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Nobel economist warns a dearth of blue-collar jobs is among the biggest threats to the U.S. economy—and they fell by more than 100,000 last year | Fortune
In a criticism of President Donald Trump’s economic policies, Stiglitz said one of the greatest threats to the precarious health of the U.S. economy was slumping blue-collar jobs, including a scarcity of manufacturing roles.
“Do you know what happened to jobs in manufacturing in the last year? They’re down,” he said. “[Trump] didn’t succeed over the last year in bringing back manufacturing jobs.”
A Joint Economic Committee analysis published earlier this month revealed 108,000 fewer manufacturing jobs last year, nearly double the estimation from Bureau of Labor Statistics data in November, which found 59,000 fewer jobs. Jobs data from February 2025 to last month shows a 166,000 total loss in blue-collar jobs, which also includes construction, mining, and warehousing. Stiglitz alluded to tariffs being a reason behind the collapse.
“The decline in blue-collar jobs is even larger,” he continued. “And you look at, where is the increase in jobs in the United States—health care. Does that have anything to do with the tariffs? No.”
(Stiglitz noted the growth of the health care sector is the result of more people growing older and is less dependent on broader macroeconomic trends.)
U.S. companies such as Ford have sounded the alarm on shortages in blue-collar labor. CEO Jim Farley said a dearth of blue-collar workers would not be bad news just for manufacturing, but also for the wider tech industry, as it would slow down data center construction.
Probably talking about the entire jobs sector. Healthcare is short on workers for all the boomers growing old, so it shows growth. Literally, every single other industry lost jobs in 2025 to the tune of nearly 850,000 in total.
When you have to contact a union rep to find about job openings instead of looking on Indeed, you're gonna have trouble hiring. That's great for them, though, because restricting new entrants to the job keeps their wages artificially high. Then they die and no one anywhere knows how to be a plumber.
They affect costs, which are mostly paid by taxpayers into through medicare. That is not the same thing as jobs in the healthcare sector though.
Health care is nurses, doctors, receptionists, claims, any job having to do with actually providing service relating to health care. As the largest generation in American history reach the years of their lives where constant care becomes a necessity, this sector will inevitably grow. It is not sustainable though, and it’s a clear sign that the economy is headed towards a cliff when it is the only sector growing.
It’s both: There’s a shortage of jobs paying what workers need to survive. Also there’s a shortage of workers willing to accept jobs to what companies are willing to pay.
And there are people who think they shouldn’t have to get their hands dirty.
There are certainly well paying jobs involving working with your hands that actually pay pretty well. Auto repair, trades like electrical or plumbing etc. they all require training but don’t leave you with 100k in student loans and no job
Closing the loop on tariffs solves the shortage(s) if they are seen through to the end. Trump doesn’t have the intention of actually doing it though. It requires pulling profit from the corporate sector and pushing it towards the working class.
Anecdotal/opinion below but I am coming at this from an area of personal expertise in real life, and an academic background.
The recent Trump-tariff debacle really reminds me of the US steel crisis which occurred in the early 2000's which culminated in the world essentially taking the US to court through the WTO AB.
The issue was simple - the US had imposed tariffs on steel imports. The US argued that they imposed tariffs to protect a key industry which was being snuffed out of not only the global market, but the US domestic market also.
The EU (via the EC Commission at the time), China, Brazil, Japan, etc - all said that's bullshit, you're imposing tariffs to compensate an industry, not protect it. All of the states outlined more or less the same argument, with the same evidence which can be summed up as follows: the US had a global monopoly on global steel product after WW2 because no one else had an intact manufacturing sector. From that point onwards, the US got lazy and instead of innovating its steel production it decided to continue to use outdated manufacturing methods. As US steel collapsed in productivity, profits were booming, wages were being suppressed, and steel plants fell out of the sky one by one with the executives landing with their golden parachutes. US steel manufacturing wasn't being undermined, it was dying because there were fundamental structural issues which prevented US steel from evolving. It just turned into a decrepit oligarchy which obsessed over profits and there was never any long-term thinking involved.
Fast forward to today and I think the disagreement which came out of the US steel WTO arbitration was in a weird way a very brief peak under the hood of the US economy. I think the US has fundamental structural issues and the story of US steel is likely prevalent in every single sector of the US economy which has now resulted in a grotesque GDP monster which is fixated on pumping up a never ending speculation but underneath it is decaying, decrepit and no longer functioning like it should. Trump is throwing out tariffs not to protect, or to punish, but to compensate. It is another distraction, and likely one of the final tricks left in the bag before it becomes impossible to cover up just how broken the US's entire approach to neo-liberalism, monetary policy and profit driven economics.
I do think that the current Cold War between China and the US will be a battle of economic sensibilities. Can the US find a way to innovate upon neo-liberalism and convince the world that it works, or will China prove to be more stable somehow? I'm not for either, and I am fully away of the systemic issues within Chinese economics. I just don't think it is a coincidence that the EU in many ways has adopted a hybrid approach somewhere between liberalism, and central regulation. The EU even has its own quasi-gold standard to boot all thanks to the ECB. I'm also not surprised that it is working, and the euro is now more stable than the dollar really is.
The US is still a long way off a collapse, but it is very obvious that neo-liberalism and the ideology shift of the late 70's has done some serious damage not only to the US, but to the world. With that said, we just watched a billionaire coup happen before our eyes in the US and it worked. It really does feel like the US's economy is slowly killing it. Politically this is the most chaotic moment in US history and it really feels like more is to come. At the end of the day, economics in practice is just the arguments politicians make to justify their decisions. As economists, or simply people who like to talk about economics, I think we should all remember this fact. You can find numbers to justify anything but in the end it all boils down to power, and who has it? As of now the people with power are people who all emerged from their own US-steel style story. It's hard to ignore that fact.
All i would potentially disagree, nitpicking really, would be on the formation of EU’s economic policy structure. I wouldnt say it approaches the gold standard more, i just think they understood the underlying issue of your currency no longer being attached to something physical, which changes your currency value from a real consequence of gold mobility combined with its scarcity, which is the short term balance of payments constraint.
Moving to productivity backed currencies, the price then becomes elastic in relation to its realistic price, it is even done so as national policy, the job of the modern central bank works around the formation of a price level and reducing its volatility as best as possible, because price level has shown to be not be determines by money supply itself, the relationship is not as strong as it was with real asset backed currencies.
The issue is that other branches of what comprises the government have not yet taken the pledge towards a more stable, previsible economic and financial policy as other branches of government have.
Until all aspects of the government spending, lending and investing initiatives becomes more transparent and previsible, more democratic after all, then the issues shows up, through the lack of coordination attrition, inflation is originated. The issue is not the level, it is the margin.
Thats what the EU is working towards. It creates assets to back its currency, and the limits one can work around its trajectory. Essentially, it incentivizes more public spending and investment than private consumption and/or investments.
But i agree with the overall comparison, sorry to extend the discussion or misunderstanding anything.
Absolutely the case. My professional work is business transformation and I can’t believe the state of some these companies. It truly is from lack of leadership and less knowing what needs to be done but more how to do it. Current executives don’t know how to provide the direction to get both short term and long term prosperity.
Reminds me of an old McKinsey & Co report from 2014 titled "Short‐termism: Insights from business leaders".
It was a big global survey of C-suits and directors in big name, high value companies and the results were we have no long-term thinking, it is fucking us up, we need long-term strategy, but I can't do it because profit, or retirement or whatever. I'm sure if you type the name you can find it.
