But the problem remains: what do those unemployed and increasingly unemployable people do with their day, and from whence comes the money to keep them alive and peaceful? In an age where even the middle-class pro with a degree is finding it difficult to find a regular job, it doesn't bode well for the future. There are more than a few university leavers who have discovered that their years there were a waste of time if they didn't read maths and sciences. Those disciplines are not within every person's ability or aptitude. Those people without those specific skills may have their degree, but it is no longer a passport, so even relatively bright people can, and do find themselves stacking shelves or handing burgers across a counter. Should good eating return as fashionable, even those Macjobs will vanish.
Rob
Hi Rob, here are a few statistics about employment in some of those unnecessary fields of pursuit:
As of January 2015, Apple Inc. claims to directly employ 66,000 employees in the United States alone. Many other jobs are attributable to Apple, including 627,000 created to support the iOS ecosystem. The company's 265 Apple stores employ about 30,000 retail employees.
Amazon added 39,300 employees during its most recent quarter, which is record quarterly growth for the company. Amazon's headcount also surpassed 200,000 for the first time and is now at 222,400 — that's up 49 percent from this time last year.
From Googles 2012 Q2 report: "On a worldwide basis, we employed 54,604 full-time employees (34,311 in our Google business and 20,293 in our Motorola business) as of June 30, 2012, compared to 33,077 full-time employees as of March 31, 2012." In the latest quarterly filing Google reported to have 24,400 employees.
The number of Microsoft employees increased from 61,000 in 2005 to 118,000 in 2015 (measured as of the last day of the financial year). Founded in a garage by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, over the last four decades Microsoft has become a vast multinational corporation.
I say again that what we need is for governments to get off the backs of the people who, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs create the jobs you want to see created. But it's not just the Apples, Amazons, Microsofts, and Googles. The outfits that have been hit hardest by government overreach are companies like McDonald's, which in the U.S., as a consequence of government-imposed "minimum wage" requirements, are pretty much shut down at the moment while they overhaul and install automated ordering devices. Guess what will happen to the people who used to take orders. They're outta there and they'll join the unemployed. What's worse is that outfits like McDonalds historically have provided the entry-level jobs that kids need to learn what it's like to work. I remember my early days with a paper route and a job at the Detroit Zoo (
http://www.russ-lewis.com/history/my%20early%20life.html). Nowadays there's almost nothing like that available to introduce you to productive work. That's not the fault of business. It's the fault of government!
Government interference with the economy is what produces what you call ". . . unemployed and increasingly unemployable
people." The free market, unencumbered, eventually can restore economic sanity and solve the problem.
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