A segment of DU is very invested in painting a dystopian picture of the US

[haele]

160. Not quite true. Their lack of action may be because they aren't able to just pick up and move.

Or that they are older, or that they are average instead of exceptional, or that they are striving for a career instead of a job. Or that they value is no longer pertinent in most fields of work.

I just completed a BS in business and much of the work was on business strategies for survivability through cost and production management, including past strategies that no longer "work". The business culture for the most part has changed over the years, and not necessarily for the better; instead of business being the long-term provision of a required service or product in exchange for a measurement of wealth, business is all about the short-term provision of wealth to investors - focus on shareholders, rather than stakeholders. This is because "successful" business means cutting costs to increase profit, or using shortcuts to increase production and make the business more "attractive" to investors or buyers.

More and more business owners, seeing the increased competition with global markets will eventually kill their small company are not looking to pass the companies down to their children, they're looking to pass shares down to their children - so the kids don't have to lose everything and start over again - when they sell their smaller business to a larger, more global business. While small businesses are up, and most people are "hired" by a small business as either a direct employee or a contracted service, it's not as lucrative as it was for most small businesses and innovative start-ups that started up after FDR and the New Deal and were able to survive pretty much through the 1990's.

To be capable to be able to match one's career to one's talent and efforts is not the same as being able to work in one's career. Likewise, working is not the same as being able to sustain a budget that can support oneself or oneself and a family in a reasonably comfortable living.

My concern is that the nature of the current mixture of "Global" and Calvinist Capitalism (i.e., Greed is good, because God rewards the deserving chosen, no matter how much they steal or gamble with fate and other people's wellbeing) is killing the ability to work the way that the western world had in the past.
It's easy to say that the technical consultant in the 1990's was could command $100 -$400 an hour for his/her bachelor's degree in IT with a couple certifications (that still cost a couple thousand every three years to maintain) just because there weren't that many people in the field with his or her training at the time, and now, with more people in the field, s/he should be happy with $30 - $50 an hour (with benefits).
But you can't at the same time say "we don't have enough people to do the work" and hire more H1Bs to drive even that down to $22 an hour with few to no benefits, while experienced people are still out there - or offshore the work itself because with technology, most workers are fungible.
Unless your client has "face to face" needs, there is absolutely no reason for a good 50% of the "professional" workers - the R&D people, the thinkers, the tinkerers, the analysts, the administrators, or the managers - not to be offshored and just upload their findings to one or two mouthpieces that parrot back findings to some board for executive decisions if that is the cost "savings" needed to ensure that returns and profits maintain the expected "tracking" to keep interest in the company.

A trained Radiologist in Romania, South Africa, or India making the equivalent of $5 an hour can look at the same X-rays and CAT scans that a trained and certified Radiologist making $50 an hour in Omaha, NB or San Francisco, CA can and be able to make pretty much the same analysis - and if the hospital system is owned by an international investment company, well - guess what they may be looking at for cutting costs.
Likewise, one can't expect companies not to want to cut production costs by implementing technology changes to the work force. The Branch Office secretary pools of 10 to 20 "girls" and bullpen of 3 to 5 "technicians" of even three decades ago have been replaced by two administrative assistants, a contract for technical support (as needed) and a network server with workstations. That's 10 - 20 careers for people with average talents and energy - not just jobs - gone, never to return. In a large city, those people will be competing against the 30 to 50 other Branch Office secretary pools and bullpens for a couple dozen positions in two or three tech support companies, or at Kelly Services or ManTech/Apple1/Day Labor. Or they need to "retrain" for existing average skill service jobs (shipping/logistics, retail, medical support, construction/electrician/HVAC/plumbing) and compete against the employees at those jobs along with all the high school grads or employees in other downsizing sectors who are being told that "these are the jobs of the future".

While one can talk all one wants about "Cars and Buggy Whip makers", the analogy is not the same. When Cars replaced the horse and carriage, there was a new product that the workers could transition to - a mechanic is a mechanic, a skilled trades worker is still a skilled trades worker, and cars actually had more basic fiddly parts that the carriages did.
As manufacturing was replacing the horse with a combustion engine, transmission, and differential system, and that in itself actually required more skilled and trained workers to produce a product. And that in itself could command higher wages.

Not the same now-a-days.

So yes, I can see why people would be so down on the employment; it's not just the numbers now, it's the numbers one can see in the future if the nature of what it means to work is not addressed soon. No one wants to live in a plantation economy, where a fewer and fewer people are privileged enough to purchase the means of survival in comfort and those people will be the ones dictating the actions of the few they would choose to allow to participate in that survival by working for them - and for how long those few will be able to work. Innovation and talent will be ignored unless a patron could be found.

The rest of us would be left scrambling for left-over scraps, no matter how skilled, hard-working, talented, articulate, or otherwise "good" we are. And hope that one day, one of "the gracious few" would take notice of at least a couple of us to lift out of the mass of "common" consumers competing for enough work to keep us warm, dry, fed, out of too much debt, and entertained enough to dream that one day we, too, could be in a situation that we don't have to constantly worry about our future and our family's future.

I, for one, don't want to go back to a anti-bellum culture of work, where workforce is considered a fungible cost in the pursuit of profits, or is on contract at the shareholder's pleasure. But unfortunately, with technology and globalization, there seems to be enough people with money who want to go back to that era - and the power of Money seems to be in the driver seat when it comes to Global economic strategies.

Haele