Your question ("why not now?") dodges pg's main point: we've been through this many times before, and the catalysts behind this recession (especially poor financial liquidity) do not suggest a material, structural shift in the type of work available in our economy. The housing market is poor and businesses are hesitant to invest, but robots have not replaced the pimply kid at McDonald's just yet.
'past predicts future' is not exactly commensurate with a point of inflection. perhaps a real-life example can help - a medical transcription firm in India hires 25 Indians to transcribe medical records. I then sell the CEO a copy of voice recognition software. He is so happy with the results, he fires 24 and keeps 1 Indian to fix the occasional transcription typos! After one month, he finds the transcription error rate is unacceptably high, so he hires one more Indian to fix typos. For the past 1 year, these 2 Indians & that software has chugged along, making money. Now that CEO is happy, making money, and has opened his second office in India, with another copy of the software & just 2 more Indians to babysit and bugfix! True story. Any way you cut it, that's net job loss. First, a bunch of housewives in Atlanta who transcribed for a living lost their livelihood, but you can rationalize that by saying, hey atleast 25 Indians got hired. But 23 out of those 25 Indians lost jobs & 1 piece of software ended up doing the job! Now unless the Atlanta housewives and the 23 Indians end up working for the voice recognition software company ( a very remote possibility ) or end up in a brand new job ( even more remote possibility ) given their limited skills, there is definitely a block of time when there is net job loss.
Ofcourse eventually some of these people will learn new skills and/or are absorbed into new jobs etc...atleast, that's the hope. But the intervening reality can't be wished away. I still think this story will have a happy ending, but so far I don't see it.
Those housewives and Indians will not be out of work for long. They are experiencing frictional unemployment right now; they'll retrain and take on a new role soon enough.
You don't see the happy ending yet because this was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We love to trash finance types, but banks facilitate a lot of transactions--including home purchases and capital expenditures. When they hurt, our economy hurts in some non-obvious ways.
Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking.
If you assume that for a portion of the people in the transcribing job, that the transcribing job was the best marginal fit, then some of them don't re-enter the job market. Others have to take a worse job. If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been. So their employment has gotten worse. May be quality, may be compensation, may be available time. Something's worse for them.
If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been.
There are a number of reasons this is not the case. I'd wager that a main reason is "re-training takes too much time." If a worker gets laid off, gets his Associate's, and starts something new, well, that's a net positive scenario. He or she produces output in a new field, while the transcription software replaces their old output. Net positive outcome.
You call it "handwaving," but the above happens to many people. This is not some accounting trick economists have developed.
