40 Years Of U.S. Workers Left Behind?? (CHART)

I wounder what that chart will look like 5yrs from now.

Kay,
You don't give yourself enough credit.
If I'm playing a game,its the personality of the dealer that keeps me at the table, not how fast the cards/hands are being played.

I too would love to stick it to "the man" for screwing the little guy but there are just too many factors involved in gauging productivity.

Analyst just love to throw statistics around without fully disclosing all of the variables. It makes for good water cooler conversation but I don't think this one is totally "the man's" fault.

As Kay mentioned, technology has definitely impacted worker productivity. The world is moving fast and those who don't adjust fast enough are being left behind. It's not fair but it's a fact.

Where it used to take a typing pool of 20 typists to run an office, now 3 temp workers and an installed copy of Word can get it done.

That's a scary looking chart if you have a job that involves producing a product. However those physical labor jobs are dwindling with the advancement of computers and robots.

From a technology standpoint, that's a beautiful chart. Because it shows that our technology is helping us to be more productive at a lower cost. Which is basically the whole point of introducing technology into the workforce in the first place.

I think we need to get out of our old labor workforce mentality of finding a way to survive through physically laboring jobs. And open our minds to new ways of generating income and finding ways to survive.

It's inevitable that labor jobs are going to decrease. The cost of technology has never increased, so eventually employing a labor force will become cost prohibitive.

This is definitely an interesting trend chart but more data is required to make accurate conclusions. Divisions by industry would be a good chart to see so you could tell specifically which sectors are suffering the most from these kinds of trends. Most likely these are primarily effecting manufacturing and possibly agriculture sectors.

Whenever I see charts like that I have to wonder what the motive behind it is. There's often more to the story than you can see in the chart. Data can be manipulated to promote idea any you want, you just have to know what to include and what to leave out. Without knowing that, it's hard to know how much meaning to attach to the chart.

Kurt, please don't show a chart that displays CEO pay. Especially if it's a comparison to the employees' pay. (I just ate lunch.)

There was a time where companies that were making huge profits passed it along to the people who made it possible. Although that theory is rare today, it happens but not enough.

I saw an even better chart on Bloomberg about a month ago. Basically it showed that since 1971 wages have flat-lined while the cost of living has escalated.

That was one of the reasons so many people borrowed against their homes in the last ten years. They were unable to live on their paycheck alone.

The US, Canada, and Germany are toast. GDP will be less than 3% forever. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are the new United States. China is the new SuperPower. People in the US don't realize the game is over.

I predict regardless of who wins the next Presidency that 2013, 2014, and 2015 will be some of the worst times the US has ever experienced. This is not doom and gloom but the stark reality of the situation.

The US and the EU have continued to kick the can down the road for many decades, now the money has run out. As Maggie Thatcher correctly stated, "eventually you run out of other peoples money."

Another thing to consider is that products have changed. One of the highest selling products right now is an itunes mp3 - or an iphone app. Even if there was a way to measure productivity when it comes to digitally delivered items, it wouldn't be a part of that chart.

Productivity has NOT increased on a per capita basis in the US. I have been to DOZENS of companies and am appaled by the waste, etc.... We have more people than ever, less production than ever, and more immigrants, illegal and "legal" than ever. I put legal in quotes because they often are here by false pretenses. BTW the largest number are here because of the claim that US citizens CAN NOT do the work. of course, being here, the Americans often DON'T have the chance. But your chart claims THEY are doing it.

And YEAH, computers took hold in like the 50s, started to skyrocket in the 60s, and took off faster than anyone would believe in the early 70s, when a person stayed late one day to test the circuit that became known as a microprocessor. Computers are now INCREDIBLY CHEAP!!!!!!!!! ALSO, in 1969 an OS was born. It grew gradually in the 70s, and SKYROCKETED in the 80s and 90s when HP, COMPAQ, DEC, IBM, SUN, all adopted it and a guy, disgusted by the high price, eventually decided to make a workalike called linux.

IMAGINE! Based on MY experience here....

1. 1985 About $75 a megabyte! YEP FOLKS! 5MB for $375!
2. 1995 About $1 a megabyte! 1GB for $1000!
3. 2012 Less than about $0.001 a megabyte! 1TB for about $100, EXTERNAL!

All prices based on about the lowest cost hard disk drive commonly available.

IMAGINE! 20 years ago accounting packages, cost about $400 per module, disk space was EXPENSIVE and DIFFICULT, and it was SLOW! Today, it is like $100 for ALL the main modules TOGETHER, CHEAP, EASY, and FAST!

Steve

I can remember there being a very bleak outlook for the United States when I was a young boy waiting in line to get gas with my father. But we managed to find a way to pull our selves up and had a very successful decade after that.

One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the economic formulas don't play out the same in countries that have a lot of natural resources. We have a lot of natural resources here in the U.S. It's much harder for our money to fail, because we have resources to continue to barter with. The reason Greece will fail a lot easier than we will, is because Greece is poor when it comes to natural resources.

We're in for a very lean decade.
Private, business and gov debt levels are staggering. Debt bombs are going off everywhere and won't stop any time soon.

Even here in Australia, where our leaders keep telling us we are the economic "envy of the world", our economy will stall later this year. Budgets are being cut everywhere. Businesses are collapsing.

Fortunately we are all in the right business (the web) so we just knuckle down and innovate, earn what we can. Things will improve but it will take a long time and probably new generation of leaders who have the balls to really address the problems.


Andrew

Hey Thom, been super busy - working and finishing my MS degree. However, I did finally get around to buying a bike! lol Been getting my time in on that too!

Joe Mobley

When I talk about the recovery being early in the process...

The U.S. economy especially for the average American has been on a slow steady decline since perhaps the early 1980's...

... but the bottom did not start falling out until mid 2008 and excellerated with the bank busts around Sept of 2008.

IMHO, We are now in the recovery phase since the bottom fell out and it's been only about 4 years.

Here's a chart to illustrate my point.

Any chart that shows "unemployment rate" leaves out two very large factions.
Those that originally were able to get unemployment but their benefits are all used up,and those that have been rejected so many times they have stopped trying. Admittedly these groupd probably do have some overlapping,but that doesn't change the fact they exist,and they are not included in charts such as this. In my personal opinion, and I am certainly not an economist,just someone that can walk the streets and look around and see the real world and what is happening in it, the depression is still very much going on. I know,the government called it a recession,but when was the last time they told the truth?

The reason I displayed the chart was to show the job loses not the unemployment rate which can be jimmied.

The job loses are the most important part of the chart and they are hard numbers that come from the BLS and show the bottom falling out of the U.S. economy starting around mid 2008.

In Jan 09 the nation lost over 800k jobs.


TL

I can agree with that.