President Obama is getting a lot of deserved ridicule for stating that ATMs are costing Americana's their jobs. Every time you use your ATM to withdraw money from your account, it costs an American a job. This is true, but it is this kind of thinking that can actually hurt the economy. In most seasons, there are not enough people to fill the demand for bank tellers if there were no ATMs. This would drive up bank teller' wages. ATMs are cheaper than people. With all of the bank failures in the past 4 years, the problem could have been exacerbated without ATMs. Therefore, ATMs actually saving jobs, not costing them.
Businesses have become more efficient, but that does not mean that there are fewer jobs as a result. It simply means that they are more efficient. Better efficiency is business saves the firm and that saves jobs. It is like throwing cargo from a plane or a ship to stay afloat.
But there are real structural problems with our economy. To name a few.
-Two income households. Not that earning more money is bad. But it makes it difficult for a household to change their address when one spouse can find a job in another city and the other can not.
-The housing crisis. Even if both spouses can move to a new city, many people are upside down on their mortgages and would have to take a big loss to sell their homes and move.
The bottom line is that households are not as flexible in their employment as they used to be. This has to be a factor in the movement of American jobs overseas. The bad news for business is that these problems will spread overseas as well, if they are not already happening. There are two answers for this. Businesses need to be more flexible, especially letting people work from home. And there needs to be better support for entrepreneurship in this US.
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