Cake or Death: Reduced work time gets another boost

(Hat Tip to Tom Walker)

Dave Johnson asks: Shouldn’t High Unemployment = Less Work To Do?

Our unemployment emergency may really be about less work to do. Hale “Bonddad” Stewart writing at 538.com, Labor Force Realignment and Jobless Recoveries concludes, (click through for gazillions of charts and full explanation)

The “jobless recovery” is in fact a realignment of the US labor force. Fewer and fewer employees are needed to produce durable goods. As this situation has progressed, the durable goods workforce has decreased as well. This does not mean the US manufacturing base is in decline. If this were the case, we would see a drop in both manufacturing output and productivity. Instead both of those metrics have increased smartly over the last two decades, indicating that instead of being in decline, US manufacturing is simply doing more with less.

So it may be that machines and computers are doing more of the work that people used to have to do.