Nothing that gets posted is ever really new, but this article does point out something very important: manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high in the US, while manufacturing employment is low. While I've been predicting this for quite a while, the actual realization is quite interesting and the societal consequences are enormous.
Good article, though i disagree with his conclusion that natural unemployment is going to fundamentally change. He is arguing that the economy is in a state of change and the losers in this creative destruction are those in low skilled jobs. so that explains the currently high unemployment, but to argue that we are at a new natural level doesn't seem justified. As the population (albeit slowly) retrains to participate in the higher skilled labor market employment will rise.
This is somewhat similar to the classic dismal science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science) argument. Even though there is high unemployment now arguing that the economy cannot find a use for these people seems very short sighted.
Modern industries take a lot more training than those of a century ago. At the very least, the time to retrain will be longer than in the past. That alone would lead to higher unemployment. More importantly, there are more people who, for whatever reasons, just aren't capable of becoming good engineers, scientists or business people.
Everyone who thinks this is thought provoking needs to read http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ ( free ) to really understand the magnitude of this problem.
Technological unemployment is part of the picture, but there isn't a 'magic bullet' to avoid it.
We need Scientists?
Ask the 1800 surplus Physics PhD's that get produced every year. It's clear that the academic system uses young and smart people, but not that it produces desirable or permanent employment for them. A wise person wouldn't get involved, unless they've got one (or preferably two) parent(s) that are already in the field who can pull some strings for them.
As for programmers, I wake up every morning with the mission of putting myself out of work.
Scientists are just like Machine learning pixie dust. It's fun to say, but you'd be hard pressed to find a small business that needs an astrophysicist. I don't mean to pick on astrophysicists by the way, pick any random phd, a small business probably doesn't need that.
Well as Aaron Hillegass says in one of his books, a degree in astrophysics may not be all that practical, but it helps you overcome challenges where doubt might creep in about having the intellect to take on a difficult problem.
1) I am having trouble solving this problem, I must not be smart enough.
2) Wait, I have a degree in astrophysics, so I am smart, this must be really hard.
Maybe I'm biased because I did research in Particle Astrophysics and now work as a developer for Particle physics experiments, but the problem with most small businesses is not that they don't need any random PhD, it's that they lack the foresight to understand what a person trained in particle astrophysics can actually bring to the table. In modern day terms, a degree in astrophysics is a degree for the polymath.
The valley and wall street are a bit different... people are willing to give you a shot at almost anything in any seemingly unrelated field because they think you'll probably be able to handle it, because you've solved hard problems that are often similar in scope. Predicting the market is pretty similar to reconstructing a collision, folding proteins, or predicting molecular orbitals. Cloud computing isn't that different than grid computing. Statistics are statistics and models are models, and companies are finding out new ways they can benefit from information processing by utilizing the people who pioneered it.
I do agree though... the Main Street small businesses, the ones that I think the GOP often fantasizes about, aren't going to usually need someone with a PhD in whatever.
A very large number of those 2 million unfillable jobs mentioned above are for basically "Someone who knows linear algebra and statistics really well."
Scientists fit the bill -- any physics phd who can't find a job can join the finance or ad tech industries by sending out a single resume.
Right, because PhD is like pixie dust you can sprinkle on a problem.
Sorry, the point i'm trying to make is it's easy to be intellectually dishonest about the complexity of problems people are facing (sorta like the ML article earlier). If your small business needs new research to survive, you've lost. Very few small businesses are limited by complicated third order effects. they're limited because the owner doesn't feel like doing inventory (or writing more tests, or calling more potential customers) over the weekend.
Sure, you can find counter examples here and there, like special hedge funds or old hippies with geology shops, but most small businesses know 5 things they could fix to make it better.
If they're really that super-efficient and organized, they're either a large business that turned into a small business because the field is dying or they're not a small business.
Intel (a small business in 1968) was started by two physics phd guys. Adobe (a small business in early 1980s) was started by two phd guys. Google (a small business in 1998) was started by phd-dropouts. I think there are many companies started by phds.
If a small company is trying to solve sufficiently complex problem, like what Intel (in 1968), Adobe(in 1980s) and Google(in 1998) were trying to solve they need a phd. If a small company is building a new social network or social app it might not need a phd.
"The physics PhD classes of 2007 and 2008 consisted of 1,460 and 1,499 PhDs, respectively. We received post-degree information on 54% of these degree recipients." ... resulting in 4% unemployed initially. Including the 7% temporarily employed that's around 150 excess Physics Phd's in 2008.
Not a physicist. But the fact that they only got post-degree information from 54% worries me, because those who are unemployed are probably less likely to answer a survey like this.
This could have been said about the industrial revolution, invention of agriculture, etc. Each time in our history when a new technology has made our lives more efficient some people have lost their jobs. In their place more jobs have been created that would never have been thought of before.
Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements on society new jobs will be created all over the world. Yes checkout clerks will no longer exist just as many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In their place we will see more software developers, consultants, entertainers and artists.
This is irrelevant because our economy is currently in the middle of the "retooling" phase (c.f. Luddite, Industrial Revolution). The wealth will be fundamentally unevenly distributed until new skilled work takes hold.