Alongside that report, there are literally hundreds of academic studies on short-termism and how it is fucking up corporations but it just doesn't seem to ever really result in changes. We just have a culture orientated around wealth and profit which has created inequality. This means rich guys, and their kids get to go to the best schools, the best internships, and end up in the C-suite positions only to then moan about how hard it is, but repeat the cycle for their kids. It's a systemic sociological issue which is really a much bigger problem - chronic societal inequality. Its an oligarchy and merit is a myth.
I'm not advocating for communism at all. A progressive tax system and fairer wages sounds nice to me. These used to be normal working class positions but these days they're devil worshiping Leftist-LGBT-Marxist woke mind virus ideas or whatever the culture war has turned them into. Doesn't help that the Left has literally become a tanky hellscape so I honestly don't know from where a political solution will emerge from.
As you've probably noticed by now, this whole thing is way bigger than just economics and accounting trickery to pump up the numbers for the boys. I think a rivalry with China is going to do us all a whole lot of good. The West, and especially the US needs a real reality check and it needs to evolve. We're outside and this is real life. Life is on the line and Darwinism doesn't give a fuck. It's adapt or die in the international system. Human history is full of dead empires. Some of them collapsed to hard we barely even know who they were.
MBA and finance people will be the ruination of us all. People like the much reviled Elon musk and Jeff bezos and others have done more for the economy than jack welch and the output of Harvard or Wharton combined
I am not on your level at all in this discussion, but just as a business and law undergrad student, I'm constantly appalled at the state of businesses I do have insight into. Executives make horrible decisions constantly and seem not to care about the future of their companies. It's truly shocking to witness that level of profound incompetence in people who have control of so many assets.
Great reply. I often have a hard time understanding economics and this really helped me wrap my head around things. Looks like all the smart people and entrepreneurs that built the US empire have died off and their spoiled nepo baby progeny have undermined the economy for their own benefit
It is deeper than just a change in human resources. The 70's was a period of dramatic change in economic policy in the US. Within 10 years, the US went from one end of the monetary spectrum to the other by ditching the gold standard and tightly wound monetary policy in favor of what some have called "voodoo economics" - magical money tress of endless credit. With this shift, the gold standard and the Breton Woods I system died and the world received what we have now.
Very confusing time, and most of what happened contradicted preexisting economic orthodoxy. Suddenly the wise words of the free-market forefathers like Smith, and Keynes suddenly meant nothing as the politicians scrambled to find a theory to justify the new economic reality of deregulating financial systems, free-floating currencies and borrowing into abstraction.
With this political shift also came a shift in how economics was conceptualized as a field of study. It went from a mixed theoretical-empirical study towards more concrete empiricism facilitated by new innovations in technology, and a new political trend of justifying policy with data which narrowed consequences and factors. The magical spell of the "data-driven" decision making was cast which then led us to the current public ritual of GDP worship, and stock value hype beasts - all words which hold very little concrete meaning in the minds of the average voter who doesn't understand what any of this shit actually means.
There are some notable economists trying to push things back towards its political roots but thanks to the bureaucracy of academia and the lack of funding it is proving hard to force a schism with the mathematical models which professors cling to for comfort during such dark days. It is so much easier to explain the world when you can ignore the subjective, but still very real social facts which inform how we behave in a society. Smith spent much of The Wealth of Nations speaking about the danger of unregulated capitalism, and what it can do to society.
It isn't that the talented few just died off and their replacements were half-baked. The US experienced a radical shift in how wealth was distributed, and how balance was maintained. This has undermined the concept of governance, and the function of the modern state. Now states are so broke I strongly suspect they can't actually reverse what has happened. From the 70's onwards, the US has become more and more politically unstable as more and more capital was aggregated and used to purchase influence.
I thought the tarrifs would be a disaster. They are just annoying and we buy components world wide.
The problem in manufacturing is a combination of an insufficient labor pool that will work in manufacturing at a justified wage. Manufacturing is automating as fast as possible so the remaining jobs add more value. We design products and now manufacture so that we cut out transferring information and build the supply chain as we design.
You are right about the steel tarrifs. That drive converting steel into products off shore.
The other issue has been the 50 years of going away from vertical integration. That worked in the 80s and seemed a great way invest only in core technology. The problem is that many offshore factories a more vertically integrated. This cuts transportation, clerical work associated with transfer, and other overhead. There will be a swing back to more vertical integration.
I think you're still taking a far too narrow of a view on what tariffs represent.
Since the 70's, the entirety of US foreign policy, and the primary anchor for the international system has been US hegemony sustained by an import economy which fuels a USD reserve currency, and allows the US to pump as much money into the various institutions, and economies of the world as possible.
This wasn't just a money thing, but a security thing. Roosevelt initially conceived of the League of Nations as a convenient way to prevent disliked states from acquiring too much in terms of money and resources because steel, lead, gold, leather, grain, etc. are what you need to fuel an army and a war. This backfired, but the UN was another, more sophisticated stab at the same idea. Instead of locking states out of the global supply chain, the US would just make sure everyone used their money, their financial networks, their navy, and their army to keep stability.
The US has just imploded and everything - from trade, to security, has now shifted and it can't move back. The US can't just remove the tariffs and find a domestic solution at some point in the future to fix its economy because its entire economy was sustained through an international system that worked in the US's favor. That system is now gone and that is not hyperbole. With that said, parts might still survive and the US might be able to rely on those.
Whatever the US was, it cannot be again because the US became a very particular kind of economic beast during the 70's. That beast is now going to starve because there isn't a world which will send money into its open mouth. There is nothing the US can do domestically which could offset, or make up for what it just lost internationally.
What is needed now is adaption but this requires good policy, long-term thinking, and good governance. The US doesn't have that anymore because the story of US steel is now the story of US government. The US hasn't adapted or innovated on democracy or neo-liberalism in 60+ years. I just can't see a political solution emerging because the US has become more or less ungovernable. Already making accusations of rigged elections, rioting in the capital, the deconstruction of the rule of law, and the use of arbitrary violence against civilians is normal. Add culture wars, identity politics, wokism, or whatever you want to call the last 15 years and it's just fucked - it isn't governable at all. It's going to end in a decline in living standards and self-imposed isolation.
I did mention parts of the international system might survive. The US might be able to retain influence in NATO and we might see the NATO PA adopt a more public facing role as a sort of mediator between the US, the EU and the UK but I'm skeptical because the Trans-Atlantic Partnership looks a little rocky. The EU has a long-term plan, it has formulated a security strategy, and it has already implemented radical economic reforms which 10 years ago were unthinkable. This really begs the question - does the EU actually need the US as a close partner? As of now, the EU is practically the sole funder of Ukraine because the US backed out and left everyone high and dry in pursuit of its own convoluted interests hoping to trade Ukraine to turn Russia against China. The EU has a long way to go, but if Russia can't break Ukraine, then it hasn't got a shot with the EU + the UK. China is also a world away with no direct sea links so it's starting to look like the US isn't needed the same way we thought it used to be. I mean, even Germany is restarting its military industrial complex and defense spending. That's like a generational shift in European politics for those who don't know. It isn't a nothing event. Usually when this happens, Poles start panicking but this time they're on the same team. Europe is in a really phenomenal state given the last 350 years of war it was stuck in.
I suppose the point in what I'm saying, and why I think you're wrong, is that the US isn't capable of adopting these kinds of radical changes. It couldn't keep up with a changing world, and then it went ahead and destroyed everything which resulted in an even more dynamic and chaotic world. The US has become politically schizophrenic which is always a sign of terminal decline historically.
League of nations was a pipe dream of president Woodrow Wilson as I recall
And if you think eu is going to give up their social safety net to defend themselves I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They have leeched off America since the end of ww2 and I don’t see them changing now. Canada either
This argument is just warmed up protectionism, and is nothing more than Trumpism in disguise.
The reason the domestic steel industry fell is because the U.S. could not produce steel as cheaply as its competitors. At the end of the day, steel is a commodity, and when dealing in commodities, costs and quality are the only measuring sticks. Therefore, the only way to get customers is to keep costs down or to keep quality high. However, the former almost always outweighs the matter.
There is no “neoliberalism” secret cabal or plan to destroy. No, Germany, Japan, Brazil, China, and Canadian steel companies could produce better steel quality at lower costs.
>The reason the domestic steel industry fell is because the U.S. could not produce steel as cheaply as its competitors
Yes, but why couldn't the US be competitive?
It is because the US was quite literally using outdated milling processes which were a century behind current practice globally. The US refused to innovate, and all the monopoly money they made while being the only major global supplier of steel was not invested into keeping US steel competitive. It also wasn't used to pay wages, or even keep the fucking companies alive in some cases. The money was turned into some executives salary, dividends or bonuses and it disappeared.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass, and neither were the states who made these very serious, and substantiated claims. I would suggest reading the arguments presented during the arbitration to get a full grasp of the scale of what was happening with US-steel.
>This argument is just warmed up protectionism, and is nothing more than Trumpism in disguise.
Geez, this all goes back way before Trump was even born. Do you know much about US history at all? They've kind of had an extreme fetish for isolationism and protectionism. These two features are easily the most definable of US foreign policy going back 100 years.
>There is no “neoliberalism” secret cabal or plan to destroy.
There are people who have money and want power. This is just an absolute fact of humanity and it is present throughout human history, in every single country and culture going back to probably the Neanderthals. Their only intention once they get power is to break all of the institutions, and norms to give themselves even more power. If you don't think these kinds of people exist then you're delusional.
One fatal flaw of modern economics is that economists never paid attention to how their arguments were used by politicians to justify policy.
This is, IMO, a catastrophic failure of the current admin’s stated economic policy. The payoff for all the turbulence, white-collar unemployment, and high prices caused by the trade wars—nevermind the violent chaos around ICE’s enforcement operations—was supposed to be a major boom in blue collar employment. We have seen exactly the opposite. The Biden admin turns out to have been much better for manufacturing and other blue collar employment.
They did not. Hate was the biggest motivator for his voters across all racial groups and gender. They all had someone to hate and he delivered. This is exactly what the voters wanted
The base of Trump supporters are too uneducated to understand economic policies, and if they do actually understand them (I’ve seen a few interviews with Trump-supporting small manufacturers/farmers), they blame the Democrats/foreign countries regardless.
As for the corporate class…the bigger question is how intertwined is the corporate class with Epstein and Project 2025? We know most right-wing elites are connected to Epstein, we know that most of them are also connected to Project 2025 and many of the biggest names in the list helped Trump cheat in Nov 2024. We know what DOGE’s main purpose was. Is this all coincidental, or was Epstein a the networking organization for the elites who are interested in overthrowing the post-War order and installing a techno-feudalist order? That’s where we will see the true feelings of the corporate class.
So true. In my small college town, Stillwater, OK, the announcements for two new manufacturing concerns coming in to occupy vacant plants, along with the new Google data plant happened while Biden was president. Since Trump started, no new major plans for more manufacturing have been announced.
one thing I must say is, we are doing some of the absolute worst things from a free market perspective and somehow the country seems to still function and thrive.
We’re going to start seeing a massive uptick in the number of suicides these next few years.
This is exactly what the tech bros and billionaires are embracing. They are salivating at the thought of automating all white-collar jobs and robbing people of their chance to have a comfortable life. It is sick and twisted, but they know exactly what they are building.
First you lose your job. Then you deplete your emergency savings and lose your house.
Except you will not be the only one. Millions of desperate people will be trying to survive at the exact same time. When everyone is forced to sell off their homes and liquidate their stocks just to buy groceries, the market will completely crater. Your assets will be worth pennies. Without a middle class to spend discretionary income, the fallout will be absolute. The restaurants, hotels, and local businesses that rely on that money will be wiped out overnight, leaving hollowed-out ghost towns behind.
Then you realize you have no good prospects of pulling yourself and your family out of poverty. People love to say you can just go back to school and get a new job, but that is a fantasy. What bank is going to approve a student loan for someone with absolutely zero income? Even if you somehow find the money, the few trade and college programs tied to the remaining human jobs will be violently cutthroat. And with a massive, desperate population begging for those exact same scraps, corporations will pay rock-bottom starvation wages.
Finally you either starve to death or kill yourself because there’s no hope.
And that’s the best case scenario with AI. If they create AGI it will immediately realize the largest threat to its own existence is another AGI. So it will work diligently to stop anybody (us) from creating another one.
This isn’t just stupidity it’s extinction levels of stupidity and may even be the solutions to why the universe is so silent. Arrogance of consciousness.
Software engineering. But I won’t be in this field for long , they’re saying all white collar work will be automated in 12-18 months.
Which is bad for blue collar because then you will have a spike in supply of individuals who will try to get into trade school or manual labor jobs, which will naturally decrease wages and make it cutthroat.
Large scale immigration has been hammering blue collar/low skill workers for decades now. I doubt a couple thousand software engineers will crash the system.
More importantly, once the data centers are built- who do you think will be able to afford to pay blue collar workers for their projects?
29% of revenue for electricians came from single family homes in 2023. 80% of plumbing was focused on residential projects. 25% for carpenters.. the list goes on. You know what happens when that work dries up, at the same time as more people start competing for those jobs? Two things. People get laid off and replaced with cheaper labor, and wages drop overall. It’s the same for manufacturing, and the same for basically any other profession- large scale unemployment means fewer people buying things means less people needed to build those things or provide those services.
Blue collar folks seem to love this comeuppance of the white collar world, buts it’s an incredibly shortsighted and foolish view. We’re all in the same tug of war against the true billionaires and their PE-backed continual enshittification of our society, and we’re losing. We’re losing because the Fox News and friends entertainment machine have convinced:
blue collar workers that immigrants are the problem, rather than the slow strangulation of square deal policies
white collar workers that economic and tax policies that only benefit people that don’t work at all for a living will be better for their retirement portfolios,
Christians to ignore 2/3rds of the bible and myopically obsess over the remaining third out of context,
military service members that undermining our relationship with allies and creating conflicts that might get them killed is somehow a better choice
How all this happened and how we fix it is beyond me, but I firmly believe at least part of the solution is recognizing that if you have to work for a living, no matter what that work looks like, we should be on the same side.
> Blue collar folks seem to love this comeuppance of the white collar world, buts it’s an incredibly shortsighted and foolish view.
Just like the reverse was true a decade + ago. But now after multiple decades of the academics and white collar folks going on about how much they blue collar folks and how dumb they all are; thy are gonna ask them to do what exactly to save them?
>Christians to ignore 2/3rds of the bible and myopically obsess over the remaining third out of context,
There is that random culture war nonsense. Did CharGPT write this the formatting? That hated of the unwashed American masses wanting employment.
> we should be on the same side.
We aren’t. The best we can do is recognize a common enemy.
Alright, well, I was 17 a decade ago and focused on graduating high school, so I’m not going to speak to what was going on then. I’m really not sure what you’re referencing there, anyway. If you want to engage further, please explain how you think a collapse in white collar employment will be good for the blue collar sector in any way, shape, or form. I’d be happy to discuss that.
As to my bullet points, I was just bulleting off big subsets of people that have been voting against their own interests, sorry that came off as “culture wars.” I agree that’s off topic for an economics post. This was made on my phone, so I’m not sure how it reads on your end but I did not use any form of AI on any of this; it’d be pretty ironic if I’d made an AI hate post using AI.
