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richardhutnik on 10 June 2012
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SamuelRSmith said:

If you want an argument against 0% unemployment, that advocates the future of work is going to be non-profit NGO's using people to address social problems, I give you "The End of Work":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work

I'd like to posit the following: when is this going to happen? The development of capital stock has essentially outpaced population growth since the dawn of humanity. Better stop those pesky farmers, they put the hunter-gatherers out of work. I mean, if we look at time periods where the data is much more easily ready, there is no evidence of this. Think about it, the past 50 years have seen the greatest period of technological development and automation since the dawn of time; population growth has exploded, plus the migration of labour; women have re-entered the work force; and people are living and working for more and more years. Has unemployment suddenly exploded? No. In fact, out side of recessions, employment has either been flat or increasing during the good years, and that's just in the USA. On the world-net, we have tens, if not hundreds, of millions more jobs today than we had just a few years ago.

Now you need to present arguments against this.

 

If economic activity and growth has been the byproduct of malinvestment and excessive debt, cause excessive money floating about, and this excessive debt is not sustainable, when the contraction happens due to the debt not being serviced, or the money supply shrinks to service it, then what do you think will happen to unemployment?

Thing is that End of Work goes into that.  Have you even read the book?  If not, then you don't know the arguments.  And what you have seen happen is that manufacturing in the United States did increase, but labor demands decreased:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/02/25/the-truth-about-the-great-american-manufacturing-d.aspx

And how about manufacturing jobs in China?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/02/03/that-giant-sucking-sound-of-manufacturing-jobs-going-to-china/

Well, China is also losing manufacturing jobs.

So, you will now say, "Well there is information technology jobs available".  Care to show there are enough of those around which could soak up the displaced manufacturing jobs?  Look around the Internet.  Care to show the future isn't going to be free content backed by advertising, that scales so that top IP producers get the lion's share of money, while the rest starve, or life won't be like Second Life, where things are so cheap to produce people can hang around forever producing free content for people, in hopes they can make it big some day?  No one is able to make a living in this free hell, but you can't afford to leave either.  And thus, I get back to The End of Work.