Talk:Jobless recovery

This article is quite bad, the first two links are totally broken and don't even define the term! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.83.254.115 (talk) 03:02, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Bullshit Factor

This article is such BS and countenances media-government propaganda. As the late Murray Rothbard and Walter Williams, economist at George Mason Univ., says GDP stats in the U.S. are overestimated, especially real (non-inflationary) economic growth. Understandably this miscalculation is more pronounced in an economic downturn. Similarly, the stock market keeps pace with inflation, so the notion that the stock market is the barometer of economic vitality is meaningless. There's no such thing as a jobless recovery. At the present pace of job creation, recovery would take 80+ years!

Breadth

Though the article is in some places unsubstantiated, the original author does provide a good framework as far as breadth. I like all the different consequences of a jobless recovery. ~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.109.156.229 (talk) 11:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words in the past. I wanted to note, now that those sections have been deleted by someone else, that they are accessible in the Wikipedia history here.[1] One of the first things to be deleted was a link (added by someone else) about a Harvard professor of religion (Harvey Cox) writing about how mainstream economics is basically immersed in unacknowledged theology.[2] So, this article maybe is heresy by that standard that perhaps some people felt compelled to stamp out (starting with stamping out the very idea that mainstream economics is more a religion than a science because of all the assumptions it makes about human nature)? I don't really know what I can do about that, and I feel the article's explanatory power (as well as related citations to heterodox thinkers) is rapidly eroding with the death of 1000 cuts by presumably several mainstream economics believers who want to remove alternative views. The same mainstream ideological forces that failed to predict the Jobless Recovery problem, that failed to rapidly cure it, and that offer mostly apologetics for suffering of so many in the world seem to be at work here (and that is not to accuse anyone of ill will, just that such behavior comes from people advocating what they have been trained to believe in as economic theology, often even to their own personal detriment sometimes). But, life goes on, and I'm not going to engage in an edit war over this myself, which is probably what would happen were I to revert the article to a version that had the text you praised. Anyone looking for a broader understanding of the topic of a Jobless Recovery from a variety of perspectives, or how it impacts real people (as opposed to theoretical ones), and lots of possible solutions to it (by the way, listing possible alternatives is not the same as a "crystal ball" prediction as supposedly justified the deletion of the text you praised), and links to writers ranging from Marshall Brain (futurist, businessperson) to Marshall Sahlins (anthropologist) to Suniya Luthar (psychologist) to Bob Black (lawyer) to substantiate those points, you can check out that old version linked above before deletionists took over the article. (Again, this is not to say that article could not have been improved, including with more references or reorganization or judicious editing.)--Freevolution (talk) 02:10, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

WP:NOR

This is probably the worst article I've ever laid eyes on. It's not even about jobless recovery but unemployment in general and belongs in a 9th grade dissertation. - 80.169.161.162 (talk) 13:18, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

POV

This is a political diatribe and deserves to be killed - I'd VfD it, except it's such a hassle to list things on VfD these days! - DavidWBrooks 17:15, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

WOAH. I just came across this article today, over five years since DavidWBrooks wrote the comment above, and it saddens me that it's still accurate. This incredibly long diatribe has been living here unmolested for FIVE YEARS? Mtiffany (talk) 17:00, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Pyat rublei 1997.jpg

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BetacommandBot 11:29, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Explanation needed

How do the Analysis figures illustrate a jobless recovery? -- Beland (talk) 06:52, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Added more to the Analysis section to explain why those figures are of interest, as they demonstrate a problem with the conventional wisdom that economic growth and employment growth usually happen in parallel. -- Freevolution (talk) 04:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Stupidity

This is among the worst written articles on Wikipedia and is clearly written to support a political stance. The person who keeps editing it is named "Freevolution", go figure. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TheRedVest (talk • contribs) 20:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC) I agree, this does not sound like an expert in the field wrote this nor any scientific background. It doesn't sound credible. ~Anonymous

Needs some distinctions, not Captain James T Kirk

The article should begin with an explicit distinction between a high unemployment as a lagging indicator of recovery (indicating a normal economic cycle)and high unemployment as a jobless recovery (indicating a major shift in employment patterns). On the whole a worthy article, but there are one too many science fiction references in certain sections of this article and consequently those sections look dubious. N.B. There is a difference between economic solutions that are practical suggestions of economists or social theorists / political scientists, and the economic solutions that are speculations dreamed up by sci-fi authors. Reading a section that recomends Star Trek-like-replicators as a solution to a jobless recovery is unnerving. I would like the editors of this page to enter into an editing contract to limmit the proposed solutions to jobless recoveries to those practical for the current jobless recovery, and not offer the solutions to the jobless recoveries of the twenty third century.

