Millions of Unemployed Face Years without Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Millions of Unemployed Face Years without Jobs

nytimes.com

44 pointspg96 comments

It seems we have at least ~20 years of a serious transition problem, even if in the long run it's a symptom of positive technological progress: there's a large cohort of blue-collar workers in their 40s and 50s caught out by the rapid decline in US blue-collar jobs. Some will find other skills, or go back to school to acquire skills (and valuable pieces of paper), but can that absorb millions of middle-aged people who have been blue-collar workers all their lives and now find that to be a dead end?

Unskilled workers can progress to doing tasks that involve labeling data for machine learning - computer vision, sentiment analysis in audio and text are examples currently being done on mechanical turk.

The only limiting factor currently is lack of imagination and investment from so-called innovators - they'd rather 'innovate' by creating another social network or incrementally improve a 1960s technology (microsoft) than do anything truly useful to society.

Efforts in this area include google goggles/voice and microsoft project natal (though it's woefully underfunded compared to it's potential).

One of my predictions for 2020 is that services like Mechanical Turk are going to employ a significant number of people in the US. The only reason this hasn't happened already is that there is a lot of friction once the tasks get more complicated than checking whether or not an image is porn. But once someone invents a 'programming language' for outsourcing that allows people to easily Turk higher-wage tasks, I think we are going to see an explosion of piecework knowledge workers.

The fact is that these people are never going to have jobs again, and once their unemployment runs out there is going to be this huge unexploited resource just waiting for someone to arbitrage.

The positive spin for HN folk: if you are an entrepreneur, get cracking ! This is both opportunity for you, as well as a Good Thing to do for the economy (yes yes, I know, unlikely to hire a long term unemployed person for a new internet startup, but it still doesn't hurt !).

Though you might not directly hire a long-term unemployed person, you could indirectly, by causing growth in suppliers.

Yeah, the problem I see with direct hiring is that a lot of the work entrepreneurs do is about creating efficiencies which remove these people from the workforce.

Mechanical Turk would be a good counter example but I don't think anyone in the US could realistically make a living from it.

Maybe the answer is a start up that aims on giving these people a new skill set, which allows them to do something that is fairly procedural but something that can't be automated. Some of the jobs we find boring and monotonous may seem new and exciting to people just moving into tech.

Yes this is a great time to ramp up a new project.

I found a great designer who was laid off from a full-time job as an Art Director. He is doing contract work now but only part-time while he looks for another full-time job. This gave me an opportunity to get him involved with a new project. I got favorable terms on compensation and he's more interested in the project because it's not just another side job.

I know a few programmers working in the US on visas that were laid off. Both decided to return to school for masters or phds instead of attempting to find a new job within a month. I'd love to hire them to do work but haven't done enough research into whether that's feasible. Both were previous co-workers. Hard working, smart and motivated to do well as programmers. But didn't have much initiative to step into design or program management. This ended up being their down fall. The company wanted people that could code and absorb layoffs in testing, design and management. Being a good programmer wasn't enough. /sigh

Definitely some great talent out there that has stumbled into bad luck with the economy.

As a follow up, all these guys are borderline cases of "long-term unemployed".

how can she possibly be in danger of going homeless if her husband gets $1595 a month? it's b/c their rent is 1380.

just move to a cheaper apartment. if you're broke with no job prospects and stay in a pricey apartment you can't afford, how is that a sob story that should make us sympathetic to more welfare spending? why should i pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine?

The article explains part of that. It costs money to move. First/last month's rent, utility activation, and the costs of moving their actual stuff.

They could have set aside enough money for that when they still had money.

Also, you're double counting some things. First month's rent ... you would have paid rent money not to move too for the same month. And last months' rent, well you already paid it where you are, when you move out you skip paying rent for the last month. Basically whether you move or not you pay the same number of months of rent.

And you get your security deposit back when you move out and can use that to pay the next one (unless you trashed the place).

I'm curious. Do you own or rent?

I rent.

Ok, I think I agree. They should move ASAP, but their credit is probably horrible.

In my experience you don't get back security deposits nearly soon enough to use them to pay the next security deposit, unless you have somewhere to go for a while in between. I've typically gotten the security deposit sent to me about 2-4 weeks after moving out (states vary on the legal requirements; California gives the landlord 3 weeks to return the deposit). Meanwhile, the new place often wants the deposit before moving in, when you sign the lease.

