Say Hello to Full Employment
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.
On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.
From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/edward_glaeser.html
It's not a good measure, but it's not a case of politicians picking a convenient metric, it's just a case of a bad metric being optimized for.
Those who are interested can read the report to the 13th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (yes, there are conferences for everything) in which the unemployment definition which U-3 is based on was adpoted: http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1982/82B09_438_engl.pdf
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/u-3-unemployment-rate-was-...
But U3 is fine for year-to-year readings of employment temperature for lay people like most of us.
1) equal pay for equal work
2) equal represenatation among (higher paying) jobs
I routinely see these two issues conflated, and occasionally the purported resolution of #1 for gender being trotted as evidence of no more "gap".
Although I can see how that could be characterized as "cherry-picking" a statistic, it doesn't make the statistic any less valid, and it detracts from the real problem of conflation. If it's true, then additional effort at #1 would, indeed, be wasted. It would be better to criticize the notion of just one "gap" rather than any cherry-picking.
How does this relate to the topic at hand? The original commentor suggested a problem of conflation, between "unemployed" and "jobless".
Elsewhere in the thread, it's been discussed whether workforce participation is a more meaningful metric.
Even that risks conflating "employed" with "fully employed" (as opposed to "underemployed", such as part time or working for a lower wage). Real wage growth comes up repeatedly, presumably because of that confounding factor.
As for equal pay for equal work - I'd be very surprised if women aren't getting that, because that's illegal and you'd expect that to show up in the form of many many lawsuits.
Yes there does seem to be an issue of some workplaces that have a boys club type environment and fail to promote women - but I don't know if that's big enough to explain the dramatic wage gaps that are touted by some people.
Negotiating a higher salary requires a bit more drive/aggressiveness than the average person has. Making up numbers here, if you say that only 20% of the population has that personality trait, men seem more likely to have that trait (perhaps 15% of men have it and 5% of women), which would contribute to the equal pay for equal work gap.
To rephrase my above statement, the current job market rewards certain personality types with higher positions & salaries, and men seem to have a higher chance of having that personality.
A completely separate question is: Is the above an acceptable situation? I would say no.
For example, more men are three times more likely to be psychopaths than women [1], and CEOs have a much higher chance of being psychopaths than the general population [2]. There's a strong chance that certain psychopathic tendencies are rewarded in the current corporate structure.
Similarly, there are other stories you hear of there being a lot of backstabbing in certain companies at the higher levels. Personality types that are disinclined to engage in that will be unlikely to climb the corporate ladder there.
It's probably in the best interest of all companies and society in general that these kind of personality traits are not rewarded unless they are actually beneficial.
By fixing the problem at this level we'll not only be solving the gender/pay gap between men and women but also the gender pay/gap between differing personalities within a given gender as well.
[1](https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/mental-disord...) [2](http://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-often-have-psychopathic-...)
Second, when you do that you're sort of controlling the problem away. Women don't seek more work/life balance because they're not as crazy as men. They do it because they're expected to carry more of the burden of raising a child. The literature is clear that the wage gap is relatively small until children enter the picture. After that the gap skyrockets.
This is why the main practical goal of every wage gap activist is equalizing the burden of having a child. It's why the number one policy issue is universal mandatory parental leave for both genders.
There certainly is sexism in the workplace, although the court ruled different I think Ellen Pao was a victim of this. That said, I don't know if it as prevalent and widespread so as to lead to meaningful and statistically significant wage gaps when all the factors are considered. Certainly the evidence for this sort of widespread institutionalized sexism is lacking in my mind.
Still I think the conversation here is more that the wage gap numbers are not as significant as they are often presented in discourse about gender equality
Saying you need to control for things that have already been controlled for doesn't leave a particularly good impression.
To me it seems like an uninteresting tautology. Like these others:
“False statements about immigration numbers are often presented in discourse about naturalization policies”
“Misleading financial figures are often presented in discourse about what stocks to buy.”
It’s like... yah. So?
All discourse is full of garbage. If you are interested in the truth, you weed through that and evaluate the numbers and, according to best practices, find a good estimate.
When you do that, you find there is a substantial gender-attributable pay gap in many countries in many industries.
Why that is and how we change it seems like a worthy discussion.
I am curious to why you think the existence of people with a poor understanding of the facts is a worthy topic of conversation.
There will always be people in “the discourse” saying wrong things. If that’s all it takes to halt the important conversation about how women get pay equity, then you have yourself a surefire tool to ensure that conversation never happens. Or at least that you never have to participate.
