When I Was Your Age
americanprogress.org
americanprogress.org
Really, Even living in a place with very low population density(Rural Mass/NH). Rents are high (and scarce), you need at least 250K to buy a small house. Houses are old, Lot's are big, big distances, very few new houses are built every year. I can't even image how blue collar families do it. If you think about it, it even makes local companies less competitive, since they need to pay more so people can barely survive.
This resonated a lot with me. https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...
A sensible national housing policy would focus on improving the characteristics of the housing stock (improving energy efficiency, removing lead, etc). Of course the building code moves forward over time and new housing generally beats older housing on metrics like that, and there are occasionally tax incentives for making improvements. but none of that comes close to the mortgage interest deduction in scope.
It would also focus on affordability. It's clear enough that with 40 or 50 years for the policy to work and ~1/2 of the nation not having much of any wealth that home equity is not the path to universal prosperity.
In the US, housing is treated as an asset, which is a huge mistake. In place like Germany, most people are renters because: rents stay fairly low, the government reassesses population periodically to allow more houses to get built, and renters have plenty of rights. Here, we allow houses to act as a hybrid place to live, ATM, and stock.
If you look at a place without the statewide tax climate of a MA/NY/CA it's easy if not trivial to find ~$100k houses that are practically mansions.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-i...
And if productivity goes up then disposable income goes up and guess what? You qualify to borrow more my friend.
Up go land prices and all that gain flows to the rentier.
It's not about houses built it's about loose credit BTW, primarily.
The issue I have with this is it promotes a certain ideology—that job-seekers have the right to hold jobs even when there are too few. This article completely ignores the other paradigm, that if you don't have a job, it's up to you to make yourself valuable to employers.
I'm not trying to argue for one ideology or the other, I just think it's absurd to ignore the existence of one or the other.
There are going to be too few jobs for people going forward. There's no point in makework. Just give each person a basic income.
However, promoting BS jobs makes society worse. EX: 80+% of all time and effort spent on medical billing is simply economic dead weight.
Medical billing reduces doctor effectiveness requiring more doctors, more people training doctors, and doctors to work longer hours doing crap work (filling out forms).
Remove bullshit jobs and only a small fraction of the population actually works. Long term we can make an endless hell where paperwork is what 98% of humanity does, or we can just chose another system.
PS: In the US over 50% of all money spent on healthcare goes to Overhead that has nothing to do with patents. In many cases it’s cheaper for people with insurance to go to private doctors who don’t accept insurance. [Think about that for a bit.]
While it sounds like a good idea in principle, it ignores the fact that without a job many people simply won't have the resources to make themselves more valuable.
It creates a catch 22 situation, and the people it effects the most also happen to be the people who will struggle the most to break out of that situation.
In America the market dictates your self worth.
When society doesn't value you as a human being, you don't value yourself as a human being.
There are many cultures that don't value people based on how much they earn. I think valuing people based on economic success is largely tied to Indian and Asian culture. As a white person from a white family in the middle of the US, no one that I care about values me based on my salary. Some cultures seem to be more obsessed with economic status than others. To me, it's repulsive.
As someone of the same background and also from the middle of nowhere mid-US, I can say this is certainly true. It seems a bit different on the coasts.
That said, even my family doesn't think too highly of the unemployed, which seems a bit inconsistent.
But how many cultures value people regardless of who or what they are? Even if it isn't tied to financials, it is tied to something and there are the haves and the have nots. You can even artificially create such values among children if you give them information to suggest that some arbitrary characteristic is a have and competing arbitrary characteristics are have nots.
I cannot say the same.
As it does everywhere in certain factors.
If you aren't attractive to a life partner, you don't get a life partner. Why should a work partner or an employer be different?
Because you don't necessarily die of starvation or become a burden to the state if you don't get a life partner, unlike what happens if you don't have any source of income?
However, the job market is qualitatively different, which is why it should be held to different standards. Loneliness is definitely harmful, but still many people don't want sexual/life partners. However, everyone needs to eat and have some sort of shelter and access to health services. If you lack money for this, you either die or become a burden to someone else, possibly the state.
Coming back to what I believe was the parent's point when they said "in America the market determines your self worth", your worth as a person isn't -- shouldn't be! -- how much money you make or even whether you have a job. That simply doesn't seem right to me.
First, only eating is really required, and it requires far less than a healthy diet. The rest of that you can find people who forgo. Also, there are some who choose to not eat and a subset of them do hold this choice until they die (which tends to be soon after and caused by not eating). Consider some monks who mummified themselves through strict control of their diet as one extreme example.