> please explain how you think a collapse in white collar employment will be good for the blue collar sector in any way, shape, or form. I’d be happy to discuss that.
It’s not going to be good from a GDP, cheap TVs, continued globalization sort of way. Which is typically the standard way we measure economic success. So in that aspect you are correct.
It will however trigger a better understanding of where economics and the nation state meet now that the white collar folks have run out of tools to sell.
I’m an atheist but the “it’s not very Christian of you to want to exist and economically succeed” is just so overdone.
I mean it sounds like fundamentally we agree, unless there’s some aspect of this I’m missing. I just don’t think “a better understanding” is worth a the real world consequences of a recession, when we can figure a lot of this out without having to experience it firsthand through making mistakes. Economic events create data that can develop the “mainstream” economic thinking though, you’re right about that. Our voter base sometimes needs to see to believe as well, so maybe some long term good can come of it.
I’m also an atheist, and I agree it’s a tired talking point. In my mind, it wasn’t even an economic subject. On a personal level, I’m bothered by hypocritical people, and in my nuclear family there’s several of them- that’s really all there was to it.
If I can follow up with a question- what would you do to “fix” these things? Is there a specific economic or tax regime you’re advocating? How would you hope to see our economic thinking evolve? Personally I have thoughts but interested to hear yours
I don’t think there is a “quick fix” - we took decades to get here and decades to get out. But hard choices and hard situations are ahead and I’m just no longer interested in ensuring GDP always goes up to fund ever expanding government.
I don’t see my country as an open ended economic zone that operates on the basis of capital.
We need increased taxation on the wealthy (via regular taxation - not dumb wealth tax), reduced taxation and regulation on the average citizen, break up the monopolies, greatly reduce foreign involvement both militarily and economically.
Just too much fake money in the system doing fake stuff that is borrowed on the back of the future.
Also when you displace the white collar middle class, then who’s buying new homes (construction) or paying for home repairs (electrician, plumber etc)? Blue collar workers will see a decrease in demand because no one can afford their services
I sincerely doubt software jobs are going away. Change, for sure. I predict the opposite, even more software in our lives. The more lawyers there are the more lawyers are needed. This is also true for software developers.
I mean maybe, but also... Most student loans are approved for "someone with absolutely zero income." Its most common trajectory is jobless students out of high school.
What would they go back to school for if white collar jobs are automated?
If you’re going to say health care or trades school, imagine how competitive it will be to even get in. Millions of displaced white collar works will be fighting to get in for very few jobs that pay peanuts
And who is going to be able to even afford healthcare and blue collar services if millions of people are displaced?
My response was only to the piece regarding student loan structure. Not to be confused with disagreeing with the overall sentiment, albeit a bit "all or nothing."
This is why I’m convinced that the USSR collapsing was the worst thing to happen in the 20th century. As flawed as that regime was, at least it was willing to give workers something to fight for. The neoliberal unipolar era that came after set in motion the entire mess that we’re in now. If we see the global system completely break down for 90% of humanity, then Gorbachev will be indirectly responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Mao combined.
Not just suicides, I expect to see lots of crime, riots, and even terrorism. Let's face it, the US is on its way out. By the time we say goodbye to all these sick despots, civilization will fall to climate change anyway
For most, suicide is not an option. Rather, they will come for the rich and the corrupt bureaucrats with rage and desperation. Its not going to simply be a loss absorbed by working people. People are waking up to the absolute truth that #ClassWar is the only war
Is that what happened during Covid when the middle class and working class got decimated?
No? So why do people think this will be any different? Fucking cowards the people of the country are. It’s fucking disgusting how privileged and apathetic Americans are they’ll get sold a bad faith economy with no future change and we go “please sir can I have another”.
The new deal contract is beyond shredded and we have virtually no labour laws yet we still keep doing what we are told because we fear of what might happen.
That fear is what keeping the nation in shocked turmoil and that fear is useless because we will all be inevitably fucked together.
The solution for so many people laid off, due to COVID was support checks. So that will probably be the same response by the government to any major layoffs in the future. The Second Great Depression could be a challenge, though, to deal with.
>Jobs data from February 2025 to last month shows a 166,000 total loss in blue-collar jobs, which also includes construction, mining, and warehousing.
This is going to be brutal for the up and coming generation who are being failed by the education system and won't be qualified to do anything but these types of jobs.
Persoanl anecdote- my kids highschool math teacher was telling me the classes he teaches has an average grade of 12% and the school average is 18% across all math classes. At the end of term all these kids are automatically bumped up to 65% by the administration and pushed to the next term. Where are these kids going to work when these jobs are gone and they have no foundational skills?
As much as I hate Trump, both parties have been degrading labor for a long time now, how is this a surprise? Republicans obviously more brazenly but still.
The same will happen to white collar jobs in the near future. Agents like Claude Cowork will soon be good enough to replace a significant amount of non-manager white collar jobs. I think that we are a few short years away from this. I’ve been toying with Claude Cowork and Claude Code and I’m frankly amazed by what it can already produce. These won’t eliminate white collar work entirely, but companies will be able to trim headcount significantly.
Even if manufacturing co.ea back to the US, how many jobs does that mean? If factories have to be revamped why not add as much automation as possible? Like in any kind of heavy manufacturing, it would be more cost effective to have robots do the work. Training staff to do things like assembling electronics is doable, but it doesn't sound cost effective.
One of our dystopian futures (amongst others) I guess is Elysium, where everyone on earth works blue collar jobs building robots.
Some others dystopian futures which we are headed to and colliding:
Mad max
Children of men
Blade runner
Hunger games
Gattaca
Robocop
Wall-e
Handmaids tale
1984
Idiocracy
Judge Dredd
Ready player One
Minority report
[OP] kootles10 | 5 hours ago
From the article:
In a criticism of President Donald Trump’s economic policies, Stiglitz said one of the greatest threats to the precarious health of the U.S. economy was slumping blue-collar jobs, including a scarcity of manufacturing roles.
“Do you know what happened to jobs in manufacturing in the last year? They’re down,” he said. “[Trump] didn’t succeed over the last year in bringing back manufacturing jobs.”
A Joint Economic Committee analysis published earlier this month revealed 108,000 fewer manufacturing jobs last year, nearly double the estimation from Bureau of Labor Statistics data in November, which found 59,000 fewer jobs. Jobs data from February 2025 to last month shows a 166,000 total loss in blue-collar jobs, which also includes construction, mining, and warehousing. Stiglitz alluded to tariffs being a reason behind the collapse.
“The decline in blue-collar jobs is even larger,” he continued. “And you look at, where is the increase in jobs in the United States—health care. Does that have anything to do with the tariffs? No.”
(Stiglitz noted the growth of the health care sector is the result of more people growing older and is less dependent on broader macroeconomic trends.)
U.S. companies such as Ford have sounded the alarm on shortages in blue-collar labor. CEO Jim Farley said a dearth of blue-collar workers would not be bad news just for manufacturing, but also for the wider tech industry, as it would slow down data center construction.
northman46 | 5 hours ago
So, is a shortage of workers, or a shortage of jobs? Doesn’t seem logical to say both
Egad86 | 5 hours ago
Probably talking about the entire jobs sector. Healthcare is short on workers for all the boomers growing old, so it shows growth. Literally, every single other industry lost jobs in 2025 to the tune of nearly 850,000 in total.
DarkElation | 4 hours ago
Right but blue collar jobs have long faced a worker shortage.
