The businesses did it to themselves. They refused to hire entry level and train for so long, they decimated their own labor pools. The employers told everyone how much they didn’t care about or need you for so long, we eventually got the picture, and aren’t coming back.
Yes, and the ownserhsip class still feels entitled to the employee loyalty that existed when OJT, pay raises, and pensions existed. It's like people forget incentives drive behavior when they have to pay the incentive.
Lots of good points in the other comments. I'd like to add some anecdotal points. I did what I was "supposed to do" and get a college degree which lead to a "good" engineering job with above average pay. Despite living frugally I can barely support a family of four. I was laid off during the sickness and got a pittance in unemployment support. So many people act like the unemployment was a lot but, when you compare it to the bailouts of all those "too big to fail" companies/banks its nothing. After working hard and doing what I thought was the right thing it has become obvious that I will never get ahead working for a corporation. The only way to make it is to do your own thing or maybe work for Wall Street. I'm guessing many people after taking so many lumps have just given up, why bother.
Some large scale, long term partial solutions: - Eliminate planned obsolescence - making fewer products that last longer will reduce the labor required. - Make products easier and thus cheaper to repair, to decrease the replacement of products that could have been repaired. Ideally provide just-in-time training that lots of owners can follow to eliminate the need for a repair visit, as a sort of recreation/self-challenge. The catch is that manufacturers will fear falling sales, since increased sales was the point of planned obsolescence. Perhaps social and economic pressures will drive this trend automatically - but more likely governments will need to intervene. For example, the govt might evaluate and tax shoddier products to discourage them.
I'm sorry but reducing planned obsolescence, which is counter the idea of a free market, will only reduce the size of the economy and drive the nation further into debt. People don't want to repair their own products that's not even an option. I'll sell a product that doesn't need repair and offer a cheap repair solution just in case and your self repair products will no longer exist. The reality is that we have an abundance of jobs and an abundance of debt. We have jobs that are in artificial intelligence, robotics, robotic assembly, data science, advanced medicine, aeronautics and space, but many Americans don't want to get an education. So, we need more immigrants to fill the jobs make our economy strong and pay down the debt. Your solution is a plan for giving our economy away to the eager people of the rest of the world.
@@obijuan3004 Reducing planned obsolescence wouldn't have to shrink the national economy. The context here is reduced labor availability, which in itself would reduce the size of the national economy if we don't do something different. Eliminating planned obsolescence would leave more resources and labor available to produce more goods and services that otherwise would not be provided. In particular, it clears the path for returning more production 'on shore', which would help keep the national economy from shrinking. On the consumption side, an aging population will mean increased demand for services, which needs more labor that could be freed up by eliminating planned obsolescence. Another big change we could make to adapt to a demographic labor shortage - change our education system. You mention many Americans not wanting an education. Those people are soured on education by being forced into an 'academic path' that insures they feel like failures and consider education pointless for them. A better path would be to use early schooling to give every student a strong foundation of mental skills and knowledge, but as they get older allow them to begin choosing among conventional academic classes or starting to work an increasing number of hours each week while taking skill-oriented classes relevant to work they are interested in. Being exposed to real world work would give them incentive to seek skills and knowlege, to get better paying and more interesting work. And if they aren't soured on education, they can still take more academic classes they find interesting.
@@tomcraver9659 The only way to stop planned obsolescence is to ration purchases. For example, limiting people to only 1 car every 10 years or more. That would require a secondary market of repair and replacement parts beyond what we have now. So, your microwave, coffee maker, computer, TV, would need have replaceable systems. Design would go from a new and improved 8K TV, to a replaceable screen and motherboard system. That is not a free economy that made us the richest nation on earth. If we limit the number of cars people can have, we would need cut back on every level of job from mining, recycling and manufacturing, to distribution and sales. Yet, our biggest labor shortage is in farming, construction, retail, restaurants and hospitality. Jobs that most American’s don’t want to work, but jobs that immigrants would eagerly fill. Our political dogma, is in the way of reducing food and housing prices by using available labor from immigrants eager to work. Its just dumb to block this immigration, but 35% of Americans call them invaders with drugs and disease. That’s not real. I have yet to see an academic path that makes people feel like failures. I have seen weak people blame academics for their own failures. Higher education is far easier today than when I attended college with a typewriter and a slide rule. We didn’t have calculators that did calculus. We didn’t have the internet so we cold look up books and journal articles online, we didn’t have computers where we can cut and paste whole paragraphs or make Power Point presentations. We didn’t have computer rooms with tutors etc. It’s the complainers who are the failures not the education system. Want proof? People come to America from all over the world to attend our universities. They succeed quite well and they get more advanced degrees per capita than Americans. They also, create almost 40% of the fortune 500 companies. The problem is not the universities, its American’s who won’t do the work, the whiners and complainers. Also, there is enough education online without a degree, one could learn how to create a company with no degree at all, but they would have to do the work. That’s where American’s fail… they fail to compete and succeed at blaming others for their failures.
If the market drops enough ti impact the retirement accounts of retired people, many will have to go back to work. It also looks like unemployment rates are no longer a good indicator of recession. However lack of economic growth is.