So what do we consider a need? If you'll live 40 years on gruel but 50 years on a balanced diet, is the balanced diet a need? What if the difference is 5 years and 15 years respectively? What if it is 3 months and 10 years and 3 months respectively?
>your worth as a person isn't -- shouldn't be! -- how much money you make or even whether you have a job
Then what should be? And what ever criteria you do choose to determine your worth to others, what of people who lack that criteria through no fault of their own?
For the majority, college isn't about an education or job opportunity. It's an extension of the white female youth and self actualization.
Personally I don't feel it is difficult to make yourself valuable enough to get "a" job. Maybe not "the" job, but "a" job. Which gives you enough resources to get "the next" job. Which you repeat until you get "the" job. It's the ladder and we climb it.
It really boils down to it is the law of the jungle out there and you want something so it is up to you to figure out how to get it.
And this is coming from someone that was homeless in the winters of Minnesota. I've been there.
It focuses on the circumstances for young Americans now and in the past, and tries to understand why -- it notes workers have no power which is why they are worse off than how they were in the past, and suggests giving them more, which by necessity takes power away from their opponents, companies. But I don't think it's necessary that they explicitly state that, it's clear enough. In fact, the article states that it is a brief designed to make that particular argument and outline that position. It's okay for an article to present a position without trying to be "fair and balanced" or consider all points of view, in fact it's generally more insidious and dishonest when they make that attempt; let the opposition make their own, strong case. If you try to make it for them you'll inevitably make a weaker one than they deserve.
Most people do not have the opportunity to make themselves valuable.
It's generally understood that at this point in history most people shouldn't really have to work at all. The whole point of technology is to make living easier for everyone. The root of this problem, as far as I can understand it, is misallocation of capital, not of "jobs". The efficiency of the free market is telling the labor market, "hey, you don't need to do this job anymore." So why are we still forcing these people to work? They should be allocated the capital gains reaped from market efficiencies that are a result of technological innovations.
Until that cultural pillar of hard work defining a person's character and place in God's kingdom goes away, we will be stuck with this idea that people are defined by their work.
What you're talking about is an effort by people to be more inclusive by communicating things about themselves that they want others to be aware of. I can understand how this can be awkward and annoying, but it also has positive effects of bringing out these kinds of unstated assumptions like the idea of a work ethic.
If you look at history, groups tended to be more cohesive and share cultural values. This made it easy for most people to relate to each other because they could rely on certain unstated agreements. Now that we have more of an interconnected world, it's important to figure out how we can live together despite different understandings and identities. Not everyone is on board with this kind of diversity, but it's hard to see how we can move forward without finding some way to connect to people who aren't like us, and so far one of the solutions put forward is to over-communicate.
There still needs to be some sort of incentive to actually do work. I'm sure most of these people in the article would rather be writing novels or creating art or something better than flipping burgers or the like.
What gives you more self-worth, learning a new programming language and completing a project in it, or sitting on the couch and watching TV?
I personally believe the ancients understood this, from the usual parables. Idle hands are of the devil, and lead you to fill your time with something. Most of the easy somethings are drinking, eating and junk entertainment.
Technology may give us less to do, but at the expense of less opportunities for developing self worth. Even some of the founding computer members understood this--Wiener, a member of the "Dream Machine" crew mentioned it in the book "Cybernetics".
Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present situation if I say that the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the “dark satanic mills,” was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery. . . . The modern industrial revolution [i.e., the computer revolution] is similarly bound to devalue the human brain. . . . The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying and selling. To arrive at this society, we need a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle. . . . (Wiener, 1948, pp. 37-38, bracketed words added)
For example, learning how to play an instrument, picking up painting, attempting to master chess, or Go, are all things that you could do instead of working and are still personally enriching, if not financially enriching. They may not boost the economy directly but they will make the culture a better place nonetheless. There is a lot of untapped potential that could be explored if people have a guaranteed basic income and didn't have to work that dead-end, minimum-wage job.
Of course we still need a lot of human labour to make society run. I mean who wants to do menial labour, or plough snow at 4am so the morning commute isn't a complete disaster.
So I don't have an answer, I just think you're falsely equating "not working" with "idle hands".
I can't comment on the "God's grace" part, but hard work is indeed centrally important to the character of a person and society as a whole.
That's a fact. Ignore it at your peril.
Personally, I would value smart and effective work over hard work any day. If we get to the point where the most effective work is also fun and enjoyable rather than a burden, we'll be better off for it.
I disagree. You can make yourself valuable in many ways, not tied to any job you're prospecting to win.
Making yourself a valuable person to society is where everyone unemployed should be. That's how you win the respect of people who work. That's what it's about. Now how one does that could be in many forms. And it's not necessarily something that needs to take up more than a couple hours a day even. in fact you find that people who work not only put in their 8 hours, they follow that up with volunteering, speaking at engagements, mentoring, helping others at church, all kinds of things.
There's the heart of the issue though. When you're on food stamps you're not thinking of creative ways to make yourself valuable because you don't have time or energy. You're thinking about how to feed your children and family. You're working two menial jobs that suck up any time and affect your mental health, thus further degrading any possibility of you finding some creative avenue to make yourself valuable.
Why are we forcing people to work? Because it cost money--ie. other people's time and energy--to feed, cloth, and take care of people.
Two reasons.
1. to scare people who are still required - do this or be destitute like them
2. to stop people sitting around and concluding that the system stinks, that people shouldn't be living in luxury because they inherited wealth and that we shouldn't have to pay high rent to exist
"Generally understood" - what? It is still a fringe belief. Please don't post things that are not true as facts.
I hold the ideology that society should organize itself in a way that makes it easier to both create things that will demand new jobs, and make yourself suitable for work to some of those things.
Everywhere I look, it seems society is going the other way, making both of those activities harder.
Indeed the right to work is a part of the universal declaration of human rights[1].
(Whether we should continue the system of unemployment post-material-scarcity is a whole another question, but a replacement system doesn't seem quick to arrive).
Working for someone else is easy because there is an established system to connect you to the people that are willing to pay for your value. That channel doesn't exist for everyone, especially people with skills in areas that do not commonly hire contractors, like IT.
- To the _number of people who want/demand a job_ because the system they've grown into told them that they had to study to get a good job to have a good life(and that they will get a job if they get a good degree)?
- To the need for more jobs for the economy to work?
- To a wild guess disguised as a "this is how the economy should work" by people who got a degree or an office so now what they say is supposed to be right?
- To something else?
There's a difference between having a right to work (that is, not being prevented from working re: discrimination) and demanding a work (notwithstanding with: is there something one could do?).
If it's a game of chairs, unless you abide "the state/system", there's no one but you to get a chair or build a new one for you. Or for you and some others. Or someone else to step in and build a chair for you. But that's not a given.
Don't rely on the state.
Also,
> There's a difference between having a right to work (that is, not being prevented from working re: discrimination) and demanding a work (notwithstanding with: is there something one could do?).
The concept as discussed in the universal declaration of human rights does include the supply of jobs: "just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment"
But the supply of jobs must not be void of meaningful/useful jobs; and the State/system is very, very unqualified to create such jobs - it tends to build on the jobs necessary to self-sustain (on the practical and political planes), and not much more.
Most qualified to create those new jobs/missing chairs are the people, on their own, or through the business they build. Then the (clever) support of the state or of big players is required to make those grow in their turn.
You may demand something out of a system. Which can self declare "everyone ought to get a job". But the system on its own is not capable of providing.
Note. I'm heavily biased. I'm French, living in France. And I am beyond amazed how this country is run on the economics level.
As we get more efficient less human labour is needed for a finite amount of land/resources. If inequality is high most valuable land is owned by a few people.
The rest of us must pledge ever more labour for the right to subsist.
The rich are very much relying on the state to keep order as inequality rockets. Guess what would happen if we had no police force to enforce collection of taxes primarily from the middle classes? Or nobody to stop someone calling into question why they can't stand in a particular spot "because that land has been owned by my family for generations".
The rich very much rely on the state.
You've made this analogy a few times in the past few days and I think it is flawed.
It's only like a game of monopoly, joined two hours in, if in monopoly the players are periodically removed from the game (death) and have their assets divided up among new players (wealth taxes OR the dilutive effects of transfer to heirs whose number is greater than the original player).
Also: imagine 50,000 more property squares that nobody wants. Detroit Place. Haiti Way. Rural Spain Parkway.
Really, the analogy is flawed.
It's not a perfect map 1:1 for the world but it's useful. Inheritance tax is necessary for a fair society.
Inheritance tax may not work as quickly as you'd like, but the avoidance that you refer to only goes so far. People multiply. They have kids. Those kids have kids. Not everyone has the intelligence and drive to produce 1%-style outcomes. The wealth dilutes. And then there is none.
In fact, even with no inheritance tax whatsoever, the old dictum "wealth never survives three generations" ("Fu bu guo san dai") absolutely asserts itself.
Of course there are edge cases. Let's not waste our time indexing all of the rothschilds and windsors and duponts.
The point is: all of the squares are not taken and the squares that are taken come up for grabs all the time:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/period-property/...
My time is wasted, not enumerating them but slaving for them.
And Windsor is a made up name, it's Saxe-Coburg-Goth.
Appropriate in that Monopoly (or more precisely, the game it ripped off, The Landlord's Game) was created to demonstrate the inequality that derives from private ownership of land, and how a land-value-tax a la Henry George removes the inequality.
Economy is something people (not just the state, everybody) can decide upon how they want it and build it.
It's just that currently only the big players make those decisions with their law purchasing power -- instead of the people at large with representative laws.
So, "having enough jobs for everybody" could be such a decision people could make, and work towards it.
Big players, that, when overrun by the people or serious shakes (French Revolution, WWI, WWII, Russian Revolution), just let some room for the people to reorganize things a bit better (and they did) and then, new big players step in.
What's going to be interesting is that now, the "big players" are not going to be states only. There are companies too (as in, groups of people organizing themselves; but also as in, groups of people whose actions is hugely driven by a small number of owners). There's something brewing.
Like any algorithm, you risk Garbage-in-Garbage-out. It's the role of society (and government) to put the right framework in place. (For example, ensuring that it is not profitable to assassinate rival CEOs.)
If people had more financial independence they would be able to choose to enter the labour market or not. For example now due to high land costs both parents must work. Some may like this, but many do not, yet they have no choice. This puts pressure on the labour market.
The current system sees rent rise to extract all productivity gains. Until this ends we will always see unemployment no matter how productive we become even if it's very clear that most people need not work full time to meet the needs of the country as a whole.
Millenials have spent their whole lives in a system with very efficient rent extraction.
If productivity jumps land prices will follow and back again we go to the bread line.
A job is something people need to live and have shelter. It's not only the most "valuable" people that should have that.
You enumerated one that matches today's world view. Previous eras would justify it with some eugenics hand waving and before that would be an invocation of divine will. And just as they did, todays adherents will say that past justifications were nonsense but today's are correct.
But the result is the same; general harm done for the benefit of a few and nice story of facile ideology that justifies it.
This paradigm totally ignores basic economics. If there is a greater supply of people looking for work, wages will go down for all employees across the board.
Now of course, wages vary from person to person based on skills, connections, and industry. So it's possible to improve your position relative to other potential employees. But across the population, overall wages will stay flat or go down.
They have been able to accumulate some wealth on service industry salaries.
They don't make much less than many of their counterparts with liberal arts degrees, who without the head start graduated into the recession with nothing.
For many the opportunity cost of college was high.
My cousin bought his first foreclosure for 33k during the south Florida housing bust. He has two more now, all from waiting tables and being extremely thirfty.
A 140k two family amortized over 30 years at 3.5% can be free to live in for the owner occupying one unit. That can be done in Connecticut for example.
This is how some of my non colege educated millenial friends are getting by quite well.
Somehow I don't think that is a believable solution.
Not sure that inflation in relevant to that.
As it is, the vast majority of labor skirts the minimum wage because nobody wants people to do anything anymore. The utility of a fleshy meatbag is at all time lows, and will only continue to decline as we carve chunks out of the labor market through automation.
It is also unreasonable to expect an entire generation to work in the very limited purview of STEM. Enough people just do not have the mindset for it and it is already hurting the overall quality of engineering how market forces are pushing people ill suited for such professions into them for survivals sake.
The only reasonable answer is the recognition that, for most of our population, we have nothing productive for them to do, but they should not be punished for being unemployable when it is through no fault of their own. It is our job to raise and educate and mold them better to get a higher yield of analytic minds, but those who do not acquire the skills at the early ages when they form cannot be condemned to a life of poverty for something out of their adult control.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, as I don't have a degree myself and stay employed just fine. But I'd bet money I've been filtered out of some places due to the lack of a degree.
If you asked me, the problem facing workers in their 20s and 30s is that people are having longer careers, either by choice or by necessity. This is coupled with a job market which has never really recovered from the mid 2000s peaks. Until the Baby Boomer generation really begins to retire, the job market will remain tricky to navigate. Compound it all with an ever increasing cost of living (basically, the cost of housing) in pretty much every market and you get the bleak landscape we have now.