That's a reasonable position up to a certain point. Not knowing what housing rates are in their area or what restrictions they have (mobility, special care, schools etc etc) it's impossible to just say "go live someplace cheaper".

Equally however, the NYT's writer glosses over the issue with the opposite emotional reaction of "how can you ask someone to move from their home?".

Neither position is particularly compelling in the absence of more context.

It's also proably true that areas that are cheaper to rent have less job prospects.

I'm not sure. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), $1380 is not much above the minimum you could pay for an apartment. It's about what I pay. To get much under that you need to go to fairly far out suburbs.

To get under $1200 (1,080 USD) for rent + utilities, you really need to move to a satellite town or further. From what I understand this is a tricky issue. Lower rent areas are also often high unemployment areas. People do worse outside of their normal circle. Moving away from existing support structures is often a negative turning point. It is a principle of social welfare that people in financial distress should avoid substantial moves.

On one hand, you want to avoid quick knee-jerks like yours from paying "high" welfare payments. On the other, you want to avoid moving people around.

I imagine this sort of thing is even more of a problem in the US then here, with higher variations in costs/income across geographic areas.

I don't know what vacancy rates are like over there but here in Melbourne they are very low. There is some real trash being pushed for around that $1380 figure here and they still have plenty of people turning up.

Going down to the $1000 figure that you can find a few very average houses in very average areas for and you have over 50 groups turning up to inspect. I've been to a few of those and though, just one of these people has to be a full time 2 income couple and we have already lost being students in casual/freelance work.

I'm not sure what you mean "there," I am in Melbourne.

Melbourne is actually not that bad, for Australia. Student isn't the worst situation to be in either. Student usually pay rent and many Universities will guarantee it (BTW, you can ask your Uni to guarantee your rent to make you application look better).

Some parts of Australia have homelessness of people that just can't get a rental. They have a bad rental history or seem dodgy for whatever reason (receiving welfare). They literally cannot get

In the US, Texas is one of the places with the best employment prospects, and it also has a fairly low cost of living. We spend so much money subsidizing dying Rust Belt cities and expensive housing in coastal cities, when there are plenty of people who should really move to places where they can get better jobs and pay lower costs.

Moving is a socially expensive act, but we shouldn't subsidize staying in place much more than we subsidize moving to a more economically reasonable area.

We spend a lot of money subsidizing expensive housing in coastal cities? How do I get in on these subsidies?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)

EDIT: Since I'm getting downmodded, maybe I wasn't clear. We spend a lot of money subsidizing housing for people with low incomes in coastal cities. It would cost less money to provide similar housing in other cities, and since some of those cities have better job markets, they might not need those subsidies at all. Since they currently get subsidies, there is little incentive to move. Subsidizing moving to areas with better economies as well as subsidizing housing would be a better approach.

I don't know if it counts exactly as a subsidy, but in some big cities, growth is artificially constrained by "Urban Growth Boundaries". These ordinances reduce the amount of available land for building, and hence inflate real estate prices above what they "should" be by artificially reducing supply. Check out Portland for an example of this. Note that I'm not necessarily arguing against UGB's - I don't think anyone has developed an alternative besides endless suburban sprawl, or naturally restricted land area, as in San Francisco or Manhattan.

That would be the opposite of subsidies.

What I mean is that there is a deliberately inefficient allocation of capital in some large coastal cities.

You're right in some sense. It is problematic if we start subsidising people to stay in wealthy/expensive areas, but the alternative also have snags.

I think your Texas exampls is a bit of a red herring. As a general principle employment, housing costs & affluence come together.

Also, there is a big difference between moving in a planned way to take advantage of lower costs or better employment prospects and being driven there in desperation with nothing in your pocket. The latter can lead to longer term unemployment.

I live in San Antonio and it isn't a red herring. You can rent in a nice area of San Antonio for $399-$500/month which would leave her plenty of money to get a used car even with poor credit. (Example property: http://bit.ly/c5pJQb )

As of December 2009 numbers San Antonio is 3rd in the nation with only a 6.8% unemployment rate. ( http://www.bls.gov/web/laulrgma.htm ) After living here for a year if she still can't find work as a Texas resident community college is almost free.

