There is an interesting post over at pieria.co.uk called "The Financialisation of Labour". Frances Coppola compares the changing economic incentives between a company making a capital investment in a slave and an employee. She then suggests replacing the word "slave" with the word "robot".
Jon Perry has written an interesting post listing some strategies for dealing with the Technological Unemployment Problem.
The Technological Unemployment Problem is the issue of technology replacing humans to the point that there is massive unemployment.
There is a very scary article on the Atlantic about how you essentially become shunned by employers after 6 months of unemployment. It is about an experiment by Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University. He applied for 600 job openings using fake resumes, within which he varied 3 factors - how long the applicant had been out of work, how often they had switched jobs, and how much experience they have. What he found is that how long you've been out of work is the most important thing that employers look at. People prefer to hire someone with no experience, than someone that has been out of a job for more than 6 months. Scary stuff.
I've just been reading this Forbes article called "The Rise of Developeronomics". The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging your own capital. This article builds on an earlier article by David Kirpatick called "Now Every Company is a Software Company".
The Luddites were a 19th century anti-industrialisation movement (and militia), who believed that their jobs were at risk because of the industrialisation of manufacturing. They proceeded to try and destroy mechanical looms in a vain attempt to turn back the rising tide of industrialisation. These days anyone seen as a "Luddite" is perceived to be backward and anti-technology.
I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently.
The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that technological improvements are severely impacting every job market except those for highly-skilled individuals.
Over at EconBrowser, James talks about Geography and Income. He talks about the question of how much economic activity is dependent on geographic location. When you look at a map of GDP density - GDP per square kilometre - it's fairly obvious that the bulk of economic activity in densely populated areas which are near coastal regions.
I saw this great info-graphic on The Atlantic comparing the costs of prison in the US with Princeton University.
There was an interesting article in the Guardian yesterday about Peak Stuff: Why is our consumption falling?. The Office of National Statistics in the UK publishes statistics about how much stuff is used - the sheer weight of the materials we consume. Currently the UK consumes the equivalent of 30 tonnes for each individual in the country!
Are the American people obsolete? Salon argues that because of globalisation and technology there is now a increased separation between capital and labour. The activities that generate wealth have both been outsourced to cheaper shores, and become more efficient because of technology. As a consequence the social contract in Western society between rich and poor - the rich provide the capital while the poor provide the labour - is breaking down. The rich still have capital, but they can now move the production of goods to the East, creating a shortage of jobs in the West.