For those having trouble reading luci’s less than lucid post ( 
), I offer this translation:
It’s a simple economic trend that cannot be fought. But it’s still the fault of Bush, the Republicans, and heartless CEOs.
Did I leave anything out, 'luc?
Well, you did better than I expected, John-boy
More like here’s the ugly facts. It is the Republican response to those facts that is heartless.
Still, pretty close.
Well, they could try “I feel your pain even though I have my $10M book deal locked up”, but I think that was already taken.
I couldn’t agree more. Unemployment is around 3% in my county, which looks great. However, because the local economy relies so heavily on tourism, you have lots of people, many with college degrees, working service-sector jobs that pay around $8.00 an hour. It’s easy to find work if you want to herd tourists around the Biltmore Estate. If you want a decent-paying, full-time job with benefits, well, those are few and far between.
How could you empirically track such figures, though? Underemployed in North Carolina might be something very different from underemployed in New York.
I have a better solution. Since the BLS and other groups already publish a great deal of information regarding production, salaries, employment and cost of living by region, industry, sector and a number of other categories, why don’t you simply do your own research?
No one cares about statistics. They care about 1) if they have a job and 2) if they bring home enough money to pay the bills.
Everyone is loyal to capitalism. Do you think business is very diferent in Europe or Asia?
Some would say it has reached it’s zenith in the entrepreneurial start-up. Basically the individuals right to try to make their own fortune on their own terms. Since about half of all workers work for small companies, not Megacorp, Inc, the facts would support this.
Everything is subject to the laws of Darwin - those most able to survive will…and should. Those businesses that are wastefull and inefficient should die and their resources and labor recycled into the economy.
Everything is also subject to the laws of Economics - I want as much as I can for as little as I have to pay for it. I will supply you with as little as I have to for as much money as I can get you to pay.
At least the Republicans understand that the way you generate jobs is to make it desirable for businesses to do business here. Democrats seems to think the answer is a lot of government regulations and then act surprised when
A lot of rhetoric and flag waving hear. Not much substance.
So you are advocating a system that doesn’t work? An outsourced job is still a job for somebody.
There’s plenty of work to go around. It’s just that you have very little understanding of how much work it takes to create all the stuff you see around you.
What is economic justice to you? That those of us who are highly educated should work while the lazy, incompetant and unskilled live off of government handouts?
No we should reward them for not gaining the skills needed to survive in the modern business world. If it was 10,000 years ago and I didn’t know how to hunt, should I a) learn how to hunt or b) complain that there isn’t any food to eat?
I suggest reading a book 'Who Moved My Cheese" by Spencer Johnson. It’s pretty much standard reading for us “MBA types”. Basically the moral is you have to react to change because bitching and moaning and waiting for someone to come rescue you doesn’t work.
burundi - Yes it is. In New York, unless you are an investment banker, lawyer or consultant making at least…say $70,000 a year and working 70 hour weeks, you are “underemployed” in the sense that you will not be able to afford to live here.
I swear this discussion of statistics reminds me of the late-80s/early-90s when all us SABR baseball stat guys were all trying to come up with the end-all be-all stat that would allow us to quantify hitter performance beyond any doubt.
Then we ended up pulling back and favoring publishing ALL data and letting individuals crunch the numbers as they saw fit.
More data…raw data…is ALWAYS preferably (to a person who can work with it) than anything pre-digested. Especially when the group doing the pre-chewing is as notoriously unreliable as a political party/movement. That’s just begging for trouble.
Unfortunately for you and all morality-free traders, the law of economics followed to its logical end results in slavery, or something very close to it, for most workers. Sometimes it can result in widespread reduction to bare-bones poverty and starvation – that’s what happend to the U.S. in the 1930s.
Most societies have decided that’s a bad thing, I find it curious that so many conservative economic types don’t see the obvious implications here – SOME kind of social controls WILL be imposed on the free market when things get too nasty, it’s just a matter of how much and when. There’s no such thing as a totally free market, and a very good thing for most folks it is, too.
What liberals are actually trying to do is keep things for getting too awful for poor folks – actually, the way the economy has been going lately, for themselves (middle class folks) as well – so that we will not find it necessary to kill rich folks until things get better, as they, or more properly their thugs, will also kill a lot of poor and middle class folks in the process, too. Plus, it will disrupt the orderly flow of goods and services something awful.
You are right, of course. I shall purchase an AK-47 and start checking out wealthy neighborhood immediately.
…and therein lies the rub. Truth and law can only go so far against spindoctoring. Short of passing a law against spindoctoring, I can’t see where defining a given occupation as “1/2 of a job” would do the least bit of good. Some of us will do our own research, check the numbers. Others will blindly nod, openmouthed, as the Administration spouts statistics that make it look good.
