the young of today will find the idea of working to support the boomers and their predecessors who are on the dole in their dotage reprehensible.

Friend and occasional contributor to our publications, Neil Howe, has done seminal work on cycles of societal change related to the ebb and flow of generations. If you haven’t read his and William Strauss’ book The Fourth Turning, do yourself a favor and get a copy. (I just checked, and it’s available on Kindle).

Or, for the CliffsNotes version, you can download and read an interview I did with Neil last year.

The long and short of things is that Neil believes we are headed in to what he calls a “fourth turning,” a period that is invariably marked by great turmoil and crisis (World Wars I and II, as well as the Great Depression are prototypical fourth turning periods).

One of my favorite examples of the sort of societal shifts Neil talks about is the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s, which you can see in the photos here.

Literally no one saw it coming.

The jury is still out on what exactly will tip the U.S. and global economy over the edge and into another fourth turning – though I suspect the disastrous financial condition of the sovereigns and the implications that has right across the societal spectrum will play a major role.

Another candidate has to do with the outlook for employment in the Western nations – and increasingly, across much of the developing world.

As with any complex system, this topic is multi-faceted.

For instance, think for a minute about the expectations of today’s youth as they look ahead to their futures. Whereas the young used to, almost as a matter of course, follow their parents into a trade – be it farming, or working in the automobile plant – today not many would picture themselves spending a lifetime laboring in what might be termed a “dirty job.”

[image5ight]You know, jobs such as working in an industrial plant, or pulling night shifts cleaning bed pans at hospitals… Illegal immigrants are no longer welcome, and enforcement actions against those who hire them are far more stringent than ever – so we can’t count on them filling the gap.

But the gap is there, and as the baby boomers move past their productive years, it will only get bigger.

And it’s not just the dirty jobs: the young of today will find the idea of working to support the boomers and their predecessors who are on the dole in their dotage  reprehensible.

As on many fronts, Japan provides a stark portrait of what’s coming. In 1950 there were ten Japanese workers for every ten Japanese pensioners. Today, the ratio has dropped from 10:10 to just 3:1.

Guess what? As you can see in the chart here, even though the retirement of the baby boomers in the U.S. is only just now getting under way, the worker-to-retiree ratio in the U.S. is right in line with Japan’s.

If you are in your fifties and think you are going to collect on Social Security, you might want to think again.

Staying on the topic of dirty jobs, a meme these days is that the Chinese have hollowed out the manufacturing sector of the United States and other countries of the West.

Yet, as the next chart so clearly shows, while the number of people going in to manufacturing in the U.S. is indeed falling, manufacturing output has remained strong.

In fact, arm waving to the contrary, U.S. manufacturing as a percentage of GDP rang in at 39.4% over the past decade, versus 37.2% in the 1990s, and 34.9% in the 1980s. So, sure, a lot of jobs shipped out overseas, but that’s in no small part because U.S. businesses have gotten so much more efficient at making things with higher margins than, say, flammable  sleepwear for children.

If you think about that for a moment, you may find some hope for the future – because while China has made achieved big competitive gains by manipulating its currency, that has to end badly. It always does. And when it does, the streamlined U.S. manufacturing sector will be ready to compete. Alas, it may not employ any more workers (something I’ll address momentarily), but anything that helps to reduce the trade deficit is to be welcomed.

To put the situation in manufacturing in proper context, look at the long-term chart for agricultural production versus employment in the U.S. Again, one can see just how efficient the U.S. has gotten at producing stuff… without employees. There’s no reason to wonder about the future of U.S. manufacturing: the chart for agriculture says it all.

What’s behind these massive structural shifts in employment? Obviously, one factor has to be the exponential advances in technology.

Another could be attributed to the increased availability and ease of accessing media. Media has long been used to convince people to dress and act a certain way, but it has only been in the last 50 years or so that its presence in our lives reached endemic levels. And none of that media today makes a virtue out of long hours toiling under the hot sun, or fixing widgets to gadgets on production lines.