Real wages may have decreased, but total compensation has been increasing steadily, at least on a per worker basis instead of a per-household one. A lot of that has been increases in the cost of health insurance paid for by employers, but some has been more vacation time, 401K matching, etc.
It might not be true for the whole workforce, but it is true for the median. For the rich healthcare costs make up basically nothing in their compensation, so all of their compensation increase show up as higher wages. The really poor often don't get healthcare. But for the median, they get healthcare and healthcare expenses are fairly big compared to their wages.
This doesn't mean that the compensation of the median worker has perfectly tracked GDP growth, because there has been a moderate but genuine increase in inequality in compensation. But it isn't nearly as big as the increase in the wage gap, and saying "real median wages have decreased" is misleading.
I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined.
I agree, there will probably be more wealth - I just think the distribution of that wealth may well be societally damaging.
If they have no skills, they never had very good prospects. Even "simple" farmhands need to have some skill at tending to the farm. It's not like you could just stand by a conveyor belt with a dumb look on your face and call yourself a factory worker for very long.
That was my point, and why I wrote "simple" in quotation marks. Even jobs that are viewed as "unskilled" generally involve some kind of skill — farmhands, factory workers, customer service representatives, etc. Any job that truly requires no skill essentially has no job security anyway, as the worker literally brings nothing to the table. The actual complaint here is that the demand for various skills waxes and wanes.
Jobs like working in mcdonalds obviously require a certain skillset, but that skillset can be taught in a very limited timeframe, as opposed to skilled jobs where that educations takes a much longer amount of time. I'm saying that the availability of such jobs seems to be on the wane.
I appreciate that such jobs are undesirable, but they're much in demands by those unable to take up a skilled trade, or those whose skillset has been rendered obsolete. They might not be great jobs, but they beat the alternative of nothing.
Right. I'm using the traditional definition of 'unskilled labour', which is generally that which does not require a high degree of training/education - not none at all. I believe that this class of labour is reducing in availability - which is a problem for a substantial proportion of the population.
I wonder if this will have knock-on implications for those of us who have relatively high levels of training. Right now, if my specialism becomes obsolete I can at least pick up a non-specialist alternative job - will this be the case in the future?
Of course, definitions of skilled and unskilled labor change too. A reasonably skilled cotton picker is still "unskilled labor" to an economy that needs machinists. A highly trained machinist is equivalently unskilled in an economy that requires programmers.
> “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”
So looking at this article - http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-pop... - my quick calculation shows that the US population is growing at about 1.3% annually. Which means there's somewhat more than 7 million new Americans since 2008 (back of the envelope produces a number of 8 million).
Which, combined with the fact that GDP has barely recovered since 2008, kind of invalidates the article - i.e its reasonable to assume that the number of jobs has not actually decreased, but has stayed static, and that that is most likely due to the depression.
This chart shows that there are now 5% fewer jobs than there were at the peak of employment 34 months ago - the lines are scaled relative to prior peak jobs, not relative to population.
"I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll."
This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think that person's output will make more money than it will cost to employ them. Period.
Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.
Government can create a good climate for businesses to exist, with laws, infrastructure and education. But those are long-term investments. Short-term, anything the government does to affect the economy is a shell game. You can't sign a law and magically make workers productive.
One of the best Planet Money episodes I've heard. Summary (from memory): the one and only way government can create jobs is to invest in infrastructure. Everything else is hot air.
>Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.
It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.
It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.
A government can certainly use monetary and fiscal policies to stimulate demand and create more work, but that does not necessarily result in more hiring.
For one thing, when there is a surplus of goods (and there frequently is late in a recession and shortly thereafter) the initial demand will be met by that surplus rather than any additional production. Even when that surplus is exhausted, additional demand may be met through through automation. Also, if an industry as a whole thinks that this demand will be short lived, it may choose to either raise prices or simply permit some of that demand to go unmet rather than make large capital expenditures to increase production.
Also, normally when a country is trying to "create jobs", its goal is to create jobs for its own citizens. In an increasingly global economy, stimulating demand may increase imports without increasing jobs in the target economy.
So, while increasing demand may help create jobs, it also may have limited impact and that impact may take a substantial amount of time to be felt.
If I do some work and grow some food from seeds, I have created actual value by my work. Monetary and fiscal policy does not do this. It creates or destroys currency, thereby either diluting or concentrating the value of dollars, creates temporary incentives to borrow or lend, which will be offset by the inevitable bounce-back. The end result is just a temporary fluctuation.
This is nonsense. The government can fund projects that create jobs. Do you have any idea how many small businesses out there make their money solely from servicing government contracts?
Just as an example, I worked at a small software consulting firm during the middle/end of the dot com boom. We were a project shop. The contracts we worked on for the state allowed us to stay in business and weather the dot com bust. In the process, we brought in and trained about a dozen 'blue collar' type workers to do project management, account representation, and basic html and coding. As a result of that government money, those people got a new career path and ten years later the bulk of them are working at other companies making 6 figure salaries. Tell me the government didn't receive a huge return from their investment on that.
It's the government, it can create any job it wants to because it is the government. If your looking form a useful or productivity or economic standpoint, that's a whole different story but jobs in itself - the government can create as many of those as it wants. Look at Cuba where everyone has a job and unemployment is low.
