American workers not "best in the world." In fact, we're actually kind of bad.

This strikes me as naive, believing that American companies want skilled American workers. They don't. They want cheap workers, and Americans with the same skills are going to cost too much. The myth of "job creation."

I've now been a Republican and damn Socialist on this thread, but unless we put in some kind of European-style job protections, the formerly middle-class American worker -- i.e. skilled labor -- is fucked.

 

I'm more concerned about the middle-class American worker's children. I understand why a current 40-year-old might have entered a soon-to-be obsolete profession - a lot of us did, right? But it's damned near criminal for them, however, not to be pushing their children into preparation for a knowledge economy.

I'm not sure what you mean by job protection. Are private companies supposed to continue to employ workers who don't add value? It's one reason Japan is fucked right now. I noted this elsewhere, but supposedly, with the amount of money that the government drained from the economy by propping up the steel industry at some juncture, it would have been better off just paying the workers their normal wages to stay home and lift the protectionist measures on imports in the mean time.

 

A link glossed over in the article talks about it.

 

You're not correct regarding what American companies want. Companies want employees whose marginal product is greater than zero. No job protection law or regime is going to lead to companies, American or no, paying for labor that has a zero (or lower) marginal product.

What the study that started this thread suggests is that, for many American workers, their human capital -- the combination of skills and knowledge -- puts them perilously close to (i.e., one technological innovation away from) that zero marginal product place. Worse, for many of these American workers they're really not capable of augmenting that capital. They're not remotely robust to change.

 

Well, yeah, and that's the conundrum, Dick. But you look at a place like Germany -- whether it's an actual government job or a law that forces a company to keep workers -- and while it might be a drag on the overall economy, it does keep individuals out of poverty.

And regarding kids ... if we all agree that not every kid is suited for college, and in fact the majority of them maybe aren't, then where do these jobs come from? What jobs are there, for non-college-educated workers, that American companies are going to keep in America rather than shipping them elsewhere? I don't know what the answer is for the tens of millions of people who fall into that category.

 

Boom.

 

The short answer is that the market has, is, and will figure it out.

 

But what's the fix for Americans who want to make, say, $30-40 an hour (a good but not extraordinary wage) when the same skills can be found in Asia for $5-10 an hour? I don't know how the American worker can make himself that much more valuable. An individual can, by getting trained in a field that requires attendance (construction, plumbing, etc.), but as a broad societal question I don't know how that solves the problem.

 

And in the last 30 years the answer has become "get rich or get screwed." I don't see that changing.

 

OK. Got it. American workers are stupid, lazy and unskilled, so they deserve to die in poverty.

SSDD.

 

Middle class wages have stagnated, which isn't good, but a middle-class person can obtain a much higher standard of living on that wage than he or she could 30 years ago. Bigger house. Bigger TV. Better technology. And so on.

 

No health care. No college. No job skills. No bootstrap help from a severely underfunded public school system. And so on.

If your answer is that the market will figure it out, the market has -- and has decided that poor people are just the cost of doing low-tax-rate capitalism.