Oh, I have no problem with that. I just prefer that people form their opinions about me by what I say, not by what someone else says. It’s one of my quirks. There are many others, but I won’t bore you…
Yeah, well, you got dignity. I’m too old for dignity. Never had much use for it, anyway, gets in the way of fart jokes.
While the basic principle is a good one, the recommendation of it as a panacea for local unemployment problems may be a bit over-optimistic. Here are just a few of the constraints that can hold people back from moving to areas with greater job opportunity:
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Sheer up-front costs. The money required for transportation to a distant place, the costs of house-hunting, security deposits, moving one’s goods (or purchasing new ones), etc., are usually not trivial. For people barely scraping by from month to month, they may well be insurmountable.
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Higher costs of living. The trouble with job-opportunity “boom towns” is that everybody else tends to be moving there too, which drives up housing costs and/or transportation costs (if you have to commute to work from a more distant cheaper neighborhood).
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Reduced access to support systems. Although legislatively blocking new residents from state welfare benefits has been found unconstitutional, it still generally takes a while (and thus costs money) for poor people relocating to a different locality or state to shift over from one assistance program to another. Add to that the problem noted by other posters that poor people who relocate often sacrifice help from informal networks of family and neighbors, and moving becomes even more expensive.
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Limited improvement in standards of living. The average poor worker with limited skills and education isn’t going to have immediate access to that much better jobs even in a job-opportunity boom town than s/he had back in high-unemployment Slumpville. Combined with costs of relocation and increased costs of living, it may end up just not being worth it financially, at least in the short- to medium-term, to relocate in search of a job.
That’s not to say that relocating in search of jobs wouldn’t be a good idea for many poor people, or hasn’t proved an effective strategy for many poor people in the past. I’m just skeptical about the blitheness with which it’s being offered here as the one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of poor unemployed people in general.
Sure, I’m in. 
I think you could start by finding out which cities & states have the lowest unemployment rates…
Is this really complicated?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, whatsoever, and I never suggested there was (and neither did John Mace, that I can see). But if it is, indeed, a good idea for many poor people, why does it always get dismissed as an unreasonable suggestion?
I don’t think anyone is offering it as a one-size-fits all solution. Certainly not me. But keep in mind the context in which this discussion started. The claim was made that there wasn’t enough work to go around and that the market based theory of labor was “fundamentally flawed”. There are certainly real problems some people face if they have to relocate. But at least right now we are at a very low level of unemployment in this country. We can argue about how good all those jobs are, but that is a different argument.
Hugs and kisses back at ya!
Yes. It is. For one thing, the “unemployment rate” is a statistic that has massaged half to death by every administration. As you probably know, the rate tends to exclude those who have flat given up. So, how do you adjust that rate to find the “real” unemployment rate?
So you don’t believe that there are some places where it is easier to find a job than other places? Or that it’s too confusing to try to figure out where those places are? I’m not sure what you are getting at, here.
You don’t. Nobody does because the academia in which it was created still teaches it that way. If you could, you would probably be going to Stockholm to claim a prize. The fact is that the methodoly is universally taught that way, and everyone accepts it. It’s kinda like money. Everyone one knows that it isn’t backed by anything (for the most part), except the full faith and credit of the government which issued it. It’s not going to stop people from trying to assess things differently, though, they just have a near insurmountable hurdle to cover, particularly, how does anyone know that someone isn’t really looking for work.
Oh, you’re quite a bit brighter than that, Sarah. I couldn’t talk over your head without a ladder, and you’d push it over if I did.
Suppose it is as easy as you say, and you prove it. Sarafeena’s List, lets call it, where you pluck these easily available facts and fashion them into a simple, direct set of facts: 1,000 jobs in New Ulm, Minnesota. And ten thousand people move there, taking the chance, being entreprenuerial and self-sufficient. Well, then, we’ve done well by a thousand and thoroughly screwed 9.000, haven’t we? Having taken their chance and shot their bolt, then what? Now, being the People’s Republic of Minnesota, they’re not so bad off as they might be, had they moved to say, Texas. (Disclaimer: long time since I been home, may have changed, but used to be official Texas state policy towards welfare was “We Hate Your Guts! Die!”…)
Not all of us are smart, Sarah. Rather few of us, regretably. You are, I am, John…bless his heart, he means well. As a smart person, you know, as I do, to be suspect and skeptical of simple solutions. They almost never are, are they?
Good point, damned if I know. Economics makes my head hurt, can’t make any damn sense of out of it.
Like I said, you can always think of a hundred reasons not to do something. You can even make up a scenario just to prove your case!
As absurd as your scenario is, I do believe we are allowed to move than once in this country. Or have the rules changed when I wasn’t looking?
Rules? Who said anything about rules, outside of you? Anybody here say anything about rules, show of hands? Nope. Looks like you’re rebutting an argument not made. But keep it handy, in case somebody does…
Since when is a question considered a rebuttal? Where I come it’s simply a question. (And that one was a rhetorical one, in case you didn’t notice).
Again, I never said there were simple solutions. But there are ways to make life better if you are willing to try. If you aren’t, then hell, why not let the government take care of you, so you can lead a miserable life? To each his own.
I would love for there to be a Sarahfeena’s list, but as you so eloquently point out, life isn’t that simple. But here is what I would do if I was having trouble finding work where I live. And, incidently, I am dead serious…this is what I would do. I would think about what type of job I wanted to have. I would research that industry, to find out where the most jobs are. I would move there. I would try to get a job in that industry, even at rock-bottom level & pay if I had to. If I couldn’t get a job in that industry, I would work whatever job I could find until I could find one. It is not rocket science. And you can use all the sarcasm you want…it’s still a perfectly reasonable way to solve the problem of not being able to find employment.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that it is as difficult as you say to figure out which areas are more or less economically depressed.
I think we’ve beat this horse dead a hundred times over, btw. I’m going to say sayonara before tomndebb closed this thread, too. Feel free to have the last word.
C’mon, John, play fair! I say if someone moves once, and shoots their bolt (a metaphor for having taken your best shot, and missed, which I’m pretty sure you know…) and then you come back with something about how its not against the rules to move twice, you have evaded my point, don’t you think?
And simply putting a question mark at the end doesn’t make it a rhetorical question, any more than sticking a smiley at the end of nasty snark makes it good humored ribbing.
Excluded middle. Not an “either/or” situation.
And I called you on it, I said, well, if the facts are right at your fingertips, bring it. So far, you haven’t. And if smart people like you and I can’t do it, what chance have our less gifted brethren and sistren got?
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable suggestion as part of an anti-poverty strategy, and I don’t think anyone’s dismissing it as such. I just think there are big hurdles to making it the centerpiece of an anti-poverty strategy.
Employment migration in a country the size of the US, with so much variation among the different states in terms of social safety nets, administrative procedures, etc., for a large subset of the working poor is just never going to be feasible, IMHO. To make it feasible, we’d probably have to spend more money on things like relocation assistance programs than it would cost to do job creation directly in high-unemployment areas.
Well, speaking absolutely literally, who can deny that this is so? The market theory of labor is explicitly based on the premise that there will be not (quite) enough work to go around. This is the economic concept of the NAIRU or Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment—i.e., the minimum level of unemployment that will keep enough flexibility in the labor market to prevent runaway wage inflation from strangling the economy.
Even if the unemployment rate is as low as its current level of 4.5%, that still means that at any given time, more than 1 in 25 people who want a job can’t find one. (And as luc notes, this ignores the problem of the “shadow unemployed”, people who have given up and dropped out of the employment statistics altogether.) The economic prosperity that most of us enjoy is inextricably dependent on the unwilling joblessness of at least 1 in 25 workers. And that joblessness disproportionately affects poor workers, who are the least likely to be able to cope with business-cycle and geographic shifts in the job market.
I’m not claiming that any other approach to labor and employment would necessarily produce better results (or even as good) than the market approach. But I think it would be senseless, not to mention heartless, to attempt to deny that the market-based theory of labor is “fundamentally flawed” in terms of the basic goal of providing work for all who want to work.
Kimstu, you clearly have a grasp of economic theory. I’ll try not to hate you for it. Won’t be easy.