Why Jobs Aren't Coming Back
Here's a few excerpts from a great article entitled Walker's World over at UPI.com. The last sentance in the article is one of the most profound statements I read in a long time. Concerning our current economic woes, it states "this is less an event, than a transition. We won't be getting back to normal, not ever."

Walker's World excerpts
.....there are three important factors at work here, beyond the flawed and over-politicized design of most government stimulus packages.

The first is that consumer demand is down by about $500 billion a year in the United States. The second is that corporations have learned to do more with less, to produce goods with fewer employees and thus to cut costs and boost earnings. The third is more worrying: that current and future employment is being depressed not by the economic cycle but by fundamental structural and technological change in the economy.

The success of Amazon in selling books and e-books means the bankruptcy of bookstore chains like Borders, whose final 11,000 employees are being laid off. The U.S. Postal Service, the need for its services eroded by e-mail, is planning to cut 220,000 jobs over the next five years, half of them through layoffs.

Whereas automation began by eroding the need for a large blue-collar workforce, we are starting to see the way computerization is eroding the demand for a white-collar workforce, whether in newspapers, paralegal services or accounting. The education industry is likely to follow, as cheap distant learning starts to erode the demand for traditional college education.

The next victim will be healthcare services, hitherto one of the fastest-growing employment areas. The coming of constant and automated diagnosis through smart phones, followed by the eventual success of electronic health records, is going to reduce the need for human staff.

Then will come the reduced need for cashiers and retail staff (6 percent of U.S employment) as we move to electronic payment by phones. Vodaphone is building hardware on the assumption that by 2020 half of all retail transactions will be conducted by smartphones.

The core of the problem is that governments have been trying to tackle this economic crisis by using the tools of the 1930s, as if it were another version of the Great Depression that could be resolved through traditional Keynesian methods. But it is starting to become clear that many of the roots of this crisis stem from the reality that we are already entering a completely different technological era in which the traditional tools of job creation and demand stimulus no longer work in the same old ways.

Where this takes us as an economy dependent on mass employment to pay for consumption, taxes and pensions that still unclear. And what it does to us as a society in which most people measure much of their self-worth by their jobs and their incomes and their ability to take care of their families is more uncertain still. But the essence of this crisis is becoming clear; it is less an event than a transition. We won't be getting back to "normal," not ever.