http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/10/he-wouldnt-buy-stuff-he-makes.html
"It's Friday, the happiest day of the workday, so it's perfect time for some more doomsday prophecies! You've seen my speculations on how the otherwise great technological advancement create a deadly mixture with the high amount of morons (people who are unable to do highly skilled jobs), and the society models that cannot just dispose them.
Today let's see a funny picture:
As you can see, in the 1989-1991 period the GDP dropped by 19% (14% if 2006 is 100%). That's a nice big number. In the 1989-1994 period 15% of the total population lost his job. And more importantly, in the 1995-2006 period only 2% gained it back, despite the GDP has increased way beyond its 1989 value.
What on Earth has happened in 1989? And what happened with 13% of population?
In 1989 the communist regime in Eastern Europe, including Hungary, collapsed. Democratic elections were held. The closed markets of Eastern Europe had opened to the West, and Western goods (that could only be accessed via smuggling) became available in the shops. The naive democratic activists expected that the GDP of the liberated countries will rise quickly and reach the Western standards in 15-20 years. No one expected freefall.
The Hungarian companies were uncompetitive to the Western ones, everyone knew that, and no one expected their survival. However it was widely believed that Western companies, seeing the low wages will arrive to fill the void, they will buy and modernize the old factories or build new ones, employ the workers.
Western businessmen did arrived, but they couldn't really do much with the workforce. It was not so cheap as Far-Eastern but was much lower qualified than Western. Simply changing the name sign on a factory won't make it able to build better products. The companies, under old or new name, in Western or Hungarian ownership kept making uncompetitive products.
This would explain the lack of GDP growth but why is the big fall? Because the closed market protected these companies from Western competition. The people preferred do buy Western products. They simply wouldn't buy the stuff they made, therefore destroyed their own workplaces. Yet they couldn't join any better company, as they were unable to create products they would buy.
Of course Hungary is not a country of idiots, the people simply lacked the proper training in the communist era. The intelligent people made huge effort to adapt the higher standards. I remember that back then everyone were learning English or German, learned new professions. Soon lot of them could work in a competitive company, and the GDP started to rise.
But not all of them. From the 55% who held job at 1989 only 38% could keep/regain his job via learning new skills. 4% kept being unemployed, experts agree that most of them lacked the skills to get serious jobs. There were horror stories even after 2000 that the government lured some huge investment to the country that "will create 2-3000 jobs", just to see that the company struggles understaffed and finally recruiting from Romania, because out of the 400K registered unemployed they couldn't find 2000 who were not alcoholists, had professions (and not of farmers or kitchen-hands) been able to read a written manual, didn't steal, and were ready to move to another town away for a job. And they are those 400K who were at least ready to walk to the unemployment office every month. Imagine the rest!
The main problem with morons is not that they can only do uncompetitive jobs. It's that they still want to get the most competitive products. No matter how hard the government tries to save their jobs, they spend their salaries on the competition's stuff and while the company has them, it can't beat the competition.
Technological advancement simply elevate the moron-barrier. Being able to read, coming in time and obey the boss is no longer enough. These people will disappear from the "proper" US and EU workplaces. Some of them will do the jobs that were previously done by illegal immigrants (house-cleaner, apple-picker, streetsweep, prostitute), but most of them will go for welfare.
These morons should have lost their jobs gradually over the last 3 decades. However what communist closed market did to the Hungarian economy, the loans did to the US and EU economies. People had so much money that they consumed in great excess, they did not really cared about quality, with proper marketing you could literally sell the water coming from your kitchen tap (most "mineral waters" are simple tap water). The good times are over, those who can't do a skilled job will lose it in 2 years or already lost it: (USA data, by Annaly Capital)"
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