Pat Gilbert:
Say what you will about old-school farming, yes it is hard work but it would keep people employed and fed. The problem with the 60,000 vacant jobs is that not everybody who used to farm has the wherewithal to perform the technological tasks associated with the new farming.
This will be true of all professions, as not everybody is a rocket surgeon, and those who are will probably be at the top of their fields already, and be the last to be replaced by the new technologies because they would most likely be the most skilled.
The argument for NAFTA was that all the outsourced manufacturing jobs would be replaced by the advanced technology jobs, except that not everybody that lost a manufacturing job could do an advanced technology job.
What does someone, whose intellectual limits necessitate his doing manual labor, do for a job once the technology has replaced the need for his services?
As the technology advances and the more specialized human labor becomes obsolete, what will all these people do?
Market forces work well for the few, and while there is an abundance of food, there are nonetheless many starving people, because of market forces and the need to make a profit, versus a more humanitarian need to recognize the inequalities involved in the distribution of a surplus of food.
When NAFTA happened, the white collar people liked it, because they saw it as cheaper prices for goods that did not affect their jobs, only the jobs of lower-level blue collar workers, who they deemed disposable.
Now that white collar jobs are affected, it has everyone wondering what they will do when their job is outsourced or automated. They could go back to school, and learn a new field that may be obsolete by the time they are finished with their studies.
As I said earlier, I am glad that I am as old as I am. If I were 35 years old, I would be very concerned.