BWV said:
What is special about manufacturing? The US actually produces 3 times, in real terms, what it made in the 70s. However, it produces this with about half the number of workers, largely due to the productivity gains from technology. Similarly, it once took 90% of the population to produce less food than 2% of the population does today. Should we bemoan the lost agricultural jobs?
Manufacturing represents the actually goods produced. Most services are ways of distributing those goods. There is crossover of course like medicine because a patient may not know what drugs to take and certainly can't preform surgery on himself. Certainly in some sense surgery is like manufacturing but perhaps many of our visits to the doctor add little value to our lives.
It is difficult to classify services like night clubs and tourism but such services are luxuries. Aside from difficult to classify luxuries like travailing, the function of most services is to distribute the goods produced. Distribution such as transportation, warehousing and retail are all forms of overhead and the lower we can make the overhead costs the greater the percentage of the goods the people in the factories produce they can enjoy.
A great part of the transportation and supply train infrastructure today is a result of consumers in the third world countries lacking the ownership of capital to be able to demand comparable wages to those in the developed world. This creates a situation where our economy organizes in a large part to distribute the goods produced by the third world rather than produce our own goods.
Well, this helps to develop the third world the artificially low wages of the third world due to dollar pegs means that often third world wages don`t keep pace with inflation. At the same time the relatively cheaper cost of third world good means a destruction of the capacity to produce in the developed world. Additionally the dollar pegs created to subsidize third world manufacturing create artificial capital flows into the developed world driving up the living cost in the develop world.
People were able to sustain themselves long before the industrial revolution. They were able to build large castles and pyramids, support nobility and fund wars. The technology growth from the industrial revolution onward has always promised greater wealth and more leisure for the worker. Well, on average the lower class have had gains in that they are less likely to starve or suffer an illness and possibly even have greater nutrition even if it is too much bad fat and low in nutrients: the worker has not seen the leisure promised despite all of our technological gain, and much of the assistance to workers in times of need has come though high overhead state programs that take away respect from the poor and while they give them what they need to survive this is not enough to keep them above poverty.
Why didn’t technology lead to the promise of wealth and leisure it promised hundreds of years ago? What has happened? I suspect it is in a large part because we are less efficient, because less people are actually making things. You claim America production has tripled sense the 70s. Here is a graph showing automobile production per capita
[URL]http://schutt.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/bicycle_production-pc-mean.png[/URL]
http://schutt.org/blog/2008/10/gas-prices-and-bike-production/
I picked automobiles because they represent an expensive purchase and are very valuable to people. They are also heavy so more difficult to outsource. An automobile represents a quantifiable unit of production rather then production such as prepackaged food which takes a good that already exists and ads very little value relative to the markup. The graph shows that automobile production has remained flat despite gains in automation.
Here is what happened to manufacturing jobs since 2000:
[PLAIN]http://financemymoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/manufacturing-jobs.png
http://financemymoney.com/the-5-percent-solution-how-5-percent-of-the-workforce-generated-40-percent-of-u-s-business-profits-and-all-of-it-was-a-ponzi-scheme/
Imagine how many more people could have had cars if manufacturing didn`t decline by 35% since 2000?
BWV said:
there is this:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/housedebt/
calculating debt as a % of GDP inherently adjusts for inflation
The debt servicing graphs don't say much because the interest rate is always kept low enough to keep debt servicing in a reasonable level.