I am not against some of the arguments presented here about nano technology, total transformations of our scientific capasities, or post scarsity economics. But consider it this way: if we did develop Replicator-like technology, would that realy be the end of a jobless recovery or would it infact spell the end of economics all together? If the solution to an economic problem is for economic to cease to exist, as we understand it; then i would argue that that diserves a page of its own. Something that is more universal than economics cannot rationally be included in the same category as a particular of economics. One page for describing the economic solutions to the economic problem of a jobless recovery, and another seprate page for descibing the scientific/techonological advances that may bring an end to economics all together. The singularity should not be on this page because it would only bring an end to jobless recoveries indirectly as a result of something else that was not actualy connected to jobless recoveries. If the singularity belongs on this page then why not also list 'an asteroid strike wiping out the human race' as a solution to jobless recoveries: after all the extermination of the human race would prevent any more jobless recoveries, but only indirectly -- as indirectly as the singularity. So please give these things their own page, which they diserve, but they are not conceptualy connected to this discussion; they are distinct issues.--Nikopolyos (talk) 10:52, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

You raise several interesting points in this section, and I will try to address most of them.

I agree with your first point about improving the distinction at the start about lagging indicator vs. structural change. Related to that is the idea that if employment lags further and further as an indicator, it will eventually meet up with the next recession. We are close to that now, with job recovery from this recession predicted by some economists to only pick in the USA in two years or so (so, as we are about two years after the start of the current recession, that will be about four years from the start of this one), but we seem to be getting recessions every five or six years or so during the past decade or two, meaning we are moving closer to Marshall Brain's scenario of a permanent jobless recovery.

On the "Captain Kirk" point you make, many people are not aware of the state-of-the-art in things like 3D printing, so I can see how that could be explained better.

Here are some references to look at.

From Wikipedia itself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing

"While rapid prototyping dominates current uses, 3D printers offer tremendous potential for production applications as well.[1] The technology also finds use in the jewellery, footwear, industrial design, architecture, automotive, aerospace, dental and medical industries."

Here is 3D printing of items from two different materials:

Autodesk University 2009: Objet Geometries

Here is printing items in multiple colors:

ZCorp ZPrinter 450 3D Printer

Here is open source printing of shoes with an open source 3D printer:

RepRapping a Left Shoe

Here is comedian and television host Jay Leno talking about 3D printing he uses to make car parts for old cars:

Jay Leno’s 3D Printer Replaces Rusty Old Parts

Jay Leno makes a point in there that you can print complex mechanisms fully assembled (and so eliminate the human labor of assembly). And also that you can 3D print in metal. Those are examples of 3D printers you can buy now (2009). People like Ray Kurzweil, K. Eric Drexler, and many others suggest that such technologies have been rapidly improving and will continue to rapidly improve to the point where they will change the very nature of supply chains for most material goods (as well as design possibilities -- for example, custom cars will not be much of a problem to maintain if you can just print out parts when you need replacements). Plus, there are a variety of similar technologies that are not so self-contained (simply improved versions of lathes, milling machines, robotic work cells, and so on). Taken together, these show that Marshall Brain may be right that key assumptions of mainstream economics about scarcity and the value of human labor are breaking down, and this is part of why we see jobless recoveries. Would more information about this in the article help clarify that issue? Is there some specific section or sections that you can point to that you think should be improved to address that?

A key point that people like Marshall Brain and Ray Kurzweil make is that these changes with robotics and 3D printing (and other things like AI and nanotech and bioengineering) are happening in a very short time -- at most two to three decades from now to have huge effects on the economy (and even now they are having significant effects, for example, as Jay Leno demonstrates, you can print out complex mechanisms assembled with minimal human labor right now). So, these changes are happening in an timeframe on the same scale as, say, economic decisions about wars, health care, and social security that talk about funding plans a couple decades from now. In that sense, I don't see the value of splitting things up, given all the technologists saying these changes are happening right now in a big way and that many mainstream economists are, for the most part, ignoring these changes (which part of the reason mainstream economists' predictions and remedies about recoveries and employment are failing). The issue of a "jobless recovery" extends beyond being a simple economic term like "demand" to being a social and political issue -- though I can agree that, as you suggest, the article could be clearer at the start about the two major divisions in thinking on this between a jobless recovery from employment as a lagging indicator and a jobless recovery from employment in an economy undergoing structural changes. There is already some mention of that, but it could be expanded.

