Where the manufacturing jobs are going

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Have not read the second article, but found a major problem with the first one.

Increasing the number of jobs for humans will mitigate the problem of inequ ality in the distribution of income only if these new jobs have three prope rties: (1) they must be jobs that a computer cannot perform; (2) they must require skills that are scarce in the human population; and (3) the new job s must include a substantial fraction of the population. Increasing the num ber of jobs, such as supermarket checkers, that do not have a scarce skill requirement will not solve the problem.

It seems obvious to me that item 2 and item 3 are mutually exclusive.

You can not require skill that are scarce and also include a substantial fr action of the population. If a substantial portion of the population has t he skills , the skills are not scarce.

Dan

I think the idea is that there must be enough total jobs to employ a substantial fraction of the population, but that they can include a variety of types of new jobs -- each of which must require skills that are scarce.

Which, I believe, is a pipe dream. The writer has set up a necessary, but probably impossible, set of conditions to solve the employment situation.

'Back to my sackcloth and ashes... d8-(

Indeed, but the people for those jobs are not the same people that were displaced from the manufacturing line jobs.

==>Remember 50% of the population is below average in intelligence [and almost all other factors]

I don't remember from high school how many other people one manufacturing job is supposed to support. IIRC the railroads figured up to 10, the railroad employee plus one other family, when they planned new towns along new lines, back before wives took jobs.

-jsw

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

This is old problem for the military. I went through an electronic school with a very high failure rate. AFAIK they used it to sort recruits by skill level and sent the dropouts to appropriate other classes.

I don't know of any source in which I'd have confidence, but the job-multiplier number commonly used for manufacturing jobs these days is 4. Whatever the real number is, it's high.

Just the supply chain alone makes it high, but that's also where it gets difficult to measure. At the top of the supply chain -- the OEM who sells the finished product -- the multiplier is much higher. At the bottom of the supply chain, it's lower.

I try to stay away from it, because there is another complication: as you reduce the number of employees needed to make something, the multiplier appears to go higher. But that depends on how automated the supply chain is. They vary a lot.

I encountered that problem when designing control panels for auto industry machinery. They would assign the least competent operator who could run it. I learned why start buttons are shielded and stop buttons aren't when I saw a girl slap the controls without ever looking up from her romance novel.

-jsw

But that isn't new. My uncle was chief electrician for a company called "Miniature Precision Bearings" back, it must have been the

1950's and the entire manufacturing portion was "manned" with house wives. All the grinding machines were automated and there was a single "foreman" in each section who understood enough to make adjustments.

Later I worked with a guy that for a while had a "factory" in his two car garage. Three Brown & Sharp Screw Machines and Mexican girls as operators. Must have been about the same period. He said that the only problem he had was the bar feeders clanked and he had to make holes in the back garage wall to clear the bar stock.

When I enlisted in the Air Force there was almost a week of tests during Basic. It was obvious that the "dull thuds" were assigned to either Cooks & Bakers or Supply as their first assignment.

However, years later I was assigned temporally to a detachment that wrote the skill tests for my specialty. The wording of both the test questions and answers were aimed at an 8th grade level of reading comprehension. Which was, we were told, the standard for all USAF technical manuals.

An ex-AF co-worker told me he had discovered that walking around with a clipboard and occasionally pretending to write down observations made everyone else nervous enough that they left him completely alone for most of his tour.

-jsw

Yup, that worked in places like Edwards AFB - the big test center - where a very large percent of the work force was civilian. Not so well at a SAC base where the only civilians worked in the mess hall. But you did need some rank to pull it off. A Master-Sergeant with a clip board was someone to worry about. A one striper would just be a joke.

FYI, CAR now is reporting a multiplier of 8.4 for jobs at GM:

If you're going to use that number in any discussion, I'd be sure that you understand how CAR measures it, and give some thought to what it means.

There are a lot of ways to look at this issue. The one point that's consistent from every source I've ever seen, over 40 years, is that manufacturing has the highest job-multiplier number of any business or industry.

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Thanks for the info and cite.

You're welcome, George, but, as I said, be very cautious about these numbers.

For example, GM's numbers, if these are accurate, have some meaning, because they produce a consumer product. The multiplier for coal mining has meaning to the economies of areas local to the coal mines, but they just produce an input to (mostly) the electric-power industry. Electric power producers may count all of the coal-mining jobs as among those produced by their "multiplier." There is almost no coal mining without power production, so coal mining "produces" no jobs on its own.

And so on. CAR is pretty good overall, but I haven't looked into how they compiled their figure for this jobs-multiplier issue.