If the government wants to, it can open positions for 10,000,000 computer typists to type "Hello World" for 12 hours a day. Since our government prints money, all it needs to do is just print more money to pay them. In fact, after those 10 million people are hired, it can create another 100 million jobs to twist wire from dusk to dawn should they desire.
The government has the ability to create as many jobs as it desires because it's the government. Now whether the people are better off or not because they have a "job" that's another story. Either way, jobs are easy to create.
Comparing the unemployment rate (still bad) to the recovering GDP is sort of comparing apples to oranges, since total employment has to keep increasing in order to keep up with a growing population. Its easy to imagine a situation where our employment levels have tracked our GDP perfectly, and our high unemployment is due to a recovery that took too long rather than a shift in the economy. However, the actual data is consistent with his thesis, as shown by this graph he should have used:
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...
Jobs are just one way to distribute wealth. Technology has made many jobs unnecessary: it doesn't mean distributing wealth has become unnecessary.
We will eventually have to come up with other, possibly less fair, ways to do the distribution; the reason for that won't likely be because it might be considered ethical by some but because it'll cause much more trouble to not redistribute that wealth.
From what I've heard, the consensus among economists is that the high unemployment rate isn't about lack of money or lack of will to hire. It's about lack of consumer spending. Right now, Americans are actually starting to pay down their debts and save money. This is a good thing in the long term, but makes companies hesitant to hire in the short term.
I have difficulty believing that hiring is slow due to technology. The fact of the matter is that you don't climb out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression overnight. We just need to have patience. Some economists have estimated that it will take 10 years before our economy is fully back on track.
Is this the new natural unemployment rate? No. Is the unemployment rate ever going to return back to 5-6%, highly unlikely. Yes, similar things were said after every revolution like the industrial revolution or the invention of agriculture but what you have to realize is that once we got over those job issues they didn't simply vanish. With more and more efficiency from these revolutions comes more and more difficulties for the common worker who has no particular skill set. The real issue that this latest recession displayed is that people who are running these small businesses and even large corporations alike have learned what running "lean" really means. They have now realized their most bare essentials to make it through these hard economic times and now that the bar has been set it will be incredibly difficult to lift it to the previous level.
I had a discussion with a Fixed Income Desk Manager when I visited MorganStanley a few months back about this very issue and we both agreed that companies will never return to the previous level of employment. The job market is fundamentally changing and this idea that everyone has that jobs are around the corner I feel is naive. Could their possibly be an uptick in highly skilled areas of the market? I think so but besides those areas I think unskilled laborers are in for a difficult time. There will always be room in the economy for people that can do hands on jobs because somethings cannot be left up to technology alone i.e. construction or landscaping but beside these things we are moving towards a more skilled society and I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees.
> I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees.
I'm not sure I follow you here. In general, older employees are more skilled, even in technological areas. It's true that younger people skew towards tech, but you'll find few 20 year-old googlers with the skills of an average 40 year-old googler.
As someone with experience hiring people, I'd say that the main advantage in hiring younger people are lower salary expectations, possibly more idealism, and a small chance at them developing into a talent and while still staying loyal to the company.
Yeah older employees do tend to be more skilled thats why I specifically said older employees who were not skilled leave the workforce, obviously people who don't exist under this umbrella are highly skilled computer programmers that work at Google, of course in their situation it is better to be older.
This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals - they stagnate innovation. Obsession over jobs is a terrible mentality - restructuring is extremely healthy and necessary part of economic growth, and trying to stop it is only going to hurt things.
People should be learning skills that are actually useful instead of doing robotic tasks all their lives. Robots will soon be replacing robotic people.
Your statement is disjointed and impossible to follow. Both parties are obsessing over jobs, and both parties have different ways to "fix" this problem.
If you want to discuss regulations, lets discuss how the lack of regulation led to the housing bubble and the near collapse of our entire economy.
If you want to talk about "robotic" jobs, please discuss how this is supposed to change? Do you want the government to persuade people to take more skillful jobs (and if so, doesn't that go completely against the conservative ideals?)? Do you want people to want to be in more skillful positions? How do you deal with the manufacturing workforce that had stable jobs for 30 - 50 years and now have nothing?
I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion about what the government should do? I said the government should stop stifling innovation, not stifle it in a different manner.
If people don't want a job that's their problem, not mine. I don't see why I should be worrying about people not interested in their own prosperity.
And wow, way to make blanket statements that are backed by the same hokus pokus logic that lead to the housing bubble. Maybe instead of listening to the loonies that said our economy was doing great, you should listen to the people that actually were trying to stop the housing bubbled before it happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
>I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion...
Probably because your first half-sentence of your original comment was itself a political discussion: "This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals..."
Downvote me all you want so you don't have to face the truth. But if you truly want prosperity, you can't listen to the liars that got us into the problem, you have to listen to the people that knew there was a problem and had a plan to get out.
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-26/ron-paul-on-the-housing-bu...