"Female Uber drivers make 7% less per hour than their male counterparts—even though the algorithms that determine pay for the ride-hailing service are gender blind, according to a multi-year study."
If their conclusion is accurate, I am puzzled as to what solution can be proposed. Should we lower speed limits or cut mens’ hours?
The studies do not "control for everything". For example I have never seen
1. Control for the much higher levels of sick days taken by women.
2. Control for the product of hours worked and years worked. Women work fewer hours and spend more years out of the work-force. This has a multiplicative effect on "hours of work experience"
Additionally the power of "controlling for X" is vastly overstated. In reality it is only reliable when the different factors are close to orthogonal, have linear relationships and are not causally related. Typically none of the above are true.
Almost impossible to make any progress in it without appeal to emotion and in-group/out-group dynamics.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo...
Women tend to choose more fulfilling lower paying careers (last point on fortune and second last on time)
http://fortune.com/2018/04/10/gender-pay-gap-myths/
http://time.com/5230911/equal-pay-day-2018-wage-gap-myths/
I don't have the original studies but I think the news sources here are fairly reliable
Perhaps you can find the citation yourself and use it to counter the point you are replying to.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claims. What is freely asserted is freely dismissed. How would the user you replied to even go about searching for the citation, given so little information to go off of?
The link you provided seems to allude to someone announcing their personal preference, which should not have to be defended. Assertions of what scientific literature have established as accepted wisdom are free game for questioning. That's what gives theories their fundamental efficacy, being able to withstand reasonable criticism.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/US...
It persistently fell from 83.3% in January 2008, to September 2015, where it bottomed out around 80.6%. It has been climbing since then, and is now up to 81.8%. Getting that back up near 83% would be a big win for the economy.
The highest that has ever hit, is 84.5% in 1999/2000. Healthy has historically (in the last 30 years) been anything around or above 83%. I think it's plausible the US can return to that figure in the next year.
We've struggled with the prime age unemployment due in part to the big loss in production jobs since ~2000. The continued recent (curved upward again at the end of 2016 [1]) boom in manufacturing jobs (exports are at an all-time high) should pull a lot of blue-collar workers back into the labor market. The manufacturing sector unemployment rate is incredibly low at 3.1% (lowest since June 2000, other than the 2.6% it hit before Christmas 2017).
Trump, were he wiser on macro strategy, would resolve NAFTA, close out the trade conflict with Canada & Mexico soon, come to a deal with the EU, and then focus all the trade war on China. US manufacturing will continue to boom, cheap energy and improved margins will largely ensure that. The only serious threat is some really bad trade moves with the non-China trading world.
Female participation rates have been rising historically and it's completely recovered to pre-2008 levels https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25FEUSM156N
Whereas, male participation rates are declining and did not recovered completely yet. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSM156N
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/upshot/we-ran-out-of-word...
I wonder if you actually only counted white and asian men, would the statistics look any better?
EDIT: I just realized how terrible that may have sounded. I'm genuinely only curious about what's causing this apparent disparity. (A disparity that must be a bit severe mathematically speaking.) So my "off the cuff" guess would be that large sections of black, hispanic, and native american men are not really able to participate in the employment markets. And that's maybe how the numbers get so high for men in general?
Men in that age range are actually employed at a higher rate than most other demographics. He is making a point about men in that age range being employed at a relatively low rate compared to historic rates for that same demographic, not their employment rate compared to other demographics now. Men age 25-54 have at times had rates getting close to 5%[3].
However, this can't entirely be blamed on a poor job market because it has become much more acceptable for men to take the role of a stay-at-home parent or caretaker than it would have when their employment rate peaked in the late 1960s. There are almost far more students in that age range than there would have been in the 60s.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/jobs_for_the...
[1] http://www.multpl.com/us-employment-population-ratio
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S?utm_sourc...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...
This morning, the Labor Department announced that the national unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent in June for good reasons, as hundreds of thousands more Americans sought work.
It’s great to see our workers in neglected sectors of the economy have a chance to get back in.
Sure some workers of neglected sectors got a boost (coal), but at what cost? Funny how there is little talk of the solar workers that got laid off following those change in policies.. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/us-solar-industry-lost-nearl...
"Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job. The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in. Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages, with growth barely keeping pace with inflation even as the unemployment rate has dropped to 4 percent"
This isn't progress
Who works in fast food and why? Mostly people who are either don't have any skills to work anywhere else or people who can't work anywhere else.