People get to a point where they're afraid to do anything. It isn't that they don't want to improve their life but the stress of the situation shuts them down and they can't act. This isn't something easy to fix.

I didn't mean that it was untrue, just that it's not indicative of a wider reality.

How is Texas a red herring?

http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/10/cities-buck-economy-forbesl...

Summary: Texas cities are among those with the best employment outlooks, and are among those where median incomes support a higher standard of living.

EDIT: I read your other reply now. There is a spectrum of income to cost of living ratios across the country. We should encourage people who can't afford their current location to move to places with better ratios.

You are right in general principle. Relocation to places that make more sense in terms of employment prospects & cost of living is rational and probably efficient. We shouldn't be preventing it.

However, there is a big difference between moving someplace with better prospects in a planned and controlled way and being driven there by crisis. The latter would most likely see the woman in the article move to a cheaper place within 1-2 hours of here current home. This means she would be disconnected from the people she knows and less likely to find employment for both psychological reasons like disempowerment (many of the individual reasons for unemployment are here) and practical reasons (jobs often come from people you know). It is the difference between losing your old life and "ending up" somewhere & going somewhere where the prospects are good.

It's not quite that simple - the unfortunate truth in most American cities is that cheaper areas also have worse transportation, which is downright necessary both for work and for self-improvement that leads one out of poverty.

So yes, you can suck it up and move to a less convenient location, but there's a limit to how far you can take that. At some point your reduction in rent will be made up by increased transportation cost (e.g., need a car, no matter how crappy, instead of a much cheaper public transit pass).

You know, I don’t normally get into these types of debates, but the heartlessness of your comment really bothers for some reason. It reminds me of the fable of the ant and grasshopper (circulated by the teabaggers lately), which basically states that the grasshopper, because of poor planning, should be kicked to the curb to die in the cold rather than forcing the industrious ant to lend a hand. (You would love the altered version descibed here: http://www.grist.org/article/the8/)

And your comment further down that they should have set aside money for moving when they still had it is completely unhelpful. I once heard of a person who took his Pontiac to a mechanic because of a problem he was having with it. He asked the mechanic "What should I do?" to which the mechanic replied, "Don’t buy a Pontiac". Not really helpful.

So, your solution to Ms. Eisen’s problem is that they should simply move to a cheaper apartment? Well, turns out that due to a work injury, her husband is confined to the couch. So, not only would he not be able to help move, but they type of apartment they could get would be restricted by his accessibility requirements. And, their vehicle broke down, so they would have to rent a moving van or rely on friends. Moving does cost money and it may not be an option.

Oh right, they "should have thought of that when they had money". Well, setting aside how completely unhelpful that comment is, maybe she didn’t think she would be out of work for 2 years, and now the money they had set aside is gone, and they never thought they would get to the point where they would have to move? Maybe they live near by treatment centers for her husband and the only places with cheaper apartments are too far way? There is not enough information in the article to come to the conclusion that simply moving to a cheaper apartment will solve all of their problems so that you won’t have to "pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine."

So, what would you do if you were standing in front of you? Tell her "Too bad so sad, you should have thought about all this when you had money", and then throw her aside in disgust, but not before handing her a couple of Ayn Rand’s books so she can learn how to pull herself up by her own bootstraps?

When society begins to suffer, we all ultimately suffer my friend, no matter whose fault it is.

Placing blame is worthwhile when it can inform the future decisions of the audience. If you neutralize all mistakes, more people will make mistakes. Someone living in a relatively expensive apartment shouldn't have their housing costs subsidized. Subsidizing moving costs would be something I could get behind, and I'd rather do it through a nonprofit than through taxes.

IMHO one of the greatest, and most misguided straw men we have as a society is the boogeyman that is the lazy, stupid citizen. I've recently started working with the homeless, and had the opportunity to live in an industrial, working-class slum in Canada... what I see in those places is not maliciousness, nor laziness.

Have I met the lazy, good-for-nothing freeloaders living in a shack in the slums? Sure - but that guy is really not as common as people seem to think. It's a critical mistake that betrays the arrogance of the monied in this country to assume that these people are anything but a minority in homeless and poor population.