They then go on to say that the Fed should continue depressing interest rates, and that employers should start providing significant parenthood benefits.
I'm not sure with the last two -- continuing to depress capital for businesses and increasing the costs of an employee -- will encourage greater hiring or higher wages.
If it's not profitable to make loans, banks won't provide the capital many businesses need to grow their staff since profits instead have to be more conservatively retained to protect against cash flow fluctuations.
I thought that recent economic research was demonstrating that, when controlled for position and employment type, male and female salaries weren't significantly different. I'm not sure this one makes complete sense as a solution to the problem of employers not hiring people, but I'd definitely be interested to see more analysis on the hypothesis that greater gap coverage for maternity leave could help keep women on track and such, that's particularly cool.
There are more distractions and diversions than ever that prevent youth from otherwise doing something constructive with their time. And universities have been dumbing down curriculum to bring in more (less qualified) students that are buoyed up by federal loans.
This syllogism is not only unfounded, but basic economics suggests the opposite is true.
There should be a positive correlation between productivity and compensation. How does "basic economics" suggest the opposite?
By all means, if there is data or more sophisticated principles at work, please correct me.
So for example if a worker can produce 20 lunches instead of 15 lunches of equal quality an hour, his productivity is higher.
I think you lost the plot by assuming the original article was implying that because of college degrees productivity must be higher. That's not what it said, it was saying that more workers have college degrees and also productivity is at record high levels.
The effect of the former could be arguable, but the result of the latter should be higher wages. It's a genuine concern to try to figure out what's going on if that's not what's happening.
Can you please clarify for the sake of readers (and me) how it is significantly different in the real world if the market of value-commanding labor changes under people's feet instead of transplanting them to a completely foreign environment?
He's not talking about air-dropping people into the Amazon he's talking about workers productivity here in this economy and their wages in this economy, thus comparing apples to apples. And he's talking about the wages of an entire generation, not applying it down to some individual level.
This shouldn't be confusing, these concepts are commonly understood by many, and are called macroeconomics. The only thing at issue here is your mischaracterization of this as somehow being opposed to "basic economics," with which further inquiry has revealed you clearly are unfamiliar.
>I think you lost the plot by assuming the original article was implying that because of college degrees productivity must be higher. That's not what it said..."
I cited an unbroken snippet from the article which clearly evinces a causal relationship. The context is, "should be the highest-paid ... They are, after all the most likely to hold a college degree". That's just reading comprehension, not economics. If you don't want to address that, fine, but your deliberate misreading of the author and my example is not likely fooling anybody here.
Those are two things. Having a college degree is debatable but certainly is associated with higher wages. Higher productivity is definitely correlated with higher wages.
You said the opposite was the case. You're wrong, but either way the burden is on you to explain why on earth you think those two things should cause lower wages.
In addition, and as a related aside, doesn't automated production challenge the "definite" productivity-wage correlation even in work typically reserved for college degreed workers? (Genuinely asking here, as I haven't seen this talked about very much in the material I read, though I want to know more about it.)
Productivity is a metric that you can measure.
You're struggling because you don't understand the meaning of the sentence you're critiquing.
Now you're back to denying what can be demonstrably seen to be so by applying very straightforward reading comprehension, and ignoring my last comment altogether, where for a 3rd time I sincerely asked you to educate us on a subject I still believed you might have some authority to speak on. Frankly, it sounds like you just want to hide behind your economics degree, and I'm beginning to doubt you have the knowledge to share.
"By rights"? This article goes off the rails right there in the first sentence. It's hard to know where to start with how wrong this is.
If the demand for your skill doesn't change and twice as many people have it, in aggregate the people with that skill are going to make less money. The idea that we're going to educate ourselves into prosperity as a society is daft - if we could all do brain surgery it would be a minimum wage job.
The over-schooling of the millennials is a massive misallocation of resources, fueled by debt, cynical college administrators, weak politicians, credulous bureaucrats, and parents doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. That's not the kind of thing that makes you wealthier. Quite the opposite.
The problem is that spending $10 on capital to make the existing work force more productive is often a better investment than spending $10 on some more labor. It's difficult for labor to argue its importance in such an environment.
New equipment helps the business earn more, which of course gives them the option to pay their employees more, but if there are lots of people willing to be employees, they business probably doesn't need to pay more.
That makes it hard to create new applications for that extra workforce, because most people have little money to spend on it.