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The Last Great American Jobs
Every good merchant understands that in real hard life there are no
problems, only opportunities. With an eye to the near future,
auspicious from the ubiquitous signs of socio-economic downturn, where
are the opportunities of tomorrow...?
Prison
Guard: With increases in crime, implementation of ever more laws and
the rising need for three squares and a roof over your head, only the
public burden of maintaining corrections facilities keeps the noble
turnkey slightly outside the realm of sustainable job security.
Gun Sales: With no end of the breathless rumors of an inevitable liberal Democrat gun roundup in sight, firearms sales presents a bright future in a time of hoarding and stockpiling. Dynamic self-starters can even work their way up to the lucrative international arms trade.
Gun Sales: With no end of the breathless rumors of an inevitable liberal Democrat gun roundup in sight, firearms sales presents a bright future in a time of hoarding and stockpiling. Dynamic self-starters can even work their way up to the lucrative international arms trade.
Grave Digger: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, union scale.
Feel free to add on to the list in comments....
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Bar:
I'd like to think that the list will, through reasons not yet known, expand to include more writers, and artists, and makers of music. As to prison guards, expect to see more and more of the dreaded contracting out practice that is a fundamental component of the privatization of government, in particular at the state and local levels.
Chag Sameach my friend.
Bruce
April 8, 2009 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was struck with a "gee, doesn't that sound familiar" thought by a sentence in Tom Friedman's column today,
that if a cap-and-trade system would be enacted, then there would be a whole new game for the financially-trained to play.
Friedman's argument, of course, is that it hasn't a good chance to be enacted. But something to do with energy and global warming is sure to make for some derivative bubbling soon?
I've noticed Obama has been pushing energy jobs (and energy bubbling,) almost at times like the guy in that told Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate "one word: plastics." Here he is at his March 25 town hall:
Now, a lot of the outsourcing that was referred to in the question really has to do with the fact that our economy -- if it's dependent on low-wage, low-skill labor, it's very hard to hang on to those jobs because there's always a country out there that pays lower wages than the U.S. And so we've got to go after the high-skill, high-wage jobs of the future. That's why it's so important to train our folks more effectively and that's why it's so important for us to find new industries -- building solar panels or wind turbines or the new biofuel -- that involve these higher-value, higher-skill, higher-paying jobs.
So I guess the answer to the question is, not all of these jobs are going to come back. And it probably wouldn't be good for our economy for a bunch of these jobs to come back because, frankly, there's no way that people could be getting paid a living wage on some of these jobs -- at least in order to be competitive in an international setting.
So what we've got to do is create new jobs that can't be outsourced.
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I myself would say nursing professor, followed by nurses. The problem of not enough nurses simply will be fixed one way or another, no matter what health care system we end up with, there's no way getting out of it with the boomers becoming elderly. Right now there's not enough programs for the people that want to be nurses, so the nursing professors will be the first, higher offering salaries will lure nurses to do it, which will then get more people training for nursing. As with all boom jobs, the salaries will go up, and then they will go down as finally too many people go into it.
April 8, 2009 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
p.s. I do realize you were doing a sort of black humor thing, so apologies for taking the oppportunity of your thread to go more serious. :-)
April 8, 2009 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
OOPS, I forgot to blockquote Obama's words in my above comment, they are the 3 paragraphs that start and end thus:
April 8, 2009 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know about the future but those employed in fixing stuff are more secure than those involved in selling the stuff that needs fixing.
April 8, 2009 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink