Has the recession created a "lost generation" of permanently unemployed?

Great Debates
121

It’s also a great deal for Americans – if they are aware of the changing world around them and retool, re-educate, relocate, whatever it takes to do something else that the Chinese don’t for us. The USA used to have a huge textile industry. That’s all moved to China, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. That’s not bad for Americans if they realize they can do something else more productive than sewing clothes.

Ok, instead of importing oil from Middle East, we could just use millions of human-powered rickshaws covering the entire country. Instead of giving Arabs the money and jobs, a million Americans get a bunch of jobs. Another nice bonus is that rickshaw doesn’t even require a high-school diploma! Explain how this scenario is better?

I do realize that one of the key mental blocks is that all these fast moving world changes are happening within the time boundaries of a person’s 40-year working career. If the pace of changes were much slower so that a uneducated machine worker at General Motors could keep that job his entire life with guaranteed raises and benefits, it would be wonderful. It would be a wonderful fantasy if we had get a 100-year warning that our telegraph job that we’ve been training for will be quickly out of date. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not willing to hand Americans a nice static career to build their lives on. We have to get used to switching jobs, switching skills, possibly 3 or 4 times before retirement – or join the military.

122

And unless we’re willing to have the military own our ass for our enlistment period, we can no longer expect the kind of help we think we’ll need to retrain or learn new skills.

The global economy is at a point where a lot of companies could afford to hire, but only as long as their hires came pre-trained. So industry is not going to give you the training. Neither is government, because industry and a lot of public opinion won’t allow spending for such things. You’re going to have to do a lot more than take the initiative - you’re going to have to go up against an economic system that really isn’t set up to let you do what you need to do.

The level of sacrifice for the individual is going to be very high, and if the above is any indication, the level of sympathy will be very low. People who’ve got theirs are being conditioned not to give a damn about people who don’t, and to feel righteous by saying all their problems are their own.

123

There are two sort of conflicting truths. The first is that we’ve ALWAYS had a permanent unemployed class. Black inner city men have horrible rates of employment as a subgroup. So what makes you care now?

The second thing is that employment rates are cyclical - I’m not convinced that this period of high unemployment will be long term. In the 1970s we thought U.S. manufacturing was dead and we’d have a class of permanently unemployed - and by the 1990s we had negative rates of unemployment in certain parts of the country.

It will certainly be long term for people who insist that their labor is worth more than the market believes it to be and refuse to adapt their skills to whatever comes along. The telegraph operator had to learn to run a switchboard. And as more people became adept at using web technologies, you had fewer $100k a year “webmasters” because there were plenty of people who’d do that job for half that.

124

Nice fallacy of the excluded middle, there Ruminator. In any event, sneering at the masses for not eating cake is not a favorable long term bet, from what I can see of history. Don’t go losing your head over this, Marie.

125

[quote=“Dangerosa, post:123, topic:549657”]

Because the investor class seems to be so busy finding ways to a. adapt to and b. profit from mass unemployment. Eventually, they’re going to find some, and that will make the connection between mass misery and the thriving of the few more concrete and direct than ever.

As to “So what makes you care now?”: I consider you to be dragging race into the discussion to be disingenuous, and I sure as hell ain’t buying that.

126

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the investor class hasn’t been raking in dough with stock market drops, dividend cuts, and low interest rates. But OF COURSE they are adapting, and you should FOLLOW THEIR LEAD. Do you expect to sit on your hands, not adapt to change, and have someone spoon feed you.

I’m not dragging race in, I’m saying that we’ve always HAD a class of people that has been permanently unemployed. They HAPPEN to be inner city black men - who have been pretty much perpetually unemployed since the civil war. Although we can go for residents of Native American reservations in the Dakotas as a group that’s permanently unemployed if you’d rather.

127

Please explain what this “excluded middle” would be. What would it look like?

In any case, I’m not sneering at the masses. I AM part of the masses! I’ve had to switch my skillset around 3 times already. I used to do “desktop publishing” with big fancy fonts on old monochrome computers before everybody had a computer with Microsoft Windows and printed their own newsletters.

One of my past lives was technical analysis of business processes.

I’m currently retooling for a 4th reincarnation (is it the 4th? or maybe the 5th? I’ve lost count) as a multimedia creator.

128

Maybe part of the problem is that those who have successfully negotiated retraining see no need to explain the process to others. Perhaps they chalk their success up to simple good character and work ethic: ie, if you can’t figure it out yourself, you’re just not trying hard enough. Same as if you can’t find work to begin with.