Another reason for the shift away from hands-on work has been the steady encroachment of government into the workplace. All with the best of intentions, naturally – but each new rule, regulation, tax, reporting requirement, workplace safety inspection, and wage mandate makes the hiring of employees something to be avoided at all costs.

I’m reminded of my visit to a huge zinc mine in Sweden, a country that is even further ahead in its workplace mothering. In Sweden, hiring a new employee is almost on a par with proposing marriage – a lifetime commitment, ‘til death do you part.

In my young and foolish days I spent six months working in a mine in the United States – and it was a big, messy, crowded place, with large elevators full of dozens of dirty miners being lowered into the depths of the earth to do a very dirty and dangerous job.

Not so the mine in Sweden. Even though it was a regular work day, there were almost no employees in evidence, even in the huge milling facility – a place the size of a decent-sized sports stadium, complete with gigantic machines noisily crushing and grinding rocks. In all the time we spent in the mill, we saw only one employee – a young 30-something who briefly appeared to check a computer screen before disappearing from whence she came. This, too, is the future for American manufacturing.

In contrast to the West, where avoiding employees is Job #1, China’s problem is exactly the reverse – they desperately need jobs for the masses. At this point in time, that means the manufacturing jobs that we in the West no longer want or can perform profitably.

Unfortunately, thanks to a brisk and accelerating inflation in China, Chinese labor costs are on the rise – up over 20% in Beijing his year alone. That makes it increasingly difficult to remain competitive. Quoting a recent report out of Nomura securities:

“For some labor-intensive manufacturers, China’s wage level is no longer attractive. The manufacturing factories will likely be moved to China’s inland provinces or to countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia where labor costs are much lower.”

This is, of course, quite threatening to the myth of China’s economic invincibility, if for no other reason than Chinese manufacturing margins are already noodle-thin at somewhere between 1% and 10%. Case in point: FoxConn, Apple’s “go-to” manufacturing company in China, works on a margin of just 2.5%. Not a lot of wiggle room.

Logically, in order to avoid a wholesale shutdown of its industry, or to require massive government subsidies on a long-term basis, China will have to adopt the same modern, labor-saving manufacturing tools that we in the U.S. are using so effectively. But, trapped between a rock and a hard place, implementing those efficiencies will cost jobs – causing the sort of civil unrest now catching fire in the Middle East.

All fine and well, and good riddance to the political heirs of the murderous Mao, I say. But,  here’s the point – none of this tossing the bums out actually creates new jobs.

Not in China and not in the U.S. And while the sprouting flowers of freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere will bring forth more work than is now available, the global trend is solidly on the side of steady adoption of the latest and greatest manufacturing tools.

Conservative projections for the robot industry through 2035 are shown in the following snippet from the November 2010 edition of Casey’s Extraordinary Technology:

The global leader in robotics remains Japan, with America and Germany coming up close behind it. That country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimates that the global robotics market will expand about 10x over the next 25 years, and nearly 60% in just the next five…

Aarkstore Enterprise, a market research firm, estimates that by 2020 the total robotics market, by its definition, will expand to match the automotive industry in gross revenues.

(If you’re interested in diversifying into money-making trends in technology, Casey’s Extraordinary Technology has you covered. We’ve just put the finishing touches on an Investor Update titled, “3 Biotech Stocks to Own in 2011.” The first stock is profiled within the update, including the stock name and buy price, free and at no obligation. Simply click here to get the Investor Update now.)

Which brings us to an interesting paradox: The world need jobs, but the steady progress in technology is slashing the need for human workers to do what jobs remain… and is slashing that need at an almost exponential pace.

The International Federation of Robotics reported a 27% increase in robotic sales in 2010, despite – and probably in no small part because of – ongoing pressure on the global economy.

And who do you think is going to be doing the work of assembling the robots? Humans? Not hardly. Like the promised future of nanotechnology, but on a macro scale, it will be machines making machines that make machines.

Soon people won’t be shaking their fists at the Chinese for stealing our jobs, but at the machines. And the machines won’t take notice.

And then what? Does the government in all of its wisdom begin limiting the use of machines in the workplace? Or will the shift be back towards command economies, where companies are forced to hire and produce based on the dictates of some ruling council?