Where have all the jobs gone pt3

Productivity gains since 1900, when everything was horse or steam driven, have been enormous.

If we produce the same with 20% of the labour then we could have a similar lifestyle by cutting our hours 80%.

A single farmer produces food for hundreds even thousands even tens of thousans, gone of the days of labour intensive farming where hundreds of people worked the land with hand tools, like in the second world war land girls etc.

This process will no doubt continue and perhaps accelerate, as I have mentioned before in older posts I once worked as a mid level tax expert, my job was replaced by a line of code.

There may be a job for the person that programs the robots or writes the lines of software though this is self defeating in that the other workers have no jobs and no income, without jobs and without income what are they going to use to buy the increased productivity gains?.

A large part of the productivity gains has gone to increase the number who in some manner do not work. In effect we society has said that their labour is not needed so they live on alternative means, these might include pensions, income support, disability benefits this is not an exhaustive list however .

A tendancy of the 1990s and 2000s has been that governments around the world have sought to increase the school leaving age or university placements. Whearas in the 1970s and 1980s 2-6% of people would go to university today (2009/2010) this figure is closer to 40% . But this is fallacy in that if there are no jobs for them then what is the use. Infact if you think about it a little deeper it is worse. In that young people are fooled into thinking university and education is the way to a brigher future.

Yet more has gone into make work position in the public sector. When we can produce all the goods that society needs with just 10% of the labour force then this will become clearer. Those few left in work will pay out 90% of their wages in taxes. It must be this way to enable the unemployed 90% to continue to buy their output.


The olde' meme of well of work and study hard and rewards may come, this sounds nice doesn't it. Unfortunately the disconnect with hard work and reward has been broken.

I am sure many of you have a basic understanding of psychology in that we encourage good behaviour by positive reinforcement , the inferior method considered by Skinner is negative reinforcement, this is not punishment as is oft mistaken for. Negative is the removal of something unpleasant.

Hence you work hard and get the money right?

Wrong, in that this disconnect has been broken, you can work hard as you want yet if you aren't lucky you won't progress anywhere. Luck might be synominous with ruthlessness as well by the way.

This has led to me thinking that people aren't being silly when they simply refuse to work and instead stay on benefits. In that this is their only legtimate manner in which they can protest. In that why fight a system that is so corrupt and twisted that the serfs are kept in their place?.In that today internships and apprenticeships are becoming more and more common, as a whole generation is willing to fight itself to work for free and undercut each other. I myself did this to others I worked for £5500 PA for 6 months about 4 or 5 years ago, did we do this to ourselves?.

Yet right wingers, boomers etc stifle this debate by just shouting at them as workshy or scoungers, you can see a certain logic as to why people don't play such a rigged game. Many people do not gamble at casinos as they know it is inherently rigged in favor of the house, many people simply choose not to work as the whole game is rigged infavor of others.