On your asteroid analogy, well, deciding not to create an asteroid defense of some sort with the best technology we have right now is a choice about priorities. Several scientists have suggested that it would be a good idea based on the potential for great damage even if the risk is low. (This is similar to how earthquake preparedness in NYC has been talked about as being important by people like Masanobu Shinozuka -- even though the risk is low, the cost would be enormous of being unprepared.) Example for asteroids:

Asteroid Defense: 'Risk Is Real,' Planners Say

The possible "cures" are about decisions people make as individuals or communities. So, in that sense, you are right that for completeness, to not do something about obvious threats is a decision, and it maybe should have a category like "Ignore existential threats" which might be much larger than just ignore asteroids?

The singularity is not mentioned on this page. Would it make sense to link to the Wikipedia page at some point? However that idea is a much broader issue that talks about AI greatly exceeding human capacities. Marshall Brain in his cited writings is mainly focused on AI and robotics and so on approaching human capacities to the point where they are good enough to replace most people (even if he may also talk about going beyond that).

Marshall Brain Makes Splash With Structural Unemployment Message at Singularity Summit 08

So, the issues here are indirectly related to the idea of a singularity of some sort in terms of a major change in society, but they are not the same as "The Technological Singularity" that focuses on creating entities that are way beyond humanity in intelligence to the point where humanity is no longer at all relevant to the evolution of intelligence or society. There is however one possible big link. If we get our economic house in order before "The Singularity" (assuming it would ever happen, there are many skeptics who suggest technology and intelligence will plateau), one might think it would be the best hope for a nice Singularity as opposed to a very unpleasant one, in the sense that people have said The Singularity is a mirror of our values, assumptions, and attitudes. If humans elected by other humans don't care about their constituents having good lives and access to the fruits of the industrial commons (regardless of employability in an automated economy), then what hope is there that super-intelligent machines built by the most competitive corporations to maximize short-term profits would care about human needs (other than, at most, those of the owning company's stockholders)? So, it would make sense to make significant social and economic changes sooner rather than later in any case (singularity or not), along the lines of what Marshall Brain points out, or James Albus points out, or numerous others (even Frances Moore Lappé in relation to hunger and employment).

--Freevolution (talk) 02:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. I read Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near when it was first released (i didn't like it - people have been using exponential growth of information to predict the singularity in a decade, every decade since 1870's, after all how can progress cannot be quantifed in a way that is ameniable to statistics? - but that's another matter). Perhaps reading his name lead me to over-interpret your refrences to him as avocating a economic recovery by way of a total change to life on this planet. But i do know his work and about 3d printing machines; i've seen them and their products: Impressive for solid tools, but not yet for fine machinery. Marshall Brain i do not know. Nevertheless the distinction i was trying to bring out was about categories. Say if we did develop nano techonology in the next twenty years, would that not be a change on a level more far reaching than economics? If we had nano techology would we even have economics any more, would we even worry / care about joblessness? I vaguely recall Kurzweil mentioning nano technology as a paradigm shift in our society. I think that's probably correct. Now, if we draw an analogy between this paradigm shift and historical paradigm shifts; we might get a clearer picture of how to classify this problem. Take the traditional shift from astrology to astronomy, or alchemy to chemistry. If we where wikipedians of the 15th centuary; editing a partchment on astrology would we include recient changes in astronomy? Or would we say that the change between the two was so revolutionary that they have decoupled, and that the changes in astronomy are no longer mentioned in astrology, but that in astrology we mention how astrology is being superseeded by astronomy, and leave it to the astronomy section to explain what changes astronomy will bring. The truth is, i dont actually know what we would do; as Kuhn said the boundaries only become clear with a few centuries hindsight; so it is just a subjective intuition i have, but i feel that radical technological changes may be touching on issues more general and steping off topic. But as i said it's subjective, so if i'm not convincing anyone then the article should stay as it is. (Oh, and I meant the asteroid example to be a reduction to absurdity; i wasn't expecting you to take me litteraly)

I do not have any suggestions of what specifically to do to alter the page / sections of the page. Except perhaps to suggest a section on 'affect of technological progress on employment' with three parts; one on how technology that actually exists today has been observed to change unemployment (industrialisation), two on how new technological change may affect unemployment in the future (self employment of programmers / improved robots in factories / working from home, etc), three how theoretical technologies may alter the very nature of employment in the future (3d, nano technology, singularity, etc). But i would not like to make such a major edit, without consulting readers to see if they would prefer it that way.