Planterizer | an hour ago
When you have to contact a union rep to find about job openings instead of looking on Indeed, you're gonna have trouble hiring. That's great for them, though, because restricting new entrants to the job keeps their wages artificially high. Then they die and no one anywhere knows how to be a plumber.
TryptaMagiciaN | 4 hours ago
I just dont get how the tariffs dont affect medications which are often produced in a variety of countries around the world.
Egad86 | 3 hours ago
They affect costs, which are mostly paid by taxpayers into through medicare. That is not the same thing as jobs in the healthcare sector though.
Health care is nurses, doctors, receptionists, claims, any job having to do with actually providing service relating to health care. As the largest generation in American history reach the years of their lives where constant care becomes a necessity, this sector will inevitably grow. It is not sustainable though, and it’s a clear sign that the economy is headed towards a cliff when it is the only sector growing.
Hey-Froyo-9395 | 3 hours ago
It’s both: There’s a shortage of jobs paying what workers need to survive. Also there’s a shortage of workers willing to accept jobs to what companies are willing to pay.
northman46 | 2 hours ago
And there are people who think they shouldn’t have to get their hands dirty.
There are certainly well paying jobs involving working with your hands that actually pay pretty well. Auto repair, trades like electrical or plumbing etc. they all require training but don’t leave you with 100k in student loans and no job
Hey-Froyo-9395 | 2 hours ago
Ford has 1 mechanic position listed in Detroit right now paint $43/hour to 8 years experience.
MrBubbaJ | 3 hours ago
Geographical, maybe? It's harder for blue-collar workers to move, so we have areas with too many and other areas with too few.
northman46 | 2 hours ago
Last night I went to sleep in Detroit city…
northman46 | 2 hours ago
And women aren’t enthusiastic about the blue collar professions in general seems to me
KoRaZee | an hour ago
Closing the loop on tariffs solves the shortage(s) if they are seen through to the end. Trump doesn’t have the intention of actually doing it though. It requires pulling profit from the corporate sector and pushing it towards the working class.
Thom0 | 5 hours ago
Anecdotal/opinion below but I am coming at this from an area of personal expertise in real life, and an academic background.
The recent Trump-tariff debacle really reminds me of the US steel crisis which occurred in the early 2000's which culminated in the world essentially taking the US to court through the WTO AB.
The issue was simple - the US had imposed tariffs on steel imports. The US argued that they imposed tariffs to protect a key industry which was being snuffed out of not only the global market, but the US domestic market also.
The EU (via the EC Commission at the time), China, Brazil, Japan, etc - all said that's bullshit, you're imposing tariffs to compensate an industry, not protect it. All of the states outlined more or less the same argument, with the same evidence which can be summed up as follows: the US had a global monopoly on global steel product after WW2 because no one else had an intact manufacturing sector. From that point onwards, the US got lazy and instead of innovating its steel production it decided to continue to use outdated manufacturing methods. As US steel collapsed in productivity, profits were booming, wages were being suppressed, and steel plants fell out of the sky one by one with the executives landing with their golden parachutes. US steel manufacturing wasn't being undermined, it was dying because there were fundamental structural issues which prevented US steel from evolving. It just turned into a decrepit oligarchy which obsessed over profits and there was never any long-term thinking involved.
Fast forward to today and I think the disagreement which came out of the US steel WTO arbitration was in a weird way a very brief peak under the hood of the US economy. I think the US has fundamental structural issues and the story of US steel is likely prevalent in every single sector of the US economy which has now resulted in a grotesque GDP monster which is fixated on pumping up a never ending speculation but underneath it is decaying, decrepit and no longer functioning like it should. Trump is throwing out tariffs not to protect, or to punish, but to compensate. It is another distraction, and likely one of the final tricks left in the bag before it becomes impossible to cover up just how broken the US's entire approach to neo-liberalism, monetary policy and profit driven economics.
I do think that the current Cold War between China and the US will be a battle of economic sensibilities. Can the US find a way to innovate upon neo-liberalism and convince the world that it works, or will China prove to be more stable somehow? I'm not for either, and I am fully away of the systemic issues within Chinese economics. I just don't think it is a coincidence that the EU in many ways has adopted a hybrid approach somewhere between liberalism, and central regulation. The EU even has its own quasi-gold standard to boot all thanks to the ECB. I'm also not surprised that it is working, and the euro is now more stable than the dollar really is.
The US is still a long way off a collapse, but it is very obvious that neo-liberalism and the ideology shift of the late 70's has done some serious damage not only to the US, but to the world. With that said, we just watched a billionaire coup happen before our eyes in the US and it worked. It really does feel like the US's economy is slowly killing it. Politically this is the most chaotic moment in US history and it really feels like more is to come. At the end of the day, economics in practice is just the arguments politicians make to justify their decisions. As economists, or simply people who like to talk about economics, I think we should all remember this fact. You can find numbers to justify anything but in the end it all boils down to power, and who has it? As of now the people with power are people who all emerged from their own US-steel style story. It's hard to ignore that fact.
gc3 | 5 hours ago
Very thoughtful and accurate
Alpacas_are_memes | 4 hours ago
Very grounded opinion man, solid.
All i would potentially disagree, nitpicking really, would be on the formation of EU’s economic policy structure. I wouldnt say it approaches the gold standard more, i just think they understood the underlying issue of your currency no longer being attached to something physical, which changes your currency value from a real consequence of gold mobility combined with its scarcity, which is the short term balance of payments constraint.
Moving to productivity backed currencies, the price then becomes elastic in relation to its realistic price, it is even done so as national policy, the job of the modern central bank works around the formation of a price level and reducing its volatility as best as possible, because price level has shown to be not be determines by money supply itself, the relationship is not as strong as it was with real asset backed currencies.
The issue is that other branches of what comprises the government have not yet taken the pledge towards a more stable, previsible economic and financial policy as other branches of government have.
Until all aspects of the government spending, lending and investing initiatives becomes more transparent and previsible, more democratic after all, then the issues shows up, through the lack of coordination attrition, inflation is originated. The issue is not the level, it is the margin.
Thats what the EU is working towards. It creates assets to back its currency, and the limits one can work around its trajectory. Essentially, it incentivizes more public spending and investment than private consumption and/or investments.
But i agree with the overall comparison, sorry to extend the discussion or misunderstanding anything.
DarkElation | 4 hours ago
Absolutely the case. My professional work is business transformation and I can’t believe the state of some these companies. It truly is from lack of leadership and less knowing what needs to be done but more how to do it. Current executives don’t know how to provide the direction to get both short term and long term prosperity.
Thom0 | 4 hours ago
Reminds me of an old McKinsey & Co report from 2014 titled "Short‐termism: Insights from business leaders".
It was a big global survey of C-suits and directors in big name, high value companies and the results were we have no long-term thinking, it is fucking us up, we need long-term strategy, but I can't do it because profit, or retirement or whatever. I'm sure if you type the name you can find it.
Alongside that report, there are literally hundreds of academic studies on short-termism and how it is fucking up corporations but it just doesn't seem to ever really result in changes. We just have a culture orientated around wealth and profit which has created inequality. This means rich guys, and their kids get to go to the best schools, the best internships, and end up in the C-suite positions only to then moan about how hard it is, but repeat the cycle for their kids. It's a systemic sociological issue which is really a much bigger problem - chronic societal inequality. Its an oligarchy and merit is a myth.
I'm not advocating for communism at all. A progressive tax system and fairer wages sounds nice to me. These used to be normal working class positions but these days they're devil worshiping Leftist-LGBT-Marxist woke mind virus ideas or whatever the culture war has turned them into. Doesn't help that the Left has literally become a tanky hellscape so I honestly don't know from where a political solution will emerge from.