When there is high unemployment, high skill workers will be more willing to take a less desirable job in order to survive. As unemployment drops, the high skill workers leave the undesirable job and find better work(more pay, better hours, etc.). Fast food places then have to either raise wages or higher less skilled workers to replace those who have left.
This is progress.
"Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job. The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in. Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages, with growth barely keeping pace with inflation even as the unemployment rate has dropped to 4 percent"
The easiest way of doing /that/ is to make social benefits (retirement, vacation time, healthcare) public pools and 'single payer' (but with competition for benefits that provide services like healthcare).
When all of society is willing to say "they don't deserve more pay, the machines are doing all the work" including the workers themselves, and 'being employed' is seen as some sort of moral imperative that is more meaningful than a paycheck and totally detached from actually producing value... things can get bad. We should always remember history, and that those people were not fundamentally different from us. They were willing to bear it. We will be too. And while they didn't have a century of fighting against 'socialist' policies so were willing to discuss the New Deal, we are in a different situation on that count. Such a solution would not be discussed seriously, much less attempted.
(But, I don't fear this too much. The fact is technology is cheap and has made people so productive that its far more likely they will realize that companies no longer provide any tangible benefit compared to working directly for customers online, especially once the software is there to facilitate it.)
> In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population.
It's very difficult to find work with a criminal record in the US.
We've got to get rid of the mindset that we need to "protect ourselves", both corporately and individually, from "dangerous people" (i.e. former criminals) by excluding them from our lives and our companies. "Love your neighbor as yourself" applies to them also. Love always involves risk. A noble society values redemption more than safety. Work itself is ennobling, especially when trust and responsibility can be earned.
That's not to say we should ignore background check results. But a crime (or crimes) in the past shouldn't mean they're automatically excluded.
However, if you got caught stealing a bunch of electronics from a past employer, you'll have a seriously hard time find a job anywhere where they have to trust you with money or property.
Honestly, people who commit crimes against their employers do this to themselves. How could you ever be trusted again when your strategy at the beginning was to shit where you sleep?
I don't feel that's really relevant, and the person who is trying to get back on their feet likely doesn't care. They just want a damn job.
"Honestly, people who commit crimes against their employers do this to themselves"
Not many do. In fact, I'd say far more employers commit crimes against their employees than the other way around. And yet, they don't have to worry.
If most people were to look at safety only a bit differently, their world outlook would change substantially. If they realized that it is stupendously easy and simple for any of the multitudes of people they come into contact with on a daily basis to kill them, and that no police force in the world could possibly stop such a thing from happening if the person were to decide to do it with no warning, the initial response would probably be fear. But, upon further reflection, they might realize that despite the tremendous ease, despite what others might have gained at any point, it simply has never happened to them. What could possibly explain that? There are ex-convicts, unpleasant people, people with disturbed worldviews, psychopaths, and other 'bad people' everywhere and you've certainly been in contact with them quite regularly. And... you've been, and continue to be, safe.
While it is challenging to keep a human being alive, what with them having all sorts of needs, it is very easy to kill one. Someone walks up to you and pulls out a knife with a 2 inch tiny blade and simply presses it into your jugular and you will most likely die in a minute. Or you could get hit with a car, or something could be put into your food, or your house could be set on fire with you in it, there are innumerable methods that are all easy and entirely within the capability of any normal person. But, killing a human requires something else. It requires the willingness to kill. Almost no one has that. Military training is arduous and difficult because even giving this willingness to the average person is insanely hard to do (and they settle for simply ingraining killing as a reflex response since they have never actually accomplished manufacturing the actual will, so soldiers typically kill before their conscious mind can decide what to do, taking their will out of the equation, resulting in neurological damage that manifests as PTSD but that's another topic). To presume that even a "bad person" runs around with this willingness constantly within them is quite ludicrous once you've faced the reality of how rare it is for such violence to occur.
And then when you look at the violence which does occur, and try to understand it, what makes those situations so different, you quickly notice that essentially all occur in situations of desperation. You might be led to suspect that perhaps the desperation is more the problem rather than the persons involved. Perhaps the 'bad people' who didn't kill anybody the day before or the day after aren't simply murder machines who will always be a threat.