I hate when people use graphs like the one in that post "U.S. Manufacturing: Output vs. Jobs January 1972 to August 2010" and lead reader to the conclusion that the significant drop in jobs will not adversely affect the output. If you try, you can also see that output, despite the recent jump pictured, has on average started to stagnate and likely is on its way down. Now, I'm not a full-on naysayer. Like the author, I also believe that good things will come, but our economy is not out of danger and the answer is not just retraining of the unemployed to become developers, which is one of the dumnest things that I've heard lately. Our world is basically mostly f'd right now. The economy is f'd. Jobs are f'd. Politics and even war and the military are f'd. But- things will eventually get better.
grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?
A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Or something that balances it with their viewpoint: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-t... This submission is just a pile of inflammatory linkbait that offers nothing new to the people that would agree with it, and enrages those who disagree by using such caustic language.
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial."
"Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling."
I have seen grammar and spelling comments given in the spirit of helpfulness, but this was not one of them, and adds nothing.
My comment adds very little more than that, but I'd like to remind people that many very smart engineers and business workers have a terrible grasp of formal English, yet they get the job done and more. WalterBright's comment was short, but pointed to more information, and was a potentially useful comment. The discussion should be about the content of his comment.
The fact that he used the wrong word is virtually irrelevant, we all knew what he meant. Yes, if you have a strong grasp of formal English you do make yourself seem more credible, especially in a formal context. But it's not the thing to focus on. Not here.
S/N on HN is amazingly high, but it is still a casual forum, and we should all cut each other generous slack.
You didn't even tell him the right word -- if you wanted to help him learn English, you might say something to the effect of:
queue -- noun. A first-in, first-out data structure, such as a supermarket line, or processes to be scheduled naively.
cue -- verb. To prepare for, to bring up, to introduce, typically used as a command. Also noun. an indication that it is time to do something, cf. "that's our cue!". Also used in the phrase "on cue", meaning timely.
The thing that bugs me here is that if you honestly consider it, in some situations either word could be used for more or less the same effect.
For example: "Cue the complaints". Surely "Queue the complaints.", meaning that the complaints should start lining up, gets across the same meaning (which is of course "oh great, here come complaints").
This doesn't always work of course ("That's our queue" has an entirely different meaning), however where I see most complaints about "mis-usage", either actually works.
But that's simply invalid English, as 'queue' is a noun, not a verb. Enqueue is the verb form, and nobody would ever say, "enqueue the complaints." :-)
derleth, I can't reply to your reply to the above reply. (Follow?)
As I pointed out, you have edited your reply, with no indication that it was edited.
Your original reply was not helpful. You were taking the opportunity to ridicule someone, with sarcasm. Your current version (assuming no further edits) would at best have no downvotes. Your original version deserved every downvote it got (none of which were supplied by me).
I assume you yourself know this, otherwise you wouldn't have done the edit.
EDIT: added the following: "I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct."
The fact that one word is shorter in this case is not what made the original usage wrong. Length had nothing to do with it. It was merely wrong.
The British "queue up" when joining a line in wait for something. As do my print jobs. The comment is submitting a topic for next consideration, so what's wrong the usage here?
Its traditionally "Cue" which can be a reminder , so "Cue the current thread" means "take a look at this current thread" not "get in line for this thread".
I say this having read the original term phonetically and not even realizing the mistake which is likely common and really didn't need to be editorialized.
I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."
'Queue' is not quite a direct replacement for 'see', there is an additional nuance that what follows it is obvious or inevitable, which is why I used it.
I also understand that many HN readers are not native English speakers, and have varying levels of mastery of the language. I would also agree that obscure usage of high falutin' words for the purpose of peacocking is annoying.
But using them to add color and nuance is appropriate.
"I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."
In the way that you used it, I believe it was wrong.
"Cue whatever ..." comes from movie and other media production, as in "Cue the Gimp!" It's a notice that the actor playing the Gimp should assume his next physical location in the production and be ready to act. See scythe's explanation.
This kind of mistake is very common, and comes from having heard phrases without having seen them in print. We then fit whatever written word we're most familiar with, or assume, on to the phrase. I'm guessing that's what happened here.
The analogue is reading an unfamiliar name or word and then, never having heard it in speech, not knowing how to pronounce it. This happens to me enough to notice.
It's probably clear enough that the word you were searching for is cue, but it strikes me that in the age of Instapaper, ReadItLater and their ilk, your use of queue isn't entirely off the mark.
> "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?
That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business should be expected to do so.
Given that, people do need to suck it up and learn new skills. The article made a good argument for that, and did it in the context of the new reality.
Some people won't be able to develop new needed skills, for various reasons. For some people technology and society will just move faster than they can keep up with. Others have some other impediment. As this trend continues, we need to get better as a society at dealing with those people.
1) We have to be clear that to be employed you need new skills (trades or science or engineering)
2) We have to find a way to encourage both the creation of skills training programs and a way to enable folks to take advantage of them.
3) We should start providing resources so that kids in school today understand that we're not 'forcing' them to go to school, they should go to school so that they can find gainful employment later (or entry into a tradeskill program).
>That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart.
I bet they and the lady at Rite-Aid regularly read Forbes magazine, right? Don't kid yourself--this article is meant for the echo-chamber. And that's why I think it's a waste of space.
The discussion can be started anywhere. Most helpful when it eventually (if it hasn't already) trickles down to the non-Forbes reading masses. If nothing else the article seeds a talking point for Forbes readers.
