By Bernard Avishai, TPMCafe, June 11, 2011

The New York Times reports that manufacturing companies are recovering, but not in a way that much reduces unemployment. They are acquiring, the report says, machines, not workers. This was as foreseeable as financial bubbles in an age of electronic securitization, and many have been warning about it for a generation.

Back in 1997, I wrote a piece for Strategy and Business laying out in simple terms what innovations in manufacturing would do to "labor" and, broadly, how governments ought to prepare for them. I imagined the warning coming as a farewell speech by a retiring CEO with common sense and vision....

Artappraiser's note: I almost posted the Times article when it appeared on June 9, especially because some of the things said in it were applicable to destor23's news item Obama Thinks Worker Skills Are The Problem? that created a lot of discussion. But I thought twice and didn't because I could see the way that discussion was going that the Times article, being so short, didn't bring out the long term issues (which were being ignored in the discussion) enough and I wasn't up to adding them. Avishai's 1997 piece does pretty well at handling those. I recommend reading both of them together before commencing with knee-jerk reactions which I'm sure some will still have.