But personal anecdotes don't actually determine what's going on in a whole country.
That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different.
I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.
Plumbers, Electricians, etc probably are OK, since robots really need to advance to replace them (like quantum leap) and locality is important. Manufacturing is probably hosed, and that is a huge problem.
Having done a little bit of work in plumbing with my dad I'd have to say that the home service type plumbing isn't getting automated anytime soon. But the manufacturing based plumbing such as installing plumbing into caravans I can see eventually getting automated.
When industrialisation began you had massive shifts that were probably scarier then the ones we see now. One relatively unskilled person could create hundreds of nails effectively destroying all employment in nail making. It would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that more people would be working in manufacturing stuff 100 years later when artisans were being replaced by machines at insane rates. Then we started consuming many more nails (and other stuff) because they were cheap and making many more nails. making became the staple employer.
One thing that might give you hope is reconsidering the flexibility of certain aspects of the labour market. There is no reason to assume that we need x unskilled jobs and y low-skilled jobs because there are inherently x & y unskilled and low skilled people in the market. Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour. You didn't need to apprentice for 5 years to make forks. There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too, in fact, most advanced economies have done this.
"Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour ... There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too..."
The other way is vastly more difficult. If you replace unskilled jobs with skilled jobs, more people will need more education. What happens to the people who aren't capable of learning more complicated things?
Based on history, it's very likely that I'm wrong. Based on the facts of this specific case, it seems hard to justify the need for non-creative labor.
That is very related to the point I was trying to make and why I used nails instead of clothes. Nail making had been important for a long time and required lots of people. Automation led to 10,000% or more increase in the number of nails per person. A handful of today's nailmakers can manufacture more nails then all the world's nailmakers a few centuries ago. It was effectively automating the entire industry.
The other way is vastly more difficult
Maybe. I'm not sure. I do think it's a fallacy however to think, as politicians seem to, of "number of unskilled workers" as some sort of constant that we can prod & shift slightly but essentially more of less the same.
A lot of what you say now could have been said at any point, particularly tipping points, which are by definition, unique. Try taking your perspective to the 18th century when Adam Smith came up with the example I bastardised. To a manufacturer of pins (Smith's example) it must have appeared that all jobs were dissolving: Adam Smith estimated (his high estimate) a productivity increase from 1 to 4800 pins per day per person. Even if demand for pins grew ten or one hundred fold, the vast majority of pin makers (47/48 pin makers after a 100X increase in demand) would end up unemployed. Pins were just one unimportant example.
There are two things that would have seemed unbelievable to his contemporaries: (1) That demand could possibly increase by that much, not just for pins, but for stuff. How much can you eat? How much can you wear? (2) That all these people made redundant by machines would ever be needed for anything. Even if all these pins (and other stuff) made manufacture of other stuff cheaper (this would have been less part of the consciousness then), all that other stuff will be manufactured by machines too. If new stuff gets invented and manufactured (this would have also been unintuitive at the time) it too will be made by machines.
I think the trick to understanding the point of this example is the magnitude: 1 to 4800. For all practical purposes (at the time) that meant getting rid of all pin makers in the same way (actually, much more) as auto-checkout will get rid of all checkout chicks.
What was the number like in 1933?
The US has just had very low unemployment for the last 15 years or so, so it feels more dramatic. It was actually higher than now at one point in the early 80s.
The fact is that many people are unemployed now due to the eceonomy being as it is, and there seems to be a consensus that things won't change anytime soon in that regard.
Couple that (on a slightly longer term perhaps) to the end of cheap, abundant oil to fuel every aspect of modern civilisation, and I think there could well be an issue of how to have everyone employed effectively.
I guess one problem may be that the new jobs require skills that the old jobs didn't, and not all of the newly unemployed would be able to acquire those skills.