It's so easy to try and take full credit for your success, and try to push all blame for failure to the individual. It's far too easy to judge people you have never met using assumptions you have never truly tested. For everyone railing against the poor, I'd highly recommend volunteering some time with your local non-profit that handles these issues. Meet these people, put a face and name to your wild accusations, and you will find it much harder to scream about lazy, freeloading Americans - because they're actually kind of hard to find.

Instead of being monied and ignorant, be monied and informed.

In other words, you've met countless people who could easily live on $1595 per month? Cool. I have no doubt they exist. And that they could have handled the situation from the article better. Why can't welfare policy focus on helping those people? Competent slum people are more effective to help, and much more sympathetic, than incompetent people getting a monthly check for more than full time minimum wage work.

Because those people, and those other people, are really not that widely separated. I currently work at two places that deal with the homeless - one focuses on work placement, the other focuses on immediate relief, and what I see is that the population between those two groups are really separated by sheer luck, and the amount of support they have been able to receive from non-profits, family, and community. The people who have been able to bootstrap themselves out of homelessness and into gainful employment all have done so with a gigantic effort from countless concerned citizens, many of whom (including myself) work entirely for free. The notion of a homeless person who through sheer determination and savvy pulls themselves up, without the understanding support of those around them, is a complete fabrication.

I find your argument as thus: I see some people who have been able to exit poverty and homelessness (conveniently ignoring the fact that the support programs that enable this are far less vindictive and judgmental than you seem to be), therefore anyone who can't is just unworthy of help. I have, in my brief time working with this issue, met many people far better than myself, who dedicate a ludicrous portion of their lives to enabling and improving lives... and none of them subscribe to the idea of the lazy, good-for-nothing poor.

If I may be so bold - our homeless/poor support systems, as overtaxed as they are, succeed in spite of attitudes like yours, not because.

According to the article, Mr. Eisen gets a $1,595 monthly disability check each month because he has diabetes, hypertension and liver failure. Surely you realize that medical care for these kinds of conditions costs something, especially in the US. Calling him and his 57 year-old wife "incompetent" and implying that an elderly couple with medical issues could live off of a single minimum wage salary is heartless.

It's important to make sure that welfare policy doesn't become a disincentive to work, but we're talking about a disability check that doesn't even bring them up to the poverty line.

Hello? They are spending 1380/month on rent. That's what I said. Did you read it? Obviously if they stopped doing that they'd have far more money.

And I'm saying I don't want them to be given more money, not to take away his check. If you don't find a job or a cheaper place for 2 years you shouldn't go "omg i'm gonna be homeless, we need help, we're the perfect sob story, write about us in the NY times and then mention how obama wants to extend unemployment so i could get more checks that i totally deserve for not working or managing my budget for 2 years".

Please keep it civil - the other poster didn't sling any mud at you, it would help your credibility if you did the same.

What mud? He ignored what I said. I pointed this out. I didn't say anything about him.

My wife worked in a school that was in a Slum in the US. All the kids parents were on welfare. The amount of graft we saw was unbelievable. One kid came to school in a taxi every morning because the mother would go out partying at night and not wake up in time to bring him to school. Another was in pain because his pants were so old and tight. He walked around with his pants undone, but his mom had the money for fancy manicures. Notices to parents went unread. She would hold parent teacher conferences days and nights so everyone would have a chance to come no matter their schedule, but in a class of 30 1 or 2 would show. Her stories in the staff room were not unique.

What is the alternative to this kind of behavior? We can't judge or criticize? I don't mean for sport or in spite, but how else can we evolve the laws?

Surely we can judge or criticize - the idea is not to pretend that these don't exist, the idea is that it's dangerous to subscribe to it in broad strokes. The poor and homeless have complex situation that really should be dealt case-by-case.

Note also that the notion that we shouldn't give a shit about these people, and just let 'em rot, is also unproductive - in this case the children would never get to school, would never have the opportunity to get educated, succeed, and exit poverty.

I'm really not experienced enough in this field to say what would be the right solution to poverty - I doubt many people are. Whatever it is though, simply pulling the plug on irresponsible people is not helpful.

>IMHO one of the greatest, and most misguided straw men we have as a society is the boogeyman that is the lazy, stupid citizen.

It's a leftover from puritan/calvinist times. Success was a sign that you have God's approval. You might even be one of God's Elect (ie you basically have a contract assuring salvation).