There is another twist to this; do we even need nano technology to bring about an end to scarsity. In the 30's Thorstein Veblen and technocrats argued that we already had a post scarsity economy and that scarsity was being artifically maintained to preserve power relations. I have seen Robert Reich mention something similar on his blog reciently. So do we even need any more technology to get beyond scarsity, and if we got the technlogy would we be alowed to use it to go put an end to scarsity?--Nikopolyos (talk) 14:08, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

This article is supposed to be about "jobless recovery". If you want to write a lot about the speculation of futurists and scifi authors on some idealised post-scarcity economy, your contributions might be better applied to a different article; perhaps Post scarcity.

What this article needs is the addition of reliable sources, and the removal of any pseudoeconomic rhetoric incompatible with reliable sources, unless framed appropriately without giving undue weight (ie. "Economists believe X is true and have published studies Y and Z supporting it; a technophile on the internet argues that X is false").

bobrayner (talk) 15:26, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Meandering economically-illiterate rant

I'll be blunt; to me, this article looks like a meandering economically-illiterate rant. It does at least use some references in places, although at the fringes of economics it's usually possible to find a source who agrees with any claim at all, including one generated by the roll of a dice. This article seems to be a big unstructured pile of what can best be described as non-mainstream economic arguments. Is it fixable? Going through it line by line is likely to be very time-consuming. bobrayner (talk) 11:12, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Bobrayner, it seems you spend several hours removing stuff from the article and making some other changes, from a mainstream economics perspective, seemingly reflecting the alliance to such you avow on your user page. To me, those changes don't seem that neutral (including your title to this discussion section), including removing most references to Marshall Brain's very perceptive and prescient writings which are important to the article as citations to major points (which you then add "citation needed" in some cases). Over the last couple of years, as cited in the article, mainstream economics both failed to predict the economic crisis from around 2008, as well as has failed to provide remedies for it in a significant way (other than bailing out some of the rich). Maybe, given such a huge failure of mainstream economics effecting the lives of billions of people, it is reasonable to present all the alternative viewpoints, especially the ones who accurately predicted the current crisis and have prescribed remedies for it? But instead, it seems to me that you spent much time gutting the article to remove exactly those alternative views that have relevant explanatory power. --Freevolution (talk) 02:28, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Mainstream economics did actually provide various predictions and solutions. If you want to make claims of fact like that, I would recommend citing a good source (oh, and I wonder what predictions Marshall Brain made about trends in overnight rates, share prices, state interventions to maintain liquidity &c). Nonetheless, the supposed lack of predictions or solutions from mainstream economics does not justify filling an article with huge volumes of pseudoeconomic speculation on other subjects, some of which has references - to allegorical scifi published by non-economists. Fiction is not a reliable source. If you want to write about it, there might be another wikipedia article which is a more appropriate home; but this article should be about "Jobless Recovery".

Some of the content that I removed was outright false or contradictory. I tried to leave behind some of the content that might be more fixable. However, there remains a large volume of text which is not really about "jobless recovery", and which appears to overlap with other articles. I recommend merging those, although the other articles are already (for the most part) coherently written and well-sourced so it might be more of a delete-and-link than a merge.

I'm not sure what alliance you think might be avowed on my userpage, but it's not really relevant. Wikipedia should be based on verifiable facts rather than on personal allegiances; and this article should be about "jobless recovery".

Please cite reliable sources. Please remove vague idealistic speculation about the future. Where your preferred lay speculators contradict economic consensus, please make that clear in the article. Where your preferred source is a work of fiction, please think twice before basing an encyclopedia article on it.

bobrayner (talk) 09:01, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

This post subsequently edited to add links to wikipedia policies - I hope we can all try to follow wikipedia policies. Sorry if I come across as being a bit aggressive; I just want Wikipedia to have better articles. I'd like to try adding some references, and have already added a few, but frankly I doubt that much of the text can be matched up with reliable sources. bobrayner (talk) 11:18, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Bobrayner, one of the most important things to understand about a "Jobless Recovery" is that, like stagflation in the 1970s, it is not supposed to happen for any length of time according to current mainstream economic theory (one reason the current economic situation in the USA was not predicted, and why remedies have been problematical). Another thing to understand is that solutions to it involve making political choices -- deciding who will benefit and who will suffer from economic activity -- it is not just an issue of abstract mathematics when societal priorities are set. Some of the first things you removed introduced that issue. Consider the first large edit you made with your comment being "Removed some unsourced fringe content, irrelevance, and rhetoric/puffery, added pointers for further improvement. Please cite a source if you want to re-add anything or remove CN tags" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jobless_recovery&diff=362603931&oldid=362594712 Removed by you were statements like:

Stagnant or declining real wages and decreasing employment in the USA for the past thirty years for many jobs supports one theory; rising wages and increasing employment in places like India and China over a similar time period supports the other. ... This clash is reflected in conflicted notions of what to do about this situation, given that many innovations succeed in the market because they are labor saving, yet paradoxically new jobs are often claimed to come primarily from innovation. (with a ref) ... But since new innovations can reduce the need for paid human labor, others argue innovation can be bad for jobs (even as it might be good for humanity as a whole). Who is right as regards job creation may ultimately depend on what exact innovations are being discussed or what timescale one is looking at. ... Many issues of economics remain contentious because many assumptions underlying economic theories are essentially statements on human nature, embody political values, or entail speculating about the potential of future technology. ... New areas of economic research have been emerging to consolidate ideas about ecological economics and the economics of technological change, emphasizing natural capital and intellectual capital. Many economists have contributed to these movements in different ways. For example, Robert Costanza suggested in 1997 that the global ecosystem could be valued at around US$33 trillion at the time, a breakthrough idea at the time, to recognize the dependence of the human-made economy on natural processes. ...

It seems right there you are taking a position by removing the alternative points of view. Those are precisely the issues one needs to know to understand why mainstream economics get so much about the Jobless Recovery wrong.

Further, your removed in one edit a reference to Paul Krugman (an economist who won a Nobel Prize); one of his recent columns talks about a potential "Lost Decade" in the USA coming up where he writes about policy makers (and by implication the mainstream free market economists they work with) getting things wrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html "For the past few months, much commentary on the economy — some of it posing as reporting — has had one central theme: policy makers are doing too much. ... But the truth is that policy makers aren’t doing too much; they’re doing too little. Recent data don’t suggest that America is heading for a Greece-style collapse of investor confidence. Instead, they suggest that we may be heading for a Japan-style lost decade, trapped in a prolonged era of high unemployment and slow growth."

Further, you deleted the item on war as a way to create jobs, when that is very commonly cited by many as what pulled the USA out of the Great Depression (correct or not). Similarly, you deleted an example about the Black Death creating opportunity when if you look at the history, that is what you will see. You removed the example of Wikipedia itself as representing a new theory of abundance.

You removed and labelled as sci-fi speculation links to video of actual robots doing things right now both in commerce and the lab. How can videos of working robots be considered sci-fi?

You removed outlines of key things much mainstream economics ignores in this edit: [3] such as: "the quality of the actual "work" in terms of enjoyability can be ignored; promoting community can be ignored in designing economic arrangements; negative externalities to the environment could be ignored; it is good or neutral that banks are the first to get newly created money; and innovation is not an important issue to consider in analyzing economies." (which had related references later in the article) and you made other related edits to remove supporting items.

You removed:

However, many mainstream economists might simply reply that the above is an example of the "lump of labor fallacy", and that limited demand is a not possible based on their views of human nature and so demand for human labor is indeed infinite. Professional economists are, for the most part, mathematicians of a sort. It might seem to make more sense to listen to psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists than mathematicians about human nature, assuming human nature can be defined at all. Still, even if demand was potentially infinite like most economists suppose, and thus always growing faster than capacity, that lump of labor fallacy has nothing to say about robotics and automation once they exceed human abilities in the workplace at a lower cost. How to reconcile these two opposite positions remains contentious. But for mainstream economic predictions to be valid, two things have to be true: demand has to be effectively infinite, and robots and artificial intelligence must never equal the ability of most human workers for workplace tasks at a similar overall cost. We seem to already see evidence of both these assumptions by mainstream economists being wrong in restricted areas (like demand for housing has fallen off, and robots can paint cars better than people), but even then, the implications are not yet fully clear if these trends will generalize or how quickly they would do so. Almost all mainstream economists failed to predict the current economic downturn; many people, including some professional economists, are now questioning in general the value of mainstream economic models for dealing with unusual situations past the boundaries of those models' assumptions. With two refs: Confessions of a Recovering Economist by Jim Stanford The Black Swan Theory by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And you replaced it with:

Mainstream economists consider that the above is an example of the "lump of labor fallacy", and that limited demand is a not possible based on their views of human nature and so demand for human labor is indeed infinite. Professional economists found their studies on observations of human economic behaviour.

without any citation for that last sentence.

