so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

[Just] 64 metro areas. . . . collectively contribute about 62 percent of the combined GDP of Canada and the U.S. Between 2010 and 2011 they represented 83 percent of the growth in the combined GDP.

More evidence for Richard Florida's assertion that the world is spiky, not flat...

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic30774.files/2-2_Florida.pdf

Why is the private sector—once the pride of America and the engine of economic growth—getting much lower returns on assets and capital than it used to get?

The reason for that is not that the managers have forgotten how to manage. The primary reason is that world has changed and management hasn’t.

Half a century ago, big firms were in charge of the marketplace. They could dictate terms to customers. Customers had few choices and imperfect information. Large hierarchical bureaucracies pursuing economies of scale and pushing products and services at customers were fairly effective in dealing with such a world.

Then the world changed. At first slowly and then, in the last decade, rapidly. Customers now have many choices and instant access to reliable information about those choices and can share views with other customers. As a result, there has been an epochal shift in power from seller to buyer. Now large hierarchical bureaucracies are no longer nimble enough to cope with a world in which the customer is effectively in charge. If customers are not delighted, they can and do go elsewhere. In order to delight the customer, a firm needs continuous innovation.

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club (WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

Bill Gross, the head of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, sums it up in no uncertain terms: “Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today’s marketplace.” There are two variables here: our educational levels, which are low, and our wages, which are high. Either we will raise our educational level or markets will lower our wages.

in the current [education] reform debates, saying poverty isn’t an excuse has become an excuse for ignoring poverty

we’re in the early stages of a “Big Shift,” precipitated by the merging of globalization and the Information Technology Revolution. In the early stages, we experience this Big Shift as mounting pressure, deteriorating performance and growing stress because we continue to operate with institutions and practices that are increasingly dysfunctional — so the eruption of protest movements is no surprise.

Yet, the Big Shift also unleashes a huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities. This flow is constantly getting richer and faster. Today, they argue, tapping the global flow becomes the key to productivity, growth and prosperity. But to tap this flow effectively, every country, company and individual needs to be constantly growing their talents.

Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We're on par with some of the world's most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Neither policy nor education is going to fix this quickly, but it needs to be fixed.

The creative class lost slightly less than three quarters of a million jobs during 2008-2010, the height of the economic crisis, less than two percent of all its jobs. Arts and media jobs declined at a higher rate, 4.9 percent, shedding 88,300 jobs. But this pales next to the destruction of more than two million service jobs and 5.3 million blue collar jobs, one in six jobs in that sector. In the first half of 2009, when national unemployment was at 8.7 percent, creative class unemployment was about half that level (4.4 percent) and just a third of the 15.2 percent rate faced by blue collar workers. Interestingly enough, creative class workers who had jobs actually saw their wages grow by 4.4 percent during the crisis, while the wages of arts and media workers grew by 3.2 percent. At the same time, blue collar workers faced the double whammy of massive job destruction and falling wages (which declined by 4.7 percent).

...

blue collar jobs are projected to decline by another 1.2 million over the next five or six years, while the creative class is expected to add another 6.8 million new jobs, with employment in arts, design, and media rising by 12 percent, according to projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics covering the period 2008 to 2018.

See also http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/04/163476/us-unequal-uganda-pakistan, which shows that our income inequality in America is on a par with (or greater than) that of countries like Uganda, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and the Ivory Coast.

The connected world was a challenge to blue-collar workers in the industrialized West. They had to compete with a bigger pool of cheap labor. The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines.

...

In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best,” and managers and entrepreneurs everywhere now have greater access than ever to the better and best people, robots and software everywhere. Obviously, this makes it more vital than ever that we have schools elevating and inspiring more of our young people into that better and best category, because even good might not cut it anymore and average is definitely over.

at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.

Over the same period, the tax rates on the richest Americans fell from 91 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, and 70 percent in the 1970s to the current low rate of 35 percent. The richest Americans won that spectacular tax cut. Middle- and lower-income Americans won no such cuts, while paying a higher proportion of their income for Social Security that the rich were required to do.

In plain English, the last 50 years saw a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation from business to individuals and from rich individuals to everyone else.

Hat tip: Larry Ferlazzo, http://twitter.com/Larryferlazzo/status/117926300441780224

Developed economies and their companies will always lose out to the emerging economies and their companies if the battle is fought on the basis of lowering cost (which is where traditional management generally tries to compete.)

Developed economies and their companies can only win in the long run if they compete on the basis of adding more value, through superior understanding and mastery of the world of the customer (which requires a radically different kind of management).

The growing need for workers to keep upgrading and adapting their skills is one of the themes of a new book, “The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here”, by Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. She argues that the pace of change will be so rapid that people may have to acquire a new expertise every few years if they want to be part of the lucrative market for scarce talent. She calls this process “serial mastery” and notes that the current educational system in most countries, from kindergarten through university, does a poor job of equipping people for continuous learning. There is likely to be a wave of innovation in further education, particularly online, that will cater to this need in a more flexible, personalised way than the traditional degree or postgraduate course. For some people, this evolution will take place within a single firm offering long-term employment. But for a growing number of workers the trick will be to jump from one company to another to take advantage of changing skill shortages.

According to Ms Gratton, people will also have to invest more in their personal “social capital”, which will involve three elements. First, they need to build themselves a “posse”, a small group of up to 15 people they can turn to when the going gets rough, says Ms Gratton. They should have some expertise in common, have built up trust in each other and be able to work effectively together.

