Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one.
The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it won't work under most existing economic systems. Our entire economy has to change to accomodate the new reality that a significant percentage of the population will be unemployed.
A major fault line in the current economic system is the concept of 'right to work'. The current structure presumes that the right to receive a proportion of economic goods of a society should be strongly associated with employment. But with most jobs are already meaningless from the viewpoint of economic productivity, the 'right to work' ethic concentrates power in the hands of the managerial classes in charge of job placement, who are very good at inventing new ways to pretend that this is all economically beneficial.
The truly horrendous problem with all of this is that our standard of living is statistically quite high so the system is sustainable for a long while, until it eventually collapses under it's own weight of pointlessness.
'Right to work' is a specific term used in the US to designate labor legislation used to cripple unions and shouldn't be confused with a general 'right' to employment.
The choice in terminology had me very confused on the first read.
> But with most jobs are already meaningless from the viewpoint of economic productivity
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering if there's any research that's quantified this idea. I have no idea how you qualify meaninglessness and economic productivity.
"But with most jobs are already meaningless from the viewpoint of economic productivity"
That's highly debatable (the word "most", specifically). I've heard the argument before, but there is a reason we have labor productivity statistics that try to quantify this.
"A major fault line in the current economic system is the concept of 'right to work'."
This isn't just a fault line, this is the foundation of market economics for the purpose of human welfare. You participate in the economic system by trading your resources, e.g. land, labour/time, capital, and knowledge.
At first glance, we seemingly never have enough time in the developed world, so lack of jobs implies there seems to be a problem in the distribution and renewal of knowledge.
If a market can't work for the world's exchange problems, we're currently fucked as to a lack of functional and pareto efficient alternatives.
> there is a reason we have labor productivity statistics that try to quantify this
Productivity measures have been pretty screwed since services became the dominant labour form. If my dog groomer decides to charge me an extra 20% then her productivity has gone up by 20% - she is now producing an extra 20% of services per hour.
> But with most jobs are already meaningless from the viewpoint of economic productivity
I have no proof of this at all - just an anecdotal gut feel. For every content producer where I work, we have 2 agile coaches, a LEAN coach, 2 marketing types (who are probably the really productive workers - promoting and protecting an established brand monopoly), 5 ops and dev supporters (in an unreachable call centre somewhere in the world), and then an endless pyramid of middle and upper management overseeing all this process. Within this context, no one every got a pay upgrade by volunteering to reduce the size of their empire.
And, also within this context, there is a lot of unhappiness that I put down to lack of meaningful labour output making the world a better place. Meanwhile, my leisure time productivity has exploded - I consume whatever media I want in whatever form I want whenever I want. I'm at the lower socio-economic end of my tiny middle-class ecosystem but my diet would be the envy of the kings of yesteryear.
My point being is that we already have too much stuff in the world, and the existing system of trading labour for putting food on the table just encourages more stuff. I would agree that we are far from pareto efficient and are, in fact, trapped in a scheme where scarce resources like primary goods and human time are wasted. But I have no idea what the solution might look like.
> Productivity measures have been pretty screwed since services became the dominant labour form.
That's not accurate. Productivity is at its most basic a measure of aggregate output for hours worked. That works for any kind of economic activity as it all boils down to dollars vs. time/person (blending in management and administrative overhead).
> If my dog groomer decides to charge me an extra 20% then her productivity has gone up by 20% - she is now producing an extra 20% of services per hour.
That's not how it works. Presumably if your dog groomer did that, she'd either be really good, or you'd switch groomers. Or if there were a scarcity of groomers, you might choose to groom your dog less often.
The amount of money made for the hours worked has to be viewed in aggregate as part of the overall market. If all businesses in a region raised their prices by 20%, and worked the same or less hours, that would be a sign that there's been a gain in productivity, because it eliminates opportunity cost and marginal utility tradeoffs and looks at the complete domestic market for all goods and services in an area.
> I have no proof of this at all - just an anecdotal gut feel. For every content producer where I work, we have 2 agile coaches, a LEAN coach, ...
I feel you. There are countless individual cases of waste and overhead in the private and public sectors. But I think this has almost always been the case in organized human endeavours. Think about the 1960s and 70s where there were football field sized rooms of typists, or layers upon layers of "strategic planners" (GM used to have a hierarchy 21 levels deep). Or the pervasiveness of sustenance farming in the early 1900s vs. the productivity of today's farmers. It really has gotten better.
In our industry for example, where I work (Pivotal) we do extreme programming and carry that philosophy of smaller teams, customer speaks with one voice, to content and product design. We will pair on each role, one from our company and one from the customer, so on a given mobile app, web content project, or web app (and I mean real commercial ones, from brands you probably know): 2 product managers, 1-2 designers, 4 developers/ops of which one is the anchor, maybe up to 2 part time QA. Maybe some support marketing people surrounding this team, and maybe 2-3 senior execs/managers around it between the customer and our own management. That's it. We can get a lot done in a few months.
I have also seen teams of 120 people attempt to do the same amount of results of our small teams in double the time.
Productivity stats mix the both and weigh down the whole sector, but imagine when the small team approach becomes widely used? This is what we are seeing more and more with IT outsourcing where the traditional outsources are getting slowly squeezed. It'll take many years, but it's hard to unsee better ways of working.
I agree that capital and headcount represents power in many large organizations but with the appropriate competition incentive and leadership, agility and time to market and cost are usually what lead to coups to the old order.
> Meanwhile, my leisure time productivity has exploded - I consume whatever media I want in whatever form I want whenever I want. I'm at the lower socio-economic end of my tiny middle-class ecosystem but my diet would be the envy of the kings of yesteryear.
I think that statistically in the USA, leisure time is mostly flat / slow growing the past few decades, and actually shrinking for those with more education as they work longer hours . Some interesting data here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/how-did-...
This seems to correlate with my theory in the OP that we have a knowledge distribution problem in the labour market. Fewer people know certain specialized things and need to work longer because of it.
> My point being is that we already have too much stuff in the world, and the existing system of trading labour for putting food on the table just encourages more stuff... But I have no idea what the solution might look like.
One person's stuff is another person's food - even if there is waste, someone does have to actually make/harvest/move/package/market the stuff eventually. But I get your point.
> This seems to correlate with my theory in the OP that we have a knowledge distribution problem in the labour market. Fewer people know certain specialized things and need to work longer because of it.
This might be the case, but I also think that the more complex work gets, it gets harder to split it between multiple people without a lot of organization, so it's "easier" if one person just works longer.
Modern (market/captial) economies aren't an all or nothing system; tax law, regulations, and social programs are very influential and the diversity among policies for various 1st world countries show the "market" economics is a fluid force that is channeled through the framework of rules we create and modify.
> Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse.
The reality is that BOTH are true.
There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them. My generation is facing this crisis, and the default response is to complain. Which is fine for a few minutes or days, it's good to vent. But at the end of the day, that won't change anything. It's time to get to work, even if "work" is 20-30% (random number) tougher than what our parents dealt with. Assigning blame doesn't solve anything.
That being said, I definitely agree some sort of Basic Income strategy will be necessary going forward. Perhaps soon.
Speaking for myself (as a 22 year-old recent graduate) -
I was brought up to respect my elders and to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity with a conscience bent more towards justice and meritocracy than corruption and inequality. I believed that the older generation who shape and structure society through government, industry, and academia were doing their absolute best to set future generations up for success; after all, what else could be the ultimate aim and goal of life once you marry and have children of your own?
Now, I'm not so sure this is the case. It seems like there is a lot less to go around, even for the older generation. I used to see teenagers bagging groceries and working menial service jobs. Now all I see are 50-60 year olds, and I wonder "how the hell did these people end up working minimum wage, 11pm shifts at the grocery store at age 58?". I see my landlord barely getting by on social security, rent income, and a sales job, unable to retire at age 65. Ageism is real, with layoffs at major companies (IBM, HP, etc.) affecting older workers disproportionately, many of whom are not yet able to retire and who don't have the time to retrain for a rapidly-changing economy that demands dramatically different skills than it did 20-30 years ago.
So ultimately, I find that many in the older generation are simply trying to make ends meet in an environment of scarcity that is new for the US, with the youth subsequently becoming disillusioned because the system seems to be set up against them.
Of course, as inequality grows, the shrinking proportion of families with money are largely exempt from these worries. But you would think "they" (the nameless, faceless, despised rich) would find it in their interests to give back to society; to give back to a system that had rewarded them with comfort and prosperity. To make sure it didn't rot from the greed, sloth, misplaced violence, weak guidance, and weaker morals that did away with the mighty Roman empire.
It's all a matter of perspective though: at least we're not being conscripted to go fight in Vietnam or WWIII, which is the ultimate manifestation of the old using the young for profit and self-serving agenda pushing.
You don't see the people who are doing much better than their parents. The more self-aware of them know that there is nothing good that comes out of drawing attention to their good fortune. The less self-aware just assume that's how it is for everybody and don't think it's remarkable.
> The more self-aware of them know that there is nothing good that comes out of drawing attention to their good fortune.
I'm part of this trend and I hate it. I have to be careful who I tell anything to. Many people dislike me for it. The world is so weird. I spend so much time pursuing utility via automation. It's so sad to see it mostly alienate people. Just as all of this stuff is becoming so easy and accessible. It has definitely crushed many childhood ideals. At a young age I observed a world in which people had to work too hard and couldn't focus on making good choices. I wanted them to have more time. Not less. It seems as if more and more people are entering a doom loop. Less aware. Less optimal. More time working. Less time learning. Less aware...
Sure, but if people were moving up on aggregate, we would see the middle class growing as children of the poor made their way up. Instead, we see the middle class shrinking, the poor growing, and the wealth collecting to a smaller proportion of the population as families are being pushed down due to the recession.
Be careful with the word "aggregate", it obscures a lot of the complexity of what's going on. In aggregate, for example, the average person will remain...average. That's not a useful conclusion when looking at absolute wealth (which nobody really cares about anyway - the working poor today have more information available to them than a corporate CEO did 20 years ago, yet it doesn't do much good for them), nor is it all that useful when predicting how to raise your social status (which a good number of people do care about).
What's really happening is that the class structure of society is being replaced entirely, similar to what happened during the industrial revolution. During the Renaissance, the class system consisted of landed aristocrats => merchants => guilds => working poor. The Industrial Revolution raised the productivity of certain industries so much that the owners of these machines displaced the previously wealthy class, leading to a class system of industrialist/financiers => unionized workers => non-union & service workers.
What's happening now is that "software is eating the world", and displacing the existing networks of production throughout the economy. That's leading to a class system of "those who own the data" (entrepreneurs & executives of large tech companies) => "those who work with the data" (software engineers, and likely hardware engineers & material scientists in the near future) => "everybody else". This transition has just begun, in the grand scheme of things; I'd estimate that we're at the equivalent of around 1900 on the Industrial Revolution timetable. The big losers likely won't be the middle class, who are probably the best positioned (in aggregate - see, it obscures a lot of relevant details) to move into the engineering class. The losers are likely to be the formerly wealthy, the descendants of the former owners & executives of old-line corporations. The landed aristocracy didn't make a great showing during the Industrial Revolution, and it's unlikely that the country-club set will make a great showing during the Information Revolution.
Pick where you want to be in the new world order, and work hard to get there. One thing capitalism definitely does reward is action. The old economic order has just been blown up, but few people realize it yet; that makes it the best time to build the new one.
I like the thrust of your argument, but from my perspective in Singapore/Asia, that's not quite what I see.
Big corporates are aggressively moving to dominate technology niches, while still dominating their existing verticals.
* All the banks have strong deal/shopping apps
* Property developers are continuing to build ever larger malls while investing in Amazon-like marketplaces (see Matahari Mall)
* Every big corporate is investing in external startups or growing internal startups and innovation divisions
* Practically all the big startup successes in Singapore, Indonesia and China are owned, often quite directly, by well-connected families or the state
Everyone's aggressively responding to the tech upstarts and trying to control their own turf.
The US-educated scions of well-connected families are especially responsible for techologising their behemoth family businesses and launching modern apps. New local players will have difficulty competing with old money's new generation of leaders.
In other words, what I see here in Asia is the entrenchment of old money. The market is saturated with new entrants, but the leaders are those who are backed by old money, simply because of the firepower that those connections give them. I think this is fundamentally different from the situation in the Valley, where more disinterested VCs (rather than old money) back the new horses.
My assessment is from the gut rather than statistical, so I'd love to be given an alternative view.
> I like the thrust of your argument, but from my perspective in Singapore/Asia, that's not quite what I see...The US-educated scions of well-connected families are especially responsible for techologising their behemoth family businesses and launching modern apps.
The report draws a similar comparison between the decline of the landed aristocracy during the Second Industrial Revolution and the coming decline of the industrial aristocracy due to "software eating the world."
However, Formation 8 is taking advantage of this opportunity: one of their partners is the scion of a Korean conglomerate, and he's no doubt leveraging his family ties to obtain buy-in from many other HNW families from all over Asia:
>What's happening now is that "software is eating the world", and displacing the existing networks of production throughout the economy. That's leading to a class system of "those who own the data" (entrepreneurs & executives of large tech companies) => "those who work with the data" (software engineers, and likely hardware engineers & material scientists in the near future) => "everybody else".
Unexplained data: $3500/month one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco. If technologists are on top of the hierarchy, why can't they get society to give them easier access to better housing?
Counter-hypothesis: because the rentier-owners of land, natural resources, and financial assets are actually still the ones on top.
They do get society to give them easier access to better housing. That's what the rent is for. Being "on top of the hierarchy" doesn't mean that they can get access to everything for free; it means that they have enough money that they can spend it and write it off in exchange for the things they want.
> Sure, but if people were moving up on aggregate, we would see the middle class growing as children of the poor made their way up.
Eh, what you really want to look at is a series of cohorts moving on up as people grow older: a lot of US population growth is from immigration (legal and otherwise) who tend to have less income (which is why they immigrate), and from children born to recent immigrants (who have substantially more children than rich people in this country).
Look at employment figures by age group and labor participation rate. You'll find that older people are working longer because they can't afford to retire.
Also, Google "calculated risk blog" and read the last 2 months or so of posts. Pay careful attention to the posts about reduced GDP due to demographics, as well as new household formations lagging due to structural economic issues.
TLDR Ain't nobody moving up in any cohorts. 70% of people make less than they did 12 years ago.
That sounds like it would only apply if the relative population growth of each group was similar. The statistics say it's not, even with child-mortality rates, the poor outnumber the rich and that gap is increasing in number.
Peter Norvig's Economics Simulation is informative in this case. Without forced redistribution, most OECD nations will become 3rd world eventually. It's a mathematical certainty. Even with forced redistribution, the rich still get and stay rich.
Am I missing something? It seems like all those transactions are merely exchanges, and no wealth has actually been created (i.e. new ipads, hepatitis treatments, Taylor Swift concert tickets, food grown, etc.).
Norvig uses the term level of wealth to describe what's being exchanged. I think that covers wealth being created (or destroyed, which, y'know, also happens, eh?)
>I was brought up to respect my elders and to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity with a conscience bent more towards justice and meritocracy
Interesting. Do you see this as more of a failure in your upbringing, or of a failure of society to live up to your expectations? Has this realization changed your political thinking in any ways?
I think young people should always respect their elders, even though they can and will be wrong at times. Doctors, engineers, politicians, teachers, parents - they're all fallible.
I don't think my upbringing was a failure - I think it's pretty normal to be extremely idealistic when you're raised in a middle class, educated bubble like I was. Most of my friends had great, successful parents and I think we all just assumed that if we followed the rules, got good grades, kept our noses clean, and went to college like our parents wanted us to, that we would be happy and successful just like them.
That was the magic formula for their generation. In fact, it allowed my mother to come to the US, get a good job at ROME Corp (later acquired by IBM in its heyday), and to pull her family out of poverty in Taiwan, where they had been so poor after her father's death that they had been forced to put 2 of her younger siblings into an orphanage. A college education allowed my dad to start his own law practice and to take out a mortgage in California, back when real estate was something people lived on, not invested in.
Now, this paradigm of education=prosperity has shifted dramatically, leading to disillusionment. My domestic friends all want to go into either tech or finance, and some (with degrees from good universities) can't find any jobs. Many of my very intelligent, driven international friends are being forced out of the US post-graduation because nobody wants to sponsor them, when in many cases they would be 10x better than a domestic candidate. The ones who stay are the lucky ones with connections at large companies that are willing to trade visas for favors and personal connections. But sometimes I wonder how lucky they really are to be staying in the US with the trajectory we are currently on.
Politically, the financial crisis and subsequent great recession has had a profound impact on me. When I studied economics in high school, I loved it because it presented such a clear path to efficiency and utility: free markets with no regulations, no distortions, no bullshit. Then 2008 came along, and I began to hear my parents argue about how they were going to afford to continue to pay for my high school, or send me to college. I didn't realize the magnitude of the event (the great recession) at the time, but became more aware of it as I started to look at the job market in college. My studies caused me to wonder why our system was set up in such a way that something so terrible could happen on such a large scale. How people were blinded or refused to see what was going on beneath the surface of the economy; how those who were supposed to protect us and our families from financial catastrophe failed miserably.
Politically, it made me realize that we need to have a strong government to regulate the greed of the free market, and that when that system of checks and balances fails, people lose their jobs and their homes. They get sick. They become homeless. They rely even more on an already-weak state. Some die.
My senior thesis was on the denationalization of currency (Friedrich Hayek's idea) through blockchain-based virtual currency, which would essentially end the government's control over the supply of money and put it into the hands of a regulated currency market. So that's where I ended up - tear down the current festering system, put better regulators into power, and let them steer the unparalleled engine of the free(ish) market. Not completely revolutionary, but definitely a bit weird and radical.
This touches me. I am 55, and I think this is a very astute observation. To me it seems the downfall of the 50+ generation was either caused or exacerbated by the financial crisis. On the other hand it seems that the top class wasn't really affected, on the contrary their wealth has grown substantially. That money must have come from somewhere.
Politicians do not seem to offer real solutions, and the media seem to be obsessing over details instead of big picture issues.
My generation may have given the greedy ones and sociopaths too much leeway.
I'm afraid I don't have the money to devote my life to politics and I'm much too idealistic to be a good politician.
In any event, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to influence the system is to have a lot of money to throw around. Then you can hire a guy to go make speeches for you and spread your message, you can buy scientists to publish research that supports your agenda, you can buy lawyers to silence dissent and block action, you can buy your way into meetings of the other elitely wealthy that really decide where investments flow, how the economy works, who wins and who loses.
We are the government, and if you choose not to help make it what you want, it gets made for you by people who don't appreciate your point of view.
Look no further than the "hell no" Republican tea-party caucus in the US Congress for a really visible example of people making the government the way they want it made while we sit on the sidelines.
You don't do it for the money, you do it because you believe the world can be better than it is. And if you do it right you can completely nullify the impact of people with a lot of money that try to force it to be different.
My grandfather told me that when the country was threatened by a Japanese invasion, the young men and women flocked to sign up to preserve their way of life. But when their way of life is threatened by their lack of participation in the governing of the country, they do nothing.
He was particularly disappointed with the youth of the 60's who would rather "drop out" than take their passion with them into public service and actually pull the US out of its sillyness in Vietnam.
Its a time horizon thing, one of the greatest strengths of Martin Luther King was that he could help people see that while it would take time, more than they wanted, they could achieve meaningful change. But if someone believes themselves to be helpless, they will live up to their own expectations of helplessness.
"We are the government"? Come on, we're not in high school social studies class here. The government of the country I live in answers to bankers and oil companies, with the democratic process providing little more than a glossy sheen of respectability.
There is no meaningful difference between a process I cannot influence and a process which could theoretically be influenced if I could put more time and money into it than I actually have. Either way, it is best regarded as an immutable aspect of the universe, damage to be routed around if possible and accepted if not. If the system were amenable to change it would already have changed.
Eh, i've personally affected local elections with both money and door knocking. But in that case, i'm one voice in thousands. At the national level, i'm one voice in 320 million.
You can change local stuff pretty easily. If you want to scale up to state level, you need to be state level worthy. The guy who owns 100 hotels controls tens of thousands of jobs, and his voice should carry more weight, about some issues at least, than mine alone. It's up to me to get a few thousand friends to counter his voice.
Yes. The feds are heavily influenced by oil and finance people. but every person's life is heavily influenced by oil and finance. Are they unethical? At some level, sure. Do they understand the national system better than anyone else? yeah. yeah they do.
There is no magical oracle we can consult for the right answer. we stumble along in the dark trying out different stuff. an 80% right solution is better than nothing. Given the size, the system is pretty nimble. If something sucks, we change it. Sometimes it takes a while for the million voices to come into harmony and say things like everybody deserves equal rights.
I get where you're coming from. You feel like you have no say and no influence. That's largely true. You're a nobody. but your influence is not zero. You can affect local stuff greatly today. You can join with others for larger scale political change. Realistically, it's a pain in the ass and you probably have better things to do with your free time like laundry or coding or whatever. But people do it. you can to, if that's what floats your boat.
Sure, local issues are a whole different matter - my comments above were about the national government. I could see getting involved in local land-use or transportation issues if there were an opportunity which didn't involve becoming a public figure or exerting an effort disproportional to the potential results. For the most part, however, politics seems like a really slow and wasteful way of accomplishing social change, and I'd rather spend my oh-so-painfully-limited hours on projects offering a better rate of return.
So here is the question for you, if you were an elected representative of your country would you give your vote or influence to bankers and oil companies? If so, and you clearly seem to despise that, why would you do that?
> There is no meaningful difference between a process I
> cannot influence and a process which could
> theoretically be influenced if I could put more
> time and money into it than I actually have.
The problem with that position is 'I', 'I', and 'I'. Is there no one else in your peer group that feels as you do? Maybe just one or two? Is there someone who is willing to be the person in office if you will help them get elected? Someone you can trust to behave in a way that you can respect and one which is free of external influence? Nobody took your ability to change the world away from you, you gave it away! Now take it back, if only in a very small arena. See if you and your friends can get one of you elected to a seat on the city council (or what ever the city's governing body is.) Have you ever tried? If not, why not? Sure being a city council person isn't going to change the world over night but it will show people what you are made of and it will show others what you stand for, if you aren't alone in that (and I don't think you are) they will come to your aide. You can inspire them to do that. All it needs is a willingness to day "I'm tired of the way this is run, I'm going to see if we can change it."
That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
Tell all your friends you are running for city council. I dare you. Tell them what you stand for and why you should be a city council member instead of the people who are currently elected. Listen to what they want in their city and try to visualize a better world. If not you, who?
I will never be in that position, because I will never have millions to spend running for office. I would have to sell out first, just to get the money to become an elected representative, and then what moral grounds would I have for turning my patrons away?
It doesn't really matter what I or anyone in my peer group thinks; as long as the war on drugs continues, none of us will ever run for office or have any visible role in politics. But it doesn't matter, because the tech industry offers most of us substantially more significant opportunities to change the world around us than anything we could accomplish if we wasted 10x as much time on the political process.
You're right that local politics is different; it is still mostly sort of democratic and amenable to change on the scale individuals and reasonably-sized groups can hope to achieve. But the scale of accomplishment available is correspondingly trivial, and the timescale is just as slow.
I don't see that the tea party accomplished much as a grassroots movement. It looked to me like the established political power structure successfully co-opted the grassroots tea party during the year after it emerged and has been continuing business as usual ever since, using the "tea party" brand to give their existing agenda populist legitimacy.
I am very much visualizing a better world and doing what I can to help create it; I'm just not wasting my time trying to accomplish that through some sclerotic, glacial, anti-transparent political process. I'm just working to create the organizations I want to participate in directly, helping build mutual aid networks, and supporting community values around resource-sharing and skill-sharing. Hackerspaces and co-housing and open source software, these are the kinds of projects where my efforts can actually accomplish something to help make the world a better place.
> That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
> A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
> That a tea party themed PR campaign was proposed by Burson Marsteller back in 1992 is somewhat interesting, but certainly not surprising. And it in no way proves an operative connection between anyone.
> The other big find of the study is that the PR group Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which back then, did work for big tobacco, split off and became Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, which is now behind the Tea Party. But the fact is, CSE wasn't just funded by big tobacco. Like all these groups, they were funded by a whole host of big, right wing corporations. Here's just a partial list of CSE's corporate clients/supporters:
> The Tea Party idea may have been the brainchild of right wing corporate PR groups. But it was only possible with the help of the corporate television media. And not just Fox. Whoever pulled the trigger on Operation Tea Party has powerful friends. If Occupy Wall Street had had such friends, we'd probably be living in a different country by now.
One argues it was the brainchild of a PR group, the other argues the first group is wrong but powered by Right Wing Media.
Either way, the Tea Party but was astroturfed into existence by rich people.
"I" do not have access to billionaires who back my interests.
The problem is not getting elected but rather how the elections are structured. Pretending otherwise is simply perpetuating the system.
In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they "help."
If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
And there were a number of people who ran as Republicans in California found that the Koch brothers donated money to help their elections. Did it make them tools of the Koch brothers? Maybe some of them but certainly not all of them. And if some billionaire donated to your election campaign would you suddenly do anything they said?
Look no further than the county clerk in Kentucky to see that once you're elected you are really really hard to fire, even if you don't do your job. There is nothing that says you have to do the bidding of your donors, the worst that will happen is they won't support your re-election efforts.
Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
I've tried, all right; that's what led to the understanding that it is a waste of my time. Months of work on a marriage-equality activist group built up a lot of public support, and then the whole thing got co-opted by the existing political establishment. All the energy disappeared, the work was wasted, we were nowhere closer to achieving our goals. The wheels continued to turn, but very, very slowly. It was eight more years before marriage equality finally happened. I'm really glad I didn't waste all that time working on activism.
> In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they "help."
If its okay with you, I'll go with the people with doctorates in the field over your opinion on the internet.
Out of curiosity, how many academic papers would it take saying you are wrong before you'd believe me?
> If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
You seem to be operating under the delusion that I don't understand how it works. I do. That is the problem.
> And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
No, I won't be surprised.
There was a good guy I know that tried this sort of thing, no billionaire would back him. In the end, people like me and his millionaire brother did. It amounted to nothing because enough "other people" funneled money into the election to "anonymously" send out mailers that implied his brother was a "Chinese citizen" and his campaign was funded by money from China.
Similarly, a councilman with platform similar to what I'd like failed to get elected.
How you ask?
Well, first they slanted the system to prevent the guy from getting elected. There was a court case that found the voting method violated the population's civil rights. They then found a guy with the same name and a different middle initial to split the vote. He's been used as a proxy in such votes before. He'd have won except for the 4% of people who voted for the wrong guy. [ Remember, the proxy doesn't actually do anything other than get his name on the ballot. So his contributions are basically payment for services rendered. ]
I could go on about all the other things money has bought that I've seen first hand if you like. Shall I?
> Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
No, Politics is money and the ability to buy people to do your dirty work for you.
No one is going to give me $3+ million to lie to people to win a single congressional seat. However, they are perfectly happy to do that for people who hold the sort of views. How much do you think the opposition raised? Less than a million.
But hey, money doesn't matter. The ability to hand a man a large chunk of money to run as a candidate whose sole job is to put his name on the ballot to confuse people [he didn't actually use any of his campaign funds to campaign, fyi].
But hey, prove me wrong. Go right ahead. Go find some nice district where there are some large incumbent players and run for city council against their interests. See how far that gets you. [ Hint: They'll hire a guy with a single character difference in the name, fund half a dozen candidates with larger treasuries than you. ]
Hell, I'll even tell you what happened to the last guy so you know what to expect.
I am really glad you invested some time and effort into making things better, and I'm sorry it didn't work out the way you wanted it too. But it sounds a bit like you're sort of "one and done" here on trying things, is that the case?
It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right? I hope you won't give up trying, learned helplessness is a terrible terrible place to be.
> But it sounds a bit like you're sort of "one and done" here on trying things, is that the case?
I listed two instances and offered to go on.
I don't see a value in posting my life story on HN given I prefer to be mostly just left alone.
> It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right?
The problem isn't "tricks", the problem is anyone who actually stands up to anyone worth standing up to doesn't have enough money.
The only real route to "success" I have is to make $5-10 million and being willing to spend half on being elected. No one is willing to spend that money on the congressional level.
That doesn't put food on the table or keep the lights on. Going into politics is very very high on the maslov hierarchy.
But I'm sure my landlord will nod approvingly when I say "Oh, I'm not going to pay rent this month, I'm in politics you see. Changing the world. Don't got time for rent."
Also, the idealists who go into politics aren't necessary good for you and me. They tend to have one-track minds, focused on a small number of issues (sometimes just one).
> Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American
public actually have little influence over the policies our
government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features
central to democratic governance, such as regular elections,
freedom of speech and association, and a widespread
(if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if
policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations
and a small number of affluent Americans, then
America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously
threatened.
That's a mythology we are told to pacify us. It has no factual connection to reality.
You're arguing the authority of traditional religious doctrine to people who've already left the faith, that strategy will not work. Try another strategy. Or consider you could be wrong, and join us.
I am old enough to have watched Anna Eshoo go from a rinky-dink Santa Clara county supervisor (with only a 2 year associates degree in English) to a Congressional Representative. Her path was pretty straight forward, she was interested in politics, she cared, she hung out with the Democratic committee groups and then got her ticket punched for the big leagues in 1988. (I voted against her).
Trust me, if she can make it all the way to Congress on passion alone, anyone can.
> That's a mythology we are told to pacify us.
> It has no factual connection to reality.
Sadly it is what people would like you to believe because it keeps people who care out of the way, but it is factually untrue. At any given instant in time you are not the government, but over the span of time you absolutely are. Civil rights, the Suffrage movement, Gay Marraige, Health Care reform, these are all things that are driven by people through instititutions that are designed to give them the power to affect change over time.
There is a folk story, I think it is originally Chinese about a worker told to move a large boulder out of the road. He says "Can't you see, no man could move that rock it is too large!" and another man steps up and says "I'll move it." The second man picks up a rock hammer and walks to the boulder and taps it until a piece breaks off in his hand. He carries that to the side of the road and then goes back to the boulder. The next day the rock is gone.
The moral of course it that what you clearly cannot do in an instant, you can often do over time. That is the power you wield. And it might take you 5 years of hanging out with the local party bigwigs, then another few years of local public service, before you make it up to the big leagues, but if you care you can do that. We take high school students and train them to be Neurosurgeons in 15 years, but nobody expects that they can say "Hey I want to be a neurosurgeon!" and instantly become one, why is it so surprising that you can't just decide you want to be president or governor without any training at all?
Start local. You absolutely can get into office if you've got some good ideas and you get people around you interested in what you have to say. Get in at the smallest local unit of government you can, whether it's the town council or water board or whatever.
You'll discover how much relationship-building goes on, and how that leads to bigger and better opportunities to make a change in the world.
Guess what, it isn't easy, but it's absolutely doable. (Not for those who call it all a myth, of course.)
I don't mean to offend, but this seems quite banal (maybe it's just how insincere it sounds in face of what most people have to go through on a daily basis to tread water).
It's as if the only way of bringing effective change (for some definition of such) along any social economic dimension (read: ways resource allocation) dimension is running for office. Its laughable to think, pandering to the status quo will improve the situation.
Sure, what we have now may be what is currently running on the OS of collective human behaviors with a high resource load, but it doesn't really stand in the way of people trying to think/experiment and bootstrap other methods grounded in the realities most people have face everyday, as compared to a more fortunate few.
As things get worse for some of us, it can also the best motivation for one to pursue other ways of being.
Well then again, maybe if the US Treasury sells a couple trillion T-backs to the Federal reserve and a couple more rounds of QE will solve all the problems the world faces, again!
Excuse me, one slight objection: the American political system is not a natural result of "the OS of collective human behaviors". It was designed to be exactly as bad as it is, and damn any human nature to the contrary.
Well, OS's are usually designed, at least everyone that I have encountered… and US system is no less designed than any others in so far as they are quite suboptimal at resource allocation, but better than say 10k years ago.
> So ultimately, I find that many in the older generation are simply trying to make ends meet in an environment of scarcity that is new for the US, with the youth subsequently becoming disillusioned because the system seems to be set up against them.
Hey, welcome to the adult world! Do you think, if you asked the older generation to describe one another in confidence that they might say the same?
At a minimum, vote AGAINST the corrupt. If that means your vote gets wasted, so be it - if you're worried about legitimizing it, instead legitimize your opposition. If there becomes a sizable (and measured!) block of disaffected votes that politicians can try to grab, maybe they'll just do that.
Not voting just legitimizes the view that you complain but don't act.
(And if you're sick of your options being so bad, start trying to get different voting methods in place locally in the interest of getting them in place on a larger scale. First Past the Post is a terrible voting system)
This is a good example of a common sense reform that strengthens every ideal that we are supposed to hold dear in this country, but that threatens the establishment powers therefore stands zero chance of happening.
Do you know why money matters in politics? Because it buys votes. Politicians are willing to sell their opinions for money because it is expensive to run a campaign convincing people who are otherwise apathetic to vote for you. And that is were most political campaigns are won because most people who aren't apathetic about an election have already made up their mind before the campaigns' marketing efforts even start up.
Yeah, and if you don't vote you get what the money wants without a fight. If you work to create things like Uber, to solve a first-world problem such as "mediocre taxis" you should be able to work towards a communication system that can combat traditional marketing and its effect on voting patterns. Otherwise, you're just admitting it's "hard" and you don't want to work on "hard" problems...
>> work towards a communication system that can combat traditional marketing and its effect on voting patterns
We already did something like that. Obama got elected due to some internet based marketing innovations. Guess what happened next ? both parties copied those methods(AFAIK), and now we're at the same point, where resources matter.
Worked for open-source software. In a relatively short time (10 years +/-?), the traditional capitalistic model which worked for centuries seems to have been supplanted to at least some degree. I was thinking of several things: 1) Modern technology to provide direct communication, 2) Sheer numbers of people in each age cohort and 3) The desire to effect change.
Social media can slaughter a movie in a day or two. I would think it would have a useful effect on its users, assuming they were willing to make the effort.
Open Source was the capitalist response to Free Software, capturing the cost reduction of shared and unpaid voluntary work and reselling it as closed systems. If anything, it underlines the point that any change will be subverted and used against its originators.
For one of two paries that are essentially the same? Obama made a lot of big prommises before getting into power. He hasn't followed through on many of them at all.
You might find both major parties to be not good enough, but that in no way implies their policies are the same. Policies MATTER. Disappointed that Obama didn't do as much as he promised? So am I. Bothered by his reactions to things like Snowden? Ditto. But don't mistake those issues as being exactly what the other party would have done. [And for those that hold more conservative views, while recent Republicans haven't done much for actual limiting government and reducing spending, make no mistake that their policies would be notably different than Obama's or a fully Democratic Congress].
Policies matter, and policy differences matter. Don't mistake unhappiness as making the alternatives indistinguishable - all that does is reduce accountability and exacerbate the problem. (And this is true for liberals, conservatives, and those that don't hold such binary opinions alike)
We're definitely drifting off-topic, but I feel this is relevant to issues like the linked article in the HN space:
I think differences in policies are irrelevant given the current setup. If Obama's two terms have proven anything, it's how ineffective the system is. You don't see leader's, in any other field stand at the podium and sigh, groan and just look as frustrated/helpless as he does.
And telling people to vote for this kind of ineffectiveness (14 years now in the middle east, just to pick one issue) is like telling Snowden to keep his mouth shut and soldier on.
The political class feel like the medallion based taxicab union just waiting to be subverted.
I didn't say vote FOR the madness, I said vote against it. Even if that's voting for third party candidates. A vote is a metric. Non-voting gives them no reason to care about your opinion, while a vote (even for no one) means you act. [And once you consider policies, I think it's better to vote for a less-bad option that can win, but if you disagree, by all means vote 3rd party]
And I'm comparing voting in this case to not voting and just bitching, or taking up arms and revolting. Neither seems like a better option. If you have a third option that you feel is better, please share.
A question I like to pose: If the US system is truly unsustainable (American-style democracies are rare and have all failed save one...so far), AND you don't really believe that there will be some sort of country-wide rebellion, then what is a future you can believe in, and what do you think gets us there?
So far the answers I've gotten are:
* Country fractures
* Dissolve the Senate
* Adopt a Parliament system
* Greater empowerment of Prez.
Mostly done not per the constitutional means, but just done, and everyone agrees to let it stand, kind of like the creation of West Virginia.
Though mostly, I get blank looks. It's not an easy problem.
> A question I like to pose: If the US system is truly unsustainable (American-style democracies are rare and have all failed save one...so far)
What possible concrete definition of "American-style democracies" is there for which this is both true and meaningful (e.g., its trivially true but clearly not meaningful if the definition is so narrow that the US is the only "American-style" democracy that has ever existed.)
(NB: All of this is my understanding, and could be completely in my head. Grains of salt recommended)
An american-style democracy (also: presidential democracy) involves the following:
* Separate executive and legislative branches
* A checks-and-balances system
I believe Chile had such a system, but collapsed because they didn't have an amendment system. Whenever the US helps set up a democracy (which we've done in both heavy-handed [Japan, Germany] and more advisory means [assorted African countries, etc]), we DON'T suggest our system, but instead a parliamentary one.
The number one issue (IMNSHO) with our system is that both the president and the legislature have equal validity, so if they have a dispute, how do we decide who legitimately represents the interests of the electorate? An example of that sort of roadblock caused The Dismissal in Australia, but we have it much worse.
As I understand the various parliamentary systems, in general, the legislature is voted in, forms a majority by agreement, appoints a Prime Minister, and seats the various Secretaries (or whatever titles). Laws are written (by and large) by the bureaucracies, not the legislators. Should the Prime Minister lose the ability to get results passed, a new election is called for. [Anyone that can correct me here, please do - it's been very hard to find what happens inside the "majority forms a government" phase]
Compared to American-style democracy, a parliamentary system has fewer roadblocks, and more empowerment to the govt agencies to suggest their own rules (subject to the requests made by legislators.
Voting for the lesser evil at the end of the day is non representative. It devalues the vote. It sends a wrong signal to establishment and to candidates.
The undecided voter is constantly bombarded with this "get out the vote or the republic will fall" fear-mongering line to push elections one way or another. At the end of the day it's a form of gaming the system.
FWIW, I used to feel the same. I voted my conscience, even when that meant voting third party or not-on-the-ballot write-ins.
Then we had Bush v Gore, when I had voted Nader. I got to see (In my opinion) a lot of bad decisions, and a lot of Constitutional violations. I felt responsible. (Was it my vote that made the difference? No. That doesn't make me feel better, because it was the concept that I backed that let this happen).
So now I vote for someone I can accept. I still value anyone that votes their conscience, as as I've argued above voting at all, even a "wasted" vote, is more meaningful than not voting. But I myself feel responsible for too much to do it when the stakes are high.
I'm not addressing not voting when you don't understand/know the issues - that's a separate discussion.
Well, Obama is only the President. Congress alone has the power to write laws and pass them. The current congress we have is not particularly interested in governing.
In Australia everyone has to vote. I think this is as it should be - voting isn't just a right, it is a duty. But of course the entire system is flawed because it seems to make no difference who you vote for. Team A and Team B play exactly the same game.
But the important thing for a given demographic is for that demographic to get enough members to vote. Because if politicians see that a good chunk of their base is 18-25 year olds, guess what their policy is going to be directed towards? After all, there is a good reason that it is political suicide to touch social security -- quite a few seniors vote.
> to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity
There is no mass of humanity in that way, just like "HN believes..." or "Reddit thinks..." is mostly impossible to say. Some folks of that generation did/do act in mostly-altruistic, benevolent ways, and some of them did/do not. The generational argument is a very clever red herring that shifts blame from a broken system to the previous generation -- print this comment out and put it somewhere safe; your future children will be blaming your generation, too.
> "how the hell did these people end up working minimum wage, 11pm shifts at the grocery store at age 58?"
Lots of times, sheer boredom. Folks like us might do freelance coding or something in our old age, but there's not a good market for freelance people managers (which a great deal of those 58-year-old bag boys probably were -- why not ask them next time?) Also, big grocery stores are typically union so it's not actually a terrible career for the kind of work it is. Your generation has a different idea of what a "good job" is, so that's probably informing a bit of your reaction too.
> I find that many in the older generation are simply trying to make ends meet in an environment of scarcity
Most people are simply trying to make ends meet. Some saved more, some saved less, some earned more, some earned less, but in the US if you worked and paid taxes, you'll get the bare minimum (social security + medicare) and won't ever starve or go cold. If your desire for retirement is more than "won't starve", start saving today and always live below your means.
> with the youth subsequently becoming disillusioned because the system seems to be set up against them.
Every generation back to the ancient Greeks felt that way. There's basically always been a counterculture movement based on youthful disillusionment, some more successful (hippies of the 60s) and some less (#occupywallst). But it's not anything new. This should tell you something important: the system is the problem, and the system is adverse to change. A lot of those hippies turned into middle managers.
> But you would think "they" (the nameless, faceless, despised rich) would find it in their interests to give back to society
They absolutely do. The top 1% of earners pay 50% of federal taxes. Those social programs I mentioned above that will keep you eating, clothed and warm even if you don't have a penny to your name? Thank the taxpayers, of whom top earners comprise disproportionately. Almost all charitable foundations are made possible by the rich. Did you take any grants, subsidized loans or scholarships? If so, thank taxpayers (mostly top earners) and private donators (again, mostly top earners).
What's weird is that you understand the effect ("greed, sloth, misplaced violence, weak guidance, and weaker morals") but totally misunderstand the cause. Yours is the first generation of "everyone's special" come to adulthood. Instead of looking at the rich person and saying "wow, I want that, how can I get that for myself?" (and then doing it or at least trying), they'll say "wow, I want that, he has it, f* that guy". It's worse than greed, it's covetousness - wanting something so much you'd take it from someone else. That will be America's undoing.
It was just my opinion, I was not attempting to speak for anyone but myself, much less my generation. My upbringing was extremely different from that of millions of others in this country, and I have no right to put words in their mouths.
I'm not sure if Medicare/Social Security will exist when I'm 65.
I work for a living. I don't say "hey fuck that guy" because he's rich, I say "hey fuck that guy" because he's a greedy sociopath who is fucking up the fabric of our society, a society that I have thoroughly enjoyed being a part of for the past 22 years and that I would love to raise my kids in one day.
I don't have anything against Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Michael Dell or people of their ilk - they're geniuses who excelled in bringing a fantastic product to market, and they were rewarded for that. I would love to emulate their success.
But the top investment bankers who were intentionally obfuscating the market through complex securitization and interest-rate manipulation? The CEOs of Moody's and Standard & Poor's who were intentionally misleading investors and prioritizing profits over quality and integrity? The people whose job it was to regulate these markets, stop oblivious consumers from taking on a $500k mortgage on $50k yearly income? The oblivious consumers and investors themselves? The government who set a precedent of propping up failed bets with taxpayer money? The ones who were not adequately punished for the pain and suffering they caused? Yeah, fuck all those guys.
> It was just my opinion [... ]I have no right to put words in their mouths.
That's fine. But let's not pretend yours is a unique or unusual opinion.
> But the top investment bankers who were intentionally [...]
So here's another good example of the red herring that's been skillfully thrown your way. They could only do what they did because the system let them. Then they got slapped on the wrist a little (if at all) because the system doesn't punish itself.
And let's not forget: most of the people complicit in all that stuff were regular folks humping a boring job trying to make enough money to not go broke. By headcount, guaranteed those sub-$40k-a-year regular folks outnumber the terrible fatcats 10,000-to-1. They're responsible, too, but you don't see people demonstrating in front of their local mortgage broker's house. So when you (the global "you") talk about IBs ruining America and so forth, it rings pretty hollow to me because the system that let them do it in the first place is what you should blame. As long as you're distracted from that fact, you are no threat which is why knowing how to think is so important (colleges will try to trick you into believing that's what they're teaching, but they're not. Your first exercise is to figure out why they're not).
Tangent: my favorite example of this method of distraction is Obamacare. All this discussion about how to make it so everyone could afford an asprin at the hospital, and when it was all over nobody had bothered to ask why an asprin at the hospital should cost $15 in the first place. Why not? Because that's not a conversation the system wants you to have. $15 asprins build hospital wings and buy fancy new machines and pay administrators 8 figure salaries. We do not talk about the asprin.
Anyway, my point is that calling out the rich or the 1% or whatever is stupid, because they give back way more than their fair share (by the numbers). When someone/something says you need to direct your hate over that way, your first reaction should be to look and see what's the other way. The system that let banks go too far is the same system that's burying young people in student loan debt. Except this time you can't walk away! You and I both know this, but now we'll tab over to our editors and keep coding and making money and paying bills and moving on with our lives. This is why the system is the system, and we are not.
> "The people whose job it was to regulate these markets, stop oblivious consumers from taking on a $500k mortgage on $50k yearly income? The oblivious consumers and investors themselves? The government who set a precedent of propping up failed bets with taxpayer money?"
I explicitly called out the regulators and the irresponsible consumers in my comment. Come on man, at least read what I have to say if you're going to form such a long and complex argument against it.
I think you mean "federal income tax" (and even then, have the number too high.) Which isn't the same thing as "federal taxes", or even federal taxes on income (since it excludes federal payroll taxes, which are the most significant federal taxes on income for a very large segment of the income-earning population.)
A good question but no, they don't have 80% of the income. Let me flip the question though - should the bottom 40% of earners pay taxes proportionate to their share of income? Because they don't pay anything at all (federally). The point is fundamentally flawed.
> The top 1% of tax payers pay 38% of all income taxes yet only have a 20% share of total AGI. [0]
It would be easy to get into the weeds on this, so I'll drop this link and let you decide for yourself. There will always be questions like, is AGI a good measure of income %? (I say yes, because AGI-reducing writeoffs phase out very early).
There's a lot of "well it depends on how you define.." even within my own argument as you can see (do they pay 50% or 38%?) but my point should be clear enough. I hope :)
The reason why we hear and repeat that old people need to retrain, is because employers don't want to hire older people and knowing that very few can afford the time and money to retrain, and that it's politically permissible to discriminate based on "retraining" then you're going to hear a lot about how its really important to retrain and old people need to work harder and its all the victims fault if they won't retrain and much hand wringing about those darn victims bringing it on themselves. If we had a magical (online?) way to retrain old people, the mantra would insta-shift to some other made up reason why old people can't be hired and no one would talk about training anymore.
It the same thing with women or minorities who aren't cultural fits. Its not that there are no star wars fans in those demographics or that it truly matters, its just a way to say in polite company that blacks need not apply because of racism. Just go ahead, "change your culture" and we'll hire you. Oh you say that's impossible, oh so sad I guess we'll hire the white boy instead. What a shame we really wanted to hit our diversity quota, but, (shrugs shoulders) well you know how important culture is. I mean look at how important culture is at every other employer who coincidentally also doesn't hire black people. Oh it doesn't matter in the greater economy? We'll we're special snowflakes in this industry, you see, and you outsiders just don't understand, we really, really don't like women programmers or black programmers.
In some hand wavy statistical sense, those old people you see bagging groceries probably would have been dead 50 years ago. If that is true (I don't know if it is, I'm speculating), they aren't evidence of scarcity.
It's hard to measure quality of life, but if you look at things like housing, people in the US have more households now, with the average dwelling having increased in size (I'm sure McMansions pull up the average, but again, oversized houses aren't evidence of scarcity).
"In some hand wavy statistical sense, those old people you see bagging groceries probably would have been dead 50 years ago."
No, some proportion of them would have been dead between 0 and 3 years old (which is what brings down the life expectancy numbers dramatically) but 100 years ago those 50 year olds would still be living to 60, just like they do now.
Fifty, and sixty year old's are not that old. I thought 50 was ancient in my twenties, but it comes quick. As to actuarial tables, we have not made that much progress in 50 years. I believe we added seven years to life expectancy, but that sounds high?
I do see guys my age in menial jobs, and I believe it's the economy. Companies just fired people. They fired them for various reasons, but technology made it possible. It's result of decling availability of good unions, or any unions--hence no real retirement. A changing workplace. Less jobs.
If anyone should be worried about their economic viability, I believe, young tech workers are high on the list.
No unions. Training/work that can be farmed out. Training that can be learned over the Internet--well. I don't want to be an alarmist, but I know too many former Programmers. Too many unemployed/close to homeless Programmers from the 80's and 90's?
I see a trend towards doing well with less employees, and no one cares as long as they get what they want. What's App has a handful of employees? Twitter will never have the amount of employees they had a week ago, even if they do really take off. We are making programming/Web developement easier daily. I'm happy with DRY. I like Bootstrap. What will it be like in another ten years?
I don't have an answer, but I don't forsee a bunch of 50-60 year old employees bagging groceries. I just see the more Homeless. I believe it will get so bad, the rich won't be able to fully enjoy their wealth, unless they beef up entitlement programs? After all, driving your sport's car past homeless can't be fun, and then you have to think about where you can park it? It's kind of like eating a fancy dinner, while the person across the table is starving? And let's not turn into Mexico, where if you have some wealth, you can't leave the house unless you have body guards.
Got off track, but the future does not look rosey. I do think we need to resind some of these treaties that make opening up shop overseas so easy, or at least raise tariffs?
I know it's selfish, but the way we are moving is scary.
> There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them
There is no law that requires this, but looking at world economic productivity numbers and our industrial & technology base there's no physical reason that people shouldn't have it easier with more resources every generation. If there is no physical reason, that leaves economic, social, & political causes...
I don't think anyone is arguing that there are natural laws of "it gets easier with each generation".
But you're right, the wealth distribution during the economic rebound from the last recession has shown that the problem is sociopolitical in nature. I feel like we're headed toward another organized labor reform sometime during the next decade, not unlike that from a century ago.
> looking at world economic productivity numbers and our industrial & technology base
If we're looking at this globally, I'd bet the overall resources and opportunities available to the average person is up from 50-100 years ago. The developed/1st world is feeling some pullback from the rush of globalization, but it's benefiting the rest of the world.
We do have it easier with more resources. I'm gen X, and I wouldn't trade my upbringing for the previous generation. And gen Y had it better than I. We have FAR more entertainment; more control over personal transport; better materials for everything from clothes to construction; better occupational health and safety; FAR better civil rights; better levels of healthcare; better public understanding of health; the jobs that are available are better (more office jobs, less factory work); better access to shopping times (24-hour retail is a recent thing); FAR better communications options and quality (we have the internet!); better transport for dissemination of products, including international; better travel options for international travellers... the list goes on and on and on. In the west, we don't even have significant wars anymore - after 10 years in Iraq, the US lost 4k people. 10 years! And people still complain that the toll is way too high.
We absolutely, posititively, utterly have it easier right now than at any previous generation. Yet we've become so entitled that if life isn't perfect, then someone must have had it better previously.
I'm gen X too, and graduated into the recession of the 90's and have been lucky to be employed in a high demand field. You mention the stuff that we can buy, and that's part of the modern abundance that I mention that I know our society can produce, but I don't agree with our economic quality of life as a society.
It seems to me that the overall opportunities available to Millennials even 5 years away from my age drop off substantially. The hours that are worked for people that have jobs have increased, and the off hours are encroached by availability of instant demand emails, texts, endless other notifications. Looking at overall stats, the millennial group is at lower employment than previous generations and I personally don't believe that they're less willing to work hard than previous generations.
I've worked for startups with founders (from a generation or two before me) that were able to start fairly deep businesses from their 9-5 job savings and pensions - and now new business starts have been on a decades decline. I was able to work my way through college and now college wages have little hope of paying for a degree. Err I'm not sure how you claim that civil rights have improved with the uncovering and continuation of wide-scale surveillance that wasn't physically possible in the past...
There's no hard scientific proof in economics, but it seems like our society is more capable than ever, but the benefits are distributed more narrowly, while general wages are flat to declining, the risks individualized with lesser margins in the income, those all feel like fundamental reverses in important life areas.
> I'm not sure how you claim that civil rights have improved with the uncovering and continuation of wide-scale surveillance that wasn't physically possible in the past...
Try being black, brown, red, yellow, or a woman.
> I personally don't believe that they're less willing to work hard than previous generations.
I can't argue with your personal beliefs, but my personal belief is that they are less willing. I see gen X as being less willing than the boomers, too. I'm not comparing snapshots-in-time - you can't compare 20-year-olds to 40-year-olds to 60-year-olds effectively. 20-year-old boomers were more willing to work hard than 20-year-old Xers, and in turn the Xers more than the Ys. The boomers worked less hard than the generation before them.
> There's no hard scientific proof in economics, but it seems like our society is more capable than ever, but the benefits are distributed more narrowly, while general wages are flat to declining, the risks individualized with lesser margins in the income, those all feel like fundamental reverses in important life areas.
See my earlier comment about perfection. Just because we're facing challenges at the moment does not mean that earlier generations had it easier. When I hear the usual "it's so much harder now" stuff, there's never anything like references to things like conscription. Or the stigma of daring to be pregnant in public. Or the much narrower selection of food available. Or the lesser resources available for dealing with domestic abuse. There's a lot more to life than unemployment rate.
It's simply true that, barring disaster, the next generation will have it easier with more resources for cheaper. This is because worker productivity continues to rise.
More is produced with fewer hours worked. It's beyond me why it's taken as a given that the result should be a decreasing share of the number of people employed at a constant rate and an increase in the number of people unemployed, rather than say a decline in the number of hours worked per worker. It would be much better to shift to a 35-hour work week and hope everyone would edit Wikipedia or put on free musical performances with the extra time (or 40-hour weeks in the developing world), than shift another eighth of the population into poverty.
IMO depends on the type of job. In lower skill jobs you do see exactly what you're describing (more workers fewer hours).
In knowledge industries it's probably much more efficient to have fewer numbers of high performing individuals that are leveraging experience and domain knowledge as a productivity multiplier.
>In knowledge industries it's probably much more efficient to have fewer numbers of high performing individuals that are leveraging experience and domain knowledge as a productivity multiplier.
Then you would think they could receive larger amounts of vacation time than three weeks per year. Or that they could collect such fat fees as contractors that they'd only have to work part of the year.
Hm, I think the shift to part-time workers in service and industrial jobs is mostly about evading labor regulation of full-time workers and further eroding the remuneration, economic stability, and bargaining position of lower-income workers.
I would hope instead for more leisure at similar pay =/
This is the same problem people faced at the turn of last century.
The solution at the time was a mix between unionizing labor and adding regulation, like anti-monopoly laws, from the public side, and basically "inventing" the service, tertiary, sector and modern consumerism from the private side.
The problem with this solution now is that there is no quaternary sector in sight to absorb the displaced from the automation of the tertiary sector. Some researchers are talking about an "experience" sector that would be inmune, at least for now, to automation, but the volume of the current job market doesn't seem to indicate that it could replace the "service" sector any time soon.
Also the current market solution seems to be sharing economy businesses, which doesn't seem to scale from a social standpoint.
> There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them. My generation is facing this crisis, and the default response is to complain. Which is fine for a few minutes or days, it's good to vent. But at the end of the day, that won't change anything. It's time to get to work, even if "work" is 20-30% (random number) tougher than what our parents dealt with. Assigning blame doesn't solve anything.
If there is only jobs for 90% of the population, 10% is fucked no matter what you do.
That is the reality we are facing. It isn't "harder" to work. It has become impossible for the entire working population to be employed full time.
That is a world of difference.
If the solution was simply to work 48-52 hour weeks, as you imply, people would do that.
"Nearly eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes did the math on economic growth and concluded that within a few generations—by the time his peers' great-grandchildren came of age in, say, the 2000's—the persistent economic problem of too-scarce resources and too-few goods would no longer bedevil a substantial portion of humanity. He was right—even in the midst of our current hard times, he is right." (2009) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/01/we-are-live-at-the-we...
>There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them.
No, but it's an absolute shame and a complete failure that this is has not been the case during the past 30 years with the resources and technology available to us and with the total wealth (of course distributed unequally) growing up.
I'm not talking about Third World either -- things might have been better there, but then again they started from a pretty low bar.
Uh yes, there is no law, but the statistical or perhaps just plain old truth is that in the future there will be more resources available, and the idea that fewer people can tell everybody what is done with those resources is disgusting if they are deciding to take away lives or even severely (obviously relative, but I think everyone can understand how difficult it would be to live like the poorest of the world) hinder the livelihood of whomever.
This is nonsense. There are, in absolute terms, more resources available, but our economic system enables and encourages the hording of those resources by fewer and fewer people who will, in all likelihood, never use them in their lifetimes.
A growing millionaire class is not mutually exclusive with consolidation of wealth, if growth of millionaire class is less than reduction in middle-income class.
There may be no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them. But it's been a working assumption for a long time, and there does not appear to be any good reason for it to stop now.
modulo the Great Depression and a handful of other such cases.
> There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them.
This is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but maybe there should be a law. Corporations have a legal duty to shareholders to make money. Why shouldn't our government have a legal duty to society to increase our resources and make things easier for each generation?
That kind of attitude invites a government to try communism (the government runs a bunch of businesses) or militarism (turn all the unemployed into soldiers; as for resources, use those soldiers to take them by force from your neighbors).
Why should governments be beholden to the smaller half of its population (at least in most developed countries), if it comes at the expense of the larger half (and the one that is actually most involved in government)?
That holds until the cross-over point where the unemployed half is larger than the employed one.
Note that most unemployment statistics define unemployment as a subset of the whole population that both has no job and is not actively seeking one. That last criteria is rarely as objective as the first one.
In Greece, unemployment is currently 25% or so. 48.6% for 18-25.
There were 3,644,000 employed individuals as of july 2015. For a total population close to 10.8m. Employed people are far from the "largest half."
For the US, from the same source (all number Sep 2015), the numbers are:
Unemployment: 5.1% (Youth: 11%)
148,800,000 employed individuals out of 319m population... So 160+m people are not seeking work either because they're kids, retired, unable to work, inmates or have given up.
There are massive costs to the employed portion of the population exacted by the unemployed. Social Security is an obvious item, but consider other side effects:
* Desperate people are more likely to mug / murder people ==> Medical cost, psych therapy cost, security cost, cost of being afraid of who's going to get you for the $20 in your pocket.
* People in shitty conditions are more likely to become drug addicts, funding criminal activity and being a burden on things like EMS / hospitals. Maybe the next time you need an ambulance it will be busy with an OD case. Or maybe the ambulance will run you over as you attempt to cross the street? Or even just the sirens interrupting your sleep at night, removing a few $ of value from your life without your consent.
* For those who grow up in the poorer portion, they're less likely to get properly nourished, resulting in stunded growth, future health problems and diminished IQ (eg no omega3s in childhood)
* Same security issues but with your kids and their kids comingling in public schools.
> each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them.
That is clearly the trend, ups and downs aside. The current generation appears to feel they have it harder than the last few generations. Not even close.
I wouldn't say we have it "harder," because I don't believe that at all. The opportunities globalism and the Internet provide us are almost infinite. But the long-term view doesn't look too damn good from an employment perspective. There is a real mismatch of skill development and what is actually available on the market; and the labor demand is not nearly as stable as it used to be (career opportunities are changing every 5-10 years rather than 20-40). There is a lot more variance and randomness going forward by any reasonable projection, and while that doesn't actually change the underlying resource allocation, people don't do well with unpredictability.
I think more accurately its that, as the recent article on telematics shows - that the stable availability of work itself is being slowly eroded.
We can continue down that track for a while before you'll get a sufficient population of disaffection for something drastic to "suddenly" become a movement.
> The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people.
This is true, but I don't think it accounts for most of the youth unemployment we have seen so far. The jobs did not go to robots in America, they went to workers in China.
To answer another common theme: we can complain about CEO pay, tax cuts, stagnant wages, etc., but the reason for the pure and simple lack of jobs is not any of those things, it's just that those jobs went elsewhere.
And of course that affects you even if you were not going to work in a factory, because now the guy who was going to do that is trying to get through college and get a white collar job, so he's competing with you.
In turn, that means that going to college is now the baseline. So, after getting more people to get into more debt to get more degrees, maybe you find that you still can't get a job.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned a word that has been a huge help in my career, "certification". Some certifications are stupid, but many HR folks will ignore your resume if it doesn't have the magic letters they are looking for. I highly recommend going the lower cost self study route. Also, some certs are really interesting, even fun, to prepare for.
Meh, I had a PMP for a while. I let it expire because nobody cared. Besides, once you have the certification they milk you by making you earn continuing education credits (which for the most part cost money to obtain).
> This is true, but I don't think it accounts for most of the youth unemployment we have seen so far. The jobs did not go to robots in America, they went to workers in China.
I think that that is only temporary though. Once the wages in China rise enough, the jobs will be probably given to robots possibly in America.
Well buying robots will probably cost the same in China and America. But for US market, if you manufacture things in the US, you will shorten your supply chain and save on logistics. But yeah, your guess is as good as mine.
Yes. China is already running our of its cheapest new labor recruits. And while people haven't been looking many of the biggest African economies have started to get going. The time when you cannot outsource for cheap labor anymore is approaching fast.
> The jobs did not go to robots in America, they went to workers in China.
They went to robots in China. There was a very good video documentary on this in (I think) The New York Times not long ago, but I haven't been able to find it. This is close, anyway, and provides context: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
> The city of Dongguan plans to finish 1,000 to 1,500 “Robot Replace Human” programs by 2016, which (if done on a similar scale to the example above) would vastly increase production and improve quality while putting nearly a million people out of work.
One interesting thing to watch in the next few decades would be this - if more and more robots are going to be used, then countries like China will no longer have the advantage of cheap labor. A robot in the US is more or less going to cost the same as a robot in China, so there are not many reasons to send jobs elsewhere.
> A robot in the US is more or less going to cost the same as a robot in China
I have no data to back this up, but my intuition tells me that a robot made in the US (with American workers) will still cost more to make than the same robot made in China. As I say, just a hunch (I don't know how much proportion of robotic work is involved in building a robot, though I imagine more and more every day), so let's wait and see.
This is not accurate. Even with the jobs being sent to China, they still require fewer workers due to the efficiency of automation. If you look at the global pool of jobs, the trend is the same: fewer workers producing more output.
The world's needs are not being met. Only the needs of the capitalist who wants to turn a profit. I can think of a million and one things we should be doing but won't because of money.
>"I can think of a million and one things we should be doing but won't because of money."
So can I, a staunch anarcho-capitalist that believes we should have no state at all. I pay taxes and I expect the poor, sick and hungry to be taken care of. No questions asked, no complaints about budget.
But let's be honest... It's not capitalism or capitalists that are letting the poor starve. Just because there are greedy people out there, doesn't mean the government get's a free-pass on not fulfilling the duties we entrusted to it.
Sure. I expect that too. In fact I would be delighted to pay more taxes if I knew they were being well spent. The state has failed us in many ways (especially by being easily bought by the highest bidder) but that doesn't mean I don't believe a state like institution should exist... possibly one that is focused more on vital services and less on repression and power. I always find it curious how people like you and me want the same thing but have such divergent concept of how to achieve it (I tend more towards anarchism... maybe techno-anarcho-syndicalist who be a fair label but I don't like to pigeon hole). I'm not saying this to start a political philosophy argument but I do wonder how you expect the poor, sick and hungry to be taken care of in an anarcho-capitalist society?
I agree that there are a million things we could do, but at the end of the day,somebody has to be interested enough to pay for them. That was always the harder issue.
But if you have ideas that fit that criteria, please share. We need such discussions.
The point of BI is that the government doesn't actually need to be involved in centrally planning all of the things that need doing— it's a huge amount of unnecessary bureaucracy when many of them are things people would love to do given freedom from having to immediately "earn a living".
So the government doesn't pay you to pick up trash in the ravine near your home. The government pays you because you are a citizen, and as a citizen of a wealthy nation, you deserve the basics of life. If you spend that life consuming fast food and internet porn, that's okay. But given the time and freedom to do so, some people will choose to clean up that ravine— they weren't directly paid, but having their living expenses covered made it possible.
Currently people who work volunteer more than people who don't work. Further more volunteers give only an average of 3 hours/week. That's not much, in the context of our discussion.
I dunno about the metric you are judging volunteering on here. Do the people who don't volunteer and don't work have enough money to get to the place where they will provide the volunteering service.
As context and a little thought experiment:
I have just switched careers and have had to cut back on expenses to a bare minimum while I was learning the skills required to get a job in my desired field. I had decided not to work and focus 100% on learning. During this time I barely left the house and if I did I would walk, sometimes up to 10km, because I didn't have the money for even the train (food and rent come first). On the flip side my mother was a housewife while my dad worked (very traditional I know!) but she would volunteer in 3 different places because she could afford to (time and money).
I'm curious if such trash would ever be picked up. While I can imagine people being more altruistic once their needs are met, humanity seems to be really near sighted when it comes to subtle-yet-broad problems like trash. "Out of sight, out of mind."
You can always make more jobs. Just tax people that have money and give the money away to other people in exchange for participating in elaborate paper pushing schemes. Bureaucracy has been providing jobs for people as the technology progressed.
For example... No jobs? That's great opportunity to hire some people to help unemployed look for a job plus some people to educate the unemployed plus some people that would decide if unemployed deserves some material aid... you can also hire some people to audit those people and hire some more to build software for those people and for the auditors and so on and so forth.
As long as you can tax, you can invent bullshit jobs to have an excuse to give that money away.
Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money.
Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education.
It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.
>It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.
This is by design, of course. The more "educated" the society is, the more "menial" jobs they have to take. Wide-swath prescription of college degrees can't solve that problem (in fact, it creates it).
Plumbers and electricians make as much if not more than 'educated' jobs and are impossible to outsource. Education is great and today you can learn virtually anything with an internet connection but family expectations mean you are expected to go the college. 'The government is oppressing me with student loans' is pretty weak sauce and is par for the course lack of personal responsibility. Don't run up debt to major in art history.
>Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education.
But there have never been enough "good" white collar to employ the current number of Americans getting a college education. The difference was there were enough good, white collar jobs for the college graduates back then. But the number of college graduates has exploded.
You can train another 20k Physicists, but we wouldn't have any use for them.
And the quality of the degrees are lower too because colleges are accepting (and then graduating) worse and worse students.
Not everyone is cut out to do great things. There is no shame in slinging coffee.
The shame isn't in the work, the shame is in having no money to do anything: get a decent apartment, raise a family, go on vacation, provide for a spouse.
>They increased worker supply, driving down wages.
True, and the switch in economic focus from manufacturing to services hasn't helped much either. Makes me wonder how single people raise kids when the average wage/salary anticipates 2 earners.
I was raised to think this - there is absolutely no shame in working for a living. This scene from Girls basically sums up millenials and their relationship with work for me:
> Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money.
Ironically, this complaint always seems to ignore that a ton of jobs in the "easy jobs" era were shitty menial jobs. Factory work in shitty conditions and similar. These are the jobs that have been automated away.
And, strangely, this kind of comment also ignores that women weren't anywhere near as significant a part of the old workforce... and the ones that were had signficantly reduced opportunites available and were legally paid less than men.
> in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education.
Maybe. Not all college educations are created equal. Got a major in philosophy? You're not useful to the economy, there are no jobs and no one is wasting your education. Of course the example here is facetious, the point is this: If you have a college education/degree in something that is not marketable to the economy, the waste is not the economies fault, but that of whomever pursued that education.
I would posit that many businesses don't know the great value of a graduate with a good philosophy education. Critical thinking, clear writing, and persuasively advocating a position are all essential to business management.
I agree entirely. I majored in philosophy, as well as biology. I currently work in biotech.
The more useful of the two majors, even taking my career into account? Philosophy. Understanding the principles which govern the properties and flow of ideas/arguments/concepts is far more important than the particulars, which can be memorized and understood as needed.
The cliche is that philosophy teaches you how to think, and it's true. Of course, philosophy isn't the only way to learn how to think, but it's a good primer.
I agree that the educations aren't created equal, but consider what these kids were told going into college: a college degree = a good job.
The nuance of "the economy can't support liberal arts majors" didn't crop up with gusto until after the economy crashed, and isn't even true-- the economy can't support a bajillion physicists or electrical engineers either, nevermind that most people aren't cut out for it.
> The nuance of "the economy can't support liberal arts majors" didn't crop up with gusto until after the economy crashed
I'm not sure where you live/work/play, but I've been hearing this since I was in high school in the 90s. There was a strong push for us to get practical, applicable degrees - business, accounting, CS/IS, engineering, etc. unless one wanted to become a professor of liberal arts.
A philosophy major is not a poor financial instrument because it's not financial instrument at all. Education has aims other than making investors money.
As a practical matter, philosophy is typically studied by those who will go on to law school, a Masters in something employable, or as part of a minor or "core curriculum" alongside a trade.
In most of the liberal arts and humanities - particularly philosophy, a graduate from a reputable institution will have extremely sharp critical thinking and writing skills. A philosophy major's daily grind is very similar to proof-based math. Across the disciplines, people are mostly writing papers that argue positions. Particularly at top-tier institutions, those papers are held to a high standard for quality of argument, evidence, and style. It may not correspond directly to an efficient way to turn capital into more capital, but it's hardly a "waste."
I would love to believe tha is true, but whenever I hear modern philosiphers (Alain de Botton comes to mind), they seem to study other classical philosiphers rather than come up with their own ideas. Its like the diference between an author and someone who reads books.
In order to make any progress, you have to understand the ideas that come before you, lest you make the same mistakes. It's the same in STEM. That being said, the idea that there's no new philosophy is ludicrous. I recommend David Lewis as a very original, modern philosopher.
Sure, but a good author is someone who has read many books. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. (I admit that I don't know much of modern philosophers, but I find it hard to believe they are not making good use of those who came before.)
I really dislike this kind of judgement of non-STEM majors. I used to make these kinds of judgements myself. The problem is the quality of education in America. Outside of certain, well-defined technical fields our universities have largely become degree mills.
A high quality education in philosophy or English, makes for effective communicators with excellent critical thinking skills. Outside of the very best universities students don't get that kind of education.
A STEM major isn't necessarily the answer either. It's often a struggle for highly educated math and science majors to find work in their industry. Sure they may have a leg up on getting certain jobs outside their industry, but it's by no means easy going for them either.
"American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields."
Fact of the matter is that, there are largely just fewer jobs to go around. Part of this is that the older generation is working longer, not vacating their positions. Some of it is efficiency gains from software and other modern technology have let companies do more with fewer people, leading to a smaller workforce requirement.
We're very quickly nearing a point where not everyone needs to work full time in order to support our population and in fact not everyone CAN work full time in productive work. As a planet we're going to have to make some serious societal and economic decisions.
> The problem is the quality of education in America.
That's quite a statement. By most standards, US has one of the best (but not the cheapest) education systems in the world. But don't worry, even in Europe, non-STEM majors, especially the likes of social studies, are pretty much worthless.
Simply said, what do such majors really give you that you couldn't learn by reading books? Abstract reasoning? Worse than most STEM. Understanding of life? Living life gives you that. Social skills? People with good social skills usually got them during their teens, whereas people with shitty social skills won't get them through a degree. Critical thinking? Well, given the state of the world and the quality of public discourse, it's not working.
I majored in philosophy, albeit with mechanical engineering, and I'd say that my philosophy education has been much more helpful for my consulting career. True, my ME degree got me the initial interview -- but almost everyone who interviewed me was very interested why I decided to pursue philosophy.
>the waste is not the economies fault, but that of whomever pursued that education.
I'm willing to place at least 75% of the blame on the recipient, but I try not to discount the previous 12+ years of "education is our greatest asset" propaganda targeted towards children.
Even for 18 year olds with an inclination to think it's all bullshit-- nobody will ever present you with an alternate viable path. It's always "You don't want to end up a loser right? Sign here..." and next thing you know the creditors are calling looking for their $X0,000.
Classic peer pressure techniques apparently count as sagely advice when coming from high school guidance counselors
> The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people.
The crucial line is when basic needs for life can be met by a minority of the population, and that line was crossed decades ago thanks to the industrial revolution.
> This should be a good thing, but it won't work under most existing economic systems.
Almost the entire world operates in an economic system that assumes, as a starting condition that not every person needs to work on providing for needs. That is how innovation can happen, and new industries can develop, like the entire entertainment, sports, and computer technology industries to just name a few.
> Our entire economy has to change to accomodate the new reality that a significant percentage of the population will be unemployed.
There is no evidence that improving the productivity of existing industries leads to long-term unemployment growth. In fact the evidence shows that the nations with the highest productivity gains are also the nations that have the highest standards of living and lowest unemployment.
The secret is innovation. Nations with growing productivity can innovate and create new industries, which create new jobs to "soak up" the new population.
On top of this, global population growth is slowing and will basically stop--and maybe even reverse--within the next century. At that point, improving productivity will be the only possible way to continue growing standards of living.
>You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one.
True as far as it goes, and I too am concerned about the future of work, but I'm skeptical that we have ever seen, or will ever see, a future in which "no one is hiring". Today, there is tremendous demand for certain occupations, even as others are being hollowed out.
The difference from historical expectations is that the rate of change between who was hiring last year and who will be hiring next year is growing, and quickly.
People "trying hard" to get jobs in technology almost certainly can do so. People "trying really, really, really hard" to get jobs in heavy manufacturing in the American midwest are probably going to have a hard time (as are would-be blacksmiths, weavers, scribes, typists, telephone operators and many others).
Said another way: the direction of the "hard work" vector is more important than the magnitude. Said still another way: "work smarter, not harder". Said yet one more way: "make something people want."
> Today, there is tremendous demand for certain occupations, even as others are being hollowed out.
While that is true, these certain occupations tend to have a skillset or a depth of knowledge that most (not all) "classical" (here used as non-STEM) educations do not provide. As we progress forward, it becomes legitimately disingenuous to put green-behind-the-ears college students on an academic path that will undoubtedly lead them to unemployment at the end of that road.
And I hate to break it to you, even occupations that still enjoys a demand in hiring such as software / native-app engineering / web development are also to become more scarce as greater droves of students enter these fields and a global economy allows employers to find offshore work for cheaper.
> People "trying hard" to get jobs in technology almost certainly can do so. People "trying really, really, really hard" to get jobs in heavy manufacturing in the American midwest are probably going to have a hard time (as are would-be blacksmiths, weavers, scribes, typists, telephone operators and many others).
At what point do you begin to discredit everyone incapable of getting a job with "you aren't trying hard/smart enough" ? This is a bit of a hypothetical question - I'm not taking shots at your argument, but its something that is very important to ask of ourselves and of others.
>there is tremendous demand for certain occupations
The problem is that if you redirect all youth into these occupations, you will likely find yourself with more supply than demand. Software engineers are well-paid, well-treated, mobile, etc. because there are relatively few of them. This will not be the case when the default state of any 18-year-old is to become a software engineer.
I get nervous the way an argument like this makes efficiency a goal unto itself. Is that really what we want the future of society to be? Billions of software engineers, interspersed with some baristas, janitors, and gig economy workers scraping by?
Part of the point of BI schemes is to free up huge swathes of people to legitimately pursue the arts in all forms. Putting on dramas, creating music, learning for its own sake, philosophizing, cleaning up the environment, editing Wikipedia, working on open-source, etc... none of these things contribute much immediate economic value, but they do, I believe, make society incrementally wealthier in a way that creating the next derivative iOS game just doesn't.
Just like I hear there is a huge demand for software engineers from the taxi driver in Dublin. "Well my mate says he can find them, but they want too much money". I have a couple of payrises in the last ten years, the only reason I earn more is by switching jobs.
"When you know your passion and you're unwilling to live by somebody else's rules, you can make your own way. And don't misunderstand, this is not about breaking rules, this is about producing results.
Ignore the job description and produce results for somebody, I promise you, you won't be ignored. People will change the rules for you if you can produce outstanding results."
Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data.
I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cover letter or resume, most people really drop the ball. If job prospects are grim, you'd at least hope people would put in more effort.
One of the problems with the this process is that the information that would drive behavior-driven feedback is not usually correlated with the behaviors you use to interact with the environment. You apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe you'll hear nothing back, or when you do, it feels random and disjointed. I have a nice job, but I can't tell you that it's a result of hard work more than it is luck. I can tell you that all the people I have worked with have praised me for being highly valuable to them, but the people who didn't hire me... what impressions can I make of them?
That they don't know what they're doing? Or that I don't know what I'm doing? Neither of these is a morale booster.
Or you could accept what most people learn in their first month of dating experience - that just because you're not right for each other doesn't mean there's something wrong with either of you.
If "just get over it" were a solution, don't you think it would have worked by now? I don't think being flippant about people's lives is all that productive.
They're just saying that some skills typically come about with experience, and I don't think they're attacking you or unemployed people.
You talk about information being limited to job applicants, but interviewing is a two way street. Interviewers are human and also trying to sift through the information you deliver, and they tend to lean towards false negatives in order to avoid false positives.
Sometimes there is a gap and it really does come down to luck (or your experience in communicating during an interview).
My concern is more that the information which would develop productive experiences is missing. Yes, learning comes from experience. But you can learn the wrong things when your experiences are bad. Applying for work often does more to reinforce learning the wrong things than it does reinforcing successful things.
It's a lot like having many failed relationships. It doesn't necessarily teach you to try harder, it often teaches you to become cynical and careless.
No, of course not. Just as with the dating metaphor, there are a lot of people who will never be mature enough to accept that. But that's something they have to deal with themselves. I'm not their therapist. I can't "be productive" and help them fix their self-esteem issues.
>> You apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe you'll hear nothing back, or when you do, it feels random and disjointed.
Then apply for places where you actually see yourself wanting to work; even if it's McDonalds, people need to eat, a career in the food service industry might be rewarding if that's what you find you like doing.
Or join the military, every country needs a strong military.
Or join a non-profit, build a resume showing what you can and want to do and cut lawns for food money until you have a resume that you can use to get the job you want. You might find you like lawn care and start your own business and become very successful that way.
> Or join the military, every country needs a strong military.
It's funny how looked down upon this is. If I said, hey come work for me for 4 years. During that time you will get paid, get lodging and likely do some traveling. Oh, and you'll learn some skills. If you want to go to college up front and be an MD for example, I'll go ahead and pay for that and you can work for me for 6 years after gaining valuable experience. If you don't go to college up front, then when you leave my job (you don't have to) I'll give you money for college.
Now, inevitably someone will say they don't want to be sent to a war zone. The % of the military that actually end up in a war zone is very small.
What would be really nice is to have a non-military civil service option. So when someone graduates high school, they can still get a government job doing things like road construction or garbage collection, or even get trained on higher skilled areas. The only problem with this, is most of these activities are done by private companies that bid on contracts, so there is no room for a government organization to fill this role.
Of course, like it is perfectly reasonable not to want to do any job. My point was that the military is a valid option that many people do not think about.
At no point did I say everyone should join, but given the down votes my point stands that for some reason it is looked down upon. Joining the military can be a great option for many people.
> secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at
What's the point? No seriously, other than stroking the ego of the interviewer with a 'please sir, I am just dying to work here because you're so awesome and I'm not worthy.' Especially at entry level, one job is pretty much the same as the other. I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job.
I don't care how much you think I should think that your place is the best place ever to work and I should prostrate myself to get it, it's just a damn job and I am only looking for a paycheck so I don't starve and I can do things I want to do with my life.
> I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job.
Yep, I'm actually too scared to state the real reasons why I'm applying. I think HR will filter out my appplication when I write "your opening sounded somewhat interesting and I want to know more about the tasks I have to do when I work here".
Instead I just drop some additional keywords and bullshit into the obligatory "Why do you want to work here?" field. This approached worked so far.
I sometimes wonder whether HR people that do that are so smart that they realize bullshiting is an important ability that must be selected for, or so stupid that they actually fall for the answers they get.
> so stupid that they actually fall for the answers they get.
This, mostly.
Never put HR on your engineering interview loops.
I actually recorded the statistics for our HR people on the loop to prove that they were random relative to the engineering assessments so I could get them kicked off the loop.
Especially with something entry-level. You aren't going to be working on anything interesting and it's a damn miracle if you actually get to be intellectually stimulated. How many people get any type of dream job straight out of college?
You are there to get "experience" and pad your resume so you can move up to something actually challenging and interesting.
Yes a good dose of self-loathing in order to get a job seems like a very healthy thing to do. It's called 'drinking the koolaid' because it's suicidal.
Companies would be in a better situation if they realized that they were just a paycheck to their employees and not a damn lifestyle. That would cut into profits though, they'd have to give raises and improve compensation to keep people.
Companies aren't looking for decent employees, they want cheerleaders and morons that are blindly working for shit compensation 'because it's an awesome place' instead of employees that think for themselves and want to be compensated properly.
People who are there "just for the paycheck" tend to be mediocre performers, whereas people who are actually passionate about it tend to do a good job.
That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. Just hire yourself -- clearly your opinion is the only opinion that matters and moving money from someone else's pocket into your own is ultimately all about about your feels.
The problem with this explanation is that, for every such person, you can probably find another one that does all of that stuff correctly but still never hears back.
That's exactly what we see with the Fizzbuzz phenomenon, with every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it, but everyone tripping over each other (including hobbyists and beginners) to say how easy it is, so "where's my job?"
I saw it too with professors and employers who blog, complaining that applicants and students can barely put together a sentence.
"every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it"
I've noticed a correlation between that and insanely low pay or horrific working conditions, or a crazy disconnect between demands and the requirements.
"I don't understand why none of the applicants can explain the details of why one BGP route is preferred over the other" -- says the guy trying to hire a CCIE for $50K at a dying utility company.
"Well, sure we pivot every month and require 80 hour super high pressure work weeks and the runway ends in six months but aren't all companies, everywhere, on a perpetual death march?" -- says the guy who doesn't get any fizzbuzz-able applicants
"I can't find any applicants with PHD level programming skills and encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms who have written a widely used LISP and/or hold a Fields math medal and/or a Nobel" -- says the guy complaining about getting no serious applicants when trying to hire for an entry level CRUD shoveler, upon being told everyone's unemployed so he should aim high.
I've never had a interview which was only FizzBuzz. The problems given are usually much more difficult than that.
But I've also done interviews with no coding at all.
Point being, nobody is going to hire on FizzBuzz alone, in fact I would hatch a guess that most companies don't use it as a problem anymore given its prevalence.
Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality.
I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago when there was the time taken to type resumes, print them up/copy, put into envelope or hand deliver, the amount of time invested likely made people more concerned with their product.
Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.
After spending a lot of time in the process, realizing that prospective employers give an extremely low effort to respond to candidates - no matter how much effort put into a cover letter, resume grooming, or discussion of why the role might be a fit - it's disheartening. Auto-declines are the norm. Posting jobs for legal reasons when there's already an internal candidate in mind is also undisclosed.
Between having to sign up for proprietary job application systems, seemingly advance to the next stage but never getting a call back like a bad one night stand, or taking months to make a decision, the power dynamic is quite unfavorable.
I think employers are finally discovering that applicants are, for lack of a better perspective, using the same kind of attitude as they have been receiving for years.
Note: I am fond of saying the phrase "Good help is hard to find" because it is, and considering the US has had absolutely appalling wage growth metrics - disgusting even - what motivation is really out there?
I can understand that frustration. An auto-decline after spending a while to customize an application probably feels bad, but frankly most people won't feel great even with a personalized "sorry not interested".
My comments about spending time in the application process primarily are geared towards candidates right on the border of being qualified.
If I get a resume from someone who is clearly very qualified, I'm going to see it immediately and schedule a call. If the resume is from someone who is absolutely no industry experience applying for a senior job, I'll decline (with a note usually if they took the time to write anything).
But say we have a candidate that is slightly underqualified or barely qualified. They can spend a few minutes writing something targeted, and that will make the difference in them getting an interview.
I've had this debate here before, but if you apply to jobs you are clearly not qualified for, you shouldn't expect a reply because you've wasted your own time and theirs now. If someone applies and is just slightly underqualified, they generally are entitled to a response (especially if they took any time in the application process). Anyone who interviews deserves a response and ideally some specific feedback, but that's another story.
The dreaded internal candidate situation is a waste of everyone's time. They already know who is going to be hired, yet collectively everyone has to come together to interview you anyway.
Then there's the rejection, if they even send one.
Oh absolutely, and I think that maybe, just maybe, there should be a legally mandated annotation on such a posting that an internal candidate has been identified and you are competing with them.
In my experience, even worse than a rejection was being offered a salary not commensurate with my experience, and in the neighborhood of $5,000 less than what I was already making in a nearly identical role. I've had that happen on at least three occasions, where the employer was either being dishonest about the salary range or withheld that information until very late in the process; even if for innocuous reasons, it functionally seemed like attempting to put me in a difficult position (stay where you are or leave for us for less and no written/promised path for advancement of position or salary).
Yeah, I'm pretty interested in seeing what effect (if there is even any, not trying to push an opinion here) the bad economy for young people has on salary/compensation negotiations between workers and employers.
Do the employers think that young people are desperate for any kind of job, and then low ball their salary? Or do the candidates settle for a number once it reaches the threshold they think they are worth? Do people negotiate more or less than before the recession on average?
I don't believe that there's even data on these questions, but they would reveal an awful lot about the economic state of affairs if you could get enough good data to establish causation-- which might be very hard.
Just wanted to share I saw a link to a Gallup research piece (by way of ZeroHedge) that touches on some of the issues young people are facing, with respect to the student loan bubble and starting new businesses:
... the country can't look to people coming out of college to reverse this trend because too many of them are strapped by student loan debt. Results of the 2015 Gallup-Purdue Index -- a study of more than 30,000 college graduates in the U.S. -- provide a worrisome picture of the relationship between student loan debt and the likelihood of graduates starting their own businesses.
Among those who graduated between 2006 and 2015, 63% left college with some amount of student loan debt. Of those, 19% say they have delayed starting a business because of their loan debt. That percentage rises to 25% for graduates who left with more than $25,000 in student loan debt. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 16.9 million bachelor's degrees were conferred in the U.S. over the past 10 years -- a time frame that mirrors Gallup-Purdue Index analysis of recent graduates between 2006 and 2015.
I think Gallup could possibly be an avenue to conduct the study / research you mused about. Wonder if they ever will!
As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone.
My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new graduate. Thus, we have to send out 10+ job applications per week, otherwise we end up as yet another one of the millions of unemployed, college-educated young adults.
It's not totally awful (I found a great job as a result of my career fair), but unless a company is specifically recruiting from your university it's pretty much a given that you won't be offered an interview, let alone a job.
You don't necessarily need to completely customize everything... In many cases, however it's more important to have good structure and information.
Start off with a basic introduction paragraph or two of what type(s) of positions you are looking for. Followed by a brief summary of the keywords related to the technologies you've used, or are experienced with. Follow this by either eductaion or work history next, whichever is more recent/relevant (if you're still in school, or haven't had a job out of school, education first)... Point out each role, accomplishment and related technology used.
In work history, give a brief paragraph for any major roles/projects again, with any related technologies used. Also include aliases and related technologies.
By doing this, you give up front what you're looking for... what you can use, and then back it up again. Have others who are great with your language proof read and give feedback on verbiage.
Half the battle is getting through the H.R. and recruiter types that hold the gates to the decision makers. The other half is following through with actual relatable experience that you understand, know or can easily learn what you need for the job in question.
Be honest to a fault in terms of what you know, what you don't and what you feel you can learn quickly.
That's my advice to anyone looking for a job in a technical field... You don't necessarily need to customize, but at least have a great resume, that will go a long way getting your foot in the door.
There's certainly a tradeoff between shotgunning and carefully crafting an individualized approach. I'm not sure it's really all that different from what it's always been though. Way back in the day when I was graduating from engineering school, I sent out a lot of minimally customized cover letters with a standard resume to many companies in what seemed like possibly interesting industries. In fact, I got a number of interviews from those shotgunned resumes and ended up working at one of the companies. It was a pretty good job and one that I'd have never stumbled onto with a more tailored approach.
OTOH, my most recent three jobs--including my current one--were all basically through people that I knew.
I don't think that's true at all, although I can see where the stereotype comes from. The fact is, the more effort a potential applicant puts in before applying, the more likely they will be to get a job at the company they're targeting. That's not to say they'll get the job that's their first choice, but they may get another just that's equally good, or perhaps just a foot in the door.
It always pays dividends to invest in your human network. That applies equally well to college grads as to experienced workers.
I'm not convinced that more effort equals more success in this context. Actually I think the less effort you have to invest in getting a job the better the job will be.
The effort mostly lies in figuring out who has the authority to make a hiring decision about you and convincing them to do so. This is really tough for young professionals who don't yet have a professional network. For a lot of folks in the mid-30s and older, getting a new job is as easy as sending an email or picking up the phone (especially in tech, but also in many other industries).
What you're seeing is actually the opposite problem. That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places. Primarily, the candidate just wants any job he/she can get because of the fear of unemployment.
"Fear of unemployment" is a necessary abstraction, but consider what unemployment actually means.
Let's say you are unemployed, and living with your parents-- a very common situation for this generation. You're getting bled each month by your student loans, even if you no other bills, which you probably do. The candidate wants to work at any one of those 40 places, because otherwise they go into default and ruin their credit and probably their parents' credit too.
If you don't live at home, the stakes are losing your apartment or car. This isn't some unreasonable fear; bills need to get paid, and there's an entire generation that is struggling to do so because their largest bill just won't go away.
I'm not saying that people aren't justified in fearing unemployment. I'm just saying that fear pressures them into making suboptimal decisions. It's even worse because 99% of those people immediately stop looking for work, often with a huge sigh of relief, after they've found a stable job.
> immediately stop looking for work [...] after they've found a stable job
As opposed to what?! Any potential employer will ask you in an interview, "Why are you looking to leave your job so soon?". What are you going to say? "Oh, I'm just trying to find something better." - a surefire way to instill trust in your interviewer and get hired /sarcasm.
I'm not sure it's that easy... At least in the UK, the employer will sooner or later find out about your previous employment, because you'll need to give the new employer some PXX tax forms.
In any case, I'm not sure being unemployed is actually that much better.
> That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places.
This sounds like a whole lot of blaming the candidate. It also assumes that the candidate could even land one of those 40 positions in the first place. I applied to a whole lot more before I landed mine - as did most of my peers now in our early-mid 20s who didn't get swooped up in a career fair early on in the process.
You can't really tell me that someone applying for a job _in the first place_ truly wants to work (instead of pursuing a passion they like) period. More likely, the candidate doesn't want(keyword) to work at any of those 40 places at all. And here's the kicker:
The candidate should not be faulted for that if he or she is competent at the job and works hard.
The modern age has shown a lot of workers being faithful to their companies and having that faithfulness be an expected one-way street. Look at the firings of Disney and IBM Engineers. The Disney engineers had to even educate their replacements at reduced salary.
I'd love to be spending all my days producing music and building native iOS apps, but that's not how the world works. So, I work somewhere I tolerate working, somewhere I work well. And I count my blessings for it - not many millennials are as lucky as me.
To gain experience? To learn the challenges & pitfalls of the field on someone else's dime? To learn from somebody who has been doing it and getting paid?
Nobody jumps from the bottom of the mountain to the top - you climb it one step at a time. There are people making a living producing music and writing apps - the world does work that way. I'm not saying tomorrow you can decide that's how you'll make a living and it'll happen - but it is something you can work towards and achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
Right, but a real problem is that the HR "match the keywords" whack-a-mole filter is totally random! 10 years of experience for a framework that's only been around for 8 years means that only the liars qualify and the honest folks don't. You don't know how people are going to evaluate your resume but statistically a bunch of companies aren't going to grade people holistically.
But since you can't know a priori which company hires which way, the solution that people have settled on is to blast out a million resumes and hope that some make it past the keyword matchers and to actual human beings making hiring decisions. That's where the actual match-making takes place. But if you don't send out enough resumes to make it through the arbitrary, unpredictable filtering stage you don't make it to the matchmaking stage which means you're unemployed.
It's a positive feedback loop. If it were not for pressure on applicants to find a job, any job, would every employer get bombarded by so many poorly written resumes that they would feel the need to implement such filters?
Yeah I'm not suggesting that the candidates are entirely innocent. But I think the companies share a bigger portion of the blame. If they didn't want to get a million responses they could do things to limit their responses to people who actually want the job like say not allowing people to apply online, or making people apply in person, or requiring a cover letter of a certain length, or whatever.
But what has happened is that the companies set up these online systems to ostensibly make their own lives easier. Candidates have responded to the environment that they live in and started resume spamming. Companies respond by using overly-precise keyword matching to filter out candidates, despite the unsuitability.
It's not as though job seekers started printing resumes by the thousands and sticking them to the door of every business in their town and the companies had to adapt to this by making online systems to reduce the crushing influx of paper.
Seriously though, I don't blame the internet or modern interconnected society anywhere. I say that companies should shoulder a larger portion of the blame for creating perverse incentives. Other than that, I'm just trying to describe the world as I see it.
There's a difference between pointing out the flaws of the new system and flatly denying any of its benefits.
Luddites would smash looms so that they could keep their old jobs; I'm merely suggesting that if companies don't want a million resumes for every open position there are things they could do -- which they are not currently doing -- to help with this.
The problem with email is that it's frictionless. It costs an immeasureably small amount of money to send an email so as long as there are some suckers out there who'll buy your penis pills, sending spam emails is profitable.
Similarly all the friction has been taken out of the "submitting a resume for a job" experience and companies are now getting deluged. That's probably not the optimal outcome for employers or job seekers, but the only people who have any power to change it are the employers. Job seekers don't have any real influence on the systems by which employers choose employees, at least not until they get hired and even then it's just about impossible.
The only knob job seekers have to turn is how many resumes they send out and there's little/no downside to sending out more so it's entirely unsurprising that they choose to do so.
Companies on the other hand have a bunch of knobs they can turn regarding how they accept resumes. They're choosing to turn none of them and dealing with the problem on the back-end (keyword matching) rather than the front-end (increasing friction). This leaves them with a quality problem because people aren't keywords and someone with a year too little of experience X might have more than enough actual skill with the thing you need. It's kind-of foolish to assume people all learn at the same rate, isn't it? But because of the quantity problem that employers have, they can't solve the quality problem because that would cost far, far too much. They'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on engineering time to try and find the close-but-not-exact-but-definitely-good-enough needles in the not-close-at-all resume haystack.
This is why various companies have tried all kinds of different recruiting tactics like Google's early days where you had to solve problems from billboards or how a lot of companies want to see your open source work or for you to take a coding quiz. That's solving the problem on the front end.
But for some reason not everyone has picked up on this and out of all the programming jobs in the world maybe only 10% (no idea, it's just a guess) get filled by people who solve the problem on the front end. Everyone else does it on the back end, and their methods for dealing with it that way are not up to the task. This is a well documented phenomena, there are countless articles on the subject.
> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.
This is the theory, yes. In practice, that 10x level of effort is not matched by a 10x increase in the number of interested responses or a 10x increase in response rate. Diminishing returns sets in quickly. You wind up with more interested responses by shutgunning your resume all over the place - assuming you have a good resume.
The good resume (and I read the comment re: "good resume = qualifications and not just a nice document") is where your argument falls a bit short. Make the recruiter/HR/hirer's job easy for them. Assume they are unintelligent, and don't give them an opportunity to misinterpret your background.
The resume is a single piece of the process. For me to open a resume, first I have to open an email. How long does it take to write a couple sentences to make me want to open your attachment/link?
Then on the resume itself: write a summary. Don't make a recruiter (who 6 months ago was a "struggling unemployed kid who took the first job offered") try to interpret that you are an experienced $LANGUAGE developer with n years of this and that. Come out and tell them exactly what they want/need to know in order to make the decision.
We generally have underqualified people reviewing resumes for companies (agency recruiters, HR, admins at startups). Don't give them an opportunity to mess up. The job says they want a "Python dev with >5 years and some experience with Django"? Tell them exactly that in a sentence in the email, and again as a summary statement on top of the resume.
This isn't 10x effort. It's minimal. It's the hiring company's fault whenever someone qualified doesn't make it into the interview. My philosophy to my resume clients is "don't let HR screw you over - hit them over the head with your qualifications and they can't say no".
An hour for 10 focused applications is a little ambitious as well. I easily spent a day on each focused application back when I was applying for jobs.
And very few of the targeted companies got back to me. I now work at a place that got my generic career fair resume and had a pretty plain "I hear you know how to program?" interview...... Fantastic place though, wouldn't trade it for a 5x pay increase. :)
Yep. Even though it's true that people will mostly end up just skimming the resume, errors or just general slapdash are huge red flags. I'm not even a particular believer in customizing resumes (unless you're looking at genuinely different types of jobs) so it's really worth the time to get it just right.
When I said "good resume", I did not mean "An aesthetically pleasing resume" or anything of that sort. I mean "A history containing the traits the would-be employer seeks".
I mean having a clear summary at the top regarding your desired position/goals, with a keyword mash of the technology you've used followed by details of work history, projects and the technologies used is a better place to start.
Having actual paragraphs combined with the keyword jumble goes a long way. You don't have to do excessive customization for each job.
I'm not sure about the technology keywords. As a student you most propably won't have extensive knowledge of any technology. I simply don't believe that most HR persons know that somebody who has experience in Java from university courses is equally suited for a C# job.
While I know the strategy was high-risk, I made a very aggressive Cover Letter touting my capabilities and frustration with not geting interviews, and eventually that landed in the hands of the boss that hired me for my first professional job out of college and start in my field of business communications.
> If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality.
I agree. I'd happily put a nominal fee in escro to ensure that the target company I'm applying to actually looks at the resume. I'd also happily pay the fee for them to drop any job ads that they don't intend to fill.
> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.
I'm not at all convinced that this is true. The response rate seems completely uncorrelated with the amount of time spent on the application. Even at a lower relative response rate, casting a wider net grabs a larger absolute volume of responses.
As an aside: the biggest thing missing from the job hunt process is respect for your applicants _time_. At this point I drop out with companies that don't seem to consider that. I don't need feedback, but I also don't have time to waste doing repeat phone screens and months of interview process.
I think your response rate in relation to time spent on the application has a third element, and that's your audience. If you are applying to giant corporate bank, your resume is first being read by a machine (ATS) scanning for words. I have no idea if your cover letter is being read. Time spent customizing is no better than basic SEO optimization perhaps.
Contrast this with applying for a startup where the CTO is reviewing the resumes, and you mention in the body of the application (they don't want a formal cover letter of course) that you've used their API and say something about how easy the experience was. You're getting an interview, unless you are largely unqualified.
I understand your complaints on process, and that's why I only work represent startups and smaller companies that usually let me streamline the process for clearly qualified individuals. I, too, was once frustrated by the process of some of my clients.
Sounds like job applicants have the same problem that men have in online dating - no feedback from 99% no matter how much effort you put in, so in the end spamming seems like the most effective strategy.
>Sounds like job applicants have the same problem that men have in online dating - no feedback from 99% no matter how much effort you put in, so in the end spamming seems like the most effective strategy.
And the same problem recruiters have when they don't get responses from potential candidates. If you wonder why you get 50 emails a week on LinkedIn, it's the same thing.
That's disingenuous. All the emails I get from LinkedIn are unsolicited and I take my normal approach to spam of not responding, because responding only makes the spam more likely. A better example would be someone putting their resume up on a job board (not a professional social network) and ignoring all the responses, which I have trouble believing anyone does.
Don't you think that some people use LinkedIn as a way to be contacted for new jobs? I think based on the way profiles are written and optimized, at least a fair number of people use it as an ongoing passive job search.
Applicant's who do spend time authoring a well formatted application are seemingly under served by the website-submission process that completely garbles and incorrectly re-formats their applicant documents. Very frustrating and demotivating for the next submitted app. Moreover, they may not even discover that the website ruins their document.
I think there's a disruption opportunity here to provide a HR Applicant Service that doesn't force consumes to blindly copy-paste blobs of text into large free text fields. Just consume and index PDF documents.
Yup, I got more than once extremely mad with crap HR recruiting websites. When you have to waste 15 minutes by filling out a lot of useless fields, having to reenter everthing again because autologout and/or using the back button in the browser, internal server errors, creating a user account and so on. And the worst is that you know that nobody ever will look at most the fields you entered because you can upload your PDFs at the end of the process. And everyone I talked with in the interviews had only my CV and cover letter printed out or opened.
Somebody please make a sane recruiting service and sell it to every Bigco.
One solution to this is to create a plain text resume to be used when submitting through an applicant tracking system. You can still perform some basic formatting in plain text (e.g., string of hyphens for a horizontal line, asterisk for bullet, carriage return at 60 characters to prevent erroneous line wrapping, etc.).
At the top of the plain text resume include a line stating something like "MS Word/PDF formatted resume available at http://ExternalWebsite..."
> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.
I don't know about the US, but at least here those who are out of work and on unemployment benefit (or, here, Job Seekers Allowance) have to "prove to [their] work coach that [they've] been looking for work". From those I know (and these are predominantly STEM people) who've been unable to get work after graduating, spending too much time on one application is considered faffing around—and if your "work coach" thinks you haven't been looking for work hard enough, they can lose their only income. So, what do they do? Apply with 100 sanitised applications, and get rejected everywhere (at the low-end because no service job will hire them because they're viewed as leaving at the first opportunity, and at graduate jobs because they don't have enough work experience).
Devil's advocate: everywhere gets so many of these that they use automated filtering to sort out resumes. Consequently, there is no point in spending ANY effort until you get a positive feedback from an employer.
So, you have a purely random process on both sides that nobody is willing to put in any energy to fix.
I think most companies that try that get some backlash from candidates who feel the company is taking advantage of free work. I have had clients who pay candidates some reduced rate for this project time, which I think is a good equalizer.
You're doing a cost-benefit analysis on a completely arbitrary guess and then using that as the basis for your conclusion? That doesn't work, sorry.
For example, what if in actuality, all other things being equal, they had a 1 in 10 chance focused vs. 1 in 300 chance sanitized, then the results would be 100% chance for the focused versus 33% chance of a response with the sanitized ones. I just used the same thing you did to make the numbers work the other direction.
For the record, based on what I've seen and read, I do think there might be a case for the shotgunned approach, and I personally have had poor luck with the focused approach. But your numbers don't help prove it, sorry.
I think it really depends. I suspect that, for a lot of people, the best strategy is to focus time and energy on companies that they're particularly interested in, have some in with, have unusual qualifications that are a particularly good match for, etc. But, perhaps in parallel, cast a wider net with a more shotgun approach that doesn't devote a lot of time to any single company pre-interview.
I appreciate the odds, but I'd hope the numbers would be better for both (we're talking chances of interview here). I usually expect candidates who are applying to jobs they are mostly or entirely qualified for will get response rates well above that (perhaps 40%), but that's only based on anecdotal evidence from my industry experience over the past ~20 years.
Too add different anecdotal evidence. Circa 2006-2007 all of my peers who were entering the job market had to send out >100 applications to get a 1-2 interviews, if they did not get referred by someone. Based on stories from younger family and friends, the situation was the same for first time jobs in 2011-2013
I'm 40, and have seen shitty resumes/interview efforts my entire life. It seems to have no relationship to economic conditions. Most people just don't seem to ... try very hard? Wish I had something more insightful to say after almost 20 years of observation.
My opinion on the matter is that every employer has unique expectations that they pretend are industry standard and obvious. I'll relate this to your statement by saying, they don't know how to try because interviews as a process are like crossing a field of landmines.
Too much academic work or management responsibility, they call you overqualified. To little: they say you aren't trying.
Enthusiastic for a low end job: we shouldn't hire them because their expectations are too high. To low of energy: they aren't the right fit.
This goes on and on and on as hirers act like their individual set of criteria bias are obvious -- likely because the interviewer themselves has limited experience.
Most people do best when they are told what to do in blind situations. Help them out with a few tips on what to expect and I'm guess you'll find much better applicant quality.
Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness.
A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?
Bad at English and attention to detail are two different things. Thoroughness, attention to detail, and knowing how to rigorously shake something down for at-a-glance defects are all skills -- disciplines -- I would expect out of a good software developer.
I think fear of unemployment as a motivator (or perhaps most kinds of fears) only works in brief, dramatic, and largely unhelpful spurts. So when I look at people who are doing a shoddy job of caring about the particulars of their (potential) job, I always think "is this something that they want to do or at they they are forced to do stave off unemployment?"
To respond more effectively: grim prospects only increase the pool of applicants, and decreases their average desire to do the job you ask for.
> It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job.
That would be because when you're applying to a huge number of jobs per week and get no response for almost all of them, it gets really hard to actually care about any of them.
He was referring to interviewees; ostensibly the interviewee has "heard back" from the potential employer, thereby landing an interview.
It is at this point, IMHO, the interviewee should at least pretend to give a shit about the place that has risen above the silence that candidate had heard to date, and opted to spend the time to interview them.
In my experience, most people who are having trouble finding a job put in a lot of effort for their first several tries, then lose hope and start just robotically resume-spamming. Probably some people are just lazy, but I'm guessing in a lot of cases you're catching people on the tail end of that.
Keep in mind that as a purely statistical matter the majority of job applications and interviews come from unqualified candidates. The good people are quickly hired, so the bad/lazy/inattentive people end up dominating the numbers.
In my last job search, I "applied" (usually emailed a friend) to 10 or so companies, had final interviews with 4, and chose one within a week or two. Contrast that with some of my friends who try to do at least 10 applications a day (yet, predictably, still don't have a job). If you were merely to look at the average quality of applications, it would be way lower than the average quality of applicants.
I'd be curious if you are seeing the results of 'shotgun' style job searching. Sending your resume anywhere and everywhere with the hopes of getting a callback. I imagine that would make it difficult to research every possibility.
I was going to mention this exact same thing. The last time I had to go job hunting I submitted my resume to 40-50 companies each week or so, and unless I heard anything back ever, I did zero research outside of seeing if what they were looking for matched what I wanted to apply for.
I didn't quite follow the same approach recently... Was my first time looking for a job in several years. I sent out maybe 50 resumes and got callbacks on about half of them. I mainly applied locally. Also, updating my linked in profile got a lot more cold contacts than sending out resumes did.
I was pretty selective as far as finding a job, the interview process reduced the responses to about a third. In the end there were about 3-4 I was interested in, and one of them bumped up the offer to where it was about 20% more than the closest competing offer, so I decided to go with it.
However, I've got about 18-19 years of experience in my field (full stack software development, focusing on web applications), and stronger throughout the stack than most. Many of the positions were labelled "Senior" but the pay, and desired experience, didn't align with that statement in my opinion. It really just depends.
Having a strong resume will go a long way... having a summary statement with your desired position, goals and skills along with technology you are familiar with followed with work/project history reinforcing that experience will go a long way in terms of getting in the door.
Actually, one of my friends on Facebook saw that I was job hunting and offered me an interview. :/
I've gotten all of my best (and last few) jobs through connections, fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for me giving advice on how to get a job.
I'm specifically in the sysadmin/dba (and a little devops-y) side of things, and less in programming.
I believe this is definitely true, but I'm speaking of the first initial interview as well. It's not quite as bad as the top of the funnel, much higher quality, but still not the level of effort I was hoping for.
The cover letter and resume are going to be read by a keyword-scanning algorithm, not a human being, anyway.
In my experience, the main way anyone gets a job is through personal connections. The cover letter and resume are like some weird archaic relic of a bygone era. As a formality, you have to submit them to some online system, but only after you've already interviewed and been offered the job. They're like paper thank-you notes for wedding gifts: The forms must be obeyed.
This is a factor as well. I remember reading an article on the Guardian a few months back about how unemployment is a significant mental health hazard, very frequently resulting in chronic anxiety/depression. It's easy to get stuck in a new rut when you're still stuck in the old rut.
Student loan debt surpassed credit card and auto loan debt in the US last year. Many college grads graduate with large sums of debt and can't find relevant jobs. Since student loan debt isn't forgivable, it'll be interesting to see the effect of this over the next decade. I have a hunch that the next big market crash will be caused by student loan debt.
I agree that student loan debt seems like an asset bubble -- in that the price of an education greatly exceeds the valuation justified by the fundamentals.
But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did.
Unlike housing, you can't walk away from your education; student loans are designed to prevent debtors from ever escaping their obligations. They're also guaranteed by the federal government, which has seemingly infinite resources.
Educational institutions themselves are also either private, or are state-run, both of which would shield the impacts of a collapse from the average citizen. The average citizen isn't invested in education like they were in public tech companies or housing. It's also impossible to short Harvard or the UC system.
I actually think this is worse in some ways. Bubble pops are scary, but the bandaid comes off quickly. Instead I fear educational indebtedness will just be a silent vampire on our economy for decades to come.
> But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did.
It would look like a social movement. It would look like tens of millions of young people realizing that they have fallen under the yoke of life-long indentured servitude to the older generation, and either 1) getting organized enough to get the law changed or, 2) saying "fuck it, I've got nothing left to lose" and rioting in the streets.
The government will eventually realize that the defaulted loans, together with penalties and fees, can never be paid back - no different than the typical house flippers of 2008 who leveraged themselves to the hilt with multiple properties.
The banks and funds that own these defaulted loans will threaten to take down the whole system, including Main Street's pension and IRA savings, unless they're bailed out. The Fed's printing machine will come to the rescue.
Loans won't be 'forgiven' per se, but just like many defaulted mortgages, the debt will simply not be enforced for those that have the balls to simply stop paying, though life will be a PITA for a while as their credit takes a huge hit for the next decade.
Those that do continue to pay will feel like suckers. The rest of us will curse the lazy bums who got off without paying. Wall Street execs will be handsomely rewarded for having saved their firms from catastrophe, while politicians will preach of reform, only to pass watered-down laws to appear proactive.
Due to the money printing, the average American will see his quality of life decrease relative to the rest of the world; meanwhile, Wall Street will begin moving money into the next hot idea that can be leveraged with no risk to themselves.
> The government will eventually realize that the defaulted loans, together with penalties and fees, can never be paid back - no different than the typical house flippers of 2008 who leveraged themselves to the hilt with multiple properties.
Yes, but the question is if they'll care. Many people believe it morally important to enforce the unenforceable.
For federal student loans, there isn't a life of indentured servitude. There are income based repayment plans that with fairly low costs per month. A single guy working at starbucks making 30k per year would only pay about $100 per month even with a 200k loan (if he had a wife and kid, he'd pay nothing). Then after 20 years the rest is forgiven.
That system exemplifies what seems to be a growing issue these days–people with too little income get programs like that to help them squeeze by, people making lots of money pay them back without a problem, and the people in between kind of float along paying enough monthly that they put off buying a house or having kids or starting a business because they have 10+ years of loan payments. The long term outcome of this doesn't seen like a healthy society to me.
Most people don't really care about government shutdowns because it doesn't directly cost most people much money. And, even then you'll notice the government never stays shutdown.
If government shutdowns meant a huge chunk of the voting population (across both parties) was suddenly going to owe thousands of dollars in extra taxes, you can bet they'd never happen.
> It would look like tens of millions of young people realizing that they have fallen under the yoke of life-long indentured servitude to the older generation
Nobody forced them to take out loans.
There are lots of options which don't involve crushing debt.
When I was graduating high school student loan debt was something I was encouraged to take on, despite my on uneasiness about doing so. My teachers, my family, everyone whose opinion I was supposed to respect told me that student loan debt was normal and even valuable (to build credit).
So while no, I wasn't FORCED to take out loans, the most trustworthy people in my life taught me that loans were okay, and never presented me with another option. Luckily this paradigm is showing signs of a shift, but for a lot people it's still considered "normal".
No, but many people feel misled about the post-graduation prospects or are unhappy with their life options and feel trapped in a career they hate and can't take a break from or change due to debt.
On which part? That there aren't roving bandits forcing people to take on huge loans? Or that there are other options?
In terms of other options, there is (a) community college—very cheap, (b) state school—much cheaper usually, especially if you live at home, (c) attending a slightly less prestigious college when they offer a substantial merit scholarship.
Back around 2000, when I saw education costs rising (and was a big believer in market forces), I figured more educators would enter the market, and things would stabilize.
It's been 15 years, and I haven't seen any new colleges or universities formed.
The market did accommodate it. Lots of for-profit schools (Wyotech, Heald, etc.) popped up and made a killing largely by helping students fill out loan paperwork for the maximum allowable amount while providing a dubious credential without meeting the standards of reputable accreditation boards. The credits were not transferrable in most cases, and many of the schools have been shuttered for charges bordering on fraud. (A friend from HS owes more on loans for 18 months at Heald than I owed from a 4-year degree at a state school.)
Universities in countries with inflated fees and tuition loans are about to fall off a cliff. I'll be surprised if they're still around a generation from now.
The Ivy League will survive because of social and political momentum. But colleges outside the prestige circuit are going to have real problems getting students for high-cost low-return education.
Are they? Are significant amounts of people actually foregoing college to learn from them instead? And, more importantly, are they getting hired in good jobs in the field they're studying in?
A non-market force happened. The government started guaranteeing student loans. Although honestly, even without that, I don't think people are good enough in estimating the extra payoff of education they haven't received yet over their 30+ years long career in the future, to properly evaluate the market value of college education; instead, they were just believing the old mantra "college is worth it".
Since 1980, the number of colleges has gone from roughly 2000 to roughly 3000. That doesn't account for increases in class size.
The demand is still very strong. The millennial generation was told, go to college or you'll have to flip burgers your whole life.
One huge problem is college demand is fairly inelastic. Another is that colleges are mostly non-profit institutions who aren't out for institutional profits. Instead they compete for prestige. If they spend a bunch of money on useless shit, USNEWs will rank them higher.
Students and parents aren't urged to consider price. In fact they are encouraged to ignore price. Just get in first! then worry about "financial aid." Which is mostly just loans at this point.
Hopefully the bubble popping looks like University of Phoenix and its for-profit brethren going out of business. The looming student loan crisis has been reported for a while, but what's more recently been reported is just how large a percentage of it is these for-profit schools.
We hear scary numbers and naturally associate them with expensive private school educations from the ivy schools or similar institutions. But there's really no crisis there...people graduating from an ivy league school will almost certainly pay off their loans, large as they might be. The bulk of the defaults will come from people who've gotten largely-meaningless degrees from those for-profit schools. It's sad, but job screening skills are so bad in most industries that they basically just use the college admission screening process as a proxy. And the fact that basically anyone can get into the University of Phoenix means that there's almost no value placed on having graduated from there.
> But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did.
It would look a lot like the retrenchment of the private for-profit college industry when private lending outside of government guaranteed programs collapsed with the 2008-2009 financial collapse, only hitting all of higher education, and the real-estate markets buoyed by universities, and the communities and industries supporting higher-education generally.
And it could happen with the stroke of a pen -- the federal government just cancels direct and subsidized loan programs.
>They're also guaranteed by the federal government, which has seemingly infinite resources.
IMO That resource is GDP. If American's can't find meaningful work that has financial value not just domestically, but internationally, we'll see how much of that resource is left after a few decades. Or more accurately, we'll see a VERY tiny percentage of Americans with vast wealth and the majority struggling for subsistence because the government has essentially been deactivated due to lack of funds.
If America runs out of money, they will just print more. If their creditors call out their loans, America is very happy to pay them off: in US dollars.
Student loan debt isn't dischargeable in bankruptcy, but their are income based repayment plans.
You can pay back either 10% of your discretionary income, for 20 years and then the remaining balanced is forgiven (if a balance remains).
Discretionary income is defined as the difference between your income and 150% of the federal poverty level.
If you have 200k in student loans, but only make 30k a year because you can't find a job better than starbucks, you'll only pay about $100 a month. If you have a spouse and a kid, you'll pay nothing.
*note these number depend on when you borrowed. Older loans have to pay 15% for 25 years instead of 10% for 20 years.
> You can pay back either 10% of your discretionary income, for 20 years and then the remaining balanced is forgiven (if a balance remains).
For federal subsidized loans, forgiveness of loans means that it comes out of taxpayer money.
For people talking about student loans as a bubble and wondering when it will pop and what that will look like, this is the most likely mechanism for that to happen.
This is a really serious principal-agent problem, because schools have only indirect incentives (at best) to make sure that their graduates are employed at rates which allow them to pay back those loans in full. On the other hand, the federal government is essentially incapable of denying people these loans as long as they meet the financial criteria.
In that light, it's not hard to see how tuitions have spiked, and student debt along with it. Schools are essentially incentivized to take out massive loans against their students, which amounts to another source of public funding for universities.
I really need to look into this then, some months I make $0 and last year my total income was below the income tax threshold, yet I'm still paying some $50 minimum monthly on my staffords.
Not to discount the severity of the student loan problem, but the market is really not large enough to cause the next big crash. For some perspective, pre-crisis mortgage debt was almost two-thirds of GDP whereas student loans are still a much smaller portion. Mortgages on hugely inflated home prices also sucked up a huge portion of incomes in 2007. Add in the systemic infection of credit default swaps and junk mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street and you had the Crash. Hopefully we'll wisen up well before student loans get to that point.
Student debt has been thought to be the next crash, but I'm not sure how unless the laws change. It's not dischargable in bankruptcy so it's not like you can walk away.
It's the next crash through a different vector - if the loans aren't dischargable, a large portion of the the economic activity that young people normally generate as they grow along their career path is now siphoned off to repaying loans. That's a low value use of the money to the rest of the economy. Maybe it doesn't end in a dramatic crash but an economic stagnation for as long as inflation is low (inflation being a side channel way of devaluing those loans...).
We can already see this in the US economy. Millenials are largely putting off traditional milestones like marriage, car ownership, having children, saving for retirement (or saving at all) and home ownership for lack of capital.
These are pretty major drivers of consumption, but think about the second order effects: fewer home pools being built, fewer new auto parts needed, fewer childrens clothes being bought, fewer weddings to need DJs, etc. There's quite a bit of fallout there, and it's going to be hard to pin John and Son's pool construction company going tits up on student loan debt slowing the economy, even if it's the case.
Student loan debt won't create a crash, it has just been an enormous brake on the US economy for almost a decade now and we've grown so used to its effects that we don't really notice it anymore.
Imagine how many young people would start a company or take a risky-but-educational job except that they need the liquidity and stability to make a student loan payment every month? You could get living expenses close to zero by living with your parents for a while, but student loan payments require you to have some cash coming from somewhere each month.
>You could get living expenses close to zero by living with your parents for a while, but student loan payments require you to have some cash coming from somewhere each month.
Not with federal student loans. They have income based repayment plans. If you have no income, you don't pay. After 20 years the debt is forgiven.
Unfortunately the cap on maximum borrowing with federal student loans is quite low compared to the total cost of many colleges, so there's lots of private loans that come due six months after graduation and don't really care what your income level is -- they just want to be paid.
That's true. But of the total student loan debt of $1.2 trillion, and $1 trillion is federal student loan debt. Private loans are a comparatively small problem.
WOW, thank you for posting this. That is astounding and I had no idea it was that magnitude when I wrote my previous post. If anyone wants a source, the $1 trillion number is from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau[1] and CFPB has even made available a detailed breakdown of the federal government's student loan portfolios[2]
For federal loans (private loans are hard to get these days) the law is actually very reasonable.
You pay 10% of your (Income - 150% of poverty level). That's less than 10% of your income. And nearly zero for a lot of people. You pay it for 20 years and they wipe out the debt.
One huge problem is that people don't sign up for this system or instead just default. It's shocking that so many college graduates are sticking their head in the sand. It's a simple process. I've done it twice.
Eventually, creditors might write it off, but the borrower would be liable if they ever return to the US.
Also, given how annoying it is for international banks to work with US expats, I can't imagine they would look past that kind of dent in credit history.
It's so easy! Why has no one thought of this? All we need to do is convince every government in the world to undertake dramatic changes to their economic and labor structure.
We lived for at least fifty thousand years without any money at all, for around three thousand with some form of money, and the last two hundred years with the idea of hourly wages and bills and rent.
It's entirely possible we'll find a better way to do this. Maybe we'll have to "undertake dramatic changes" to avoid an even bigger disaster.
Life before money was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In fact I wouldn't choose to live anytime before the last 100 or 200 years. 1950 or later would have been my preference had I been given a choice. For how much we all like to armchair quarterback our current system (yes.. capitalism), it's easy to forget how bad 99.9 percent of the human experience on this planet would have sucked comparatively. That's not to say let's quit trying to fix things, but take a deep breath and look around. Things are pretty good. There is an unbelievably high probability that you and all your children live to old age. You won't have to be too cold, too warm, or too hungry during your stay. Not bad.
Don't forget the vast majority of this has been built on the abundant wealth not found from capitalism but in the form of fossil fuel. This has been an enormous boost to productivity, food production, and general well-being.
The importance of coal and oil in modern society cannot be understated. It has been enormously transformative.
I'm not saying things aren't good, or that capitalism hasn't been a factor, but that if we're not careful we'll get stuck with terrible legacies rather than more opportunity.
For example: Undoubtedly we have access to more resources than ever before, yet these resources seem to flow up to the 0.1% at a rate that's unprecedented, and the rate of depletion of essential resources is increasing even as supplies are becoming more constrained.
One by one we're hitting "peak" everything: Peak oil, peak water, peak education, peak fish. We really need to radically re-think how we're approaching things when unchecked geometric growth is no longer an option.
So let's learn from our successes and failures and show a little forward thinking. In the 1900s people would go to work day after day for their whole life building things designed to last a hundred years. Today we smack together something over the course of a weekend and spin it off into an IPO a year later. A little long-term thinking would be nice.
Actually, I read of it being done in Europe by World War II. I don't know how much before that it existed. But I think (without concrete data) that it was much less common before somewhere around 1950.
One thing about the early European replacement lenses is that they were transparent at least some way into the ultraviolet. It turns out that the human retina can see a short distance into the ultraviolet, but the lens blocks it. The replacement lens let the person see further into the ultraviolet than ordinary people. The OSS used these people as guides on commando raids. There would be a parachute drop of supplies, for example, and they'd put a UV beacon on it. The commandos couldn't see the beacon, and neither could the German soldiers. Only the old person with cataracts (and surgery) who was guiding the commandos could see it.