A lifestyle worth living? Spend any time on social media recently? Everybody's account is plastered with endless meals out eating and drinking and vacations that I would die for. Now of course you can't go to any of those restaurants or vaca getaways with clothes that are more than a season old because after all, how would they look with your $300 sandals, $400 tennis shoes or your $1,200 stilettos. Naturally to keep up with all your besties on social media you absolutely have to have your $1,500 cellphone phone not to mention you unlimited data plan and your hotspo Of course all of those things are necessary because when you have nothing going on in your life how is everyone gonna compare themselves to you other than all of that superfluous bullshit. And of course to relax from deprived lifestyle there's that $5,000 gaming system connected to the highest Internet connection on the planet. You people are a fucking joke.
There are more Millennials than Boomers, so they are replacing them. Millions of Boomers are retiring every year, but that was not unexpected. Overall US population is not decreasing. Current immigration is more than offsetting replacement rate. Setting immigration levels at that needed to maintain our population sounds fine to me, but no more than that since we have a housing shortage.
Interesting date, but I believe you're advice about what to do about it is shortsighted and or half measures. Supply and demand. If you have people sitting at home and there are tons if businesses begging them to come work then there's a simple solution. Offer $1000 and hour for them to be your cashier and you'll get that sucker fill in no time. My point is businesses want workers at a price that works for the business not one that works for the employee. So now we have a good old fashioned stand off. Who's going to give in first? Keep in mind, most businesses would rather fail than pay their workers enough to fill all their positions quickly. It's going to be interesting going into the future with these dynamics
I object to his claim at the beginning that Boomers "worked so hard." They were healthier and had lower mortality rates at comparable ages and even Boomers with criminal records were not excluded from any kind of work (even volunteer work) than subsequent cohorts. I've never personally known what Boomers were like before age ~35, but it seems to me that they've gotten ahead by making everyone else work harder for less.
Interesting, but a big huge titanic blind spot: ROBOTS. I searched through the whole transcript; no mention of robots. Advanced robotics, soon to be driven by sophisticated AI, is a game-changer. Actually it is an UNDERSTATEMENT to say that it is just a game-changer; it is an overwhelming transformative tsunami, just starting to hit the beach. Robots are now performing surgeries, doing complex assembly operations, and on and on. There will be virtually no limit to what robots can do within a short few years -- perhaps 5 years. It is happening that fast. In any case, there is no point, and I mean NO point, in talking about the future of labor, jobs, and so on, without considering this gigantic mega-trend (META-trend) that is well underway and soon to be astonishing in its influence.
We need less employees, a drastically higher minimum wage so that each employee would be more like a partner, and ultimately more self-employed people. A nation of entrepreneurs, not a nation of wage-slaves.
" a drastically higher minimum wage" Self-employed people have no minimum wage. I know I earned less per hour than my employees for several years when I started up. I didn't see any of my employees wanting to be a partner at that phase.
@@wisenber a drastically higher minimum wage on those businesses relying on cheap labor to crush the competitors. If the wage was near partner level, that would greatly discourage hiring, massively weaken large firms that rely on cheap labor, and allow the self-employed to better compete.
@@nathanwinters1247 "a drastically higher minimum wage on those businesses relying on cheap labor to crush the competitors." Were you assuming there's no skill to that labor and that employers don't compete for better employees? Or were you just looking for a way to disincentivize any potential employees? "If the wage was near partner level, that would greatly discourage hiring, massively weaken large firms that rely on cheap labor, and allow the self-employed to better compete." I've run my own company for decades. I never needed to rely on the government to punish my competition to succeed. Any clever self-employed person understands that they fulfill a niche not met by larger less agile companies. The don't need government to help them exploit that need. Now if you have no unique talent or service level and no desire to develop any, I can see where you might want someone like a government to step in and make your commodity level offering more competitive. That's a pathway devoid of innovation yet bountiful with mediocrity.
They assume you have a place to eat and sleep, but have you seen the amount of homeless everywhere?? Could those 5 million missing people be the addicted homeless on the side of the road? The population required to take the jabbb were the working age population.
My brother was a late Boomer. I'm an early X'er. Our life experiences couldn't have been more different even though we're just a few years apart. Gen X has more generation gap on both sides of us than any generation in history. Which is something that never gets brought up. We are truly the "lost generation." And we're not coming back. LOL
This video has very good content, again, but there is an 80 to 95 percent overlap between "Demographic Drought" and this video. If you looked at the first video, the best use of your time may be to start this video at 34:51 or to skip this video. ("Demographic Drought" was uploaded to RU-vid in September, 2021, and not much has changed in these five months.) Note that the roughly 2 million plus undocumented immigrants to the USA in the Federal Government fiscal year ending in September, 2022, obviously are not included in this presentation because it was prepared significantly before September, 2022. A significant portion of these immigrants are young single males. If this immigration continues a lot of these lesser skilled individuals may eventually help address the jobs that do not need any college education.
