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Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.
[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @03:12PM
Within a week some idiot
The kind of place that is penny wise and pound foolish when hiring, probably purchases all its robots from the robot equivalent of Harbor Freight, so having some idiot buy the wrong robot and program it the wrong way isn't going to fix anything when the fundamental problem is its the same idiot who used to hire the wrong people. Half of all management is below median, and all that.
One good thing about humans is in theory you can fix an idiot, although it might take a long time and be expensive and probably not too pleasant experience for anyone involved, but you'll never fix a POS machine on any realistic timescale or financial budget. Also an idiot who can't hire properly at least occasionally makes a good hiring decision, the blind dog sometimes finding a bone anyway, but an idiot can't randomly go negotiate against a major robot supply corporation and not get his ass handed to him buying the wrong tool for the job at the worst possible price.
In the programming world we have the same problem with checkboxes for UI and security. You can't fix stupid once its gone stupid and if its not stupid it doesn't need fixing. Don't matter much if its a manager of an assembly line or sysadmin of assembly language computer coders.