'The Great Doubling' helps explain why jobs are so hard to find

[Liberal_in_LA]

'The Great Doubling' helps explain why jobs are so hard to find

Why is the job market so tough? The answers are as numerous as the people looking without success in the worst job market since the Great Depression.

But Harvard University economist Richard Freeman paints the big picture that helps explain some of the pain being felt today -- the world's workforce has effectively doubled in the last decade, and a global readjustment of labor and capital is now underway.

Freeman has written scholarly articles in which he describes how China, India and the former Soviet bloc nations began entering the global economy in the 1990s, setting economic waves in motion that continue to adjust the worldwide balance between labor and capital. He writes:

"This change greatly increased the size of the global labor pool from approximately 1.46 billion workers to 2.93 billion workers . . . I have called this 'The Great Doubling' . . . What impact might the doubling of the global work force have on workers? . . . You don't need an economics PhD to see that this would be good for employers but terrible for workers."

link to Freeman's paper at this link

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gettowork/detail?blogid=163&entry_id=59297&tsp=1#ixzz0iZzSRaXq

[Subdivisions]

1. It doesn't help either that world crude oil production is now in decline,

which is wreaking serious distortions on the global economy. We are in overshoot and carrying capacity has been exceeded by billions.

[safeinOhio]

2. Wouldn't doubling the work force

also double the number of consumers, or doubling of the markets for the goods produced? Something is not right about the logic.

[Demoiselle]

3. I don't think that all those extra workers get the high salaries Americans used to get.

So the consumer buying power hasn't doubled. (That's my theory, anyway, and i'm stickin' to it.)

[MUAD_DIB]

5. I doubt the Chinese sweatshop worker gets pain what an American worker would get if

doing a comparable job.

[girl gone mad]

4. Only if they are paid well.

Unfortunately, we've spent the past few decades destroying high paying manufacturing jobs in this country and replacing our laborers with slave wage earners in third world countries. That's one reason why we're not really reaping benefits from the Chindian boom. It takes ten Chinese factory workers to replace the earning power of one American, and 3 or 4 Indian tech workers still earn and consume less than one American IT worker.

China may be able to succeed in raising workers' wages to a degree, but most other nations will have a tougher time even keeping wages stable in the ongoing race to the lowest pay and worst conditions.