As you've probably noticed by now, this whole thing is way bigger than just economics and accounting trickery to pump up the numbers for the boys. I think a rivalry with China is going to do us all a whole lot of good. The West, and especially the US needs a real reality check and it needs to evolve. We're outside and this is real life. Life is on the line and Darwinism doesn't give a fuck. It's adapt or die in the international system. Human history is full of dead empires. Some of them collapsed to hard we barely even know who they were.
northman46 | 2 hours ago
MBA and finance people will be the ruination of us all. People like the much reviled Elon musk and Jeff bezos and others have done more for the economy than jack welch and the output of Harvard or Wharton combined
Super_Goat_634 | 19 minutes ago
I am not on your level at all in this discussion, but just as a business and law undergrad student, I'm constantly appalled at the state of businesses I do have insight into. Executives make horrible decisions constantly and seem not to care about the future of their companies. It's truly shocking to witness that level of profound incompetence in people who have control of so many assets.
Solomonopolistadt | 2 hours ago
Great reply. I often have a hard time understanding economics and this really helped me wrap my head around things. Looks like all the smart people and entrepreneurs that built the US empire have died off and their spoiled nepo baby progeny have undermined the economy for their own benefit
Thom0 | an hour ago
It is deeper than just a change in human resources. The 70's was a period of dramatic change in economic policy in the US. Within 10 years, the US went from one end of the monetary spectrum to the other by ditching the gold standard and tightly wound monetary policy in favor of what some have called "voodoo economics" - magical money tress of endless credit. With this shift, the gold standard and the Breton Woods I system died and the world received what we have now.
Very confusing time, and most of what happened contradicted preexisting economic orthodoxy. Suddenly the wise words of the free-market forefathers like Smith, and Keynes suddenly meant nothing as the politicians scrambled to find a theory to justify the new economic reality of deregulating financial systems, free-floating currencies and borrowing into abstraction.
With this political shift also came a shift in how economics was conceptualized as a field of study. It went from a mixed theoretical-empirical study towards more concrete empiricism facilitated by new innovations in technology, and a new political trend of justifying policy with data which narrowed consequences and factors. The magical spell of the "data-driven" decision making was cast which then led us to the current public ritual of GDP worship, and stock value hype beasts - all words which hold very little concrete meaning in the minds of the average voter who doesn't understand what any of this shit actually means.
There are some notable economists trying to push things back towards its political roots but thanks to the bureaucracy of academia and the lack of funding it is proving hard to force a schism with the mathematical models which professors cling to for comfort during such dark days. It is so much easier to explain the world when you can ignore the subjective, but still very real social facts which inform how we behave in a society. Smith spent much of The Wealth of Nations speaking about the danger of unregulated capitalism, and what it can do to society.
It isn't that the talented few just died off and their replacements were half-baked. The US experienced a radical shift in how wealth was distributed, and how balance was maintained. This has undermined the concept of governance, and the function of the modern state. Now states are so broke I strongly suspect they can't actually reverse what has happened. From the 70's onwards, the US has become more and more politically unstable as more and more capital was aggregated and used to purchase influence.
henrycatalina | 4 hours ago
I thought the tarrifs would be a disaster. They are just annoying and we buy components world wide.
The problem in manufacturing is a combination of an insufficient labor pool that will work in manufacturing at a justified wage. Manufacturing is automating as fast as possible so the remaining jobs add more value. We design products and now manufacture so that we cut out transferring information and build the supply chain as we design.
You are right about the steel tarrifs. That drive converting steel into products off shore.
The other issue has been the 50 years of going away from vertical integration. That worked in the 80s and seemed a great way invest only in core technology. The problem is that many offshore factories a more vertically integrated. This cuts transportation, clerical work associated with transfer, and other overhead. There will be a swing back to more vertical integration.
Thom0 | 4 hours ago
I think you're still taking a far too narrow of a view on what tariffs represent.
Since the 70's, the entirety of US foreign policy, and the primary anchor for the international system has been US hegemony sustained by an import economy which fuels a USD reserve currency, and allows the US to pump as much money into the various institutions, and economies of the world as possible.
This wasn't just a money thing, but a security thing. Roosevelt initially conceived of the League of Nations as a convenient way to prevent disliked states from acquiring too much in terms of money and resources because steel, lead, gold, leather, grain, etc. are what you need to fuel an army and a war. This backfired, but the UN was another, more sophisticated stab at the same idea. Instead of locking states out of the global supply chain, the US would just make sure everyone used their money, their financial networks, their navy, and their army to keep stability.
The US has just imploded and everything - from trade, to security, has now shifted and it can't move back. The US can't just remove the tariffs and find a domestic solution at some point in the future to fix its economy because its entire economy was sustained through an international system that worked in the US's favor. That system is now gone and that is not hyperbole. With that said, parts might still survive and the US might be able to rely on those.
Whatever the US was, it cannot be again because the US became a very particular kind of economic beast during the 70's. That beast is now going to starve because there isn't a world which will send money into its open mouth. There is nothing the US can do domestically which could offset, or make up for what it just lost internationally.
What is needed now is adaption but this requires good policy, long-term thinking, and good governance. The US doesn't have that anymore because the story of US steel is now the story of US government. The US hasn't adapted or innovated on democracy or neo-liberalism in 60+ years. I just can't see a political solution emerging because the US has become more or less ungovernable. Already making accusations of rigged elections, rioting in the capital, the deconstruction of the rule of law, and the use of arbitrary violence against civilians is normal. Add culture wars, identity politics, wokism, or whatever you want to call the last 15 years and it's just fucked - it isn't governable at all. It's going to end in a decline in living standards and self-imposed isolation.
I did mention parts of the international system might survive. The US might be able to retain influence in NATO and we might see the NATO PA adopt a more public facing role as a sort of mediator between the US, the EU and the UK but I'm skeptical because the Trans-Atlantic Partnership looks a little rocky. The EU has a long-term plan, it has formulated a security strategy, and it has already implemented radical economic reforms which 10 years ago were unthinkable. This really begs the question - does the EU actually need the US as a close partner? As of now, the EU is practically the sole funder of Ukraine because the US backed out and left everyone high and dry in pursuit of its own convoluted interests hoping to trade Ukraine to turn Russia against China. The EU has a long way to go, but if Russia can't break Ukraine, then it hasn't got a shot with the EU + the UK. China is also a world away with no direct sea links so it's starting to look like the US isn't needed the same way we thought it used to be. I mean, even Germany is restarting its military industrial complex and defense spending. That's like a generational shift in European politics for those who don't know. It isn't a nothing event. Usually when this happens, Poles start panicking but this time they're on the same team. Europe is in a really phenomenal state given the last 350 years of war it was stuck in.
I suppose the point in what I'm saying, and why I think you're wrong, is that the US isn't capable of adopting these kinds of radical changes. It couldn't keep up with a changing world, and then it went ahead and destroyed everything which resulted in an even more dynamic and chaotic world. The US has become politically schizophrenic which is always a sign of terminal decline historically.
northman46 | 2 hours ago
League of nations was a pipe dream of president Woodrow Wilson as I recall
And if you think eu is going to give up their social safety net to defend themselves I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They have leeched off America since the end of ww2 and I don’t see them changing now. Canada either
TaxLawKingGA | an hour ago
This argument is just warmed up protectionism, and is nothing more than Trumpism in disguise.
The reason the domestic steel industry fell is because the U.S. could not produce steel as cheaply as its competitors. At the end of the day, steel is a commodity, and when dealing in commodities, costs and quality are the only measuring sticks. Therefore, the only way to get customers is to keep costs down or to keep quality high. However, the former almost always outweighs the matter.
