I read an interesting article from Reason magazine’s website today that covers some of the issues you guys have brought up in the context of the debate over NAFTA.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/125218.html

It is short but gives some of the actual numbers I think Mackenzie was asking for.

In fact, the argument that we are now living in a two-income society would seem to strengthen my argument that imports do not hurt employment rates because employment rates have dropped even with the doubling of our available workforce.

You move the goalposts again when I answered your question about what jobs have replaced those we are losing when you begin to argue that we can and will lose many of those jobs to other nations and that others of those jobs apparently don’t count because they are supported by a debt-based economy. Once again I believe that our values are aligned here but the value judgment of whether our society is making sound financial decisions was not the point of discussion.

The data cited, and the point of the post, was to show that losing jobs to imports does not lead to rising unemployment.

Also – I never said that you were mistaken – that was another commenter.

Just because I include local observations does not mean that I am only concerned about what is happening locally, as I have already explained in our business we deal with a national and sometimes international market and so you should not assume that because I use an example from what is closest to me that I am concerned only with my local community.

I am asking you to hypothesize or else relate to some kind of a study that identifies actual jobs that have been created to replace jobs that are leaving the country.

I identified a new job with day care centers and that new job also identifies a change in the quality of life, where by the responsibility for raising children shifts from the family unit to the community, This is a change in the quality of living that directly relates to an economic shift during the time period when unemployment has allegedly decreased. If housewives formerly did not need to work out side of the home, then, according to your explanation, they would formerly have been excluded from the statistics, If a second income is needed to support the family, then now a housewife would be included despite the fact that there is still a need to do the work that supports the home and family – another change in the quality of existence, women’s liberation aside. because a man or a woman could be a housewife, full time or part time. So we are not just dealing with a change in unemployment statistics, only. We are dealing with a different demographic upon which those statistics are calculated.

Granted, technology changes over the years, but you are now arguing that we have replaced manufacturing jobs with manufacturing jobs and technology. Ok, but a lot of the technology that can be exported to a third world country, without environmental laws or worker’s rights, are being exported for those reasons and this erodes democracy. In this country manufacturers, (and hand crafted products qualify as manufacturers) have to pay a large percentage of parole to support workers rights that this nation has developed over the course of its history. Large corporations increase their profit margins by moving whatever manufacturing, technology development, and service industry they can to less democratic nations without ecology laws. One of our chief competitors in the job market is communist China, which also happens to be a heavily polluted nation with a competitive, inexpensive labor market. Any job that a large corporation can move to a less expensive economy will be moved.

A lot of the jobs you mention depend on the existence a thriving economy to support those jobs. Our economy is riding on a huge amount of national and personal debt, which is probably supporting many of the types of jobs that you have mentioned.

As I see it our economy has to look to small and medium sized business for it’s secure employment. This is not a bad thing, in my opinion, but I still do not have a picture of what those jobs are that secure within a non-competitive democratic economy, – (that is non-competitive with non-democratic economies).

Over time, the peoples of the non-democratic nations are apt to be motivated to increase individual rights and environmental laws, whether through legislation or acts of violence. This has been the course of history whenever wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the few.

As for the unemployment statistics, the key question is who are the control groups? Is it a fair cross-section of the economy? If this question were answered, it would likely also answer the question of what new jobs are being created.

We have millions of new technology jobs. We have manufacturing sectors that didn’t exist before we had to manufacture microchips and circuit boards (for example). We have new service industries such as day-care and dog walking. Our ever-increasing body of knowledge has led to new academic disciplines and many more jobs in higher education as rising percentages of our expanding population seek college degrees at all levels in established fields such as accounting as well as newer fields like geophysics.

In short, the growth is rampant in areas that we can’t even think of in the context of 50 years ago. If you want to know where the growth will be in the next 50 years I can’t predict that.

You’re mistaken on this point – unemployment figures do not count all those without jobs as unemployed (if it did, our unemployment would be well over the 5% mark we see today). To find the unemployment rate, a large sample of people are surveyed. They’re first asked if they are gainfully employed. If they answer no, then they’re asked if they are actively seeking work – if they want to be employed. If they ask my wife – a homemaker – she’d say no, and they’d leave her out of the equation entirely. The unemployment rate consists, then, of those without work, but who are able and willing to work, and who are actively seeking employment.

How it is counted when one person has two jobs – and how are partime jobs counted? Are the statistics based on a forty hour week?

If you want to compare the economy to the economy half a century ago that was a time when the distribution of wealth took the form of a bell curve, with the greatest concentration of wealth shared by the greatest number of people. That makes a better environment for the nurturing of a democracy than the way that wealth is distributed today.