Note also that in an early edit you removed the reference to a theologian from Harvard University (a citation originally added by someone other than me) which said:

"Harvard Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox writes in "The Market as God" (The Atlantic, March 1999) that the "Do Nothing" philosophy is connected to a rising tide of theological thinking in economics; he suggests the new "economist-theologians" have created an economic theology "comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth" which suggests that human interventions in the economy are ineffectual since the free market takes on the divine properties of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence; he cites Alan Greenspan's testimony to the US Congress in 1998 against regulation of financial markets after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis as an example of a true believer increasing in faith after adversity. Alan Greenspan's comments a decade later show a shift in his faith somewhat, referenced above as "Alan Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds".(two refs)".

Also, some supporting facts for statements made in the article are on Wikipedia pages cited and would be familiar to someone who has explored the related topic (so, does that mean a citation is really needed for each one in this article too?)

Also, the point of having a comprehensive list of solutions in one place is in understanding the topic; merging that content into other articles and removing it from this one to disperse the content would make harder that unified understanding. Could the article be improved? Sure. But your approach may not be the best way to do it. And then you appealed for assistance in defending your changes and opinions in a place almost certain to have mostly mainstream economics people. Where is the call for help from heterodox economists? From anthropologists? From historians? From others in other parts of academia or government with alternative explanations?

You list your affiliations on your user page as being an MBA student, a free market believer, and an atheist. No doubt you can make many good additions to the article from those points of view. Anyway, my suggestion is that you rollback your deletions, and then that you make additions from a neutral point of view, suggesting, with references, what specific free market-oriented economists have to say. I find it problematical that you started instead by removing what others have to say relevant to the topic who are heterodox economists, Harvard theologians, futurists, technologists, psychologists, notable comedians, and so on. Any article created that only admits to the mainstream economic point of view (is that what you are working on now?), especially when there is widespread sustained vocal criticism of that mainstream point of view both within and without academia would be very biased and not very useful in understanding a topic that is essentially about a big failure of mainstream economics, IMHO. It would be like someone in the 1960s taking an article on stagflation and trying to say stagflation did not exist, or was not significant, or should be solved by handing a bunch more money to already wealthy people who best know what to do with money and we should not worry our little heads about all that complex money stuff.

As just one example from the alternative media, consider: "What Would Jesus Say? The Chicago Boys' Free Market Theology " [4]

"Many academics recently received a petition signed by 111 University of Chicago faculty members, explaining that “without any announcement to its own community, [the University] has commissioned Ann Beha Architects, a Boston firm, to remake the Chicago Theological Seminary building into a home for the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics (MFIRE) and has renewed aggressive fund-raising activity for the controversial Institute.” It would be hard to find a more fitting metaphor than what the press release characterizes as “conversion of the Seminary building into a temple of neoliberal economics.” Even the acronym MFIRE seems symbolically appropriate. The M might well stand for Money in Prof. Friedman’s MV = PT (Money x Velocity = Price x Transactions). And the FIRE sector comprises finance, insurance and real estate – the “free lunch” sector whose wealth the Chicago monetarists celebrate."

All human action rests on assumptions, values, aesthetics, and various other beliefs and feelings about the world, whether we are atheists or theists or something else. Sometimes the best we can do is make those assumptions as clear as we can. Many mainstream economists have a very abstract model of society and human nature that is not in accord with reality to a high enough degree to be that useful to building an advanced technological society (such as Marshall Brain or many other technologists envision), but as Keynes said, the mainstream economic opinions are often celebrated anyway because they are in accord with the desires of those with a lot of economic or political power. Anyway, thanks for your interest in the article, and I hope we can work together to improve it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Freevolution (talk • contribs) 23:45, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

There's too much going on above and in the article for me to comment on all of it intelligently. Freevolution, while there's plenty in mainstream economics (itself a pretty big tent) to be criticized, I'm afraid you're looking to this article to do too much of that, and it risks becoming a WP:COATRACK for general criticisms of mainstream economics, certain policies, and so forth. I'd recommend keeping this article on track by only referring to material/references which specifically talk about jobless recoveries in general, or a specific jobless recovery. CRETOG8(t/c) 02:43, 26 May 2010 (UTC) It looks to me lik

References

Third opinion

I have requested third opinions, or any other comments/criticism, over at WikiProject Economics. [5]

bobrayner (talk) 12:27, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Article issues