There is no “neoliberalism” secret cabal or plan to destroy. No, Germany, Japan, Brazil, China, and Canadian steel companies could produce better steel quality at lower costs.
Thom0 | 57 minutes ago
>The reason the domestic steel industry fell is because the U.S. could not produce steel as cheaply as its competitors
Yes, but why couldn't the US be competitive?
It is because the US was quite literally using outdated milling processes which were a century behind current practice globally. The US refused to innovate, and all the monopoly money they made while being the only major global supplier of steel was not invested into keeping US steel competitive. It also wasn't used to pay wages, or even keep the fucking companies alive in some cases. The money was turned into some executives salary, dividends or bonuses and it disappeared.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass, and neither were the states who made these very serious, and substantiated claims. I would suggest reading the arguments presented during the arbitration to get a full grasp of the scale of what was happening with US-steel.
Here's a link to the 2003 WTO report: https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=Q:/WIt's
>This argument is just warmed up protectionism, and is nothing more than Trumpism in disguise.
Geez, this all goes back way before Trump was even born. Do you know much about US history at all? They've kind of had an extreme fetish for isolationism and protectionism. These two features are easily the most definable of US foreign policy going back 100 years.
>There is no “neoliberalism” secret cabal or plan to destroy.
There are people who have money and want power. This is just an absolute fact of humanity and it is present throughout human history, in every single country and culture going back to probably the Neanderthals. Their only intention once they get power is to break all of the institutions, and norms to give themselves even more power. If you don't think these kinds of people exist then you're delusional.
One fatal flaw of modern economics is that economists never paid attention to how their arguments were used by politicians to justify policy.
Gamer_Grease | 5 hours ago
This is, IMO, a catastrophic failure of the current admin’s stated economic policy. The payoff for all the turbulence, white-collar unemployment, and high prices caused by the trade wars—nevermind the violent chaos around ICE’s enforcement operations—was supposed to be a major boom in blue collar employment. We have seen exactly the opposite. The Biden admin turns out to have been much better for manufacturing and other blue collar employment.
makemeking706 | 5 hours ago
I don't see how anyone could possibly believe or expect that Trump could competently govern.
atlasburger | 5 hours ago
They did not. Hate was the biggest motivator for his voters across all racial groups and gender. They all had someone to hate and he delivered. This is exactly what the voters wanted
Albus_Harrison | 4 hours ago
And don’t let them tell you otherwise. The economy bullshit is their smokescreen. Sick of hearing it.
zedazeni | 5 hours ago
The base of Trump supporters are too uneducated to understand economic policies, and if they do actually understand them (I’ve seen a few interviews with Trump-supporting small manufacturers/farmers), they blame the Democrats/foreign countries regardless.
As for the corporate class…the bigger question is how intertwined is the corporate class with Epstein and Project 2025? We know most right-wing elites are connected to Epstein, we know that most of them are also connected to Project 2025 and many of the biggest names in the list helped Trump cheat in Nov 2024. We know what DOGE’s main purpose was. Is this all coincidental, or was Epstein a the networking organization for the elites who are interested in overthrowing the post-War order and installing a techno-feudalist order? That’s where we will see the true feelings of the corporate class.
harbison215 | 5 hours ago
Who knew it would be tough on blue collar employers when you start arbitrarily manipulating their input costs on a random basis? /S
danodan1 | 3 hours ago
So true. In my small college town, Stillwater, OK, the announcements for two new manufacturing concerns coming in to occupy vacant plants, along with the new Google data plant happened while Biden was president. Since Trump started, no new major plans for more manufacturing have been announced.
Rymasq | 4 hours ago
one thing I must say is, we are doing some of the absolute worst things from a free market perspective and somehow the country seems to still function and thrive.
Healthy_Cup_7711 | 5 hours ago
We’re going to start seeing a massive uptick in the number of suicides these next few years.
This is exactly what the tech bros and billionaires are embracing. They are salivating at the thought of automating all white-collar jobs and robbing people of their chance to have a comfortable life. It is sick and twisted, but they know exactly what they are building.
First you lose your job. Then you deplete your emergency savings and lose your house.
Except you will not be the only one. Millions of desperate people will be trying to survive at the exact same time. When everyone is forced to sell off their homes and liquidate their stocks just to buy groceries, the market will completely crater. Your assets will be worth pennies. Without a middle class to spend discretionary income, the fallout will be absolute. The restaurants, hotels, and local businesses that rely on that money will be wiped out overnight, leaving hollowed-out ghost towns behind.
Then you realize you have no good prospects of pulling yourself and your family out of poverty. People love to say you can just go back to school and get a new job, but that is a fantasy. What bank is going to approve a student loan for someone with absolutely zero income? Even if you somehow find the money, the few trade and college programs tied to the remaining human jobs will be violently cutthroat. And with a massive, desperate population begging for those exact same scraps, corporations will pay rock-bottom starvation wages.
Finally you either starve to death or kill yourself because there’s no hope.
Haunting-Writing-836 | 5 hours ago
And that’s the best case scenario with AI. If they create AGI it will immediately realize the largest threat to its own existence is another AGI. So it will work diligently to stop anybody (us) from creating another one.
This isn’t just stupidity it’s extinction levels of stupidity and may even be the solutions to why the universe is so silent. Arrogance of consciousness.
TF-Fanfic-Resident | 4 hours ago
If the fall of communism wound up leading to this era of control by rich tech fanboys who don’t care about civilization,
and it ends up with billions dying,
then we can safely conclude that Gorbachev was worse than Mao and Stalin put together.
Careless-Degree | 5 hours ago
What field are you in?
Healthy_Cup_7711 | 5 hours ago
Software engineering. But I won’t be in this field for long , they’re saying all white collar work will be automated in 12-18 months.
Which is bad for blue collar because then you will have a spike in supply of individuals who will try to get into trade school or manual labor jobs, which will naturally decrease wages and make it cutthroat.
blessitspointedlil | 4 hours ago
You still need software engineers to tell the computer what to do, even if not writing as much code directly.
Careless-Degree | 5 hours ago
Large scale immigration has been hammering blue collar/low skill workers for decades now. I doubt a couple thousand software engineers will crash the system.
WolfImpressive1521 | 4 hours ago
More importantly, once the data centers are built- who do you think will be able to afford to pay blue collar workers for their projects?
29% of revenue for electricians came from single family homes in 2023. 80% of plumbing was focused on residential projects. 25% for carpenters.. the list goes on. You know what happens when that work dries up, at the same time as more people start competing for those jobs? Two things. People get laid off and replaced with cheaper labor, and wages drop overall. It’s the same for manufacturing, and the same for basically any other profession- large scale unemployment means fewer people buying things means less people needed to build those things or provide those services.
Blue collar folks seem to love this comeuppance of the white collar world, buts it’s an incredibly shortsighted and foolish view. We’re all in the same tug of war against the true billionaires and their PE-backed continual enshittification of our society, and we’re losing. We’re losing because the Fox News and friends entertainment machine have convinced:
How all this happened and how we fix it is beyond me, but I firmly believe at least part of the solution is recognizing that if you have to work for a living, no matter what that work looks like, we should be on the same side.
Careless-Degree | 3 hours ago
> Blue collar folks seem to love this comeuppance of the white collar world, buts it’s an incredibly shortsighted and foolish view.
Just like the reverse was true a decade + ago. But now after multiple decades of the academics and white collar folks going on about how much they blue collar folks and how dumb they all are; thy are gonna ask them to do what exactly to save them?
>Christians to ignore 2/3rds of the bible and myopically obsess over the remaining third out of context,
There is that random culture war nonsense. Did CharGPT write this the formatting? That hated of the unwashed American masses wanting employment.
