Where are the jobs?

How strong is the economic recovery going to be? With the housing market still problematic and jobs scarce, one might even wonder if we have a recovery at all. In any economy there are some who do well and some who don’t. In a macro sense, we consider the country in a recession if the GDP decreases over a couple of quarters. Now when we had such a massive downturn, like we did in 2008-2009, the end of recession is not the same thing as recovery.
Having seen economic growth return only means we have adjusted to the changed circumstances created by the housing and credit collapse. For any individual company, the adjustments they had to make were often painful and most likely permanent, assuming they survived and will continue to survive. While there were a number of changes the one that is part of a longer economic trend and which will most likely continue is the loss of certain jobs.
If you consider any country, it goes through stages. In America, the early country was dominated by farmers, because there really wasn’t much choice. However, as the country progressed and farming techniques modernized, we needed fewer and fewer farmers. The good news was that new jobs were being created in the growing manufacturing sector and these excess farm workers were absorbed into our growing industrial society as a source of cheap labor.
So the average worker in this country went from someone who tilled the ground to someone who worked in a factory. There are still farmers, but nowadays, unless you live in a farm community, you probably don’t run into them all that often. It is also becoming rare to be a factory worker.
We are turning into a nation of service and knowledge workers. Yes, blue collar labor still exists and always will, but between importing goods and automation of factories, there are fewer and fewer jobs. For a period of time, it looked like the service and knowledge industries could absorb the excess workers, but as artificial intelligence improves many of these jobs are being replaced by automation. How many switch board operators are left? Look at how many “Self Service” opportunities there are in today’s world. Tax Preparers are seeing more and more people using sophisticated programs to do the taxes themselves. There are software developers looking at almost everything we do to see if it can be simplified and automated into a self service program.
So what about the service workers? Well, we need fewer of them every year. Even worse, for those we still need, it is often cheaper to locate them in another country. So, low end service workers are finding work difficult to find. This makes companies more profitable, assuming there are people out there to buy their products.