Second, they need a “big-ideas crowd” who can keep them mentally fresh. This echoes the discussion of “managed serendipity” in last year’s business bestseller, “The Power of Pull”, in which John Hagel and John Seely Brown argued that the successful worker of the future will live in clusters of talented, open-minded people and spend a lot of time going to thought-provoking conferences. Third, they need a “regenerative community” to maintain their emotional capital, meaning family and friends in the real world “with whom you laugh, share a meal, tell stories and relax”.

Hat tip: Richard Florida, http://twitter.com/#!/Richard_Florida/status/111868240019472384

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

...

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

times are tough and the critics are quick to jump to the fact that science, too, must be downsized.

But science is different. Science is the Engine of Prosperity.

Downsizing science is like eating your own seed corn. Politicians spend all their time arguing how to cut up the pie and devising all kinds of different ways to slice it up. My Attitude is: We Need a Bigger Pie. And a bigger pie, comes from science, the engine of prosperity. So, by slowly losing the edge in different areas, the US is making it difficult to generate the new technologies which will give us a bigger pie.

what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value- adding jobs that technology can't, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

This is the post-industrial era. Success is not about speeding up the assembly line as much as it relies on individuals able to create leaps forward. The person capable of doing that sort of work is in far higher demand than ever before.

Top American firms have cut hiring or moved to a lower-tier pay system for many new associates. Corporations are reducing their legal departments. Legal temp companies now pay as little as $20 a hour to board-certified lawyers for document reviews that a decade ago might have been billed at $200 an hour.

But there is at least one glimmer of light. And it comes from a surprising direction.

Outsourcing firms, the companies that in recent years added to the financial woes of the American legal profession by sending work to low-cost countries like India, are now creating jobs for lawyers in the United States.

The American salaries for outsourced work, typically in the $50,000 to $80,000 range, may look meager compared with the six figures that new associates might still hope to draw at a big firm. But outsourcing jobs typically pay better than temp work — and certainly better than no work at all.

the ITIF rankings have a category that measures how much a country has improved its innovation capacity from 1999 to 2009, factoring in measures like government funding for basic research, education and corporate-tax policies. Of the 40 countries analyzed, the U.S. came in dead last.

Less of a felt need to do this because we're fat, happy, and complacent (relatively)?

From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two criteria. They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a four-year college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more than three-fifths of adults.

But as the country grew more diverse and better educated, the white working-class share of the adult population slipped to just under 50 percent in the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey. That number has since fallen below 48 percent.

. . .

Still, amid all of this change, whites without a four-year college degree remain the largest demographic bloc in the workforce. College-educated whites make up about one-fifth of the adult population, while minorities account for a little under one-third. The picture is changing, but whites who have not completed college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces across the country.

They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated group in American society.

Sector	Revenue 2010 (in millions)	Decline 2000-2010	Forecast Decline 2010-2016	Establish- ments 2010	Decline 2000-2010	Forecast Decline 2010-2016
Wired Telecommunications Carriers	$154,096	-54.9%	-37.1%	23,474	-10.5%	-15.9%
Mills	$54,645	-50.2%	-10.0%	9,553	-23.6%	-12.8%
Newspaper Publishing	$40,726	-35.9%	-18.8%	6,128	-28.6%	-17.6%
Apparel Manufacturing	$12,800	-77.1%	-8.5%	2,265	-60.5%	-11.3%
DVD, Game & Video Rental	$7,839	-35.7%	-19.3%	17,369	-34.8%	-11.2%
Manufactured Home Dealers	$4,538	-73.7%	-62.0%	3,968	-56.7%	-58.7%
Video Postproduction Services	$4,276	-24.9%	-10.7%	1,789	-43.2%	-37.8%
Record Stores	$1,804	-76.3%	-39.7%	2,916	-77.4%	-11.6%
Photofinishing	$1,603	-69.1%	-39.1%	7,083	-59.3%	-33.3%
Formal Wear & Costume Rental	$736	-35.0%	-14.6%	2,310	-28.5%	-17.0%

The 10 largest fields accounted for about 20% of the workforce last year — and they tended to include some of the worst-paying positions, the Labor Department said Tuesday. Heavily concentrated employment in low-paying jobs has been a concern for some economists, who note the economy is creating more low-paying jobs and more high-paying jobs (that require higher education) and leaving fewer opportunities for the traditional American middle class.

"more, bigger, faster, cheaper" doesn't necessarily add up to or equal "better, wiser, smarter, fitter, closer." Examined closely, relative to GDP, living standards already did collapse: examined closely, measures of gross industrial output decoupled from still deeply flawed but perhaps slightly more meaningful measures of human welfare, like the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and Genuine Progress Indicator, which have at best sharply lagged, or at worst flatlined, for decades. (And lest you pooh-pooh these updated conceptualizations as the utopian visions of idealists, remember that the Measure of Economic Welfare, for example, was conceived of by no less than Nobel Laureate James Tobin.) Concisely: the opulence bubble says that stuff probably yields sharply diminishing returns in human terms. It means that we can pursue Olympian levels of output, live in skyscraper-sized McMansions, drive Sherman tank-sized SUVs, glued to Jumbotron-sized 3D TVs — but it's at best unclear whether and at worst improbable that doing so will power any lasting marginal boost in our capacity to live meaningfully well, especially when you factor in the hidden costs and unintended consequences of doing so.

The Commerce Department reports that since 2000, U.S. multinationals have shed 2.9 million workers at home but picked up 2.4 million workers overseas. And that is to say nothing of the millions more who work for the foreign companies that now make many of the products and components sold by multinationals.

Most likely, all jobs that can be done by robots will be done by robots