As a person who was unemployed for a long period of time until my recent job, I had a lot of time to think about why it is that Jobs are so scarce and few in this day and age.
My Main Thesis is simple:
At a certain point in an economy based primarily on growth, there will come a time with growth is no longer possible. Once this point is reached, it becomes more and more difficult for the private sector to hire employees. Especially in a deflationary environment like today with both gas and food increasing in cost while wages have remained stagnant.
I agree mostly with Lord John Maynard Keynes who believed in the Government stimulating the economy with the private sector could no longer to so to even out the boom/bust of the business cycle. The problem is that moneyed interests in the US have captured both political parties (DEMS and REPUBS) and neither will lift a hand to assist the economy in any way.
But even the esteemed Lord Keynes did not imagine a world where growth had already been reached, and what has become normal is the process of firms merging with other firms to be profitable.
The Law of Dinimishing Marginal Returns applies to growth, I think, as it does in the Natural world. I mean look at the APEX predator. Once the predator eats all his prey, he ends up starving and dying. I mean if the market truly was allowed to work, then the too big to fail banks would have gone bankrupt. The TARP - i.e. the taxpayer - bailout out the monied class to stave off the disaster to the monied class - and are then blamed and castigated for being "not frugal enough".
What we have today is a situation where corporations have infiltrated all the institutions and have abandoned any notion of market discipline. It is socialized capitalism, where only those connected to the existing systems can get funds and survive even egregious wrongdoing and fraud.
The US is not IMHO really growing. The firms in it have long since abandoned society itself to pursure the quarterly profit and golden parachutes.
In the other industrialized nations, the solution to growth has been heavily state subsidized export based manufacturing along with manipulating foreign exchange rate through dollar reserves (China and Japan mostly, with Korea as a smaller player in that equation). The US was the target of their trade policy, and we just took it as it was advertised that free market capitalism would lift all boats (not just those of the rich, but all boats).
In the US, the solution has been to use less people in industry through gains in efficiency and productivity.
The most costly and expensive item for a firm is maintaining its workforce. And the simplest way for most of the large cap firms to generate profit is to use those efficiencies to have less workers based in the US (where it is expensive - health care, especially). Outsourcing is practiced in most large firms, along with the use of H1B visas. Although immigration reform is a true issue, what is more basic is to find some way to generate growth in the economy.
Other ways to generate profit include using tax havens as headquarters.
To do this requires LONG TERM Thinking as well as deep thought and debate on what we want our society to look like. This is definately is not currently being practiced by the powers that be.
It also requires a basic questioning of the assumptions of capitalism and the costs of the "FREE MARKET ECONOMY" religion, especially when I see a world full of resource constraints of all kinds limiting possible growth opportunities (PEAK OIL being the most obvious but others come to mind as well, like PEAK Phosphorus used for farming).
Anyhow, that's enough rambling on this topic... will post more later when thoughts arise
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