I find that attitude smug. Smugness doesn’t make anybody improve their circumstances. Does it?

129

I dunno, sneering that if we don’t love or agree with all aspects of your pet economic theory, we must be Luddites who want to go back to telegraphs and rickshaws, perhaps?

Suuuure you are. All I can tell you is that there are going to be people lined up against the wall exclaiming the exact same thing.

130

So what do you and **Beware of Doug **want? Someone to keep paying you to do a bullshit, obsolete job that there is no longer a need for?

Also “office worker putting out spreadsheets” isn’t a fucking job. Do you mean like a CPA accountant or lawyer or some other professional person? Or do you mean some sort of bullshit office temp job collating files?

No, in the real world, people go back to school to get degrees, learn to type, learn computers, learn accounting, learn air conditioning repair, become a cop, fireman or bartender, blow people under the viaduct for quarters for all I care.

I get it. Losing your job sucks. But you can’t control the economy and sitting on your ass griping about it doesn’t put bread in your pocket either.

So how do you elevate the people who don’t have anything to a position where they do?

131

Try me - I actually really want to believe it. I don’t want a degree in a discipline that is later shown to be fundamentally wrong. But so far, on one hand I have dull, uninspiring lecturers who present the material as if it is self-evident, and on the other hand I have books by people such as Erik Reinert and Joseph Stiglitz, who present well argued cases against modern economic theory and the consequences of free trade, that are based on empirical real world evidence rather than abstract theory. Economists, after all, have the reputation of never agreeing with each other and making predictions that turn out completely wrong. Now, perhaps economics is in its infancy, and the accuracy of its predictions will improve in years to come, or perhaps, as some of its critics argue, there is something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions made (rational actors and everyone having perfect information are the two that spring to mind). I’m not just going to blindly accept everything that’s in the textbook, when the textbook itself is under attack from Nobel Prize winning economists. Whereas a physics textbook I would be far more inclined to accept on faith.

But my mind is *far *from made up, and I’m really hoping Stiglitz and his ilk are wrong. Anyway, kinda hijacked this thread so I’ll leave it here. Might start another thread on this though.

132

How I successfully negotiated retraining - the process.

I went to school for Art History, there aren’t any Art History jobs…so I started temping.

I used to be a secretary. When I was a secretary, I taught myself all the basic computer programs that were “new” in 1984. I practiced typing to become a 90 wpm typist. I didn’t like being a secretary. I paid for my own systems administrator courses and self study materials and became a Novell Netware administrator. I paid for my own certifications. I built servers at home. I worked my way up from someone who adds accounts and rights, to an engineer and architect. I went to user group meetings. I sat on the board of professional organizations. I taught courses on Netware.

Novell Netware became a pretty dead product maybe six or so years ago. I evolved into a project manager. I paid for my own training. I took CBTs on my own time. I attend local meetings for PMI on my own time. I have kids, so I don’t spend nearly the effort on being recognized in this field as I did with Netware.

I didn’t have a degree, that was holding me back. I worked full time and finished my degree. I paid for it myself.

133

Serious question: what exactly were your expectations about how the working world works?

Even in the 1980s, I was repeatedly told that the USA is not Japan and we don’t have “guaranteed lifetime employment” here. That’s my perspective. What’s yours? And how did you get that perspective?

134

I don’t consider myself an economist at all, but I am failing to understand those posters here who don’t seem to get the fact that things change and you either change with them or you are obsolete.

My profession–Architecture has changed significantly since I started in it. When I started working as a draftsman it was all by hand, very labor intensive and very local to the community you are in. Very closed system and not much innovation to be honest.

However once computer drafting and desktop publishing,and faxes, and then electronic files, etc came on, you either adapted or you were left far behind. Education and retraining doesn’t stop once you secure a new job–it is an ongoing continuous process.

Now we do work around the world, new opportunities have opened up that pushes what Architects have traditionally done in the past. We now compete with Graphic Designers, Artists, Renderers, Way Finding, Landscapes, Furnishings, Interiors, etc for work besides the traditional type of work that Architects do.

I probably have learned more new programs in the past three years then the previous ten years combined. I now know several graphic rich programs such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, SketchUp, 3D Studio, etc. that I never thought of seeing myself learning, but I can’t do the job without them. 3D cadd programs such as Revit will be the next big thing in our field and I am quite sure I will need to learn how to use that program as well. My education and training didn’t stop once I graduated, or when I got my license, or when I got my LEED training, etc–it is an ongoing continual thing.

