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vincentML -> RE: Would you agree to tax incentives to bring jobs back to the US? (7/29/2010 7:13:23 AM)
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Problem is, Vincent, there's a world of difference between retraining a blacksmith to turn bolts on an assembly line, and taking that same blacksmith and trying to train him to troubleshoot servers and routers.
The whole "let's retrain everyone" scenario is predicated on the false notion that every worker in the US is equipped with the same intellectual skills. It simply ain't so. You cannot wave a magic wand and imbue the ability to code software, or read x-rays, or perform any number of tasks which are required in this wonderful "post-industrial" society. Almost 30% of black youth have been left behind. Now increasing numbers of whites, who previously had well-paying jobs related to manufacturing, have been sidelined with no marketable skills and who are, for all practical purposes, untrainable.
Thank you, HK, but I feel you've misread what I said and my intent. I did not advocate retraining everyone.
I said: I don't have much faith in retraining programs but I suppose they are partly a solution. So yeh, many suffer. Sad to say that has always been a force in Capitalism that we have not been too quick to acknowledge. Technology and circumstances change the job market. Labor is no longer secure. Maybe never was. We have to face the fact that some jobs will never come back because they are of a different era.
I did not spell it out but I was referring to the concept of "Creative Destruction" which is an imbedded force in Capitalism. Simply put, new markets, new business arrangements, and new technology render previous job skills and business plans as obsolete. Tax manipulation is a feeble finger in the dike. People need to be aware that their jobs can quickly become obsolete, their skills useless. This is particlularly tragic for fifty year old blue collar workers with whom I have great sympathy. I am not saying the situation is hopeless for future 50 year olds. I am saying Creative Destruction is a force to be reckoned with. Not only have we no solution as yet but we aren't even talking about the real problem.
This from Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942], pp. 82-85:
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Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems, of which exactly the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.
As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the contents of the laborer's budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .
Schumpeter's observation is that Revolution is the essence of Capitalism. Deal with it.
There is more here: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/materials/schumpeter.html
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