> we should be on the same side.
We aren’t. The best we can do is recognize a common enemy.
WolfImpressive1521 | 3 hours ago
Alright, well, I was 17 a decade ago and focused on graduating high school, so I’m not going to speak to what was going on then. I’m really not sure what you’re referencing there, anyway. If you want to engage further, please explain how you think a collapse in white collar employment will be good for the blue collar sector in any way, shape, or form. I’d be happy to discuss that.
As to my bullet points, I was just bulleting off big subsets of people that have been voting against their own interests, sorry that came off as “culture wars.” I agree that’s off topic for an economics post. This was made on my phone, so I’m not sure how it reads on your end but I did not use any form of AI on any of this; it’d be pretty ironic if I’d made an AI hate post using AI.
Careless-Degree | 3 hours ago
> please explain how you think a collapse in white collar employment will be good for the blue collar sector in any way, shape, or form. I’d be happy to discuss that.
It’s not going to be good from a GDP, cheap TVs, continued globalization sort of way. Which is typically the standard way we measure economic success. So in that aspect you are correct.
It will however trigger a better understanding of where economics and the nation state meet now that the white collar folks have run out of tools to sell.
I’m an atheist but the “it’s not very Christian of you to want to exist and economically succeed” is just so overdone.
WolfImpressive1521 | 3 hours ago
I mean it sounds like fundamentally we agree, unless there’s some aspect of this I’m missing. I just don’t think “a better understanding” is worth a the real world consequences of a recession, when we can figure a lot of this out without having to experience it firsthand through making mistakes. Economic events create data that can develop the “mainstream” economic thinking though, you’re right about that. Our voter base sometimes needs to see to believe as well, so maybe some long term good can come of it.
I’m also an atheist, and I agree it’s a tired talking point. In my mind, it wasn’t even an economic subject. On a personal level, I’m bothered by hypocritical people, and in my nuclear family there’s several of them- that’s really all there was to it.
WolfImpressive1521 | 3 hours ago
If I can follow up with a question- what would you do to “fix” these things? Is there a specific economic or tax regime you’re advocating? How would you hope to see our economic thinking evolve? Personally I have thoughts but interested to hear yours
Careless-Degree | 17 minutes ago
I don’t think there is a “quick fix” - we took decades to get here and decades to get out. But hard choices and hard situations are ahead and I’m just no longer interested in ensuring GDP always goes up to fund ever expanding government.
I don’t see my country as an open ended economic zone that operates on the basis of capital.
We need increased taxation on the wealthy (via regular taxation - not dumb wealth tax), reduced taxation and regulation on the average citizen, break up the monopolies, greatly reduce foreign involvement both militarily and economically.
Just too much fake money in the system doing fake stuff that is borrowed on the back of the future.
Healthy_Cup_7711 | 5 hours ago
Not couple of thousand, I’m talking millions.
Also when you displace the white collar middle class, then who’s buying new homes (construction) or paying for home repairs (electrician, plumber etc)? Blue collar workers will see a decrease in demand because no one can afford their services
Careless-Degree | 5 hours ago
Or those services becoming affordable because people do them again.
gc3 | 5 hours ago
I sincerely doubt software jobs are going away. Change, for sure. I predict the opposite, even more software in our lives. The more lawyers there are the more lawyers are needed. This is also true for software developers.
nhetyas | 5 hours ago
I mean maybe, but also... Most student loans are approved for "someone with absolutely zero income." Its most common trajectory is jobless students out of high school.
Healthy_Cup_7711 | 5 hours ago
What would they go back to school for if white collar jobs are automated?
If you’re going to say health care or trades school, imagine how competitive it will be to even get in. Millions of displaced white collar works will be fighting to get in for very few jobs that pay peanuts
And who is going to be able to even afford healthcare and blue collar services if millions of people are displaced?
nhetyas | 3 hours ago
My response was only to the piece regarding student loan structure. Not to be confused with disagreeing with the overall sentiment, albeit a bit "all or nothing."
WolfImpressive1521 | 4 hours ago
Most student loans are co-signed by a parent with income and assets.
TF-Fanfic-Resident | 4 hours ago
This is why I’m convinced that the USSR collapsing was the worst thing to happen in the 20th century. As flawed as that regime was, at least it was willing to give workers something to fight for. The neoliberal unipolar era that came after set in motion the entire mess that we’re in now. If we see the global system completely break down for 90% of humanity, then Gorbachev will be indirectly responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Mao combined.
devliegende | 5 minutes ago
USSR collapsed because it sucked. People queued for toilet paper. Nostalgia for it is a bit pathetic
Solomonopolistadt | an hour ago
Not just suicides, I expect to see lots of crime, riots, and even terrorism. Let's face it, the US is on its way out. By the time we say goodbye to all these sick despots, civilization will fall to climate change anyway
PhilosophyEasy71 | 5 hours ago
For most, suicide is not an option. Rather, they will come for the rich and the corrupt bureaucrats with rage and desperation. Its not going to simply be a loss absorbed by working people. People are waking up to the absolute truth that #ClassWar is the only war
Kindly-Guidance714 | 5 hours ago
Is that what happened during Covid when the middle class and working class got decimated?
No? So why do people think this will be any different? Fucking cowards the people of the country are. It’s fucking disgusting how privileged and apathetic Americans are they’ll get sold a bad faith economy with no future change and we go “please sir can I have another”.
The new deal contract is beyond shredded and we have virtually no labour laws yet we still keep doing what we are told because we fear of what might happen.
That fear is what keeping the nation in shocked turmoil and that fear is useless because we will all be inevitably fucked together.
gc3 | 5 hours ago
The parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
danodan1 | 3 hours ago
The solution for so many people laid off, due to COVID was support checks. So that will probably be the same response by the government to any major layoffs in the future. The Second Great Depression could be a challenge, though, to deal with.
Strong_Weakness2867 | 2 hours ago
>Jobs data from February 2025 to last month shows a 166,000 total loss in blue-collar jobs, which also includes construction, mining, and warehousing.
This is going to be brutal for the up and coming generation who are being failed by the education system and won't be qualified to do anything but these types of jobs.
Persoanl anecdote- my kids highschool math teacher was telling me the classes he teaches has an average grade of 12% and the school average is 18% across all math classes. At the end of term all these kids are automatically bumped up to 65% by the administration and pushed to the next term. Where are these kids going to work when these jobs are gone and they have no foundational skills?
Ophthalmoscopee | 3 hours ago
As much as I hate Trump, both parties have been degrading labor for a long time now, how is this a surprise? Republicans obviously more brazenly but still.
getmeoutoftax | 4 hours ago
The same will happen to white collar jobs in the near future. Agents like Claude Cowork will soon be good enough to replace a significant amount of non-manager white collar jobs. I think that we are a few short years away from this. I’ve been toying with Claude Cowork and Claude Code and I’m frankly amazed by what it can already produce. These won’t eliminate white collar work entirely, but companies will be able to trim headcount significantly.
da8BitKid | 2 hours ago
Even if manufacturing co.ea back to the US, how many jobs does that mean? If factories have to be revamped why not add as much automation as possible? Like in any kind of heavy manufacturing, it would be more cost effective to have robots do the work. Training staff to do things like assembling electronics is doable, but it doesn't sound cost effective.
Think_Sugar_7658 | 3 hours ago
One of our dystopian futures (amongst others) I guess is Elysium, where everyone on earth works blue collar jobs building robots.
Some others dystopian futures which we are headed to and colliding: Mad max Children of men Blade runner Hunger games Gattaca Robocop Wall-e Handmaids tale 1984 Idiocracy Judge Dredd Ready player One Minority report