Unemployment epdemic

In a conversational occasion of an afternoon tea at my friend's place last week, the unemployment issue was one of the topics we discussed on.  We talked about why this social problem could be knocking down almost every one of the governments so severely around the world?

A news media recently reported that the US young people's unemployment is all time high in the history. They described the current major social problem as "unemployment epidemic". That means US is not the only one suffering from high unemployment problem, the rest of the world are in the same situation.


A few months ago, the news reported that less people are using pen and paper in letter writing  nowadays, Post shops everywhere experienced a sharply falling volume of mails to be delivered; postmen had far less mails to deliver than before. In 2011, the US Postal Service was going to closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers. Obviously, IT industries have made the postal service taking actions in their restructuring process.

I was in the printing industry, installing web offset printing machines for newspapers in Taiwan prior to my immigration to New Zealand 20 years ago. We serviced the printing systems for most of the major newspapers then. Now, not as many people are buying a copy of papers from the newsstand to read as before. People reads news from internet, or from their mobile smart phones. So there are only 4 newspapers survived now since the internet technology was launched comparing to the days before 1998 when the count of all of the important newspapers was about 10.

The huge company restructuring, or to be more straight forward, making employees redundant, associates my thoughts to the major invention in 1769, steam engine. Steam engine was invented by English engineer, James Watt. His invention could replace a huge team of workers working on the same volume of workload and never complained being tired. According to the history, the next year of his invention, 1770, Industrial Revolution ignited and the whole Europe experienced an unprecedented change. Workers were laid-off, the rich were getting richer, and the poor had no place to work for making a living. It took the nature to adjust to assimilate to the new order of human beings' civilization for about 100 years, when everyone wanted a job got a job, to see the society calming down.

Now, in the year 1995, we saw the IT industry has almost matured to a degree that it was able to start a chain reaction causing almost every sect of the various industries to leap in an even bigger pace than the one occurred 200 odd years ago. Every government is headache with all the changes its brainy ministers had never seen, not to say they were not sure how to harness this monster effectively. Therefore, ministers hit by the tough problems stepped down one after another. The changes are hard to be brought down to the earth. The internet is creating all sorts of problems more efficiently than the human brain.

I remember when I brought my family to live in New Zealand in 1992, I often went to library with my children whenever they had school project assigned by the teacher to do, and were in need of information. Every child was permitted to borrow 20 books to take home for reading, digesting, extracting the information in order to complete the school assignment. A few years letter, my children gradually stop going to library to carry those heavy books home for study, they sit in front of the computer and punch a few keys and all the information they needed were on the screen. So I envisage that librarians must have sensed the upcoming redundancy. 

In another tea meeting with some friends, we talked about the unrest in many parts of the world. Everyone of us presented their views of the unemployment epidemic. I said that this monster will be growing even bigger and more powerful, yet human brain will be shrinking because the super fast evolution of IT technology.

To my perception of the unemployment problem, IT's fast evolution was the factor to blame,  I call it the modern day revolution. Indeed, it has advanced too fast and too huge a scale that wherever an incident occurs, the rest of the regions global wide will react instantly.

What will this revolution be developing into? Nobody knows, but we can guess what it will  turn to-- a monster, and an angel at the same time. Yes, it will take our jobs away and at the same time, it raise the productivity growth and provide more low cost commodities for us to enjoy. We end up getting more time to relax, but we will not feel as happy as the days when the IT was just two letters.