That is a bit of an oversimplification. There are many living embodiments of people who failed not for lack of God's grace, but rather self destructive behaviors, poor life decisions, and lack of motivation. Others see this and make judgments accordingly.

I like this response. Having watched my grandparents' and parents' generations age, and being the age I am, it's easier for me to discern what constitutes an individual failure and what is simply a mistake of ignorance. If only the problem of poverty were as simple as sloth, ignorance, lack of opportunity, insufficient education, poor habilitation or mental depression. Any one of those problems is easy to solve. Any two of them in tandem may also be easy to solve. But if you've got all of them AND add happenstance to that list; things that, even at your most cynical, you could not plan against, the complexity of the problem of poverty requires more consideration that any single one of us has.

To some people, all the little things that foster individual success are just background noise -- you aren't aware of the noise until it's not there anymore. This has never been more apparent to me than now, as I am raising my children. Somehow I would like them to be grateful that they have so much more than I did, but the only way that can really feel that is to suffer like I did... and I can't let that happen.

Volunteering is part of the solution, though. We are each other's most precious resource.

That's certainly not true everywhere. Because it's that way in your experience in Canada, doesn't make it true anywhere else.

My experience with the poor and homeless happened with actual ghetto dwellers in Baltimore, MD, not the sweet and fuzzy California or Canadian homeless. I got stuck, through my school, volunteering at a soup kitchen every weekend for about eight weeks. In that time, I witnessed the exact same people showing up every single day. They referred to their welfare checks as their paychecks, openly purchased drugs, wore new Fubu clothes and new Nike shoes, and talked about the latest HBO shows. This was somewhat ironic as, at the time, I couldn't afford cable TV or HBO, new brand name clothes, or very much of anything else, but I was able to pay for my own food. I just couldn't go somewhere and have a person serve it to me though, as they were able to. I could also afford to give up my weekend and drive to Baltimore to serve people that can afford fifty bucks for an eight ball, but cannot spare fifteen dollars for twenty pounds of rice. In the entire eight weeks, I only met a single person that was actually down on their luck, everyone else was just lazy.

The reason poor people have no money is that they are awful at fiscal management. Instead of food, they pay for cable, instead of rent, they buy drugs, expensive clothes, and shoes. That's not my problem, and continuing to take care of people that refuse to care for themselves does nothing but perpetuate the problem. These people won't work because they have no incentive to do so. They receive more from the government than they could make with the amount of effort they're willing to expend.

If you want to solve homelessness and hunger, solve the problem of rich liberals feeling guilty and deciding to solve other peoples problems because they have too much time on their hands.

If we give money to people with a track record of bad judgment about issues like whether they should save enough money to be able to move apartments, whether they will be able to find a new job soon or not, and how to live cheaply while unemployed, what do you think is going to happen to that money? It will make them into wiser people?

Of course it will make them wiser -- in the exact same way bailing out the banks has put an end to CDOs.

F_J_H, I would love to feel sorry for these people, but there is little to be sorry for. The worst scenario presented in this article is the Eisens with their $19,000/yr disability income. That is a large sum to live off of. I have no pity. As far as I care, they are living pretty damn good although very irresponsibly.

The next have prospects of $15/hour and the other was making $2500/month in child support and unemployment. That's pretty damn good!

The new poor are whiners, making plenty of money, but not enough for what they're used to. It's like my father who repeatedly tells me he wants to continue living the lifestyle he is accustomed to without paying it forward. Will I pay his dues? Sure will, but I don't really care for the Eisens. I don't care to supplement their income above minimum wage. Why does an honest worker get paid $7.25/hr and someone who does nothing makes more?

I understand your argument, the basic gist of which seems to be that we shouldn’t feel sorry for, or help people who have fallen on hard times due to their own irresponsible behavior. They should have to live with the consequences, and especially if they still have it better than others who do act responsibly as you feel is the case with the Eisens.

You know, there are people out there who feel that we shouldn’t help those of have contracted AIDS through subsidizing drugs or health care when the person got the virus due to risky behavior. I’ve heard people say that although they feel sorry for someone who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, there is no way they are going to feel sorry for “some fag who got it from romps in a bathhouse”. Hopefully that sounds abhorrent to you, but it really is not far off the logic you are using in the case of the Eisens.

