Letters to the editor: Lynbrook, East Rockaway

Week of Jan. 12 — 18

Posted

More people, fewer jobs

To the Editor:

Re Scott Brinton’s column last week, “Trump in charge? Blame creative destruction”: I enjoyed the column, but I believe Brinton left out certain major points.

1. As the United States –– and the world –– become more technologically advanced, fewer people will be needed to do the work. Case in point: We have lost millions of manufacturing jobs in the United States over the past 20 to 25 years –– not only to other countries, but also to robots. In fact, as many as 80 percent of manufacturing jobs may have been lost to automation.

2. When it comes to re-educating people, how many highly skilled people do we need to manufacture goods if robots are doing the work?

3. Our problem is quite different today than it was during the Industrial Revolution, which took over England and America during the late 1700s and into the 1800s. People left farms and came to the cities to get away from agricultural manual labor. Yes, they had machines to do the work in the cities, but those machines were still labor-intensive. Now they are not.

4. As the world keeps growing in population while jobs decrease, we will have a big problem. Yes, education is part of the solution. Even if the entire world were highly educated, though, there would be more and more people looking for fewer and fewer jobs.

Sorry for my pessimistic outlook.

Tom Wingenfeld

Lynbrook

. . .

D’Amato disses The Times

To the Editor:

I was very disappointed to read former Sen. D’Amato’s column announcing that he was canceling his subscription to The New York Times (“To learn more, tune out the liberal media,” Dec. 15-21) — and, I guess, encouraging other people to do the same.

Yes, it’s probably true that much of The Times’s reporting has a bias based on its publisher’s opinions. Most newspapers have the same opinion base.

But The Times has a very broad range of journalistic coverage. It has the organization and skills to report on much of what is occurring in the world. Its pages can inform, entertain and educate its readers, on a scale that no other newspaper in New York (or maybe in the world) can do. It certainly beats a 30-minute television “news” broadcast.

And I think the senator insults the intelligence of newspaper readers when he infers that they might not be capable of understanding or identifying reporting they believe to be biased. After all, Donald Trump was elected even though The Times opposed him.

And also: The president-elect himself described The Times as a “jewel” and a “national treasure.”

Herman Kirschen

Woodmere