Two months is not enough to establish a definitive trend.
That’s fortunate because it works out to losing about 7% of all full-time jobs on an annualized basis.
In fact, outside of recessions the US has never lost this many full-time jobs this quickly
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(long-term chart below for perspective.
Compared to the total workforce, the number of people employed full-time right now is not bad. (Beats most of the Trump years)
But the direction is bad and may or may not be the beginning of something awful.
Need to see 2 more quarters. But there are several factors that seem to be aligning in a negative manner.
Losing full time jobs and adding part-time jobs, is that the current trend?
As AI becomes more prevalent and is utilized by an increasing number of industries we will see both less full time and part time jobs.
I do believe in another generation we will have got to the point where a growing number of people will have zero chance at employment.
As I said in another thread, AI is not like other employment disruptors because it is not creating new professions as it replaces human beings.
I am pretty sure folks said that about the age of automation,
the automobile, the desktop computer, the Internet etc…
In each case there was a lot of disruption.
(Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical harvester displaced a ton of farm workers )
and in the end what we had was more stuff (goods and services) for less input IOW standards of living rose.
But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
I think the economy is at the beginning stages of some sort of generic downturn.
The seven fat years and seven lean years comes to mind.
As long as we saved and did not spend money during the seven fat years we’ll be fine.
I disagree, those advances led to new industries and new opportunities such as mechanics etc, what new industries does AI create? I hope there are some but I cannot think of any.
From my own experience one company my employer already has some sophisticated Large Language Model AIs in operation and we are about to move to a new platform which will reduce the need for us to create ongoing scripts by 70%.
Think about the impact on so many professions - realtors, legal, accounting and tax accountants, journalism, customer service, financial advisers, stock brokers. Maybe these professions are not impacted to any degree today but give if 5 and 10 years they will be.
I am not saying this is a bad thing but it will have a massive impact on society both good and bad.
AI will likely have some degree of negative impact on many white collar type jobs. Any type of profession which involves having a human analyze a problem could arguably be replaced with AI.
And i think the degree will be much greater than most people realize.
In a generation or two, across the globe there will be people who will never know any form of employment.
It might be a little early in the thread to turn to topic to AI, but oh well.
(reserving to bring up the main topic again on another thread)
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Think about the impact of automation on so many different professions
In each case the Luddite types said these would result in mass unemployment, which it did for a time, but ultimately each of those contributed to the higher standard of living we have today.
Adam Smith has an example, of a farmer and a miner and how an advance in farming leads inexorably to each worker getting twice as much grain for a day’s work.
I’ll try to look it up.
So how will they sustain themselves?
We have, as yet no reason to think AI will bring us any changes except those brought again and again and again by previous innovation.
Disruption (unemployment) that was limited in time and duration and
an overall a higher standard of living and a shorter work week became permanent.
Before automation destroyed labor:
Family of six lived in a dark 1-BR apartment and had two sets of clothes. Kids quit school and worked beginning at age 12, work week was 60+ hours.
With the labor-killing automation:
Much better.
Big picture:
The length of the work day fell sharply between the 1880s, when the typical worker labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and 1920, when his counterpart worked an 8-hour day, 6 days a week. By 1940 the typical work schedule was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. . . .
. . . further reductions in work time largely took the form of increases in vacations, holidays, sick days, personal leave, and earlier retirement, time diary studies suggest that the work day has continued to trend downward less than 8 hours a day.
(Link below)
More recently:
If so, and if white-collar-type workers can’t get white-collar jobs, there will always be labor jobs. If they want to eat, they can “push a broom”. (Or learn to be an electrician, or a carpenter, or a plumber.)
Or start a business. Or … or … or …
Giverment teat, of course.
Look, the war has already begun!
According to some reports, the robot taxi said “I’ll be back” before it was completely consumed by the flames!
lol
And the layoffs continue:
Maybe we lost 1,6 million full-time jobs, but we gained 3.2 million part time jobs.
So no big deal, right?
I’ve lost count how many times over the past year or so I’ve seen this from many of our larger more established companies:
That is the essence of Bidenomics, building the economy from the bottom up and middle out! One of the key strategies of Bidenomics is to flood the country with over ten million of the world’s impoverished, uneducated, unskilled, non-English speaking labor, then over time a small percentage of them get low wage-dead end jobs (many being part time). This in turn boosts the labor numbers, which gives a false sense of some booming economy.