Or think of the Katrina victims, which hit the impoverished the hardest. City officials knew there were problems with the levies, and some of the victims behaved in a pretty reprehensible manner (shooting a police/rescue workers, looting, etc.) But you know, despite the clear path of blame, I don’t think the right thing for the rest of the country to do would have been to stand there with arms folded saying “It’s your own damn fault, you fix it! Don’t look to me for a handout!”

I know there are people out there who are suffering due to their own irresponsibility, and yes, it is hard to feel sorry for them at times. But what do we do? Let them die?

I am not proud to say it, but I once felt the same way as you do about people like the Eisens. But then someone helped me understand that poverty and disease, no matter who is at fault, ultimately effects all of us (e.g. when my neighborhood starts to crumple, my own house starts to lose value.) And at the end of the day, we all make mistakes, and what helps us progress is education and a helping hand, not an “I told you so” lecture.

People are dying in India from poverty. Why should my tax money go to americans with 20k/year instead of indians with $350/year?

Personally I'd rather my charity go to the Indians. It'd do a hell of a lot more good there. But I don't have that choice because people like you vote for higher taxes to provide welfare for americans. how is that helping the world?

Something to ponder: comments on the Internet are never for the benefit of the person they're addressed to.

The lady in the article is never going to read Hacker News. She has no idea that people are gossiping about her life. All these comments are completely unhelpful to her, because she's never going to read them. And even if she did - what's she going to do now? Even if you "fix society", it'll take so long that she won't be able to reap the benefits. (Reminds me of my mom's work on the sidewalk committee when I was 8: by the time we got a sidewalk by our house, I'd gotten my driver's license.)

However, this site is filled with young people just starting their careers. A good many of them are renting apartments. The advice above isn't completely unhelpful to them. It may save them from some very expensive mistakes.

Indeed. It's worth putting one's self into the shoes of the people in the article and thinking about what you would actually do. Unemployment at 57 and living in overpriced housing in an expensive area of the country doesn't seem like an unlikely fate for many hackers.

Is there any average-skill, reliable way that people can make an income during a down turn like this?

I'm thinking outside of the internet-set like istockphoto / writing articles / etc.

Tangible, GDP positive tasks.

Farming?

This is not really tangible or necessarily GDP positive, but it does really pay $15/hour while you work from home. I know that 99.99% of work from home jobs are a scam, but this is indeed real, my brother has been doing it for three months now and has gotten several paychecks. They are hiring in most non-UK countries. The job is rating the relevance of results for specified search engine queries.

http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/...

Cottage industry, possibly? Farming is difficult to pull off at more than subsistence levels without significant machinery, even if you're targeting the relatively high value hand-picked/local/organic market.

A lot of the obvious cottage industries also decline during a downturn, like miscellaneous arts and crafts, but I've run across people making decent livings from textile work that they sell on ebay. For smallish amounts of money, one step up the farming chain to baking is fairly profitable. However it gets complicated fast if you want to make a full income doing it, because there's all sorts of health regulations for being a baker or confectioner that pretty much prevent you from doing it out of your home kitchen. Can probably get away with ignoring them if you're selling cookies and bread to <50 friends and friends-of-friends.

That's an interesting idea.

Locally I've seen a variety of people springing up offering to do meal services (eg they'll cook for you and your family, as well as their own).

Had a buddy who became a certified electrician. It helped him during the tough times. Also know a couple of people who do some carpentry (furniture, mostly).

Machine Vision / Video Analytics - getting computers to see in factory and security surveilance is always a growing industry. Requires collecting data and using a machine learning algorithm, and selling skills.

I only see this getting worse in the future. There just isn't enough work to go around anymore. How many white collar/service jobs don't involve any actual work? I just hope our economic system can adjust so we don't have a perpetual, growing underclass.

I believe this is an illusion. It always seems like technology is eliminating jobs, but it has always tended to create as many as it kills, which is why after hundreds of years of new labor-saving inventions, the number of jobs is still close to the number of people who want them.

It's not an illusion. It's real. I'm closer to poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.

No it's an illusion. I'm further from poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.

But personal anecdotes don't actually determine what's going on in a whole country.

What's going on in the country -- that of which I have some direct experience -- is far more than any one personal anecdote. Your experience, in fact, is anecdotal.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21un...

That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different.

I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.

what do you consider unskilled labor? Are you talking entry service jobs?