Just a thought. If wages rise rapidly it will drive inflation up, causing reserve banks to raise rates, which will collapse the asset bubble and people will be forced to work for longer to afford retirement. At the moment there is too much asset wealth robbing our economy of labour. Maybe higher wages are the answer? 🤔
I have said this since 1995. As our economy becomes more technical, American people will move away from physical labor jobs. That means we need the central and south American labor force knocking at our door for those labor jobs in farming, meat processing, and construction. Also, we need a steady stream of these people, because the following generation or two will be educated and move into the high tech jobs. We are POLITICALLY being forced to be afraid of the very work force than can lower our food prices, lower the cost of new homes, and pay taxes and support the small communities around the farms where much of this manual labor is so drastically needed. The GOP is actually INCREASING the prices of everything by stopping the flow of cheap labor. In 2012 Georgia lost $1 billion in unpicked crops due to a crack down on immigrant workers. We need to change how we see the people at the border looking for work and we need to do it TODAY.
another cause of the disappearing labor force that wasn't talked about here, the fact that our prison population keeps growing every year. can't have workers when they're all in prison
“…right now, we have this great resignation, people are not exactly loyal right now, because pay rates are going up so dramatically that their taking advantage of their opportunity…” I understand, maybe I have a skewed perspective as a lay person, but this has to be a joke, pay hasn’t risen significantly since the boomers first started protesting Vietnam in the damn 60’s, according to the BOL only 8%. Maybe it’s finally starting to bite y’all being so picky about who to hire, but that is hardly a reason to complain about how much you pay your people. You reap what you sow, and y’all have sown nothing but short term extreme profits for a generation, and now you reap a discontent populace and another recession after the dotcom bubble and the financial crisis. Until those who run this economy change their minds, problems will not be solved.
One of the most overlooked aspects is language skills. As people age, they get less and less competent at acquiring language skills (for a second language). You therefore need a constant stream of very young (under 20) immigrants if you want to get the most out of them in a workforce. A lot of the training will go over their heads if they don't understand the new language well. It's one of the few skills that gets harder to learn the older you get.
why not to allow europeans who already know english and know culture to come easily? make visas easier for eastern europeans. almost everyone 20-30 there speaks english, and plenty of productive people would come and have families there.
@@teaja211 The English speakers are mostly in wealthy countries, so they have little reason to emigrate. The main source of immigration is poor countries because these people see a chance for a better life, but few of these people speak English fluently.
@@kellynestegard5208 Check out the case of Genie (Susan Wiley) who was locked up in a room until she was 14. She never learned to talk properly because she missed the critical learning period for language that's around age 10. That could also be why peoples' memories start to become suddenly much clearer from around that age - they have ways of organising thoughts through language that they didn't have earlier.
Funny how so many blame these changes on employers, when they didn't really do anything differently to bring about said change. What did bring about the change during this period? Welfare programs.
" What did bring about the change during this period?" There was a bit more than that, but structural costs of government did exceed the combined cost of inflation and population increase over time. The creation of Medicare/Medicaid would result in over a third of federal spending within three decades of their creation. The departure from the gold standard ensured combinations of debt and inflation in perpetuity. Plus don't discount children being taught that humans were the primary cause of the planet's demise dating back to the early 1970s. Small wonder fewer children would be had.
"funny how people blame employers for running shitty work environments when the real person destroying the economy is the lazy diabetic grandma down the street who gets $1200 a month to barely feed her 3 grandchildren." that's how comically evil you sound.
Well if you want to get really “radical” it would be encouraging all women to enter the labor force, but brains shut down if you say that, even though this has so, so many knock on effects that we’re seeing today
@@namaan123 " it would be encouraging all women to enter the labor force" That's been happening for over six decades. The video even covered it. That has also been a contributor to smaller families and the demographic hole we're in.
@@wisenber I wouldn't say the video covered it, moreso mentioned it in passing, which is more than I can say for most so still impressive. The issue is central to many of the problems of modernity, and covering it can't be done in passing. A documentary's worth might scratch the surface of the problem.
@RonaldFisher In an odd way your gonna get your wish. Most countries will be having similar demographic problems and will all be competing for an ever shirking pool of immigrants. Even refugees may become rare as countries may start competing to get them (the young ones at least).
@RonaldFisher You are incorrect, I am not under such delusions, merely when a person is writing about a labour shortage that will effect almost every developing country it fairly normal write in more general terms. Yes there will be exceptions, and there definitely will continue to be lots of well educated and wealthy people trying to get to the USA. The thing is how many countries will even to let people leave when their own work forces are eroding? Will lower wage workers start getting a better deal in their own countries or local regions will we even see as much immigration? Consider this Mexico is no longer the main supplier of illegal immigrants to the US, it hasn't been I think since roughly the mid 2000s, most are just traveling through mexico trying to feel the rampant gang violence and corruption of the Central America states. This changed happened largely because Mexico's economy has improved quite a bit and a lot of jobs have been moving to the country. Mexico's unemployment rate is right now very low, I would not be surprised to find that long term Mexico itself will start absorbing this migrants as the need for labour in manufacturing continues to grow in the country.
