Douglas Coupland Quotes

Offshoring manufacturing jobs left Americans with fewer high-value-added, well-paid jobs, and the U.S. middle class downsized. Ladders of upward mobility were taken down. Income and wealth distributions worsened.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

I don't think that artificial intelligence means doomsday, and I think many new jobs will be created, too. However, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that these new types of jobs will favor low-income demographics. We need to address the needs of those who will be left out of the new job market.

The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment.

There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore.

Reliable data on the outsourcing of American jobs is sorely missing from the debate on globalization.

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

Displacement by technology has probably occurred since the invention of the shovel.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

The most urgent issue facing American workers today is not the glass ceiling. It is the sinking floor.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

If our institutions can’t build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today, how will we ever do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and five times that number of jobs disappear twice as fast?

Automation is going to cause unemployment, and we need to prepare for it.

I think what we have to do is figure out how to make sure we get the benefits of improved technology and yet cope with the dislocation that it will inevitably produce in certain industries.

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

We're losing all kinds of white-collar jobs, all kinds of jobs in addition to manufacturing jobs, which we're losing by the droves in my state.