"Cataract surgery in its simplest form is at least 4000 years old. Couching for cataract was the earliest method at about 2000 BC, and even then was evidently practiced in the Tigris / Euphrates area, as well as India and Japan. The earliest records are from The Bible and The Red Sea Scrolls as well as early Hindu records of Susruta’s time."
Ha! Ironically enough I was born, raised, and currently live in Detroit (albeit the suburbs). I have worked in the city right next to Comerica Park (Maybe next year Tigers).
Wages, bills, rent, and taxation easily date back to classical times, and predate coinage (coinage being introduced in large part to make collecting taxes easier). Indeed, I believe the earliest writing that we've deciphered is an accounting bill or receipt.
Within cities this was common, yet the vast majority of the population did not live there and was "employed" in other ways.
For someone living an agricultural lifestyle things weren't great, you did have to appease your land-owner, but usually that was facilitated by paying a portion of your crop as rent. During the winter months when you had little to do other than care for livestock, things were pretty laid back.
We're a lot less self-sufficient than we used to be, and this is perhaps irreversible. Nobody can be expected to make their own medication, to build their own computer from sand.
We've developed the technology to support our greed, and now that a small group of people has become infinitely more powerful, they won't be willing to cede control.
I don't think of it that way. Even the most destitute person can go to the ER and get medical treatment that Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller or JP Morgan couldn't buy with their entire fortune. It's not always free, but it's available. Most people living near or above the poverty line can afford devices fit in their pocket and instantly share information with anyone on the planet. Entire ivy league university courses are instantly available for free anywhere with an internet connection. We've developed the technology that we were able to because we could. Wealth inequality sucks, minimum wage sucks, environmental pollution sucks, but we aren't doing all that bad for a bunch of apes just trying to figure things out.
Not sure what you mean by greed but I hope it's not the description applied, too often exclusively, to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned - never to those wanting to take other people's money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse provided by such taxation.
> It's entirely possible we'll find a better way to do this.
It's already possible to do this: give up your toys, transport, access to medicine... everything you rely on your broader community for, and join a commune or live in the rural third world. Basically, join a self-sufficient community. It's going to suck when someone breaks a leg or has complications in childbirth, but you'll be free of the work required to maintain modern living standards.
I'm not disagreeing with the premise, my sarcasm was too harsh in hindsight. I just disagreed with the idea that this is a simple fix. OP did not assert that, so that's just me reading into it.
I'm still hoping for a 'favor' economy like a story I read "And Then There Were None" by Eric Frank Russell.
It's not easy, it's very, very hard, but every journey has a beginning.
Some places have already started experimenting with basic income. Other places are experimenting with reducing the 8-hour work week. Those responses are much better than the knee-jerk response of this article, i.e. that we need jobs jobs jobs, and that we will always need jobs jobs jobs.
The economic structure changes drastically every few generations anyhow. Why not take direction of it? Besides, it's less a matter of making structural changes as it is of trying to change the culture and popularize the ideas that will motivate structural change.
My parents lived in the Soviet Union and Russia now is nothing like it was even three decades ago. It's pretty incredible. It's less drastic but still true for other countries.
It's mostly related to real estate prices. In uncertain economies investment goes into stable markets -- land and buildings. Prices increase, rents increase, people need more money to pay for their housing. Everything else gets cheaper, but housing keeps getting more expensive.
If you want to decouple these things, look into Land Value Taxes and a Citizen's Dividend.
Well said, if only we had a huge body of the population that was idealistic, intelligent, motivated, and had enough free time to create new solutions and ideas.
This is anecdotal at best, but I feel like there is an apathy epidemic. It's fucking impossible to get people to even do "fun" things, much less a "boring" job. Everyone just wants to sit at home in front of a screen. It could just be the people I surround myself with, but that's the feeling I get.
Haha, I was just thinking that if I'm only 4 years away from being an adult, then that feels about right. I don't feel like an adult at all, but maybe when I'm in my 30s.
" Taking just wage growth, simply put (and for more detail follow the links above), an end to the global labour glut should see real wages (wages accounting for the change in prices) start to rise at a faster pace. An ONS report of 2014 found that UK real wages in the 1970s and 1980s grew by an average of 2.9% a year."
I'm struck by the fact that, if 600M people were living together in one area, they'd spontaneously create jobs around the fact that 600M people will have to figure out ways to interact with each other in an civil way.
I tend to believe that the reason we don't have enough jobs right now are because of market distortions that place unequal value on certain, expensive things, like college educations, personal vehicles of far greater passenger capacity than strictly necessary, private dwellings of extremely large size, and the latest and greatest smartphones ever two years. Our "betters" have successfully created a scenario where people willingly enter into debt slavery to acquire what they believe is their entitlement.
Because, sans weird pricing, there is real need for work to be done, that is not getting done, in our current environments. There are roads that are falling apart. There is food that is not getting to hungry people. There are children who are not learning what they need to learn to be successful. There are hydrocarbons that are continuing to be burnt. There are routine medical physical exams that aren't being performed.
There are things that people want, but can't acquire at a price that is reasonable. This could be a function of the constituent inputs being too expensive, but I doubt this. Arbitrage is a powerful force for innovation. I suspect there is a much stronger force at work that is preventing the goods and services that people need from being created: mega-corporate-backed government regulation.
There are people in 1st world countries who are going hungry, who don't have heat, who don't have doors on their house. I have seen this with my own damn eyes. Yes, they are poor, but is their poverty their fault? And even if, in some extremely twisted way, it is their fault, does it justify forcing them to live in squalor? Should the laziest of lazy people be forced to live in literal shit-holes?
As long as there are people willing to work but incapable of moving, I think a little "undeserved" compassion is a good enough reason to create a job. Just because some vanishingly few poor people are slovenly doesn't justify completely writing off the entire class.
As the article highlights, the Arab revolutions were led by the youth. I wonder what, if anything, will happen in the USA when the current generation, saddled by seemingly insurmountable college debt, comes to the realization that it cannot find stable work or afford decent housing.
I truly believe that moment will be an earthquake for the current political environment; what we characterize Republicans and Democrats today will dramatically change (just like it did after the Civil War and also the Civil Rights movement).
...claims that the average debt of graduating seniors is $28.4k. I'd like to see a histogram of all recent graduates and dropouts, with the bins in dollars of debt. I'd also like to see a scatter plot showing the median debt vs. debtors age (for all age groups, not just recent grads). And another scatter plot of debt vs. income.
Job hack: open volunteer trade schools in impoverished urban areas and fund it with both government and private money and give tax incentives to those that fund them or volunteer to work there. This could be anything from computer jobs to specialized manufacturing (Foxconn-esque).
Not only could this provide us with a 'cheap labor' manufacturing workforce that corporations love, tech jobs that could be done remotely would also be easy to train for, and thus our country's very limited transportation options wouldn't be such a barrier to getting work. Areas of high crime or gang violence could begin to get kids off the streets and into a stable job.
These stories are always interesting to read, both from what they say, and what they don't say. For example, do you know that world wide there is a shortage of people in various trades roles[1] ? (Welding, masonry, carpentry, electricians, etc) And why are their young people who are loading up on debt they can't afford to go to Ivy league schools when they can be just as successful going to state schools? How much part time employement might be found if there wasn't a floor on minimum wage? [2] Since we don't have the category of 'extra' or 'part time' job like we used to, current minimum wage policy is geared toward making every job pay a living wage. That prices a lot of jobs out competitiveness for humans and spurs the development of robotic replacements. Not that those jobs are career paths, but they do offer people a bit of extra change in their pocket.
A more intriguing question is to what end might you employ two or three hundred million people? Imagine they are sitting outside your window waiting for your command. Assuming you are paying them a living wage, what economic output could they accomplish that would be "worth" say 5 to 15 trillion dollars a year?
> Assuming you are paying them a living wage, what economic output could [200-300 million people] accomplish that would be "worth" say 5 to 15 trillion dollars a year?
A good thought experiment! My initial thought was a spiritual successor to WPA-like projects of the depression, but I'm not very well-read on the economic outcomes. My layman view at least sees the humanitarian and creative output of such projects.
But your last sentence is key: would it be "worth" 5-15 trillion/year? Is there a way to "measure" such a number of WPA-like projects?
Since the number presented was world wide, I expect just the US would be a smaller number, but it would certainly be interesting to offer young people an opportunity to participate in a service program which was not a military outfit. So you spend 2 years of service shoring up infrastructure or working to rebuild cities ravaged by flood or other disaster. In exchange you get basic clothes, room and board, and perhaps payback on any student loans you have outstanding.
Ah, the old "I've got mine" philosophy. I'd like to see a solution that doesn't add up to "Screw developing countries". And I'm pretty sure what bringing work home means - you and I pay a buttload more for everything, because Westerners have to be well-paid.
And in the end, if every fat cat has to "bring the work home" then they all just raise their prices. Its not the 1% that get hurt; its all the rest of us.
I don't know how this is going to work, I actually think the root-cause of mid-east crisis is more related to youth-jobless.
Young people without job will lead to bad things, in the meantime the technology/AI/robotic-factory is making more people "unneeded", will it either be a utopia-coming-true or a revolution?
1. Legislate a maximum working hours (probably < 40 ) . 3 jobs at 40 hours per week becomes 4 jobs at 30 per week, 33% expansion, problem solved.
2. Allow humans to undercut automation in price competition (eg abolish minimum wage)
3. Expand government to employ people for whatever, just print the money you pay them.
Clearly these all come with unsatisfactory side-effects.
Maybe the fix is to end our obsession with creating jobs and jobs being the form of survival we offer our species. Imagine if we just created 600M jobs automating all the things so that those jobs would never (or nearly never) need to be done again? The future generations would need Billions of jobs! But no one would be worse off for it. Its like when a dishwasher became common place, suddenly kids were free to do more homework or facebook or xbox etc. Suddenly parents were more free not to have kids (to complete household chores). Etc etc. By automating and reducing the work that human kind has to do, we're enabling better lives all involved, including the displaced workers. Change hurts in the shortrun, but can bring utopia in the long run.
#2 is probably the absolute worst possible thing to be done, and perhaps the most likely thing to be done.
Abolishing minimum wage won't cause the costs of things to come down, but it will create even more people who are given no choice but to have a job that doesn't pay them enough to live, or starve.
"Imagine if we just created 600M jobs automating all the things so that those jobs would never (or nearly never) need to be done again? The future generations would need Billions of jobs! But no one would be worse off for it."
Except for the people who aren't able to buy food or put a roof over their heads because they don't have a job.
"By automating and reducing the work that human kind has to do, we're enabling better lives all involved, including the displaced workers."
You're gonna have to explain what's better about being evicted from your apartment because you can't pay rent.
You're missing the point that if automation does all the work there is no competitive reason not to lower the price down to near 0 (or the cost of capital, which at current interest rates is VERY low).
If I can get land, put robots on it and churn out apples, all entirely without my labor, and I can borrow the money for near free, at what price could I sell said apples for?
Who needs a job? We need "goods", and to obtain then we usually trade in part of our monetary income; but that does not need to come from a job.
I believe in "mincome" or "basic minimal income", as provided by a form of government to all citizens; to be paid for by tax money. This will be low, but enough to sustain yourself (simple shelter + food). If you want more then that you need to either find a job or walk a more entrepreneurial path and make a job.
The amount people receive as "mincome" will be an important number to control by politicians. It will have a strong effect on the then emerging "post-mincome unemployment rate". This would be all people that are looking to supplement their mincome, but currently have not found the means to do so.
I think a mincome-society will find a lot more people entrepeneuring: as a safety net is in place.
The "jobs" that the article speaks of are only going to be created if there is a strict need for them. A business will usually only create a job in last resort, as employing people costs money and brings risks.
I'm curious if that sentence is itself an explanation for the perception that a 28 year old might not be an adult.
In other words, at least in American culture, adulthood is strongly tied with stable employment. If the 15 - 29 age bracket in general does not enjoy stable employment, that could itself be responsible for creating the perception that members of this bracket are not adults.
Adulthood is also tied with marriage, home ownership, car ownership, child-rearing, etc... these things have been pushed back a decade or so as a result of too little money.
By the standards of the 1950s, the 20-somethings of today aren't adults. That has sociological twists to it as well, of course-- but primarily economic. I suspect that people aren't actively avoiding having a house, car, wedding, or children, so much as adjusting their wants to be more in line with what is realistic-- choosing one or half of one of the above listed items.
This is a truly massive global issue and it hits quite close to me. I've been absolutely lucky in going to university and getting a reasonably promising role in a financial institution whilst studying. The flip side has happened to my brother who at this point is stuck doing menial jobs to pay for food and transport to get to university whilst he collects debt for going. I've had conversations to the effect of 'I actually cannot afford to go to class today or ill be losing another few hundred dollars i need for food' which is not a though ANY young person should have to face. The system needs immediate change for the future of our current society.
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
-Buckminster Fuller, Foreword, Grunch of Giants
He's talking about the Demographic-Economic Paradox by the way. There is a renewable surplus of the basic physiological needs of humanity, yet almost 50% of the global population lives in poverty and struggles to obtain these basic needs. The most simple and effective solution to overpopulation is to focus on renewable production processes and distribution methods (i.e. farming the sea; using automated solar power drone distribution methods). Technically, it is entirely feasible, it is just a matter of user buy in which is the real challenge.
Why do you think that developed countries have below replacement birth rates? Many people cannot afford to raise families anymore. By afford I mean, afford to raise them to an adequate first world standard. So that's already happening.
Why not the other way around - just kill everybody above a certain cutoff and feed them as soylent to the rest? They've already spent most of their productive years anyway, right? Its equally ridiculous, isn't it?
Every developed country in the world has a negative net population growth - natural growth excluding migration. The only reason the seniors are fed, clothed and washed is a a supply train of foreign nurses and home-care aides, usually from a country such as Philippines - which has a positive population growth. The entire economic system, as it is right now - in reality, is based on positive population growth. How is decreasing the number of kids is going to help?
Because automation means less need for labor, which solves the issue of "positive population growth" -- since it's not the bodies that are providing the economic activity, its their labor. But the bodies require more and more resources that our planet is not capable of sustaining. Hence, less babies.
Meanwhile the more menial / labor-intensive jobs are being replaced by automation. I read somewhere that automation was supposed to be the great liberator, enabling an ever-increasing amount of leisure time. But at some point attitudes started shifting so that people must justify their existence by continuously working hard; and if things don't happen to work out for them, well they just weren't motivated enough. This attitude is apparent in our [US] welfare system which has a huge administrative overhead in place to prevent freeloading.
The point is there will be less and less global-economy jobs (because of automation and the insane productivity it allows to very few skilled people) and more but not enough local-community jobs (caring, agriculture, menials and so on). In a fair deal of the so-called first world, too many educated people are just reverting to local-community jobs already, competing with the uneducated and migrants. This is not going to end peacefully if some sort of basic income is not introduced soon.
Less jobs more food. Grow food, at whatever scale available, pots in your room, pots on the balcony/porch, small gardens, side gardens, public spaces, large gardens.
The job market has people coming in, but also, in parallel, people exiting out of it.
developed markets, especially in Europe and Japan, will see massive attrition due to people retiring or dying off. the baby boomer generation in the US is retiring as well. all those jobs need to be backfilled and all those old people will need services.
as the world population is stabilizing, it should not be that bad, no?
I recently saw an article (don't recall where, but I think it was based on a World Bank report) that indicated that the fraction of the population aged 18-65 had peaked in 2012. That was part of the problem - more people were of working age. But demographically, that's going to be less and less true as we move forward; perhaps that will soften the conclusions of this article.
Another idea: how are people today that do so-called 'work' contributing to the human race anyway? In my occupation I call 'work' my contribution is minimal. I help build software to make corporations more money. Almost a negative on the human race. My saving grace is that I make music in my spare time. That is my real contribution to the world.
If we had space exploration capability like in Star Trek, we could think about a different approach. But we are constrained to Earth and we have limited resources. Capitalism is the best system available to allocate resources. What we have right now is not really Capitalism.
Hey how valid is this information? I didn't quite grasp if they counted in other factors, for example, people incurrent jobs that will pass away. Additionally data such as baby boomers are getting older and will create markets in stagnant areas at the moment.
The young people of today are different. They are on the cusp of potentially something wonderful and strange for the human race. Older people don't recognize it. The values are different. Maybe the idea of 'work' will change to suit them.
"They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble."
Extra schooling only delays reality and leads to more debt. What really matters is simple supply and demand - whether people have the skills that others are willing to pay for.
The reality is with $31 Billion in mobile app sales and rising those jobs will come from small businesses building mobile apps as we have 1 TBytes of free data to organize into mobile services every year that our current programming languages cannot self learn how to organize.
Yes there will still net jobs loss as tech progress eliminates them..the new job is your small business you set-up
As difficult as it would be to find money for it - I would propose a one time entrepreneurship grant to all college graduates equal to an average yearly salary in the profession (this is an approximation and experts should figure out what variables should adjust for best amount). That would allow several things to happen:
1. New graduates with a strong drive for entrepreneurship can start working on their ideas right away and do not have to spent several years working for corporations, picking up anti-patterns.
2. New graduates who are unable to find professional work can have a cushion while they search, and can potentially become lesser partners to people in the first category.
Jobs and careers are created by businesses, so the more small-medium size businesses there are, places that are still flexible in their mindset - the more work there will be.
The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it won't work under most existing economic systems. Our entire economy has to change to accomodate the new reality that a significant percentage of the population will be unemployed.