The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worldwide were to refuse to invest in education in any way, the rational business decision would be to take this on themselves, or risk having no workforce with which to remain competitive. From this point of view, our enormous societal investment in education looks a lot like a subsidy.
Businesses pay taxes and spark huge amounts of taxable activity in the course of operating — that's how they pitch in (even discounting the non-tax benefits that businesses provide to society). If society is not providing education with those tax dollars, that would be society's choice.
I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's.
"... in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's."
If a business wants to be successful they should invest in employee training IMO. I'm one of these recent college grads with "no marketable skills".
The company I'm with needs iOS developers. They could conceivably try to find qualified people, but that would be time-consuming, expensive and far from guaranteed that they'd find anyone (as there is little iOS developers where I live). Instead, by allowing me to teach myself to build apps, they have someone who will hopefully be making them money in a few weeks/months at a fraction of the price of an experienced developer (if they could find one). This point ties back into the article's observation that people are graduating with unneeded/bullshit degrees.
I would be interested to see some quantification of the total cost to educate a company's work force, compared with its tax burden (and the "taxable activity" it sparks, if that is quantifiable in some way), for a number of different types of companies. Has anyone seen data like this? Doing some napkin-style calculations it seems like I could convince myself of either conclusion.
The 'business lobby' is almost 100% against providing education, which is a significant part of the reason that neither the public nor private sector is doing an adequate job.
Business and society don't operate apart from each other.
But it is higher-risk to be unable to find anyone employable than it is to train people yourself. So the system depends on a surplus of already-trained workers, which someone needs to provide, or everyone suffers.
Well then businesses could just start offering contracted jobs with fixed lengths rather than "at-will employment" (aka: "leave/be fired for the lulz employment").
The "blame tech" theme is what struck me - in all its appalling wrongness (see my sharply critical comments on some vapid assumptions made in a like piece that ran on HN yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770994).
Could we be trending towards a future where 99% of people are unemployed, but the 1% that is employed are so productive that there is plenty for everyone? I guess that's basically the same as saying that robots will do everything.
Sadly, that is not the way captialism works. The 1% of people will have everything and the remaining 99% will starve. I'm paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes: "Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth. It is a lousy system for the distribution of wealth."
I suspect I will make some flack for this comment. I'm not arguing big govt. Rather, I'm pointing out that in a world where a small number of individuals CAN produce the majority of wealth, we need a better system for redistribution to avoid a dystopian society.
In the US, you try for a wealth distribution anything approaching what you're discussing and what you'll actually end up with is 1% of the population under a constant barrage of sustained small arms fire. Parents aren't going quietly watch their children starve.
Incidentally, I agree wholeheartedly that we need a better redistribution system.
It will be interesting (and terrifying! don't get me wrong, but also interesting) to see what happens if we get to this point - there is no Bastille for the masses to storm, throwing out the entirety of the democratic government would accomplish very little in terms of wealth redistribution, and the military now has the literal capability, though hopefully not the strength of will or weakness of conscience, to kill every member of the starving horde. Our distribution of wealth may not be as skewed as pre-revolutionary France, but our concentration of might is far higher.
"Sadly, that is not the way captialism works. The 1% of people will have everything and the remaining 99% will starve. I'm paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes: "Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth. It is a lousy system for the distribution of wealth."
This isn't true. It's one of (if not the best) system for distributing wealth. Anybody can start their own company (look at all the startups on HN alone) with relatively little money and generate wealth for themselves.
I don't think there's any evidence that 99% will starve. Certainly not in this country. Our problem is obesity. This chart on Wikipedia is showing that though in income inequality is increasing, all quintiles are also increasing (inflation adjusted.) Not only that, but the TV's that you can buy now are a lot better than those you can buy in 1940, ditto for the cars, houses, apartments, etc. And food is dirt-cheap if you actually try to be cost-conscious about it.
This is an argument that the unemployment problem is structural rather than cyclical. Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand, but wages aren't rising for anybody that makes less than 400,000, though for those above they've increased 23% since 2008.
The structural unemployment argument is a trope to insist that the government can't do anything to encourage employment, because stupid people just can't do today's jobs. Its politics disguised as economics.
If there are many job openings, but little actual hiring, then there is no real demand. If there were real demand, businesses would actually be filling those supposedly open jobs and figuring out how to make use of who they hired. Cherry picking with open job ads does not in itself show demand.
If wages are rising for people who make more than 400K, it's because demand for people who fill those jobs is real. That may be because businesses have decided that maxing out on employees who almost literally make money is better business than maxing out on the people who are effectively tools for the 400K+ crowd.
> If there are many job openings, but little actual hiring, then there is no real demand.
Or there is demand but inadequate supply. I've heard several people on HN talk about their companies having openings, getting 10 times the resumes that they did in 2007, but seeing significantly fewer qualified applicants overall.
Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand,...
A testable prediction of (one version of) structuralist theories [1].
...for those above [400k] they've increased 23% since 2008.
It looks like reality fits the structuralist predictions - wages are rising for some people, and falling for others.