On second thought, what I'm thinking of is even broader than unskilled labor. Plenty of jobs require training or minimal advanced education, but they could still be done by computers or robots. Manufacturing, retail, accounting, and similar fields seem easily automatable in the near future. For instance, once reliable anti-theft systems are built, many retail jobs will be eliminated.

Accounting might actually be safer, but not because of job requirements. It is one of those "blame-a-person / someone needs to testify" type of positions that could be problematic going the computer / overseas route.

Plumbers, Electricians, etc probably are OK, since robots really need to advance to replace them (like quantum leap) and locality is important. Manufacturing is probably hosed, and that is a huge problem.

Government insures that account is kept around with crazy regulation that complicates the entire thing. A simple tax system which could be done by anyone online because of simplification of the tax system would create an enormous efficiency gain.

Having done a little bit of work in plumbing with my dad I'd have to say that the home service type plumbing isn't getting automated anytime soon. But the manufacturing based plumbing such as installing plumbing into caravans I can see eventually getting automated.

I think this is part of the illusion mentioned above. Throughout the history of technological advancement you have the destruction of jobs that seem very hard to replace.

When industrialisation began you had massive shifts that were probably scarier then the ones we see now. One relatively unskilled person could create hundreds of nails effectively destroying all employment in nail making. It would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that more people would be working in manufacturing stuff 100 years later when artisans were being replaced by machines at insane rates. Then we started consuming many more nails (and other stuff) because they were cheap and making many more nails. making became the staple employer.

One thing that might give you hope is reconsidering the flexibility of certain aspects of the labour market. There is no reason to assume that we need x unskilled jobs and y low-skilled jobs because there are inherently x & y unskilled and low skilled people in the market. Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour. You didn't need to apprentice for 5 years to make forks. There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too, in fact, most advanced economies have done this.

Making nail manufacturing more efficient freed up labor to manufacture more complex and valuable things. Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.

"Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour ... There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too..."

The other way is vastly more difficult. If you replace unskilled jobs with skilled jobs, more people will need more education. What happens to the people who aren't capable of learning more complicated things?

Based on history, it's very likely that I'm wrong. Based on the facts of this specific case, it seems hard to justify the need for non-creative labor.

Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.

That is very related to the point I was trying to make and why I used nails instead of clothes. Nail making had been important for a long time and required lots of people. Automation led to 10,000% or more increase in the number of nails per person. A handful of today's nailmakers can manufacture more nails then all the world's nailmakers a few centuries ago. It was effectively automating the entire industry.

The other way is vastly more difficult

Maybe. I'm not sure. I do think it's a fallacy however to think, as politicians seem to, of "number of unskilled workers" as some sort of constant that we can prod & shift slightly but essentially more of less the same.

Technology made nail manufacturing more efficient, but the cost savings created new products to be manufactured. This phase of technological advancement will effectively eliminate manufacturing as a profession. The savings may lead to more new products, but robots will manufacture those too. It truly is a unique moment in history, which is why I think the lessons of the past may not apply.

I'm not trying to demonstrate how the economic transition will mimic earlier ones (though, I am tempted), just how the illusion might.

A lot of what you say now could have been said at any point, particularly tipping points, which are by definition, unique. Try taking your perspective to the 18th century when Adam Smith came up with the example I bastardised. To a manufacturer of pins (Smith's example) it must have appeared that all jobs were dissolving: Adam Smith estimated (his high estimate) a productivity increase from 1 to 4800 pins per day per person. Even if demand for pins grew ten or one hundred fold, the vast majority of pin makers (47/48 pin makers after a 100X increase in demand) would end up unemployed. Pins were just one unimportant example.

There are two things that would have seemed unbelievable to his contemporaries: (1) That demand could possibly increase by that much, not just for pins, but for stuff. How much can you eat? How much can you wear? (2) That all these people made redundant by machines would ever be needed for anything. Even if all these pins (and other stuff) made manufacture of other stuff cheaper (this would have been less part of the consciousness then), all that other stuff will be manufactured by machines too. If new stuff gets invented and manufactured (this would have also been unintuitive at the time) it too will be made by machines.

I think the trick to understanding the point of this example is the magnitude: 1 to 4800. For all practical purposes (at the time) that meant getting rid of all pin makers in the same way (actually, much more) as auto-checkout will get rid of all checkout chicks.