This all, however, requires a great deal of thinking. And thinking about emotionally arousing topics at that. Life, death, the uncertainty of strangers, the fragility of ones own situation, etc. Before you can begin down the road of thinking about these things, you have to know how to think. And you have to be willing to think. Both of those factors are in substantially short supply in modern society. The knowing how to think because we don't teach it in schools (the Republican Party in Texas actually had opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills as a primary plank in their official party platform not long ago) save in college philosophy courses. The willingness due to a total reliance upon intuition as a guide to truth. Intuition can not deal with these topics at all. It arises from the 'default behavior' of our brains which arises from their structure that evolved to keep us alive (just) in small tribes on the African savannah. It is prone to obsession with fear, and fearing the unknown, and fleeing from threats rather than facing or dealing with them. Until a person can turn their back on intuition and use reason instead, the monstrous 'bad people' will be a constant bugaboo.
With enough demand, we may begin to see employers willing to retrain these workers and bring them back into the fold.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retrain...
That's the first sentence of the article. You're telling me that in a list of over one hundred course, covering everything from computer programming to nursing, there's nothing with pay and benefits comparable to coal mining?
When NAFTA was being negotiated, there was similar talk of retraining all the blue collars. There were blue jean factories in Western NC, once they left there were no jobs to move into. Training or not.
Now it is easy to say, "Move to where the jobs are" but for someone who owns a house in an area but has little to no other assets, this is not a solution.
The official employment stats cover both. U3 is the unemployment rate, which correctly covers only the labor force, while U6 covers the labor participation rate, which covers the population.
So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?
> Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.”
> “There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work. The construction trades, the roofers, the framers, the dry-wallers,” said Dan Culhane, the president of the Ames Chamber of Commerce. “Those are [workforce] challenges that Ames and Story County and Des Moines face.”
> The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in.
Also, all kinds of stressors can create recessions - from a supply shock (the sudden increase in oil prices in 1979 forcing the US economy to restructure to adapt), to a demand shock (a sudden drop in consumer access to credit in 2008), to sudden shifts in the type of demand (both WWI and WWII ended in steep, short recessions during the switchover from wartime to peacetime production).
Businesses need to be made to squeal in pain here. Run the economy as hot as we can get it for as long as we can and shove wages through the roof at the cost of business margins (which were just considerably boosted via the tax cuts).
If the Republicans and Democrats weren't collectively so stupid, they'd be cooperating on hammering out a massive infrastructure spending plan paid for by a trillion dollars printed by the Fed across 10-15 years (or similarly constructing an infrastructure bank filled courtesy of abusing the global reserve currency while we still have it). And doing that would juice things that much more right now and for the next decade.
Wages will naturally adjust to the equilibrium supply and demand. If the needed increase in wages to increase production pushes prices up such that supply falls then production will be cut to adjust. That is what actual economic theory says.
In the real world their is a lot of lag, so some market participants will be increasing wages and producing too much, and then they lose money, and have to overcut on the other side, but in a massive diverse economy this random noise balances out.
The market will never over price labor, therefore inflation cannot come from increasing wages.
Inflation comes from printing money (or creating it digitally since we don't actually print any more). When the inflation from printing money results in rising wages, then that is a sign to the bankers that they should cut back so that they can keep the poor in line, and keep them from paying off their loans so that they can't get out of debt.
Real world economics.
But from a business standpoint, no point in increasing wages above inflation until workers revolt. So what's needed is a healthy dose of inflation to get workers to revolt, and make business compete for workers by taking the risk, instead of hoarding, and paying more. Businesses and their shareholders have had it really good compared to workers, because workers have been docile and shareholders have been there to scoop of the profits that workers refuse to fight for.
i gotta say, this idea has some appeal. since businesses tend to use the new tax savings for stock buybacks or paying out dividends instead of hiring and expanding, force their hand a little.
Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job.
What does such a restructuring look like, in concrete terms?
The dependent part is where these slashes and cuts are accompanied by lowering prices in a race to the bottom within the industry, to the point where every business in the sector is operating on near-zero margins. Then, when wages overall start to go back up, the first business in the industry to flinch has to raise prices immediately as well, and ends up getting out-competed into oblivion. But if nobody flinches, the entire industry's labour pool dries up, harming everyone.
That's a good thing. Welding is hard to learn and takes a lot of practice to get right. There shouldn't be people sitting around idle with that skill.
Ask employers who are whining about a shortage of skilled labor "how many people do you have in training right now?"
When people talk about higher wages for these jobs as a solution for the labor shortage, I always bring up improvements in working conditions (safety, hours, etc.) as a perhaps more cost-effective way to make these jobs attractive.
That strikes me as an exaggeration. Notwithstanding "sitting is the new smoking", I don't imagine trucking has nearly the permanent health risks of welding, especially considering that maximum-time regulations are now actually getting enforced, thanks to electronic logbooks.