[1] Not all structuralist theories predict this, however. Krugman's version of structuralist theories is based on assumptions of interchangeability of labor, no delays in price adjustment (i.e., no sticky wages or sticky prices), and several more. It's strange how Krugman believes in sticky prices/wages when pushing Keynesian theories, but believes them to be false when bashing structuralist theories.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThis is somewhat similar to the classic dismal science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science) argument. Even though there is high unemployment now arguing that the economy cannot find a use for these people seems very short sighted.
Here's the author's blog: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/
"And it’s not just Microsoft who you can blame."
"It’s not all Microsoft’s fault."
We need Scientists?
Ask the 1800 surplus Physics PhD's that get produced every year. It's clear that the academic system uses young and smart people, but not that it produces desirable or permanent employment for them. A wise person wouldn't get involved, unless they've got one (or preferably two) parent(s) that are already in the field who can pull some strings for them.
As for programmers, I wake up every morning with the mission of putting myself out of work.
1) I am having trouble solving this problem, I must not be smart enough.
2) Wait, I have a degree in astrophysics, so I am smart, this must be really hard.
The valley and wall street are a bit different... people are willing to give you a shot at almost anything in any seemingly unrelated field because they think you'll probably be able to handle it, because you've solved hard problems that are often similar in scope. Predicting the market is pretty similar to reconstructing a collision, folding proteins, or predicting molecular orbitals. Cloud computing isn't that different than grid computing. Statistics are statistics and models are models, and companies are finding out new ways they can benefit from information processing by utilizing the people who pioneered it.
I do agree though... the Main Street small businesses, the ones that I think the GOP often fantasizes about, aren't going to usually need someone with a PhD in whatever.
Scientists fit the bill -- any physics phd who can't find a job can join the finance or ad tech industries by sending out a single resume.
Sorry, the point i'm trying to make is it's easy to be intellectually dishonest about the complexity of problems people are facing (sorta like the ML article earlier). If your small business needs new research to survive, you've lost. Very few small businesses are limited by complicated third order effects. they're limited because the owner doesn't feel like doing inventory (or writing more tests, or calling more potential customers) over the weekend.
Sure, you can find counter examples here and there, like special hedge funds or old hippies with geology shops, but most small businesses know 5 things they could fix to make it better.
If they're really that super-efficient and organized, they're either a large business that turned into a small business because the field is dying or they're not a small business.
If a small company is trying to solve sufficiently complex problem, like what Intel (in 1968), Adobe(in 1980s) and Google(in 1998) were trying to solve they need a phd. If a small company is building a new social network or social app it might not need a phd.
Do you have better data than this?:
"The physics PhD classes of 2007 and 2008 consisted of 1,460 and 1,499 PhDs, respectively. We received post-degree information on 54% of these degree recipients." ... resulting in 4% unemployed initially. Including the 7% temporarily employed that's around 150 excess Physics Phd's in 2008.
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/phdinitial.pdf
Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements on society new jobs will be created all over the world. Yes checkout clerks will no longer exist just as many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In their place we will see more software developers, consultants, entertainers and artists.
More wealth, yes, but not necessary wealth that gets distributed (as productivity in the US has increased, real wages have decreased).
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp195/
This doesn't mean that the compensation of the median worker has perfectly tracked GDP growth, because there has been a moderate but genuine increase in inequality in compensation. But it isn't nearly as big as the increase in the wage gap, and saying "real median wages have decreased" is misleading.
I agree, there will probably be more wealth - I just think the distribution of that wealth may well be societally damaging.
I appreciate that such jobs are undesirable, but they're much in demands by those unable to take up a skilled trade, or those whose skillset has been rendered obsolete. They might not be great jobs, but they beat the alternative of nothing.
I wonder if this will have knock-on implications for those of us who have relatively high levels of training. Right now, if my specialism becomes obsolete I can at least pick up a non-specialist alternative job - will this be the case in the future?
> “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”
Which kind of makes you wonder how disruptive the singularity would be.
Which, combined with the fact that GDP has barely recovered since 2008, kind of invalidates the article - i.e its reasonable to assume that the number of jobs has not actually decreased, but has stayed static, and that that is most likely due to the depression.
http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html#category=Employment&...
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...
It was really sloppy of the article to use those number like that, but his point isn't invalidated.
This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think that person's output will make more money than it will cost to employ them. Period.
Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.
Government can create a good climate for businesses to exist, with laws, infrastructure and education. But those are long-term investments. Short-term, anything the government does to affect the economy is a shell game. You can't sign a law and magically make workers productive.
It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.
A government can certainly use monetary and fiscal policies to stimulate demand and create more work, but that does not necessarily result in more hiring.
For one thing, when there is a surplus of goods (and there frequently is late in a recession and shortly thereafter) the initial demand will be met by that surplus rather than any additional production. Even when that surplus is exhausted, additional demand may be met through through automation. Also, if an industry as a whole thinks that this demand will be short lived, it may choose to either raise prices or simply permit some of that demand to go unmet rather than make large capital expenditures to increase production.
Also, normally when a country is trying to "create jobs", its goal is to create jobs for its own citizens. In an increasingly global economy, stimulating demand may increase imports without increasing jobs in the target economy.
So, while increasing demand may help create jobs, it also may have limited impact and that impact may take a substantial amount of time to be felt.
