I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing. Plenty of reasonable sounding explanations are offered elsewhere in this thread for why this time is different, but then lots of reasonable sounding explanations were offered in the past.
I'd say it's 95% that job losses aren't permanent, although I'm not sure 5 years is enough time to settle it. I'm perfectly willing to believe we could be in a recession/depression for the next 10-20 years. That has precedent in our and other economies. However, I'm not prepared to believe that--simply because I can't imagine what people will do--people won't end up doing something. Everyone likes to be productive, and humanity has a really efficient means of organizing labor to trade around everyone's productivity.
I am all for 95% or 100% unemployment, though, if such a fantastical reality can come to pass!
>I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing.
// It's like peak oil isn't it. We keep getting "we're at [or passed] peak oil" but then a new oil field or new extraction method makes this seem less likely. Thing is that oil will run out.
To me technological changes haven't converted in to less jobs because we've exploited those changes to increase resource use, and hence production. As natural resources falter then we can no longer have the increased resource use and so the removal of jobs via technological improvements can't be mitigated by the addition of jobs in new areas.
There are various resource pressures and financial problems that suggest to me that we're at the turning point. It would be nice to be wrong about that in some ways.
Oil doesn't have to run out to drastically change the economy. The new methods of extraction are more expensive than the old, and the price of oil per barrel is a lot higher. One can easily imagine a system where the equilibrium unemployment with oil (ie: energy) at $X+10 per barrel is much higher than one with oil at $X per barrel.
I'd say it's 95% that job losses aren't permanent, although I'm not sure 5 years is enough time to settle it. I'm perfectly willing to believe we could be in a recession/depression for the next 10-20 years. That has precedent in our and other economies. However, I'm not prepared to believe that--simply because I can't imagine what people will do--people won't end up doing something. Everyone likes to be productive, and humanity has a really efficient means of organizing labor to trade around everyone's productivity.
I am all for 95% or 100% unemployment, though, if such a fantastical reality can come to pass!