Mad Men Are Creating a World Without Jobs

The Lost Boys still haven't come to terms with why there are no jobs in this economy. They desperately need to believe that it's all due to failed government policy. They are right on one level, the egregiously errant government policy was to turn a blind eye to what the private sector was doing by selling off the economy. Suffice to say that the real economy will in no way improve and there will be no net job creation until such time as the corporate frat boys and their corrupt apologists are forced to come to terms with what they have done to their own country...

When I say jobs, I am referring to real jobs not the $1 million dollar apiece McJobs that Obama has been buying with the Grandkids' money...

Robots Don't Buy Things

Even at this late juncture, there are apologists telling us that regardless of outsourcing to Third World countries, that automation was going to kill the jobs anyway. First off, robots don't have wages or incomes so that billionaire-fantasy was going to hit the brick wall of collapsed demand profits too. Secondly, replacing workers with mass arrays of robots and automation is extremely capital intensive. We live in history's largest glut of excess financial capital without any comparison. The real question is how much capital will be available when financial markets are "normalized" and 0% interest rates become a thing of the past. At that point, I suggest there will be a lot more capable workers and a lot fewer robots. This deluded fantasy that 1% of the population was going to live like kings with robots attending their every whim while the masses lived in abject squalor, is straight out of a dystopian horror novel.

A World Without Mexicans

Underlying all of this of course was the insane (and very temporary) arbitrage profit gained by outsourcing to the Third World. The second derivative however was an underlying superiority complex and its attendant laziness. As a society we decided that the hard stuff - the dirty work - was beneath us. We could send that overseas or import Mexicans to do all of that while "we" focused on the high "value added". It was all of course a deluded fantasy, since along with the low wage jobs went a lot of high wage jobs, intellectual capital, engineering capability, manufacturing capability and management experience. It all went overseas, not just the shit jobs that corporate frat boys rationalized as being "commodities". It was all sent overseas by country club CEOs hatched in the Marketing department ("Mad Men") who had none of the aforementioned skills nor any appreciation for how real economies (or companies) are actually created. They didn't "build this" economy, they merely sold it to the highest bidder.

Mad Men Will Put Us All Out of Work Eventually

And unfortunately, given enough time EVERYTHING can be commoditized. Marketing departments. Finance departments. MBAs. Politicians. Management consultants. Wall Street traders now HFT bots. Really, only massively overpaid country club CEOs have yet to be sent through their own shrink-wrap machine. We'll get to that next.

The Age of the Mega-Corporation is Dying

The age of the multinational company buying in one locale and selling in another is coming to a predictable bad ending. Like all forms of arbitrage it has had its predictable outcome of equalizing prices between markets. However, in this case, since wages are "sticky down" (Econo-dunce term, not mine) in the developed world, the outcome was instead mass unemployment. That resistance to embrace third world wages and environmental standards gave the outsourcers plenty of time to complete the migration and gave countries like China plenty of time to catch up and overtake the developed nations with respect to manufacturing and engineering capabilities. On the other side of the reset - aka. the awakening, no one will ever again trust the mega-corporations, their frat boy CEOs or any of the erstwhile apologists who still think that this can all be corrected by fine tuning "government policy". This was all only about greed and stupidity, both of which as we see for the moment are currently in over-drive. 

Until we start to see a general widespread acknowledgement that industrial arbitrage (outsourcing) and trade with nations that have no labour or enviromental standard is at the root of the "jobless economy", we can assume that the vector is hard down. So let the corrupt frat boys talk all they want. All they are doing is wasting more time and allowing history's largest estate sale to continue unabated...