Where Have All The Jobs Gone part 1

This clip is Andrew MacAfee talking about how robots, droids, and other technology will affect the number of human jobs available in the future.  Though he starts off with some dark ideas, he's got a positive attitude for the long term.  You may notice that this isn't a Tedx Talk in some backwater town somewhere, he's in Boston, one of the high tech capitols of the United States. 

My mom likes to watch Steve Harvey's afternoon talk show, which means I often watch it since I'm unemployed at the present time.  On his show a couple days ago, Steve had three women with financial problems, and a woman who just wrote a financial book advising them.  One of the women said she recently graduated from college with $160,000 in student loans.  That's not a loan payment, that's a freakin' mortgage in my book.  The woman said she had no job prospects.  Not poor job prospects, she had absolutely NO job prospects.  She went to work for a non-profit organization which allowed her to defer her student loan payments for one year.  The woman said she lived in a converted storage unit, with a roommate, surviving on a small living stipend she got.  After that year, her student loan payments alone would be nearly $3,000 a month. 

The sad thing is that this isn't a rare situation.  I hear over and over on TV how smart college graduates are having trouble finding jobs.  The job hunt is much tougher for people (like myself) who don't have college degrees.  We keep hearing that the great recession is over, but the job market still seems to be pretty bad for large numbers of people.  More people are on Food Stamps and other government assistance problems than ever.  Food pantries are having a hard time keeping the shelves stocked because of increased demand.  At the last job fair I went to in this area (Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina) I walked past about 2,500 people to take my place in line... for 100 rudimentary jobs at a local employer.  My first thought wasn't to apply for a job, it was to open up a snack bar next to the people waiting for hours in that huge line. 

So where have all the jobs gone?  A lot of you are probably thinking, "China."  Yes, thousands, maybe millions of factory jobs have gone to China.  Lots of jobs went to Mexico before that.  Many jobs went to Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and India before that.  But I've heard several times that we've actually lost more jobs to robots than to other countries.  I couldn't find a specific article to back that up, but if you search "robots taking jobs" on either Google or You Tube, you'll find that a lot comes up, like the Ted Talk above.  We need to realize that most of the high paying factory jobs are gone forever.  Unfortunately, in my area, that's what the economic developers are still looking for.  They want to bring a major car factory to Greensboro, the largest of the three cities making up the Piedmont Triad, as this region is known.  Winston-Salem, the second largest city here, has taken a different tack.  They've spent over $400 million (according to a recent newspaper article) to build a biotech research area in the once empty downtown.  This huge project is anchored by Wake Forest University's extensive biotech program.  They're on the right track, but they're about 25 years late to the biotech party.  Time will tell how the new research area fairs. Even if it takes off, it won't provide jobs to the thousands of unemployed and under-employed people who needs jobs in this area.  It will most likely bring in well paid scientists from other areas.  What do we do with all the average people who need jobs here... and everywhere else?

This is a huge issue now, and will continue to be a major issue in the future.  Today's huge tech companies employee far fewer people than manufacturing companies of similar economic size did a generation ago.  Even scarier, technology is evolving to take many of the intellectual jobs in the future.  So where is everybody going to work?  The answer I keep coming back to is entrepreneurship.  As far as I can see, we are going to need huge numbers of people to start new businesses, both big and small, to employ the unemployed people of today, and those in the future.