There are a number of issues with this article, but most obvious is its size - at 196KB, it's well over the recommended maximum length for articles. (See WP:Article size.) The normal solution is that parts of this article should be split off into separate articles to make it smaller and easier to edit. However, I note this article also has a more serious problem - much of it appears to be original research by the author, with no references whatsoever. If references cannot be provided for the claims and arguments in this article, then they should be removed; doing this would also cut down the size of the article drastically. Robofish (talk) 22:24, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I won't deny the article could be improved (even if many good Wikipedia articles are long). As for original research, there are several references to people like Marshall Brain and many others who have presented alternative views on jobs and economics which are explained in this article (although some references were removed by the most recent extensive edits by Bobrayner). Consider this snippet from an article just published in a mainstream source, Forbes magazine, written by Martin Ford who has a recent related book:[6] and also mentioned here

Many dismiss this rather pessimistic view by pointing to the fact that, while technology eliminates jobs, it also creates new industries and employment sectors. This argument glosses over the fact that new technology-based industries tend to be capital intensive: they do not employ large numbers of people. Compare McDonalds with Google: In 2008 McDonalds employed 400,000 people with revenue of $59,000 per worker. Google had just 20,000 employees--each of which brought in, on average, over a million dollars in revenue. The question we have to ask is: What happens when McDonald's begins to look more like Google? ... The economy of 2020 may well be characterized by substantial, broad-based and ever increasing structural unemployment, as well as by stagnant or plunging consumer spending and confidence. Mainstream economists, content to rely on quantitative models built in the last century, are largely oblivious to and ill-equipped for the reality of the next decade.

Forbes magazine (calling itself a "Capitalist Tool") is not exactly a bastion of social radicalism relative to mainstream economics; and so I feel that Forbes article (the fact that it was published there) shows how more and more people are slowly beginning to acknowledge, long after the fact compared to people talking about this years ago like Marshall Brain, Hans Moravec, Bob Black, or the Triple Revolution authors or many others (cited in the article), that there are substantial and long-standing ongoing trends related to an interplay of capitalism and automation. I feel the Wikipedia article (at least in the past) reflected that growing sentiment (even if it is not yet widely understood). So, as I see it, there are plenty of references out there and in the article, even though there is also a lot of politics and emotion is our society involved in denying that there is any ongoing and accelerating problem related to our society and employment, because that thought can be pretty scary about so much ongoing change in fundamental ways. Could the article benefit from more references? Sure. Cretog8's comment that the article risks becoming an coatrack has some fairness to it. And could the list of alternative solutions be changed somehow or split out or have something else done with it, maybe to some benefit of the overall article? Probably. But the direction the article seems to be going recently is to strip out alternative viewpoints that have actual explanatory power, and replacing them with comments from a mainstream that has been unable to address a growing issue (decades of stagnant wages in the USA, a recent decade of no job growth, entire sections of the economy falling by the wayside, etc.). I'd suggest, if even Forbes is starting to accept the nature of the ongoing issue related to technology and employment, maybe Wikipedia can too, especially as Wikipedia itself is part of this change (putting paid encylopediaists out of work, replaced mostly by volunteers) -- although that was another example removed from the article recently. I'd suggest that what the article most needs might be connections to those who study the history of society and technology (such as Lynn Townsend White, Jr.) who have seen such transformations in the past more than it needs more about mainstream economics and related policy that has so failed to predict or to deal effectively with this ongoing crisis. Still, that remains subject to debate, and it is certainly fair to suggest the article should reflect that debate, though it already does, to some extent.--Freevolution (talk) 14:59, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Freevolution, while I understand the effort that you've put in here and appreciate your concern for jobless recoveries, would you not agree that this article would be much more accessible if it was trimmed down significantly and adopted a summarizing style? It would also be more informative if it focused particularly on jobless recoveries, which is certainly a big topic in economics right now. II | (t - c) 03:31, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

POV

This is the worst entry on this site. Almost all information on this page is peripheral, a normal reader would come away with no basic knowledge of Jobless Recovery. Wikipedia articles should be concise, direct and to the point of ONE IDEA. There is no room for socio-political posturing or advocacy in an encyclopedia article. It should be SCRAPPED COMPLETELY and written over by someone with more restraint and knowledge of Jobless Recovery. Please Freevolution, give this article up! Its truly a disgraceStevIstKrieg (talk) 14:21, 10 June 2010 (UTC)StevIstKrieg

Use a hatchet, not a scalpel

I think the article is well beyond the point where even moderate tweaks can bring it up to any thing half-decent. Basically everything that is unsourced and everything that is only barely relevant to the topic should be mercilessly removed per 'be bold!'.

