It saved the Us by creating jobs when the economy was in the toilet and Nafta had sent too many US jobs overseas. The 2000's job recession was when the tech companies started sending their work overseas. It was really a tech industry recession. Yes, the .com bubble burst but the massive exporting of jobs to China and India is what made us unemployed and unable to recover for so long - we never actually recovered. Many people left the tech industry all together and never got back.

We will go into another giant recession if the TPP comes which will gut us worse than Nafta did.

it's forcasted that over a million jobs will leave America and countless jobs in America will be taken over by the very large increase of H1B's that the TPP allows to be let in who are coming specifically to take our jobs for low pay.

Since the 70's our job recessions have to do with work going over seas(actually south America in the 70's) and since the 2000's work going overseas as well as overseas labor imported here.

Incidently this is one of the ways Nafta has destroyed many countries and it's big brother the TPP will destroy even more. When the jobs moved to countries where the labor was cheapest, they stayed there until workers demanded rights and then moved to the next country were work was cheapest leaving the one they left in ruins with their recent new found economy of jobs gone and their old system completely totaled as it had been replaced by the new system. This went on all over South America and it currently working its way through Asia and Africa. It destroys every 3rd world economy it hits - first making them feel wealthy with jobs and then abandoning them as fast taking all the jobs with it, after the countries restructure to counting on those jobs and have gotten rid of the traditional system they used to have.

You must be mistaken. It destroyed 15 million jobs, so it must be worse than free trade.

The tech industry saved us by suddenly coming up with jobs when our manufacturing had moved over seas. After a long job recession - all through the 80's tech grew in the 90's and took over. The Regan era was a terrible recession that the computer industry of the 90's took us out of. Of course through the early 2000's the computer industry exported many of their jobs just like the factories had done before them and that's why the big tech job recession that snowballed into all but low paying job recession as the tech workers saturated the market looking for any job they could find. It still hasn't recovered. The Us just doesn't count the people no longer on unemployment - that were kicked off from being on too long and never finding a job. I know many men who never came back to work, still - because the jobs still aren't there and they've given up.

They're job-killers, plain and simple.

Are you talking 70's factory labor that got robotized factories but still exported most of their labor to Mexico and South America which was the real job killer?

And, I am not "shilling" for Tech companies.

Since you don't understand a word I've said, I will end the communication with you. Thanks for providing no depth but wild opinion in this lop sided discussion. Lopsided because I provided information and you provided nothing.

You're joking, right?

Remember how there used to be travel agents?

Brick & mortar bookstores?

In-office couriers?

Every single post is dripping in snark and sarcasm.

Whole sectors of employment don't exist anymore.

I work in the travel industry, which was mentioned upthread somewhere as being affected. Yes, we were affected to an extent but the focus shifted and different jobs were created. We don't need people to sit and hand write tickets anymore but we now need people that can create mobile apps, that can enhance distribution systems, etc. While I don't doubt that 10 million+ jobs are no longer as they were, a new subset of jobs that didn't exist at the time have been created.

I'm applying the same standard to the Internet a lot of posters apply to trade

Trade agreements certainly had the same affect, transforming and shifting jobs. The only problem with that for the US is that it shifted and transformed them by moving them from this country into other countries. While tech jobs allowed for those adjustments to be made here for the most part, allowing US workers to make that transition and claim those new skills and positions, a large magnitude of those jobs affected by trade agreements simply moved to workers in other countries. Their workforce grew while ours took the loss.

Sweden and Germany would be economic wastelands populated by poor people with weak unions and shattered safety nets. They are not.

Sweden did not get where it is today by blaming and attacking 'free trade' but by doing what FDR did - supporting strong unions, raising taxes on everyone, especially the rich, providing an effective safety net and regulating businesses and corporations.

Keystone XL, right? Under Nafta if our laws stop a company they can sue us for what profits they would have had and they can't be subjected to our laws to stop their profits. With the TPP they not only get to sue us but the trade union itself is the court and judge. Democracy Now keeps having Trade Watch.org on their site and explain this quite well.

strong unions and a progressive society together?

The difference is the "tech boom" also created jobs in this country. Free trade policies have failed to do that.

Really?

But when Apple "exports" their iPhones, they aren't making a whole lot of US jobs.

I eagerly await your claim that an $8/hour service job is exactly the same as a $30/hr manufacturing job.

And they rose more in the 2 decades after NAFTA than the two decades before.

Your model is wrong. People found higher paying jobs.

Have you ever asked yourself to whose interest it is that you believe the opposite of what the data say?

with job displacements.