Yes, I think this will matter to some extent in the next several Presidential elections. The current President, for example, says he’s improving education, creating jobs, and bettering the economy. Meanwhile, my job in education is going to shit, and is currently in jeopardy due to budget cuts. Oh, and the cost of gas is skyrocketing, which affects the price of everything else. My first thought, in view of these facts, is “The President is a liar,” which would tend to affect the way I vote, no?
Um… actually, historically, gigantic megacorps have almost universally made a point of squashing entrepreneurial startups, left and right, whenever circumstances made this possible, either by buying them out or manipulating the market.
Actually, I’d define “economic justice” as “equal opportunity to earn a damn living.” If there are no jobs, how am I supposed to do this?
If it was 10,000 years ago, you’d know how to hunt. Basic survival skill. What, then, would you say when megacorporate entities exterminated all the wildlife and said “learn agriculture or starve?” Gee, maybe we should ask the Indians. That’s largely what happened to them. A great many of them died. Is this justice?
Read it already, thank you. Johnson makes some excellent points, but he isn’t trying to address the whole societal thing; he’s talking smaller scale. Therefore, he’s a bit short on ideas about what to do when the howling unemployed mob shows up to loot your neighborhood and burn your house down…
While I do agree that people should be prepared to deal with change, and that our society is changing pretty fast, I also believe that if we are not prepared to enforce some sort of social and economic justice, for the good of society, then we might as well ditch the Constitution and hand the whole country over to Enron or Exxon or whoever’s top dog this week. Darwinism works both ways, you know… and the last major political figure who copped this “let them eat cake” attitude wound up with her head decorating a pike, as a result of a major restructuring of French society…
…but, of course, as long as you aren’t next in line at the guillotine, you can simply sit back and say, “Oh, well, guess she wasn’t prepared to deal with change, now, was she?”
Or, as I’ve said, they vote in politicians who WILL ease back on free trade and be damned to the larger picture.
msmith: *Everything is subject to the laws of Darwin - those most able to survive will…and should. Those businesses that are wastefull and inefficient should die and their resources and labor recycled into the economy.
Everything is also subject to the laws of Economics - I want as much as I can for as little as I have to pay for it. I will supply you with as little as I have to for as much money as I can get you to pay.*
But these wild oversimplifications of “Darwin” and “Economics” leave out crucial parts of the situation. Human beings maximize our survival chances as a species not just by competing within our species, but also by cooperating. The economic law of supply and demand works perfectly only within perfect markets, which simply don’t exist in real-life economies.
Given these much more complicated situations, we need to look beyond the simple principles of individual competition and “buy low, sell high”.
At least the Republicans understand that the way you generate jobs is to make it desirable for businesses to do business here.
Unfortunately, what many businesses consider a “desirable” employment environment these days involves no labor protections, no environmental protections, no overtime, no sick leave, no vacation, no benefits, and wage rates less than $5/hour. Do we really want to make our society more “desirable” to employers on those terms?
*There’s plenty of work to go around. *
Sure, every society everywhere has stuff that needs to be done. But our point is that by itself, that doesn’t necessarily translate into paying jobs that provide a decent living for everyone who’s willing and able to work.
Basically the moral is you have to react to change because bitching and moaning and waiting for someone to come rescue you doesn’t work.
I don’t see anybody here advocating “waiting for someone to come rescue you.” What many people are suggesting, on the contrary, is taking the initiative to make our jobs situation better and our levels of economic opportunity more fair for people at different education and skill levels. That’s not “waiting for someone to come rescue us”; that’s starting to rescue ourselves.
Well, that sounds wonderful when presented in a vague way. But let’s talk about specific actions you want the government to take that does not hurt the overall economy. That’s the problem. It’s easy to save Joe Schmo’s job at the expense of someone else’s job, or more likely a few someone elses’ jobs.
JC: Or, as I’ve said, they vote in politicians who WILL ease back on free trade and be damned to the larger picture.
Exactly. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: the free-trade boosters really have nobody to blame but themselves for stupid reactionary protectionist measures.
As I pointed out over in the “Permanent Job Loss” thread, trade liberalization is a great boon in the long run (and you’ll notice that even the pro-outsourcing Mankiw makes that qualification), but in the near term its benefits are very unevenly distributed. If our trade policies cause us to shed decent jobs faster than we’re creating new decent jobs, then a lot of hard-working people are going to suffer.
And what do suffering hard-working people tend to do in a democracy when November rolls around? They throw the bums out, that’s what. If we care not only about economic growth as a whole but about the overall prosperity of our citizens, we can’t afford to ignore the need for government initiatives—education, retraining, more adequate unemployment benefits, job creation stimulus and incentives—to improve our local jobs situation.
