subscribe to this last philosophy because of everything I have studied even though all the other explanations also have a part in this too.

So, the way I see it is that globalization has taken away jobs by people being able to order goods from any country through companies like amazon.com and Target and Costco and directly online from many other sources. This has put many other competitors in the U.S. out of business now that must charge more for their products because they have to pay their workers more than people do in other countries.

Then companies seeing they were going out of business in the U.S. discovered that they could stay in business by laying off most of their employees and by buying technology and robotics to replace those employees with. This kept those businesses competitive on the world stage but left millions (12 million people) out of work over the last 5 to 7 years now.

So, my explanation is: The jobs are not coming back at all. People who haven't figured this out already are homeless or worse, some dead already worldwide from starvation and suicide and broken families with no money.

So, my solution would be that since jobs are not coming back how do you survive this? The best way might be to go back to growing your own food on a rented or bought piece of land. Since it takes about 1 acre per person (this is a minimum so you would be skinny but healthy) you would need at least 1 acre of land for every member of your family to survive. So, maybe you get a part or full time job while in your spare time growing food so you will have enough. You barter for your needs if possible also when you live in the country somewhere with decent land that food can be grown on.

However, if you are well educated or a self starter you may also start your own business or businesses. This is what I started doing in my late 20s with my young family. This worked out well in the long run even though you really have to want your business to work and to study how to make it work sometimes 7 days a week to actually make a business work.

Also, just remember you learn much more from your mistakes as a business person than your successes. And last of all remember STeve Jobs started in his parents Garage with Apple Computer.