This is exactly what happened in our current recession.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PAYEMS
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGORDER
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IPDCONGD
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DMANEMP
This is nonsense. The government can fund projects that create jobs. Do you have any idea how many small businesses out there make their money solely from servicing government contracts?
Just as an example, I worked at a small software consulting firm during the middle/end of the dot com boom. We were a project shop. The contracts we worked on for the state allowed us to stay in business and weather the dot com bust. In the process, we brought in and trained about a dozen 'blue collar' type workers to do project management, account representation, and basic html and coding. As a result of that government money, those people got a new career path and ten years later the bulk of them are working at other companies making 6 figure salaries. Tell me the government didn't receive a huge return from their investment on that.
>This is nonsense. The government can fund projects that create jobs.
There's no evidence this is a net creator of jobs, though. There's a lost opportunity cost to take into account here.
It's the government, it can create any job it wants to because it is the government. If your looking form a useful or productivity or economic standpoint, that's a whole different story but jobs in itself - the government can create as many of those as it wants. Look at Cuba where everyone has a job and unemployment is low.
If the government wants to, it can open positions for 10,000,000 computer typists to type "Hello World" for 12 hours a day. Since our government prints money, all it needs to do is just print more money to pay them. In fact, after those 10 million people are hired, it can create another 100 million jobs to twist wire from dusk to dawn should they desire.
The government has the ability to create as many jobs as it desires because it's the government. Now whether the people are better off or not because they have a "job" that's another story. Either way, jobs are easy to create.
We will eventually have to come up with other, possibly less fair, ways to do the distribution; the reason for that won't likely be because it might be considered ethical by some but because it'll cause much more trouble to not redistribute that wealth.
Good point.
I have difficulty believing that hiring is slow due to technology. The fact of the matter is that you don't climb out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression overnight. We just need to have patience. Some economists have estimated that it will take 10 years before our economy is fully back on track.
I had a discussion with a Fixed Income Desk Manager when I visited MorganStanley a few months back about this very issue and we both agreed that companies will never return to the previous level of employment. The job market is fundamentally changing and this idea that everyone has that jobs are around the corner I feel is naive. Could their possibly be an uptick in highly skilled areas of the market? I think so but besides those areas I think unskilled laborers are in for a difficult time. There will always be room in the economy for people that can do hands on jobs because somethings cannot be left up to technology alone i.e. construction or landscaping but beside these things we are moving towards a more skilled society and I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees.
I'm not sure I follow you here. In general, older employees are more skilled, even in technological areas. It's true that younger people skew towards tech, but you'll find few 20 year-old googlers with the skills of an average 40 year-old googler.
As someone with experience hiring people, I'd say that the main advantage in hiring younger people are lower salary expectations, possibly more idealism, and a small chance at them developing into a talent and while still staying loyal to the company.
People should be learning skills that are actually useful instead of doing robotic tasks all their lives. Robots will soon be replacing robotic people.
If you want to discuss regulations, lets discuss how the lack of regulation led to the housing bubble and the near collapse of our entire economy.
If you want to talk about "robotic" jobs, please discuss how this is supposed to change? Do you want the government to persuade people to take more skillful jobs (and if so, doesn't that go completely against the conservative ideals?)? Do you want people to want to be in more skillful positions? How do you deal with the manufacturing workforce that had stable jobs for 30 - 50 years and now have nothing?
What is it you are actually trying to say here?
I don't care about political parties, why is this suddenly a political discussion about what the government should do? I said the government should stop stifling innovation, not stifle it in a different manner.
If people don't want a job that's their problem, not mine. I don't see why I should be worrying about people not interested in their own prosperity.
And wow, way to make blanket statements that are backed by the same hokus pokus logic that lead to the housing bubble. Maybe instead of listening to the loonies that said our economy was doing great, you should listen to the people that actually were trying to stop the housing bubbled before it happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
Probably because your first half-sentence of your original comment was itself a political discussion: "This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals..."
A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills. Or something that balances it with their viewpoint: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/growing-up-t... This submission is just a pile of inflammatory linkbait that offers nothing new to the people that would agree with it, and enrages those who disagree by using such caustic language.
Queue the recent discussion about rampant cheating in college. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254
I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct.
"Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling."
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
My comment adds very little more than that, but I'd like to remind people that many very smart engineers and business workers have a terrible grasp of formal English, yet they get the job done and more. WalterBright's comment was short, but pointed to more information, and was a potentially useful comment. The discussion should be about the content of his comment.
The fact that he used the wrong word is virtually irrelevant, we all knew what he meant. Yes, if you have a strong grasp of formal English you do make yourself seem more credible, especially in a formal context. But it's not the thing to focus on. Not here.
S/N on HN is amazingly high, but it is still a casual forum, and we should all cut each other generous slack.
Written with helpful intention. :)
queue -- noun. A first-in, first-out data structure, such as a supermarket line, or processes to be scheduled naively.
cue -- verb. To prepare for, to bring up, to introduce, typically used as a command. Also noun. an indication that it is time to do something, cf. "that's our cue!". Also used in the phrase "on cue", meaning timely.
I stand corrected.
For example: "Cue the complaints". Surely "Queue the complaints.", meaning that the complaints should start lining up, gets across the same meaning (which is of course "oh great, here come complaints").