Definitely a scary graph. But surely it's more likely that it is a graph of a bad recession happening than a sign that a trend that has run for hundreds if not thousands of years has stopped at this exact point in history.

What was the number like in 1933?

The unemployment rate in the US peaked out at about 2.5x what it is now in the Great Depression. Even now the US is the US isn't really in that bad of shape for a developed nation; it's about 2% higher than most EU countries.

The US has just had very low unemployment for the last 15 years or so, so it feels more dramatic. It was actually higher than now at one point in the early 80s.

Is it not our goal as programmers to make manual labor unnecessary? Even if Google (or LexisNexis) is a poor substitute for a librarian, it has likely reduced the economic demand for simple research. While making society as a whole more wealthy, it permanently removes jobs from the market. If this age-old employment trend were to change, now is exactly when I would expect it to happen.

I agree on the influence of new technologies, but the current economic downturn has had nothing to do with that.

The fact is that many people are unemployed now due to the eceonomy being as it is, and there seems to be a consensus that things won't change anytime soon in that regard.

Couple that (on a slightly longer term perhaps) to the end of cheap, abundant oil to fuel every aspect of modern civilisation, and I think there could well be an issue of how to have everyone employed effectively.

There was some interesting discussion about this a couple of days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127274

I guess one problem may be that the new jobs require skills that the old jobs didn't, and not all of the newly unemployed would be able to acquire those skills.

You are probably right. My intuition is that technology should be eliminating more jobs. The demand of the world can be met with less and less workers. I'm having a tough time picturing the new jobs that are going to emerge, but I suppose that scenario is much more likely than the ruling class allowing a disaffected underclass to emerge.

I think the barriers to entry in many business fields are just getting higher and higher.

I think the only reasonable solution is to stimulate regional economies by limiting trade with cheaper outside areas. The only people that really benefit from importing everything from cheap countries are the people with money in the first place. The working class gets put out of work and the middle class become the new serfs.

What I don't understand is why people aren't calling for massive restructuring of the financial system that leads to fucked up situations like this, i.e. collapsing bubbles caused by greedy investors looking to get something out of nothing. A CEO gives himself a multimillion dollar bonus and nobody flinches and chalks it up to the way the market works. If the cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head explode well then there isn't much point to making up sob stories like this.

I've been thinking of hiring a bunch of commission based salespeople for our startup. Has anyone done similar? Can people still receive their unemployment until they start making some sales or would they have to stop immediately when they started calling on prospective buyers?

We can't afford to put them on a salary yet, but it could be a good opportunity to help get some unemployed people going.

That probably depends on the rules in your state. You should contact the agency that handles it. On my unemployment (CA) form it asks me if I earned any money for the weeks I am claiming for. Presumably they subtract any money I earned for those weeks from the benefit amount I would receive, so it could be that if your employee does not earn any commission for a given claim period then they would not lose any unemployment benefit but its always safest to get it from the horses mouth.

It is based on the time period, at least in the state that a friend has worked in. So if the time period is 2 weeks, then if you pay once a month, that will be a 2-week period where they were employed, and a 2-week period they were not. For individuals it is run on a cash basis, that is, if you cut them checks every 3 months, they would only lose benefits for 1 period each 3 month interval.

The day of reckoning for an entitlement-based economy is coming. Many people will have a hard lesson to learn: no one deserves a job or unemployment benefits. This idealism is a product of good times.

Yeah, some people deserve to starve. Fuck 'em.

I did not say this. I just said some people don't deserve to eat.

Nobody deserves by virtue of existing to be supported by someone else. Nature dictates that the least fit die. We humans have decided to disagree. We named it "civilization".[1]

[1] We haven't got it quite perfected yet, but we're working on it. So far, it hasn't been half bad.

Not sure what you mean by entitlement-based economy. Everyone certainly deserves a job since everyone should participate in some productive way in a social environment.

And entitlement-based economy rewards people based on their situation rather than their contribution. BTW -- Your logic is flawed -- 'should participate in some productive way' != 'deserves a job.'

My logic is flawed? It seems to me that your definition of productive participation is flawed since a job by definition is productive contribution. Next time you claim somebody's logic is flawed you better check the axioms, i.e. how your terms are defined.

But the Obama graph shows massive improvement since Bush left office!!!!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898

No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people are losing jobs much more slowly.

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