Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "job" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Opinion | Americans Don't Want to Return to Lousy Low Wage Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shortage-jobs-biden-covid.html

low wage jobs unemployment politics policy Economics

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • When Congress passed the CARES Act last May and the American Rescue Plan Act this March, it was hard, even impossible, for policymakers to forecast the demand for labor or the pace of the economic recovery. The pandemic was still stubbornly lurking. The economic (and humanitarian) risk of doing too little far exceeded the risk of being generous
  • the entire point of the enhanced unemployment checks, at least originally, was to tide Americans over until it was safe for more people to work again.
  • Republican-controlled states, as well as some more politically mixed states, are doing this because they presume there is a macroeconomic upside to millions of workers returning to lower-income jobs. They shouldn’t be so sure.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Either there won’t be enough jobs for the people eventually looking for work because so many businesses closed during the pandemic, or the jobs left over will be, frankly, lousier jobs. This latter possibility would leave a large share of Americans underemployed, which would cause a wide reduction in household income among the country’s less wealthy half.
  • Just imagine seeing millions of new jobs added over the next few months and unemployment falling, all accompanied by a decline in household spending by workers who are then only able to access the low-wage, low-hours jobs they had before the pandemic
  • The majority of the jobs that aren’t back to prepandemic work force levels are very low-income jobs; they are what the U.S. Private Sector job Quality Index, which I cocreated, calls low-quality jobs.
  • Through March of this year, most of the private sector jobs eliminated during the pandemic that haven’t been restored are production and “nonsupervisory” jobs that offered weekly pay averaging less than $750 prepandemic. There are more than 45 million low-paying jobs like these, constituting roughly 43 percent of all production and nonsupervisory jobs in the country. This is not about a mere, unfortunate corner of the jobs market.
  • here’s the rub: When you add normal state unemployment benefits and the federal supplements together, $750 per week from the government is a fairly typical benefit for an unemployed American.
  • 23 million of these jobs paid under $500 per week prepandemic: That’s $26,000 per year. Not only are the wages low: Many of these jobs offer well below 30 hours of work per week.
  • And it is safe to assume that someone getting $750 per week for not working is not eagerly jumping up to go back to work for potentially hundreds of dollars a week less.
  • The chronic problem we face as we put Covid-19 in the rearview mirror is that the U.S. economy before the pandemic was incredibly dependent on an abundance of low-wage, low-hours jobs. It was a combo that yielded low prices for comfortably middle-class and wealthier customers and low labor costs for bosses, but spectacularly low incomes for tens of millions of others.
  • If, in this summer interim, the remaining federal benefits for those without jobs pressures some employers to increase wages and offer a more full-time hours to their employees, then that is all to the good for them and the sturdiness of our economy
  • Instead, why not absorb the lesson being taught?
  • It’s pretty simple and one that, normally, progressives fight to have heard: businesses are paying tens of millions of workers too little money relative to the cost of living in this country.
carolinehayter

The covid recession economically demolished minority and low income workers and barely touched the wealthy - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...coronavirus-recession-equality

recession minority politics pandemic us economics policy inequality

shared by carolinehayter on 02 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The economic collapse sparked by the pandemic is triggering the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history, delivering a mild setback for those at or near the top and a depression-like blow for those at the bottom, according to a Washington Post analysis of job losses across the income spectrum.
  • While the nation overall has regained nearly half of the lost jobs, several key demographic groups have recovered more slowly, including mothers of school-age children, Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, Asian Americans, younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) and people without college degrees.
  • White women, for example, have recovered 61 percent of the jobs they lost — the most of any demographic group — while Black women have recovered only 34 percent, according to Labor Department data through August.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • The recession’s inequality is a reflection of the coronavirus itself, which has caused more deaths in low-income communities and severely affected jobs in restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues
  • No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 caused similar job losses across the income spectrum, as Wall Street bankers and other white-collar workers were handed pink slips alongside factory and restaurant workers.
  • The unemployed are facing new challenges. Despite President Trump’s promises of a short-lived recession, 26 million people are still receiving now-diminished unemployment benefits. The unemployed went from receiving, on average, over $900 a week in April, May, June and July, under the first federal stimulus package, to about $600 for a few weeks in late August and early September under a temporary White House executive action, to about $300 a week now on state benefits.
  • At the height of the coronavirus crisis, low-wage jobs were lost at about eight times the rate of high-wage ones, The Post found.
  • The less workers earned at their job, the more likely they were to lose it as businesses across the country closed.
  • By the end of the summer, the downturn was largely over for the wealthy — white-collar jobs had mostly rebounded, along with home values and stock prices. The shift to remote work strongly favored more-educated workers, with as many as 6 in 10 college-educated employees working from home at the outset of the crisis, compared with about 1 in 7 who have only high school diplomas.
  • Americans ages 20 to 24 suffered the greatest job losses, by far, of any age group when many businesses closed in the spring. College-age workers and recent graduates tend to be overrepresented in low-paying retail and restaurant jobs, which allow them to gain a toehold in the workforce and save money for school or training.
  • In the wake of widespread closings of schools and day-care centers, mothers are struggling to return to the workforce. Mothers of children ages 6 to 17 saw employment fall by about a third more than fathers of children the same age, and mothers are returning to work at a much slower rate. This disparity threatens years of progress for women in the labor force.
  • “The sectors most deeply affected by covid disproportionately employ women, minorities and lower-income workers.
  • What ties all of the hardest-hit groups together ― low-wage workers, Black workers, Hispanic men, those without college degrees and mothers with school-age children ― is that they are concentrated in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality jobs.
  • Most recessions, including the Great Recession, have affected manufacturing and construction jobs the most, but not this time. Nine of the 10 hardest-hit industries in the coronavirus recession are services.
  • Economists worry that many of these jobs will not return
  • Women had logged tremendous job gains in the past decade before the coronavirus hit.
  • over 30,000 restaurant and hospitality workers are unemployed in New Orleans, making it nearly impossible to find a job.
  • Ten percent of renters reported “no confidence” in their ability to pay next month’s rent, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted Sept. 2 to 14.
  • Black women are facing the largest barriers to returning to work, data shows, and have recovered only 34 percent of jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic.
  • It took until 2018 for Black women’s employment to recover from the Great Recession. Now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased.
  • Historically, people of color and Americans with less education have been overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. Economists call it “occupational segregation.”
  • Black and Hispanic men face many of the same challenges as Black women, encountering discrimination in the workforce more often than others, and they struggled to rebound from the Great Recession.
  • While the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 8.4 percent, double-digit unemployment lingers in cities and states that depend heavily on tourism.
  • But with many schools and child-care centers closed and the migration to online learning, many working parents have had to become part- or full-time teachers, making it difficult to work at the same time. That burden has fallen mainly on mothers, data shows. For example, mothers of children ages 6 to 12 — the elementary school years — have recovered fewer than 45 percent of jobs lost, while employment of fathers of children the same age is 70 percent back.
  • Single parents have faced an especially hard blow.
  • One in eight households with children do not have enough to eat, according to the September survey by the Census Bureau.
  • The Fed predicts unemployment will not near pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2023. For many jobs, it may take even longer — especially those already at high risk of being replaced with software and robots.
  • “Since the 1980s, almost all employment losses in routine occupations, which are relatively easier to be automated, occurred during recessions,”
  • Many economists and business leaders are urging Congress to enact another large relief package, given the unevenness of the recovery and the long road for those who have been left behind.
  • “There are very clear winners and losers here. The losers are just being completely crushed. If the winners fail to help bring the losers along, everyone will lose,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Things feel like they are at a breaking point from a societal perspective.”
Javier E

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nology-wrecks-the-middle-class

economics employment trends technology middle-class

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly
  • the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.
  • Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false.
  • Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor.
  • The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.
  • Computers excel at “routine” tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs
  • Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who perform “nonroutine” tasks that complement the automated activities
  • At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity.
  • On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction.
  • Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined.
  • overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization.
  • So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging.
  • Spurred by growing demand for workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment.
  • The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility
  • we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, adaptability and problem-solving.
  • this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more than type and file
  • Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills the “new artisans.”
  • The outlook for workers who haven’t finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the past
  • we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the “new artisans”: licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides
Javier E

The End of Men - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...308135

women men roles history culture demographics US sex

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same
  • Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions
  • “You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”
  • ...98 more annotations...
  • In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1.
  • A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
  • Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,”
  • Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,”
  • what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?
  • Even Ericsson, the stubborn old goat, can sigh and mark the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”
  • Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His 26-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no-prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’
  • Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other
  • And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide
  • Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world.
  • As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.
  • As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized
  • None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal.
  • in the U.S., the world’s most advanced economy, something much more remarkable seems to be happening. American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.
  • What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?
  • what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?
  • Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men.
  • The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years
  • Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s job
  • With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success
  • Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women
  • Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
  • The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true
  • Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment
  • In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city
  • The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class
  • The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions
  • “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”
  • Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.
  • “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”
  • In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.
  • Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation
  • Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.
  • The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits.
  • The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining.
  • Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time
  • The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.
  • women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980
  • About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.
  • When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”
  • A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire,
  • The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical
  • Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable
  • Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities,
  • Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.
  • What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective,
  • Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
  • the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational”
  • he aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences
  • Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life.
  • Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”
  • he association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.
  • To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools
  • emographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.
  • Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s
  • “We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” s
  • n a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
  • ne would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”
  • I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent.
  • the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers
  • As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”
  • “The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate.” But they don’t.
  • Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust.
  • Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.
  • it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs.
  • Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away.
  • realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established their careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to get to their own careers more quickly. They would be a campus of Tracy Flicks, except that they seemed neither especially brittle nor secretly falling apart.
  • Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, the gender gap pretty much disappears. But the story is not so simple. Wealthier students tend to go to elite private schools, and elite private schools live by their own rules.
  • Quietly, they’ve been opening up a new frontier in affirmative action, with boys playing the role of the underprivileged applicants needing an extra boost
  • among selective liberal-arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points
  • the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has voted to investigate what some academics have described as the “open secret” that private schools “are discriminating in admissions in order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance.”
  • To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.”
  • Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days
  • “Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”
  • the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up
  • identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire)
  • t’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.
  • movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys
  • In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs.
  • allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge.
  • Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.
  • his is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their familie
  • ncreasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are.
  • or all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.
  • The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage
  • he women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’
  • Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?
  • Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”
  • The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years.
  • Many of their mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college.
  • Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,”
  • Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men
  • the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach.
  • The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.
  • Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”
  • American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack.
  • At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood,
  • the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980
Javier E

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...l-intelligence-jobs-automation

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
  • at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke
  • The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early
  • while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.
  • Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."
  • robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
  • Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.
  • We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.
  • In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change
  • The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?
  • if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.
  • Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.
  • Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.
  • Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories
  • The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced
  • in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.
  • the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles
  • in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.
  • In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too
  • Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.
  • Take driverless cars.
  • Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin
  • we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.
  • Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them
  • we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."
  • would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?
  • The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.
  •  economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"
  • In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.
  • it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.
  • When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see
  • A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.
Javier E

Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-race-for-american-jobs.html

robot employment jobs economic crisis

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.
  • “The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,” Mr. Acemoglu said.
  • “If you’ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don’t have the skills to go into health care,” he said. “The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.
  • The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat to blue-collar jobs. The researchers said the findings — “large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages” — remained strong even after controlling for imports, offshoring, software that displaces jobs, worker demographics and the type of industry.
  • Robots affected both men’s and women’s jobs, the researchers found, but the effect on male employment was up to twice as big.
  • The data doesn’t explain why, but Mr. Acemoglu had a guess: Women are more willing than men to take a pay cut to work in a lower-status field.
  • The findings fuel the debate about whether technology will help people do their jobs more efficiently and create new ones, as it has in the past, or eventually displace humans.
  • Mr. Restrepo said the problem might be that the new jobs created by technology are not in the places that are losing jobs, like the Rust Belt. “I still believe there will be jobs in the years to come, though probably not as many as we have today,” he said. “But the data have made me worried about the communities directly exposed to robots
  • The next question is whether the coming wave of technologies — like machine learning, drones and driverless cars — will have similar effects, but on many more people.
mattrenz16

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
Javier E

David Stockman: Mitt Romney and the Bain Drain - Newsweek and The Daily Beast - 1 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...romney-and-the-bain-drain.html

finance ROmney private equity LBO investment

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.
  • Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
  • Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.
  • That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.
  • So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.
  • In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers—vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.
  • Accordingly, Bain’s returns on the overwhelming bulk of the deals—67 out of 77—were actually lower than what a passive S&P 500 indexer would have earned even without the risk of leverage or paying all the private-equity fees. Investor profits amounted to a prosaic 0.7X the original investment on these deals and, based on its average five-year holding period, the annual return would have computed to about 12 percent—well below the 17 percent average return on the S&P in this period.
  • having a trader’s facility for knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em has virtually nothing to do with rectifying the massive fiscal hemorrhage and debt-burdened private economy that are the real issues before the American electorate
  • Indeed, the next president’s overriding task is restoring national solvency—an undertaking that will involve immense societywide pain, sacrifice, and denial and that will therefore require “fairness” as a defining principle. And that’s why heralding Romney’s record at Bain is so completely perverse. The record is actually all about the utter unfairness of windfall riches obtained under our anti-free market regime of bubble finance.
  • When Romney opened the doors to Bain Capital in 1984, the S&P 500 stood at 160. By the time he answered the call to duty in Salt Lake City in early 1999, it had gone parabolic and reached 1270. This meant that had a modern Rip Van Winkle bought the S&P 500 index and held it through the 15 years in question, the annual return (with dividends) would have been a spectacular 17 percent. Bain did considerably better, of course, but the reason wasn’t business acumen.
  • The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.
  • The Wall Street Journal examined 77 significant deals completed during that period based on fundraising documents from Bain, and the results are a perfect illustration of bull-market asymmetry. Overall, Bain generated an impressive $2.5 billion in investor gains on $1.1 billion in investments. But 10 of Bain’s deals accounted for 75 percent of the investor profits.
  • The secret was leverage, luck, inside baseball, and the peculiar asymmetrical dynamics of the leveraged gambling carried on by private-equity shops. LBO funds are invested as equity at the bottom of a company’s capital structure, which means that the lenders who provide 80 to 90 percent of the capital have no recourse to the private-equity sponsor if deals go bust. Accordingly, LBO funds can lose 1X (one times) their money on failed deals, but make 10X or even 50X on the occasional “home run.” During a period of rising markets, expanding valuation multiples, and abundant credit, the opportunity to “average up” the home runs with the 1X losses is considerable; it can generate a spectacular portfolio outcome.
  • By contrast, the 10 home runs generated profits of $1.8 billion on investments of only $250 million, yielding a spectacular return of 7X investment. Yet it is this handful of home runs that both make the Romney investment legend and also seal the indictment: they show that Bain Capital was a vehicle for leveraged speculation that was gifted immeasurably by the Greenspan bubble. It was a fortunate place where leverage got lucky, not a higher form of capitalist endeavor or training school for presidential aspirants.
  • The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.
  • The bankruptcy forced the closure of about 250—or 40 percent—of the company’s stores and the loss of about 5,000 jobs. Yet the moral of the Stage Stores saga is not simply that in this instance Bain Capital was a jobs destroyer, not a jobs creator. The larger point is that it is actually a tale of Wall Street speculators toying with Main Street properties in defiance of sound finance—an anti-Schumpeterian project that used state-subsidized debt to milk cash from stores that would not have otherwise survived on the free market.
  • Ironically, the businesses and jobs that Staples eliminated were the office-supply counterparts of the cracker-box stores selling shoes, shirts, and dresses that Bain kept on artificial life-support at Stage Stores Inc. At length, Wal-Mart eliminated these jobs and replaced them with back-of–the-store automation and front-end part-timers, as did Staples, which now has 40,000 part-time employees out of its approximate 90,000 total head count. The pointless exercise of counting jobs won and lost owing to these epochal shifts on the free market is obviously irrelevant to the job of being president, but the fact that Bain made $15 million from the winner and $175 million from the loser is evidence that it did not make a fortune all on its own. It had considerable help from the Easy Button at the Fed.
  • The lesson is that LBOs are just another legal (and risky) way for speculators to make money, but they are dangerous because when they fail, they leave needless economic disruption and job losses in their wake. That’s why LBOs would be rare in an honest free market—it’s only cheap debt, interest deductions, and ludicrously low capital-gains taxes that artifically fuel them.
  • The larger point is that Romney’s personal experience in the nation’s financial casinos is no mark against his character or competence. I’ve made money and lost it and know what it is like to be judged. But that experience doesn’t translate into answers on the great public issues before the nation, either. The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.
  • The Bain Capital investments here reviewed accounted for $1.4 billion or 60 percent of the fund’s profits over 15 years, by my calculations. Four of them ended in bankruptcy; one was an inside job and fast flip; one was essentially a massive M&A brokerage fee; and the seventh and largest gain—the Italian job—amounted to a veritable freak of financial nature.
  • In short, this is a record about a dangerous form of leveraged gambling that has been enabled by the failed central banking and taxing policies of the state. That it should be offered as evidence that Mitt Romney is a deeply experienced capitalist entrepreneur and job creator is surely a testament to the financial deformations of our times.
Javier E

Andy Grove's Warning to Silicon Valley - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...warning-to-silicon-valley.html

market fundamentalism job silicon valley employment policy economic

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Lost in the lore is Mr. Grove’s critique of Silicon Valley in an essay he wrote in 2010 in Bloomberg Businessweek. According to Mr. Grove, Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by failing to propel strong job growth in the United States.
  • Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”
  • Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • And yet, an all-out commitment to American-based manufacturing has not been on the business agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, that belief was flawed.
  • The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, he said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable.
  • There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”
  • Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs, many now do so by shifting profits overseas through tax-avoidance maneuvers.
  • The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.”
Javier E

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uctivity-inequality-wages.html

tech economics policy crisis employment income stagnation polarization

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.
  • automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.
  • Automation is splitting the American labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.
  • “We automate the pieces that can be automated,” said Paul Hart, a senior vice president running the radio-frequency power business at NXP’s plant in Chandler. “The work force grows but we need A.I. and automation to increase the throughput.”
  • “The view that we should not worry about any of these things and follow technology to wherever it will go is insane,”
  • But the industry doesn’t generate that many jobs
  • Because it pushes workers to the less productive parts of the economy, automation also helps explain one of the economy’s thorniest paradoxes: Despite the spread of information technology, robots and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, overall productivity growth remains sluggish.
  • Employment in the 58 industries with the lowest productivity, where it tops out at $65,000 per worker, grew 10 times as much over the period, to 673,000.
  • The same is true across the high-tech landscape. Aircraft manufacturing employed 4,234 people in 2017, compared to 4,028 in 2010. Computer systems design services employed 11,000 people in 2017, up from 7,000 in 2010.
  • To find the bulk of jobs in Phoenix, you have to look on the other side of the economy: where productivity is low. Building services, like janitors and gardeners, employed nearly 35,000 people in the area in 2017, and health care and social services accounted for 254,000 workers. Restaurants and other eateries employed 136,000 workers, 24,000 more than at the trough of the recession in 2010. They made less than $450 a week.
  • While Banner invests heavily in technology, the machines do not generally reduce demand for workers. “There are not huge opportunities to increase productivity, but technology has a significant impact on quality,” said Banner’s chief operating officer, Becky Kuhn
  • The 58 most productive industries in Phoenix — where productivity ranges from $210,000 to $30 million per worker, according to Mr. Muro’s and Mr. Whiton’s analysis — employed only 162,000 people in 2017, 14,000 more than in 2010
  • Axon, which makes the Taser as well as body cameras used by police forces, is also automating whatever it can. Today, robots make four times as many Taser cartridges as 80 workers once did less than 10 years ago
  • The same is true across the national economy. Jobs grow in health care, social assistance, accommodation, food services, building administration and waste services
  • On the other end of the spectrum, the employment footprint of highly productive industries, like finance, manufacturing, information services and wholesale trade, has shrunk over the last 30 years
  • “In the standard economic canon, the proposition that you can increase productivity and harm labor is bunkum,” Mr. Acemoglu said
  • By reducing prices and improving quality, technology was expected to raise demand, which would require more jobs. What’s more, economists thought, more productive workers would have higher incomes. This would create demand for new, unheard-of things that somebody would have to make
  • To prove their case, economists pointed confidently to one of the greatest technological leaps of the last few hundred years, when the rural economy gave way to the industrial era.
  • In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.
  • The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.
  • In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.
  • The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”
  • the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
  • The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.
  • the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.
  • Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.
malonema1

Trump's tariff plan puts jobs at risk - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...ff-plan-puts-jobs-at-risk.html

US economics policy trump

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump fulfilled a long-running campaign promise Thursday in levying tariffs on imported steel and aluminum products after a week of build-up to the announcement. The reaction to the move was divided, with major steel and aluminum players expressing support for the move, some promising job creation, while critics said the tariffs would lead to job losses in other industries.
  • Employment in the steel industry has been declining for two decades, down some 35 percent from 216,400 workers in 1998 to 139,800 in 2016. Between 2015 and 2016 alone more than 14,000 jobs were lost due to plant closings, bankruptcies and more, according to a January 2018 report from the Commerce Department. U.S. Steel and Century Aluminum have both committed to reinvesting in closed plants and hiring workers, 800 in total, as a result of the tariffs, while other major payers, including Alcoa and ArcelorMittal, have expressed their support for Trump's order.
  • But economists and researchers say that despite gains in steel jobs, losses will be seen in other sectors that will more than cancel out any new job creation. A report from global research firm Trade Partnership Worldwide finds that while some 33,000 jobs will be added within steel and aluminum due to the tariffs, the broader U.S. economy, including manufacturing and energy, will see losses of nearly 180,000 jobs, for a net loss of nearly 146,000 jobs. For every one job created as a result of the tariffs, five will be lost, the report finds. The study does not take into account any retaliation against the tariffs, only the tariffs themselves.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He said the jobs added in the metals industry will likely not be permanent. "As you damage the consumers of metal in the United States — the people in the supply chain who purchased the steel and aluminum — in time they would purchase less metals which would lead then to these new created jobs being temporary," Hardy said.
brickol

For the Class of 2020, a Job-Eating Virus Recalls the Great Recession - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...avirus-class-of-2020-jobs.html

COVID-19 us economics

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • When the coronavirus pandemic forced college students across the country to leave campus in early March, the abrupt departure was especially painful for seniors. It meant rushed goodbyes, canceled graduation ceremonies — an overwhelming sense of loss.
  • Now, many of those seniors are home with their families, contemplating an even worse prospect: a job market more grim than any in recent history. Last week, according to the Labor Department, nearly 3.3 million people filed for unemployment benefits, more than quadruple the previous record.
  • As the economy barrels toward a recession, college seniors fear they could become the next class of 2009, which entered the work force at the peak of the Great Recession as companies conducted mass layoffs and froze hiring.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • At some job fairs in early March, major companies simply didn’t show up; now all those career events have been canceled.
  • The number of new job listings posted between mid-February and mid-March dropped 29 percent compared with the same period last year, according to data from the job marketplace ZipRecruiter. Postings for retail stores fell 14 percent, events jobs went down 20 percent and casino and hotel jobs dropped 23 percent.
  • The hiring situation will probably get worse over the next few months, as closures and cancellations ripple across the economy. “These are still early effects. The first wave of industries hit will not be the last,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “There will be a large human cost.”
  • Historically, college students who graduate into a recession have settled for lower-paying jobs at less prestigious companies than people who finished college even a year earlier. Economists have found that the impact of that bad luck can linger for as long as 10 or 15 years, leading to higher unemployment rates and lower salaries — a phenomenon known as “scarring.”
  • Whether the class of 2020 will face long-term consequences depends on a range of factors, including the length of the pandemic and the severity of the recession that seems certain to follow. But it doesn’t look good.
  • A severe downturn could also jeopardize the career prospects of students who graduate later this year or in 2021.
  • Some industries, like nursing, have even seen an increase in job listings, according to ZipRecruiter. The number of e-commerce listings rose 228 percent over the past four weeks compared to last year. Personal consulting jobs went up 26 percent.
  • Over the last few weeks, many job-hunting seniors have engaged in an awkward dance with recruiters in industries like law, journalism and technology, asking for updates while trying not to seem insensitive or selfish. All the traditional rules of engagement in a job hunt suddenly feel irrelevant. A meet-up for coffee is out of the question. A request for a networking call might seem invasive.
  • For some seniors, uncertainty about the economy has created outrage. Most of them were in fifth grade in 2008. But they remember the damage wrought by the Great Recession.
  • “This is the first pandemic that I have lived through, that my parents have lived through, but this isn’t the first time the economy has not been great,” said Amy Germano, a senior at James Madison University. “If we can get through the recession in 2008, I think we can get through this.”
Javier E

Opinion | There's a Reason There Aren't Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eacher-shortage-education.html

teaching teachers trends history school analysis shortage

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.
  • Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”
  • In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”
  • We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.
  • “The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years
  • a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010
  • The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.
  • Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.
  • The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.
  • the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.
  • We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”
  • By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.
  • These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,
  • Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure
  • “We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”
  • teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.
  • the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.
  • Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.
  • How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.
  • policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.
  • The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.
  • The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.
  • “On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”
  • Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”
  • These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”
  • Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress
  • In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364
  • Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.
  • White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.
  • and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar
  • A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint
  • Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?
  • Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.
  • Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.
  • Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.
  • Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.
  • The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.
  • These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.
  • State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.
  • Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?
  • Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century
  • Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years
  • the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low
  • Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years
  • The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.
  • Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.
  • The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color
  • We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions
  • We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.
  • In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.
  • If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.
Javier E

Male Labor Force Participation Rate Drop Is About Masculine Identity | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...entity-nicholas-eberstadt-book

history crisis culture politics work working class male identity

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • some economists think identity plays a starring role in the economy. “Some of the decline in work among young men is a mismatch between aspirations and identity,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “Taking a job as a health technician has the connotation as a feminized job. The growth has been in jobs that have been considered women’s jobs — education, health, government.” The economy is not simply leaving men behind. It is leaving manliness behind.
  • The problem is not working women, the problem is genderphobia, the half-century growth of the pervasive ideology that acknowledging the basic realities of gender and gender difference is somehow a crime against women
  • Here’s what humanity understood for thousands of year that we’ve forgotten or trashed: If you want good men, you need to admire, idealize, and reward masculine goodness.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.
  • we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard
  • : religion, patriotism, community, and yes, pro-social masculinity.
  • For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social
  • Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy
  • Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker
  • A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.
  • The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.
  • Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.
  • Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.
  • If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.
  • Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.
  • What are these young men doing?
  • “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”
  • this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”
  • “Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”
  • Almost 40 percent of all Americans without work are now male.
  • Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.
  • By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”
  • the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.
  • Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent
malonema1

Work Requirements Won't Improve Medicaid. A Jobs Guarantee Might. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550301

US politics trump jobs

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration has been signaling for months that it plans to  implement conservative reforms to core federal welfare programs, including by allowing states to have work requirements for Medicaid. So it was no surprise on Thursday when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued guidance for “state efforts to test incentives that make participation in work or other community engagement a requirement for continued Medicaid eligibility.”
  • So far, it’s unclear how widely adopted work requirements will be and how exactly states will implement them under CMS’s new guidance. On Friday, Kentucky was the first state to have its 1115 waiver creating work requirements approved by CMS. On Thursday, Verma noted that nine other states had already submitted waivers asking the federal government to approve incentives or requirements for some Medicaid beneficiaries. In addition to allowing strict job mandates, CMS will also allow requirements for “other community-engagement activities,” including volunteering, job training, and caregiving. (These rules only apply to specific adults; CMS carves out people with disabilities, the elderly, children, and pregnant women.)
  • Yet if states want work requirements to increase the health and self-sufficiency of Medicaid beneficiaries—their stated goal—most available data suggest they’ll fall short. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2017, most people on Medicaid who can work do work. Around 60 percent of adult enrollees have a job, and for the most part those who don’t report impediments in their ability to work. Even those who are not officially disabled often attest to having debilitating conditions—like severe back problems—that make full-time jobs difficult or impossible. Others may be in school, work as primary caretakers for loved ones, or may have retired.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty
  • Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.
  • A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.
  • Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.
Javier E

How to Prepare for an Automated Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-for-an-automated-future.html

automation job economic culture education technology

shared by Javier E on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers.
  • The logical response seems to be to educate people differently, so they’re prepared to work alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can’t. But how to do that, and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions.
  • Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said n
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • People still need to learn skills, the respondents said, but they will do that continuously over their careers. In school, the most important thing they can learn is how to learn.
  • At universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions and find answers, deal with new situations,”
  • many survey respondents said a degree was not enough — or not always the best choice, especially given its price tag.
  • these are not necessarily easy to teach.
  • “Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,
  • “I have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational tools to address those gaps,” wrote Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute. “I have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the socioeconomic factors that are underpinning skill training.”
  • Andrew Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote, “Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to ‘up-skill’ people.
  • Schools will also need to teach traits that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration.
  • Many of them expect more emphasis on certificates or badges, earned from online courses or workshops, even for college graduates.
  • One potential future, said David Karger, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., would be for faculty at top universities to teach online and for mid-tier universities to “consist entirely of a cadre of teaching assistants who provide support for the students.”
  • Portfolios of work are becoming more important than résumés.
  • “Three-dimensional materials — in essence, job reels that demonstrate expertise — will be the ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills.”
  • Consider it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said — learn new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.
  • Focus on learning how to do tasks that still need humans, said Judith Donath of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: teaching and caregiving; building and repairing; and researching and evaluating
  • The problem is that not everyone is cut out for independent learning, which takes a lot of drive and discipline.
  • People who are suited for it tend to come from privileged backgrounds, with a good education and supportive parents,
  • “The fact that a high degree of self-direction may be required in the new work force means that existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future,”
  • “The ‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work.”
Javier E

The Geography of Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-geography-of-trumpism.html

crisis culture politics US demagogue economics social class demographics

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
oliviaodon liked it
  • We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
  • What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
  • “It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
  • Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.
  • the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
  • have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.
  • I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.
  • Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.
  • I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.
  • Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.
  • Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.
  • there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.
  • Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.
  • among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.
  • The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.
  • Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.
  • As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.
  • Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.
  • Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.
  • This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.
  • The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.
  • I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture
  • Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."
  • It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.
  • Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.
  • The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.
  • If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.
  • You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.
  • There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.
  • However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.
  • It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future
  • So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.
  • this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
  • There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker
  • The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.
  • These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.
  • Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history
  • I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that
  • racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.
  • One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.
  • The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.
  • Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.
  • We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.
ethanshilling

For the Economy, the Present Doesn't Matter. It's All About the Near Future. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...economy-jobs-future.html

US economics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The economy is at a major inflection point, and the question is whether job creation will accelerate in the months ahead.
  • The new jobs numbers that the Labor Department released Friday morning don’t matter.These numbers can sometimes be unimportant in the sense that any one economic report offers only a partial view of what is going on, and is subject to margins of error and future revisions.
  • One worrisome sign in the new employment numbers: State and local governments appear to be cutting jobs en masse. They cut a total of 83,000 positions, about 69,000 in education.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But the economy is still in a deep hole, with nine million fewer jobs than a year ago, or around 12 million shy of where we would be if pre-pandemic job growth had continued over the last year.
  • In normal times, the total employment gains reported Friday would be a blockbuster number. But continuing to add jobs at that pace would still mean a two-year grind back to pre-pandemic employment levels.
  • The report that 379,000 jobs were added in February and that the unemployment rate edged down to 6.2 percent is good news.
  • Will many of these jobs come back, if schools are able to operate at full capacity by the fall? The Biden pandemic rescue plan before the Senate includes $130 billion to help schools reopen safely, and an additional $350 billion to support state and local government budgets more broadly.
  • Huge job gains were reported in February in some of the sectors most directly affected by the pandemic, specifically an increase of 355,000 in leisure and hospitality jobs, most of it tied to restaurant employment.
  • Things remain murky on the longer-term implications of the crisis. The surge in employment in February was entirely driven by people no longer being on temporary layoff — the number of these temporarily unemployed workers fell by 517,000 people.
  • It is easy to describe the pathway back for jobs at schools and restaurants. But true economic health will mean that those 2.2 million people find their way back into the ranks of the employed as well, and that could take more than just a shot in the arm.
Javier E

The great artificial intelligence duopoly - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...artificial-intelligence-2

AI basic income jobs unemployment automation rivalry

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The AI revolution will have two engines — China and the United States — pushing its progress swiftly forward. It is unlike any previous technological revolution that emerged from a singular cultural setting. Having two engines will further accelerate the pace of technology.
  • WorldPost: In your book, you talk about the “data gap” between these two engines. What do you mean by that? Lee: Data is the raw material on which AI runs. It is like the role of oil in powering an industrial economy. As an AI algorithm is fed more examples of the phenomenon you want the algorithm to understand, it gains greater and greater accuracy. The more faces you show a facial recognition algorithm, the fewer mistakes it will make in recognizing your face
  • All data is not the same, however. China and the United States have different strengths when it comes to data. The gap emerges when you consider the breadth, quality and depth of the data. Breadth means the number of users, the population whose actions are captured in data. Quality means how well-structured and well-labeled the data is. Depth means how many different data points are generated about the activities of each user.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Chinese and American companies are on relatively even footing when it comes to breadth. Though American Internet companies have a smaller domestic user base than China, which has over a billion users on 4G devices, the best American companies can also draw in users from around the globe, bringing their total user base to over a billion.
  • when it comes to depth of data, China has the upper hand. Chinese Internet users channel a much larger portion of their daily activities, transactions and interactions through their smartphones. They use their smartphones for managing their daily lives, from buying groceries at the market to paying their utility bills, booking train or bus tickets and to take out loans, among other things.
  • Weaving together data from mobile payments, public services, financial management and shared mobility gives Chinese companies a deep and more multi-dimensional picture of their users. That allows their AI algorithms to precisely tailor product offerings to each individual. In the current age of AI implementation, this will likely lead to a substantial acceleration and deepening of AI’s impact across China’s economy. That is where the “data gap” appears
  • The radically different business model in China, married to Chinese user habits, creates indigenous branding and monetization strategies as well as an entirely alternative infrastructure for apps and content. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for any American company to try to enter China’s market or vice versa
  • companies in both countries are pursuing their own form of international expansion. The United States uses a “full platform” approach — all Google, all Facebook. Essentially Australia, North America and Europe completely accept the American methodology. That technical empire is likely to continue.
  • The Chinese have realized that the U.S. empire is too difficult to penetrate, so they are looking elsewhere. They are trying, and generally succeeding, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Those regions and countries have not been a focus of U.S. tech, so their products are not built with the cultures of those countries in mind. And since their demographics are closer to China’s — lower income and lots of people, including youth — the Chinese products are a better fit.
  • The jobs that AI cannot do are those of creators, or what I call “empathetic jobs” in services, which will be the largest category that can absorb those displaced from routine jobs. Many jobs will become available in this sector, from teaching to elderly care and nursing. A great effort must be made not only to increase the number of those jobs and create a career path for them but to increase their social status, which also means increasing the pay of these jobs.
  • Policy-wise, we are seeing three approaches. The Chinese have unleashed entrepreneurs with a utilitarian passion to commercialize technology. The Americans are similarly pro-entrepreneur, but the government takes a laissez-faire attitude and the entrepreneurs carry out more moonshots. And Europe is more consumer-oriented, trying to give ownership and control of data back to the individual.
  • An AI arms race would be a grave mistake. The AI boom is more akin to the spread of electricity in the early Industrial Revolution than nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Those who take the arms-race view are more interested in political posturing than the flourishing of humanity. The value of AI as an omni-use technology rests in its creative, not destructive, potential.
  • In a way, having parallel universes should diminish conflict. They can coexist while each can learn from the other. It is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
  • We will see a massive migration from one kind of employment to another, not unlike during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. It will largely be the lower-wage jobs in routine work that will be eliminated, while the ultra-rich will stand to make a lot of money from AI. Social inequality will thus widen.
  • If you were to draw a map a decade from now, you would see China’s tech zone — built not on ownership but partnerships — stretching across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa and to some extent South America. The U.S. zone would entail North America, Australia and Europe. Over time, the “parallel universes” already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world.
  • There are also issues related to poorer countries who have relied on either following the old China model of low-wage manufacturing jobs or of India’s call centers. AI will replace those jobs that were created by outsourcing from the West. They will be the first to go in the next 10 years. So, underdeveloped countries will also have to look to jobs for creators and in services.
  • I am opposed to the idea of universal basic income because it provides money both to those who don’t need it as well as those who do. And it doesn’t stimulate people’s desire to work. It puts them into a kind of “useless class” category with the terrible consequence of a resentful class without dignity or status.
  • To reinvigorate people’s desire to work with dignity, some subsidy can help offset the costs of critical needs that only humans can provide. That would be a much better use of the distribution of income than giving it to every person whether they need it or not. A far better idea would be for workers of the future to have an equity share in owning the robots — universal basic capital instead of universal basic income.
Javier E

Fewer Americans are working. Don't blame immigrants or food stamps. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lame-immigrants-or-food-stamps

working class work employment

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.
  • Between 50 and 70 percent of that decline probably was due to an aging population.
  • pretty much all the missing jobs are accounted for.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • trade with China and the rise of robots are to blame for millions of the missing jobs.
  • Other popular scapegoats, such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare, did not even move the needle.
  • The era of vanishing jobs happened alongside one of the most unusual, disruptive eras in modern economic history — China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its subsequent rise to the top of the global export market.
  • this competition cost the economy about 2.65 million jobs over the period.
  • Automation also seems to have cost more jobs than it created. Guided by research showing that each robot takes the jobs of about 5.6 workers and that 250,475 robots had been added since 1999, the duo estimated that robots cost the economy another 1.4 million workers.
  • Abraham and Kearney used previous research into how teens and adults respond to rising wages to produce a high-end estimate of the impact of minimum wages over this period. Other recent research has found either a small effect or no effect. In the end, they combined those figures to find that about 0.49 million workers were lost.
  • the labor force shrank by about 0.36 million as an increasing number of workers drew disability benefits.
  • The economists estimated that roughly 0.15 million people were not working because of the expansion of a disability insurance program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • There were about 6.5 million former prisoners in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2014, according to the best available data. Assume that 60 percent of them served time as a result of policies implemented since the 1990s, account for their ages, time served, and pre-prison earnings, and you get a conservative estimate of 0.32 million lost jobs.
  • What did not reduce employment
  • Immigration Most research indicates that immigration does not reduce native employment rates.
  • Food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) SNAP benefits average about $4.11 per person per day. Able-bodied adults are generally cut off from benefits unless they are working.
  • The Affordable Care Act Obamacare went into effect in 2014 and has not had a noticeable impact on jobs to date.
  • Working spouses who allow men to stay home While this is a popular theory, the share of men who are not in the labor force but had a working spouse actually fell slightly between 1999 and 2015
  • other explanations are out there, pushing and pulling the estimates in either direction.
  • The paper’s most striking finding is not, however, speculation on idle American youths. It is that many of the topics that dominate political discourse about the labor market — such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare — are unlikely to bring back lost jobs.
  • Instead, policymakers should be focusing on the forces that took those jobs in the first place: import competition, automation, incarceration and disability insurance.
1 - 20 of 1809 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page