Couple quick random observations:

1. This article is NOT on the subject of "unemployment" in general. It is about a specific economic phenomenon where output per capita recovers but employment does not increase. Everything that is not explicitly connected to this phenomenon needs to go. This includes all the hodge podge of theories of what causes unemployment (as opposed to what causes it to stay high in a recovery), how the unemployed "feel", social impacts of unemployment etc.
2. The most common theory for a "cause" is not mentioned at all, even though the article has a whole list of barely relevant and crank-ish theories about 'causes'. The most common explanation (almost an accounting definition) is that worker productivity rises in a recovery, which raises output per capita, but due to uncertainty about the future, individual firms hold off on hiring extra (more productive workers) in order to avoid training and hiring costs until the economy wide situation becomes clearer. Since everyone thinks this way, the # of jobs does not increase, further fueling concerns about the future (in essence, a form of coordination failure).
3. Discussion of historical issues should be limited to episodes where there really was a 'jobless recovery' not to unemployment trends or structural unemployment or the fact that unemployment goes up during recessions. Basically it should be limited to: a) Great Depression - and even there it's not 100% that the period in between the two recessions that comprised it was one of "jobless recovery" (which is different from a "slow recovery"), b) aftermath of the 2000 recession and c) present situation.

Ok that's just for starters.radek (talk) 22:10, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Can we just delete the whole section under "Four long-term heterodox alternatives"? It is mostly irrelevant to the topic and is more or less a rant (though with some cites thrown in). Of course "heterodox" solutions and policies aimed at dealing with a 'jobless recovery' (not ones aimed at dealing with a 'recession' or 'unemployment' in general) should be mentioned - though even among "heterodox" theories there is a big difference between some theories which are simply held by a minority of economists/policy makers but have some arguments behind them, and outright nuttery. In that spirit the mention of 'heterodox' solutions should probably focus on old style Keynesian policy of government sponsored work programs and such and perhaps some Post-Keynesian ideas about changing the income distribution to alleviate unemployment.radek (talk) 22:23, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Reverted section blanking

I've reverted a section deletion of Population growth vs. employment growth

The editor claims, WP:SYNTHESIS, yet there is no conclusion made here, just the notation that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not offer the data in the age-ranges depicted, some grade-school addition and subtraction is explained and outlined in the accompanying text.

WP:SYNTHESIS states: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources."

The section is entirely sourced from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (thus no multiple sources) and there is no conclusion or implication because the table displayed is WP:CALC. The section quite relevant to the Jobless Recovery topic as employment creation, retirements and labor availability are primary components of the Jobless Recovery phenomena. 009o9 (talk) 19:22, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

There is absolutely nothing in the source about "jobless recovery", and a huge table which draws no conclusions about this neologism obviously has no place in the article. bobrayner (talk) 10:53, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm adding a reference to the section, from the BLS which is focused on jobless recoveries. As for neologism, are you referring to the term "Jobless Recovery" or the suggestion that we should be allowed to look past last month's U-3 for explanations and solutions. Okay, I see, sou were quoting the MOS without providing a link. If you would have read the next section "Jobless Recovery" is WP:WORDISSUBJECT and the term is quite well documented in economic journals so also fail on WP:NEO. Could I get you to stop censoring this information if I collapse the table?009o9 (talk) 13:28, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Article cleanup

I'm willing to take on a cleanup of this article and I'm writing to see how many other editors are still interested in this topic. (When I added my section, this discussion was very dated.)

I believe that the section Recent employment trends in the USA should be removed from the Causes section, and "Recent..." appears to now be 3 years old. Some of that section looks okay, but it seems to be suffering from what I call drive-by edits -- a few un-sourced sentences pasted in around the content.

There is a ton of credible reference material out there, and for the United States, the Jobless recovery publications generally start with early 1990's, however some do note the Great Depression having a jobless recovery. I'm thinking that maybe an upper level section Recessions that exhibited jobless recoveries with subsections for each. Perhaps something from the Recent employment trends in the USA lecture can be salvaged for a Great recession section.

Perhaps an outline like this:

Lede

Official Definitions (some economists are now calling it "persistent unemployment")

Causes

Theory 1

Theory 2...

United States

Recessions that exhibited jobless recoveries

Recession 1

Recession 2...

Data

Additionally, I want to move the existing reverences to a Reflist | refs = section. I feel that it is a better format and makes it easier reading when the references tags are not commingled with the text. (It's still okay to add inline just easier to read) If there are no objections, I will work on the article directly as I find time -- probably mostly just quotes from notable economists 009o9 (talk) 19:27, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Table update

The table of employment and population statistics at the end of the article is several years out of date. Could someone update it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.74.105.124 (talk) 00:35, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

•  Done 104.174.231.6 (talk) 21:29, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

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