Re: <nettime> Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class (2)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

I'm sorry, I should have given the source for my observation about the 
return of high-wage and low-wage jobs in the US, compared to the 
devastating loss of mid-wage jobs. It is here:

http://bigstory.ap.org/interactive/interactive-great-reset

It's an amazing little animated graph, dated 2013. What you have to do 
is click on "replay recoveries" and then on the arrow below. You will 
see that 42 months after the "recovery" of 2009, only 85,380 mid-wage 
jobs were regained, out of 3,764,120 mid-wage jobs lost during the 
so-called "great recession" of 2007-09. The net job loss in the mid-wage 
range was 3,678,740. A very big number.

In the high-wage sector, 908,990 jobs were lost, but 1,011,210 were 
created: that's a net gain for high-wage earners.

In the low-wage sector, 2,803,390 were lost, and 2,421,010 were gained. 
There you had a net loss of 382,380 low-wage jobs. But that's only 10% 
of the net loss of mid-wage jobs.

The failure of mid-wage jobs to come back is absolutely staggering. 
Jarod Lanier sees this through the lens (indeed) of Kodak vs. Instagram, 
or music file-sharing etc. Yet he's basically right, you just have to 
amplify his explanation. As the video included with the graphic 
explains, both mid-wage manufacturing jobs and a host of white-collar 
service jobs have either been outsourced or automated (or both, for that 
matter: there is a lot of partial automation, so that one worker in 
China or India can do what ten used to do in the US). Web 2.0 functions 
have indeed made many white-collar workers redundant. It's technological 
unemployment with a vengeance.

This heralds a major change in US society, and undoubtedly the same 
applies to European societies after austerity is over (if ever). I 
believe that what happened - why we didn't see this coming - is that the 
stagnation of mid-wage earnings was compensated by credit and rising 
home equity for a generation, from the mid-1980s to 2007. Then the Great 
Recession (or Depression, or Repression, or whatever you wanna call it) 
came and choked back all that credit and middle-class wealth-effects. 
The entire economy of the mid-wage jobs then collapsed: no profit margin 
for those companies anymore, because sales plunged. It was necessary to 
implement the automation and outsouring in order for those kinds of 
businesses to stay afloat. So you still have many of the businesses: 
just not the jobs.

Somebody should research this further, to verify if the Reuteurs article 
was right, what the comparable situations are in the different "advanced 
economies," etc. I will do so when I have time. Right now I am headed to 
Spain to look at the future up close.

all the best, Brian


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