Where Have All The Jobs Gone part 2

This is a quick clip of professor Richard Florida, who has been promoting his findings about the "creative class" for about 13 years now.  As he mentions in this clip, this is where the real job growth is these days.

The region of North Carolina where I now live was once thriving thanks mostly to three industries:  tobacco, textiles, and furniture manufacturing.  It's no coincidence that the city of Winston-Salem is the name of two brands of cigarettes, and that the city's nickname, "Camel City," refers to yet another brand of cigs.  You know what's happened to the tobacco industry over the the last 20 years as the dangers of smoking were finally brought to the forefront.  For other reasons, the furniture and textile industry jobs have taken similar hits.  As I mentioned in the last post, we've lost thousands of jobs in this area, and millions nationwide to automation (robots) and out sourcing of jobs to lower wage countries.  Now this area is one of the worst in the nation in childhood hunger.  There are thousands of people looking for jobs that no longer exist.  The same is happening in the smaller cities and towns all over this country.  It's not just industrial age cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland that have taken the hit, but thousands of small towns and cities as well.  This is where Richard Florida's Creative Class idea comes in.

I first heard of the Creative Class concept in the local entertainment weekly paper about five years ago.  It made mention of the cities here trying to attract the creative class.  I was intrigued, and went on to read three of Richard Florida's books.  He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, which had a great hi tech program.  Florida's area of expertise was economic development, something the struggling city of Pittsburgh sorely needed in the 90's.  But Florida noticed that the top IT students were leaving, going to the Silicon Valley in California, Boston, Austin, Texas, and other cities.  So he began looking into what was happening.  He learned that today's tech companies don't wait for smart people to come to them, the companies go to where the highly skilled people are in abundance.  This trend is a factor in why the majority of hi tech is clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, L.A., Raleigh/Durham, Washinton D.C., and Austin, Texas.  That's where the big groups of highly talented people are.  In addition to the businesses moving to where the quality people are, the talented and creative people tend to move to cities that are tolerant of all kinds of people, have lots of jobs, and afford a good quality of life.  In short, highly creative people like to live around other highly creative people.  This has created a brain drain that is attracting the best and brightest people coming out of college to a hand full of urban areas.  Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country is falling further and further behind.  I happen to live in one of those areas that's way behind the times and is not attracting much in the way of tech companies at the moment. 

As I mentioned in my last post, Winston-Salem has spent a lot of money to develop a biotech research area.  They are actually remodeling the old R.J. Reynolds cigarette factory into a center for biotech research and start ups.  Time will tell if they are able to attract a significant portion of the biotech industry.  But they're trying, which is good.  Many other small cities and towns are trying similar tactics to bring hi tech businesses and the Creative Class people to their areas.  But we're still in a weird middle area where there are lots of people still looking for traditional industrial age jobs.  The majority of civic leaders in this area are still trying to bring industrial jobs back.  So we have a disconnect.  There are thousands of people locally, and millions nationwide, looking for jobs that are long gone and won't come back. 

After my last post about jobs, my friend Mike left me a link to Mike Rowe's Facebook page.  As you probably know, Mike Rowe hosted the Dirty Jobs TV show, and now hosts Sombebody's Got To Do It.  Through his shows, Mike has shined a spotlight on all the people working hard at jobs that aren't the most pleasant.  He's given props to the hardworking Americans who were never in the spotlight before.  But Mike Rowe is part of the Creative Class, he found his niche in the entertainment industry by being willing to do really physically demanding jobs... for one day each.  He makes a good living precisely because he is a creative guy.  The job growth in the future won't be in the jobs Mike does on his show, but in creative work like Mike Rowe himself does as a host and producer.  Isn't it ironic, don'tcha think?

The question remains:  what do we do with the millions of people who have the wrong skills for the highly creative jobs that are being produced in abundance these days?  What do we do with an education system that was designed to produce factory workers when there are few factories left?  How do we get the city leaders across the country to focus on inspiring the people in their area to create more new businesses and more jobs?  We are in a big, long, tough period of major change right now.  It's going to be really hard on lots of people.  At the same time, there are all kinds of opportunities for people using new technology and new ideas.  I don't know how this will all shake out, but we need a lot more people working on this issue than we have right now.

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.