> Who wants to spend a month at a time away from family?
Someone without a family (usually modified by "yet") or who's into making shorter-term sacrifices for the longer term. The latter would apply if the pay were high enough, but it isn't. The latter type seems to exist in the military.
The question makes an assumption that isn't necessarily valid, as there's another kind of person: one who has no kids and brings a spouse along to drive as a team.
None of this, of course, necessarily translates into an attractive long-term career, but it's also not high- or increasing-skill labor.
> improvements in working conditions (safety, hours, etc.) as a perhaps more cost-effective way to make these jobs attractive.
I suspect the reason such measures are particularly unattractive to employers is that many would be practically impossible to roll back once the job market turns. Wages are a "knob" that turns both ways, but once you've spent money on all those safety upgrades at the plant, there's no un-spending it.
As cynical as that may sound, for low-margin businesses, the fear of being out-competed is always on their mind. Whether the fear is exaggerated compared to reality is another matter.
Now that's a good point. The job could be much better if the employers were better organized. Employers want to send someone out on the road for weeks at a time. With better scheduling, the first driver drives for four hours, stops at a truck stop, and swaps trucks with another driver going the other way. Both drivers end up back home at the end of their shift. Where's that Flexport guy who's always on here when you need him?
That's the point I was getting at.
Is that a pharmacist degree? Don't those need a PhD equivalent to be most beneficial?
(I know that wasn't really your point since you were comparing with something more different like dentists...but the fact that the example specifically said "node developer" instead of just developer is scary)
No Java shop worth its salt gives a flying duck if you know Java's syntax. They care if you understand how to build systems. Caching, queuing, service to service communication, algorithms, performance, debugging etc. If you learnt that stuff in Go instead of Java, who cares? Yes, the job reqs and lazy recruiters will come at you with a list of keywords, but that's usually not what the hiring manager truly cares about.
How many Java developers would come in knowing how to use LINQ efficiently and know the difference between
customers.Where(c => c.Age > 65).ToList()
And
customers.ToList().Where(c => c.Age > 65)
when using Entity Framework or the Mongo linq driver? They would both give you the same result but one is much more efficient.
You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve seen people use a Func<T,bool> instead of an Expression<Func<T,bool>> and wonder why their code is so slow in production.
How many Java developers would migrate toward log4net because they have heard of log4j instead of using the much better Serilog?
How many would come in knowing how to efficiently use ASP.Net Core and plug things in the pipeline?
Knowing the language is the easy part. Knowing the frameworks and the ecosystem takes time.
No one would hopefully ever say a Windows system admin could function at the same level with Linux as someone who had Linux experience.
That’s just like the “AWS Architects” who translate all of their knowledge of on prem deployments to AWS without knowing AWS best practices and wondering why the same infrastructure costs more.
I’ve been a hiring “manager” - more like the architect. I’ve got deadlines and deliverables. Why am I going to hire a Go developer when I can find perfectly competent C# developers that have the skill set I need? Why would I learn Go knowing that the local market wants C#, Java, and Node developers?
The competent developer with knowledge of systems know that the first step when using any form of ORM or sql generation tool is to figure out how to look at generated queries.
Also in that particular example, you're dealing with a reasonably common concept across all languages (generators). While LINQ works by letting you introspect the AST and its a reasonably unique concept, when looking at the snippets here it actually doesn't matter if you don't know that: in basically any data structure manipulation code, doing a data structure conversion followed by a predicate operation is almost always a mistake, because the whole point of "toSomething()" functions is to go from the specialized domain into the language's generic's constructs. LINQ is a particularly accessible implementation of concepts that are age old. The Rx family of tools (which do exist in java) follow similar semantics, and then most ecosystems have very similar constructs even outside of RxWhatever.
Those fundamentals won't let you figure out edge cases, but they're pretty easy to pick up once you get it. The system building aspect is what takes a lot of experience to catch. Other examples would involve how to debug a server's memory dump: it's very different between C++ and .NET, but very few people know how to do it in EITHER environments, while anyone who knows how to do it in one can pick it up in another by skimming a blog post in the middle of an outage.
Probably a reason why people should learn Category Theory too. Not quite the same thing, but it would help people make more solid assumptions.
At least, that's been my experience working in both Canada and in the US, and I've never been close to Silicon Valley (or the west coast for that matter, so if its true there, I stand corrected).