I know several Architects who have been let go who didn’t learn and adapt to those skill sets, the focused on a singlular aspect of our work and figured that was enough, obviously it wasn’t.

I doubt my profession will stay very static, we are expected to be at the cutting edge by our clients and we will be there. We can’t have a competitve edge in the world without that innovation. Our work is global now and it is what it is. We do easily 40% of our work internationally now and I fully expect that percentage to grow. I have never expected my job to be guaranteed and it never has failed to meet my expectations!

135

Forty years ago there was a saying:

Economics is the only subject where the don’t have to change the questions on the exam paper each year.

It’s unnecessary as they change the answers, instead.

136

I don’t know how to respond to that. There are about 20 million more people in the labor pool than jobs. Which jobs are they supposed to retrain for?

If you take China’s population and put them in Canada, there aren’t enough jobs no matter how many times you retrain.

137

There are supposed to be more jobs than people. Economist generally believe that full employment is a bad thing - it usually leads to wage inflation, which leads to general inflation, which theoretically leads to recession, which leads to unemployment. In a “normal” economy (and its been a while since my economics course) you want unemployment to run about 3%. The same 3% will not always be unemployed (unless you are Native American in South Dakota or a inner city black man), but there will always be turnover.

Things are tough now - no doubt about it - we have a much higher rate of unemployment than is ideal. But I’m not convinced that it is structural. I’ve seen too many changes called structural over my business career, and none of them have been - remember the “new economy?” That was were everyone was employed and rich! Without inflation! And it would last forever (or until 1999, but no one read the fine print on the expiration date for the “new economy”).

138

I guess I must be some kind of pampered bleeding-heart entitlement-baby, because I have this idiot idea that “the working world” is part of society, and as such, it ought to be responsible to something besides the quarterly numbers - I don’t know, like maybe growing the pie? Instead, the working world now runs society, and does so on a basis of hypercompetitiveness and manufactured scarcity.

Pardon me if I broaden the issue too unduly, but I notice that people arguing for the status quo (like yourself) tend to narrow it. And why wouldn’t you? The more issues that are off the table of discussion, the more “down to earth” and “practical” you can feel. When people talk about the “real world,” it’s always such a simple place.

139

So you’re finding that economists disagree with each other. Well, yes, scientists do that. Bear in mind that it is not very long ago that most scientists thought the idea of continental drift was stupid. That’s the way this works.

But I assure you Joseph Stiglitz is sure as hell not going to deny the concept of comparative advantage. That would be like Einstein denying the existence of gravity. Your professors are trying to give you the underlying framework of economics; Stiglitz is writing about policy that assumes you’ve got the framework and then some, although in his particular case some of his stuff is very accessible. I assure you Stiglitz is absolutely NOT disagreeing with the basic stuff in an Econ 101 textbook; what he’s doing - and remember that this is a man at the very cutting edge of the study, so I can at best provide a basic summary - is examining the effects of information costs on markets, be they free or state-driven. Among other things.

And again, people tend to confuse policy with science. Economics is a science; it explains how and why things happen. What SHOULD happen is a matter of policy. There is considerable evidence, to use one example, that minimum wages and laws that protect employees from summary dismissal result in higher unemployment. Work on determining the link continues. But that’s not a policy prescription. Perhaps we should have minimum wage and labour laws anyway because it’s better to accept some unemployment in return for strengthening employee rights, or perhaps not, or perhaps we need a different mix than we currently have; those are questions for the voters to decide upon. You can agree on the existence of underlying economic theory but disagree on what we should be prioritizing as a society.

Or to bring it back to the notion of international trade, the overall benefits of international trade are awfully well documented. But if a country were to refuse to trade weapons or weapons technology for the sake of protecting their national security, well, that might make a hell of a lot of sense, even if it means DefenseCorp makes fewer bucks.

140

Sorry if this was mentioned already:

One of the underlying premises in the OP is false: that the number of jobs available today will remain the same for the forseeable future.

I teach a unit on overpopulation. An 18th century philosopher, Thomas Malthus, coined the term “overpopulation.” He predicted that if production remains the same human population growth will exceed population within 10 years. Luckily, within years after he published his ideas, the Industrial Revolution happened, and production increased exponentially.

Imho, this will create a generation of the unemployed only if job growth remains the same or decreases. I think eventually, there will be a boom in the economy such that there will again be more jobs than people who want them, probably though the establishment of more businesses (rather than existing businesses expanding and creating new jobs.)