Dean Baker: high unemployment for 7-9 yrs?

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According to Dean Baker, economic policy advisers are forecasting high unemployment for the next seven or nine years. The government seems to be willing to do little about it and infastructure spending is Baker's prescription to fix this potential catastrophe.

Aside from the flaws of large segments of the population being unable to do productive work, do any of the Washington analysts realize that high unemployment creates quite a bit of resentment and instability? From a purely internal security position, this is a crisis.

By the way, Dean Baker is one economist who saw the Housing bubble.

The jobs will never come back.

A generation ago banks were full of people with adding machines. Now a computer does it all.

Factories with computers and robots can produce more products than 1000 men on a production line.

Stores used to have far more staff then they do today.

One man with a huge bulldozer can shift more dirt than 100 men with picks and shovels.

One man with a huge tractor can plow more land than 100 small farmers with horses.

Catch 22. Without well paying jobs how we can buy the cars and refrigerators made by the robots?

Answer: We can't. I have no idea where we will go from here.

Actually, to produce everything that our society needs, you really don't need everyone to be working. What's the point? In fact, quite a lot of the people who do have jobs aren't doing anything useful anyway. People who are paid the most are doing the least.

The solution may be a negative income tax.

The problem with Americans is that a lot of them really don't value leisure at all. They never travel. All they want to do is work, work, work. And, they want to raise the retirement age, so that more of them will die before they can retire.

America is just a plain stupid, dumb, sick society.

The obvious solution (i.e., more leisure) is simply anathema to their vile, little minds.

The blood of our ancestors was shed in order to give us the 40 hour work week.

And, many employees are pressured to work extra hours, and to work on Saturdays, for no extra pay.

To get where you want to go will require more shedding of blood, another revolution.

Part of the problem is that our tools for measuring economic indicators need to maintain comparisons year on year, but can't always account for changes in the economy.

Gone are the days of a single wage earning supporting his (sex exclusive chosen deliberately) family from a career with a single employer from graduation to retirement.

The fastest growing employment sector is likely (I don't have hard stats at my fingertips) self-employment. How do we measure the employment activity of those whose who do not pay themselves a wage, but simply draw from the profits of their business? Is the day-trader "employed" within the conventional meaning of the word? Many people are working at two or three part-time jobs in order to get enough hours to constitue full time work. Do they count as being employed full-time, or are they simply numbered among the "marginally employed?". Many workers are hopping from employer to employer as often as every few months, contributing to the phenomenon of transient unemployment.

Yes, the hundreds of clerks with adding machines are gone--but they have been replaced by programmers and network administrators. Where were the management consultants in the 1950s? Where were the internet entrepreneurs? Every day the economy is different than it was the day before.

That's very true.

Under the old system, the cost and availability of health insurance gave people a huge incentive to seek an employer who could provide these as benefits. Hence, taking a risk at self-employment meant a major risk. It helped if one spouse carried employer-sponsored health insurance. If you had retired from the military and didn't need health insurance, you could save your employer about $10,000.

Now, self employment will have an opportunity to grow.