Not simply "technology" as a whole

I can carry just about everything I need, including recorded music, books for pleasure and data for work, videos, TV, games, etc., on my phone nowadays. So far, robots haven't displaced my job, although a trained primate could probably handle it in a pinch.

We definitely need to figure out how to handle the future in terms of guaranteed income, etc. It's going to be tough.

The boom in tech jobs created high paying jobs that the millions of tech displaced workers could not qualify for. It created a million high-paying jobs and eliminated 15 million middle and low income jobs. However, the tech industry escaped any blame or cause for the increasing income gap and the loss of industrial jobs...you just can't blame robots because they don't run for office against your preferred candidate.

While Bernie rails against the income gap he only blames Wall Street, NAFTA, trade deals, and banks and Hillary.

A dose of reality is strong medicine for everyone. No one will swallow it.

That is what the motto of many BS supporters seems to be. If facts do not fit their positions, they just simply forget about them.

You want high quality goods and services delivered to you at affordable costs, then you have to innovate with technology AND use cheaper labor markets where possible.

It's not all greedy CEOs driving this phenomenon. It's primarily the US consumer.

It's not about what you or someone else does on an individual level. It's on a mass level. Amazon put a lot of bookstores out of business. The same with Netflix.

Manufacturers and retailers are responding to what consumers are demanding on a mass level.

At least many new jobs were created here and around the world. Just wait for machine learning and AI-- they are the second wave of change that may have even greater consequences. There may not be as many compensatory jobs, when humans are less needed.

there was hardly retraining for workers like you see in the energy field today, to transition those workers.

Receptionists? Customer service for every company that was ever in the U.S. How did the tech boom hurt?

Which shuts out mainly poorer people.

You can sign all the trade deals you want. An Uberized economy isn't the worst thing in the world if there's no threat of starvation or homelessness. Of course, the threat of "work or starve" is fundamental to the capitalist system and and that concession would only be made as a last resort.

Interestingly, a 25k UBI is around what 15 dollars an hour would be after taxes.

It simply has gone to the Jeff Bezos' of the world.

Jobs have disappeared but the GDP grows apace.

Tax the fuck out of 'em. Use the proceeds to restore a middle class within the new economy.

To me, "boom" implies something short term.

It's an ongoing technical evolution, and it will continue to accelerate and dstroy jobs. How we are to deal with this should be a major topic of conversation in the election.

I'm suspicious that every change has both positive and negative impacts.
If you are happy with the positive impacts, you overlook the negative impacts and vice versa.

Thing is, though, that we are more productive with the fewer jobs than we have ever been. The increase in tech should have made us a society with more leisure because the value is still there, it just comes with fewer labor hours.

The increasing minimum wage is a step in the right direction, but we have to fundamentally rethink the structure of the workplace to catch up with ourselves.

This is nothing new. The very manufacturing jobs many DUers wish to protect at all costs initially displaced other jobs, frequently higher-pay artisan type work. Its effects too crossed international borders. Trade has shifted many times both in commodity and geography. Remember, large-scale human commerce began in an area now considered to be worthless wasteland but which for centuries was the engine of the global economy and the seat of wealth and power.

I'll never see it, in the US at least, but eventually we have to decide which decades-old vision of the mechanized computerized future we'll get to see. The collaborative utopia of Star Trek or the brutal dystopia of Soylent Green. We have to decide what the billions of people who are incapable of becoming or surplus to requirements for programmers, engineers, technicians, executives or leisure industry workers get to do. They (what am I saying? If it were here and now that would be "we&quot either need to be killed, passively or actively or superannuated with the fruits of excess global production capacity.

The race for the vast majority of human history was for productive capacity and reaource generation to catch up with the number of people who needed those resources. In the last few decades that race has been reversed, and the excess people need to do something else.

I'm assuming this is making about a point about free trade, and it is a good point. Neither tech nor trade really affect the total number of jobs out there, they just affect what kinds of jobs there are. The unemployment rate didn't rise during the tech boom, nor did it rise after NAFTA or other trade agreements.

What does happen is some jobs disappear, and the people working those jobs have to find other things to do, and their new jobs a lot of times don't pay as well as what they were doing before. And there is a valid argument that tech has increased inequality, buy creating a small (relatively) number of high paying jobs, but causing many OK-paying jobs to disappear. Same is true with trade.

It's just the way things are, we aren't going to stop developing technology or trading, nor should we. I do think that more should be done to help people who lost their jobs to either of those, and also that there should generally be more redistribution of wealth.