But telling that to most free-trade advocates is like talking to the fucking wall. Even our late lamented Collounsbury, in many ways one of the most knowledgeable and insightful posters ever to have (dis)graced this board (well, he was smart as hell but he had a mean mouth on him :)), couldn’t come up with a better response to the problem of disgruntled laid-off workers than to castigate them for “whingeing” (which apparently is how the Brits say “whining”, for reasons that I don’t understandge).
And here’s msmith too, implying that hard-working people who have had their jobs pulled out from under them and are mad about not being able to find another, or to find one as good, are “lazy, incompetant and unskilled”; are “not gaining the skills needed to survive in the modern business world” (what are the skills that guarantee your survival there, by the way? these days there are plenty of highly competent but unemployed PhDs, MBAs, software engineers, and lawyers who were assured a few years ago that the skills they were paying to acquire were the key to a shining future!); and are just “bitching and moaning and waiting for someone to come rescue you”.
Folks, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this line of response is simply dumber than a poached egg. I don’t like economic isolationism or reactionary, unwise protectionist measures any better than you do, but if this brutal snarl of “Fuck you, you whin(ge)ing loser! Only the strongest survive!” is the best alternative you can come up with, I guarantee you that we’ll be stuck with “America First” anti-trade policies for a long, long time to come.
I agree, that is the problem. I have lots of ideas that will stimulate the economy, but none of them fit your supply-side voodoo economic model, so you will dismiss them out of hand. We can never agree on what helps or hurts the economy, so the debate is unresolvable. Would you like to hear them anyway?
JM: *But let’s talk about specific actions you want the government to take that does not hurt the overall economy. *
For example, let’s see some spending for decent jobs in infrastructure rebuilding, better unemployment and retraining benefits, better labor protection so that workers can negotiate for better jobs and more control over their companies.
As for “does not hurt the overall economy”, do you mean that you don’t want policies that cause the overall economy to shrink, or that you don’t want policies that prevent the overall economy from growing as quickly as it might have with no intervention at all? If the latter, you’re probably not going to get it. Increased government spending on things that help workers will make our overall economy healthier in the long run, but it probably won’t produce as fast immediate growth as letting those who formerly earned decent livings scrape by on credit card debt and fast-food jobs.
Tough luck. The whole point of this position is that pushing overall economic growth to its absolute maximum is not the only standard of economic success we should be using. Zooming growth rates are nothing more than window dressing if the economic benefit from them isn’t reaching the majority of the people.
Evil Captor
[Moderator Hat ON]
Gee, I sure hope you weren’t trying to hint that anyone posting in GD qualifies as a “idjit”, because as you know that is against the rules here. Got it?
[Moderator Hat OFF]
As I said, the most important economy is each person’s own.
Um…actually, historically, gigantic megacorps cannot “manipulate the market” to the extent you think they can. Smaller startups have certain advantages that large corporations don’t and vice versus. If you decide to create a start up that will go head to head against Microsoft or Walmart then yes, they will squash you. You can’t compete with their economies of scale for price or volume. If, on the other hand, you create a start up that focuses on developing a particular software product or custom broom handle or some such shit, they can’t compete with your levels of service.
You need to work my job for awhile. After sorting though the 10,000 small suppliers a typical Giganacorp or Conglomertron deals with, you might get an idea of how many companies there are out there besides the Fortune 500.
Sombody’s working. I really don’t know what to tell you. I know it sounds easy to blame big corporations (who employ the other half of all workers), Bush, Indians, Chinese, or whomever, but that doesn’t solve your problem of finding a job.
Ok. So what would you have the government or corporations do? Would you be willing to pay a premium for products that are manufactured domestically by higher paid American workers? Should we keep the Third World backward so that they won’t “steal” our jobs?
By how? Osmosis? I would have to either teach myself or be taught how to hunt and survive. I don’t believe our current education system adequately prepares most people for the real world. It still prepares people for a 1950s career model of “work hard, go to school, get a good job with a company for the next 50 years.”
I am not an economist and not particularly fluent in it. I do, however, like to read about it.
It seems reasonable to me that the free-trade advocates are right. In the long run it will be better.
However, one of my favorite expressions (not mine but not sure whosaid it, is “In the long run we are all dead”.
So, while I agree with what free-traders are saying, I’m not sure they are right. (which I know sounds weird and paradoxical)
Got it. I meant the usual Media Crew – Limbaugh, Coulter and the like.
It is not just that the new jobs are lower paying, it is a tremendous waste of our resources.
When an educated enginneer, IT professional, or whatever, loses his job because it moved to asia, and he now can only get a job at McDonalds, then all the time and effort we spent training him was pointless.
All the tax money that we spent on colleges, professors, graduating students who learned high skills, and then making them even more skilled by working at it for a decade or two, (eg an IT professional) is a complete waste of our resources. If we are only going to create jobs at hamburger joints, then we should close down our public universities and save our tax dollars.
How many professionals do you actually know who are working in McDonalds? I’ll bet the numbers are anecdotal at best.