This doesn't always work of course ("That's our queue" has an entirely different meaning), however where I see most complaints about "mis-usage", either actually works.
But that's simply invalid English, as 'queue' is a noun, not a verb. Enqueue is the verb form, and nobody would ever say, "enqueue the complaints." :-)
Commonly heard used in the phrase "Queue up".
Besides, verbing weirds language. ;)
As I pointed out, you have edited your reply, with no indication that it was edited.
Your original reply was not helpful. You were taking the opportunity to ridicule someone, with sarcasm. Your current version (assuming no further edits) would at best have no downvotes. Your original version deserved every downvote it got (none of which were supplied by me).
I assume you yourself know this, otherwise you wouldn't have done the edit.
EDIT: added the following: "I'd understand this better if people didn't always pick the longer word when the short one would be correct."
The fact that one word is shorter in this case is not what made the original usage wrong. Length had nothing to do with it. It was merely wrong.
Yours in helpfulness, -- sixtofour
I say this having read the original term phonetically and not even realizing the mistake which is likely common and really didn't need to be editorialized.
'Queue' is not quite a direct replacement for 'see', there is an additional nuance that what follows it is obvious or inevitable, which is why I used it.
I also understand that many HN readers are not native English speakers, and have varying levels of mastery of the language. I would also agree that obscure usage of high falutin' words for the purpose of peacocking is annoying.
But using them to add color and nuance is appropriate.
In the way that you used it, I believe it was wrong.
"Cue whatever ..." comes from movie and other media production, as in "Cue the Gimp!" It's a notice that the actor playing the Gimp should assume his next physical location in the production and be ready to act. See scythe's explanation.
This kind of mistake is very common, and comes from having heard phrases without having seen them in print. We then fit whatever written word we're most familiar with, or assume, on to the phrase. I'm guessing that's what happened here.
The analogue is reading an unfamiliar name or word and then, never having heard it in speech, not knowing how to pronounce it. This happens to me enough to notice.
That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business should be expected to do so.
Given that, people do need to suck it up and learn new skills. The article made a good argument for that, and did it in the context of the new reality.
Some people won't be able to develop new needed skills, for various reasons. For some people technology and society will just move faster than they can keep up with. Others have some other impediment. As this trend continues, we need to get better as a society at dealing with those people.
1) We have to be clear that to be employed you need new skills (trades or science or engineering)
2) We have to find a way to encourage both the creation of skills training programs and a way to enable folks to take advantage of them.
3) We should start providing resources so that kids in school today understand that we're not 'forcing' them to go to school, they should go to school so that they can find gainful employment later (or entry into a tradeskill program).
Serious business.
I bet they and the lady at Rite-Aid regularly read Forbes magazine, right? Don't kid yourself--this article is meant for the echo-chamber. And that's why I think it's a waste of space.
I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's.
If a business wants to be successful they should invest in employee training IMO. I'm one of these recent college grads with "no marketable skills".
The company I'm with needs iOS developers. They could conceivably try to find qualified people, but that would be time-consuming, expensive and far from guaranteed that they'd find anyone (as there is little iOS developers where I live). Instead, by allowing me to teach myself to build apps, they have someone who will hopefully be making them money in a few weeks/months at a fraction of the price of an experienced developer (if they could find one). This point ties back into the article's observation that people are graduating with unneeded/bullshit degrees.
Business and society don't operate apart from each other.
I suspect I will make some flack for this comment. I'm not arguing big govt. Rather, I'm pointing out that in a world where a small number of individuals CAN produce the majority of wealth, we need a better system for redistribution to avoid a dystopian society.
It's been tried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
In the US, you try for a wealth distribution anything approaching what you're discussing and what you'll actually end up with is 1% of the population under a constant barrage of sustained small arms fire. Parents aren't going quietly watch their children starve.
Incidentally, I agree wholeheartedly that we need a better redistribution system.
This isn't true. It's one of (if not the best) system for distributing wealth. Anybody can start their own company (look at all the startups on HN alone) with relatively little money and generate wealth for themselves.
The structural unemployment argument is a trope to insist that the government can't do anything to encourage employment, because stupid people just can't do today's jobs. Its politics disguised as economics.
If wages are rising for people who make more than 400K, it's because demand for people who fill those jobs is real. That may be because businesses have decided that maxing out on employees who almost literally make money is better business than maxing out on the people who are effectively tools for the 400K+ crowd.
Or there is demand but inadequate supply. I've heard several people on HN talk about their companies having openings, getting 10 times the resumes that they did in 2007, but seeing significantly fewer qualified applicants overall.
Paul Krugman points out constantly that if the unemployment problem was structural, we'd see wages rising in areas where there is demand,...
A testable prediction of (one version of) structuralist theories [1].
...for those above [400k] they've increased 23% since 2008.
It looks like reality fits the structuralist predictions - wages are rising for some people, and falling for others.
[1] Not all structuralist theories predict this, however. Krugman's version of structuralist theories is based on assumptions of interchangeability of labor, no delays in price adjustment (i.e., no sticky wages or sticky prices), and several more. It's strange how Krugman believes in sticky prices/wages when pushing Keynesian theories, but believes them to be false when bashing structuralist theories.