william the wie
Gold Member
- Nov 18, 2009
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With the energy, robot, additive manufacture, materials science, private space launch plus other minor fields both increasing output while decreasing product prices and manufacturing employment, services are expanding.
The switch to service employment tends to be most advanced in the US among the multi-trillion economies but the US is also the world's largest or second largest manufacturer in the world pretty much every year. We also do about as well in agriculture and extractive industries as in manufacturing relative to the rest of the world.
So, here are the problems:
The US is the third largest country in the world in population.
The fourth largest country in physical size and closely allied to the 2nd largest, Canada, and 6th largest, Australia, the US has highly secure access to more resources than any other place on the planet.
The US has spent the last 55 years as consumer of last resort to the rest of the world so, what happens to employment in the rest of the world when automation of say textiles goes below the hourly wage in say Bangladesh? Well Mali will set up a lot of automated factories for their huge cotton crops but employment will shrink there much less in Bangladesh. And the US will not be the major importer since the US has adequate cotton crops for the North American market what kind of employment will be available to these people when that happens?
This is not intended as a we're all going to die thread but more of a how are these other low wage economy people going to survive thread?
The switch to service employment tends to be most advanced in the US among the multi-trillion economies but the US is also the world's largest or second largest manufacturer in the world pretty much every year. We also do about as well in agriculture and extractive industries as in manufacturing relative to the rest of the world.
So, here are the problems:
The US is the third largest country in the world in population.
The fourth largest country in physical size and closely allied to the 2nd largest, Canada, and 6th largest, Australia, the US has highly secure access to more resources than any other place on the planet.
The US has spent the last 55 years as consumer of last resort to the rest of the world so, what happens to employment in the rest of the world when automation of say textiles goes below the hourly wage in say Bangladesh? Well Mali will set up a lot of automated factories for their huge cotton crops but employment will shrink there much less in Bangladesh. And the US will not be the major importer since the US has adequate cotton crops for the North American market what kind of employment will be available to these people when that happens?
This is not intended as a we're all going to die thread but more of a how are these other low wage economy people going to survive thread?