George Rebane
The American workforce is in crisis, and no one wants to talk about the real nature of that crisis. Perhaps the established news outlets and commentators consider the issue too hot to handle; then again, maybe very few see the problem. Today, this is often where the itinerant blogger enters unannounced, and shouts his vision to an audience uncertain, and most likely unbelieving.
The un-debated national problem is that a large and growing fraction of our adults of working age can no longer sell their labor at wages that will support their current lifestyle. Today’s recession may be seen as a blessing that hides this reality for another year or two. We are assured by the media and government pundits that all the jobs and more will return when the recession is over, but they most certainly will not return through the same companies that are now using the financial crisis to permanently pare back the unproductive labor component of their businesses. In this series of posts I will attempt to make the case for the dimension, causes, and direction of this national crisis as I believe it will unfold.
Let’s start the whole thing off with the bottom line. Automation fueled by radical advances in cheap machine intelligence, robotics, and globalization (that makes available equally or better trained workers) is relegating the overpriced American worker to the hinterlands of human capital. The short form is that the natural dispersion of human intelligence (recall that half the people have two-digit IQs) combined with a catastrophic educational system has produced an exploding population of under-qualified workers, the larger fraction of whom are simply untrainable to compete in the global job markets of which the United States is now but a part. And that same educational system continues undeterred on its well-worn path.