Whats harder is finding a job you'll love with great career advancement opportunities, using the tech stack you like, with a manager you "click" with, and where you're appreciated.
What does “career advancement” look like to someone who doesn’t care about management? Career advancement for me means keeping up with the most marketable tech stack and getting paid as much as I can in my local market and still staying hands on.
“The tech stack I like” is whatever stack pays the most and has a reasonable amount of opportunities. By definition, a popular tech stack will have plenty of openings where you can stay current.
I choose to work for small companies with highly technical managers. A small company can’t afford to silo you. As far as “clicking with the manager” that kind of just happens with more technical managers when they trust your judgement. The only “appreciation” I need is to be paid market rates based on my skill set. I’ve had managers “appreciate me” verbally but didn’t push for the salary I wanted - I left.
I’ve been offered signing bonuses by recruiters who really wanted to get thier cut of my first years salary. I’ve turned them down. Out of my three requirements for a job - right technology, right environment, and money. Money is the least important as long as I’m making the median for my market/skill set.
No way. WWII, for example.
I can either complain about the direction that front end development is going and Node or I can look at the current technology landscape and where the market is going and learn what’s hot and keep my family fed.
But there is s move toward “rural sourcing” where outsourcing companies would use foreign outsourced labor are now setting up shop in rural areas where they can both pay people less than in the major cities and still get the benefits of being in similar time zones and people can travel more easily to be on site occasionally.
https://prestigestaffing.jobs.net/
http://www.professional-insight.com/
These are all reputable agencies that don’t submit your resume without your permission. They will tell you the salary range up front and once you talk to them, they will tell you the name of the company.
As far as relocation. Probably not, but if you’re a good developer and not finding jobs quickly in your market. You need to relocate anyway.
It’s neved taken me longer than a month to find a job as a developer in over 20 years - always paying more.
I moved from a small town the week after I graduated from college in the mid 90s because I knew there were no jobs there.
The salary survey posted by Matrix jibes with my experience at least for Atlanta.
I just picked a random city -Boston - and Google’d “Boston software recruiters”. I found two or three just now.
Even with the job boards, recruiters post jobs thier and instead of sending your resume, talk to them. If you have the skills, and interview well, they will be more than happy to work with you. They get a 20% finders fee from the company you are eventually hired through and it doesn’t affect your salary.
If they won’t give you the information for the hiring company when you ask - don’t deal with them. Also, don’t be shady. Don’t go behind the recruiters back, make sure you aren’t being submitted by more than one company and make sure they always ask before they submit your resume.
The general rule of thumb is not to tell them your current salary. I’ve never gone by that rule. I always tell them the minimum salary I want - and no “target compensation” and bonuses don’t count - and don’t waste my time discussing any company that can’t meet my requirements.
I’ve had them negotiate on my behalf after a company was interested for more than the salary the company offered. The more I make the more they make.
As for mismatches, what is your solution?
Principal will tank when the market drops (company almost tracks large index funds), they have already hearded most employees into shared community desks like cattle with draconian policies against any personal items or even paper.
DuPont is about to be eaten alive by State funded Chinese seed corn.
John Deere is at an inflection point where they need massive RD spending in a bad economy. Either they ship autonomous bots for seed/weed/feed or they become a dinosaur.
Wells Fargo ... isn't exactly the most ethical corporation.
Those are pretty impressive honestly.
Wells Fargo is 2008 Bank of America. They will do everything they can to improve their image -- good time to join actually, IMO.
DuPont will be fine. JD can become a dinosaur and still live another 50+ years on name alone.
The longest we've gone without a recession in the past 100 years is 10 years.
To use a different metaphor, the Fed and the Presidents are playing a game of musical chairs with their successors and no one wants to be the one standing when the music stops.
So yes, it's not about the President, but the nature of control over the financial system is not through the interest rate channel either.
I'm not sure how you can come to that conclusion given it is common knowledge and fairly obvious that the Fed has been inflating the economy at absurd amounts to get us out of the 2008 crash.
Sadly, it's highly likely that the current administration will - of course take credit - but more importantly - reap all the rewards (i.e. votes) in the next federal election.
I still am amazed at how Obama pulled the US from the brink of utter financial collapse shortly after taking office. Hopefully the next incoming administration will be as lucky.
The public debt almost doubled from 11T to 20T during his presidency). He also created moral hazard by not only NOT prosecuting people who he himself called "fat cats of Wall Street", but actually continuing to bail them out (started by W. Bush)
It's worth noting I do blame Obama era policies for wage and working condition stagnation/deterioration, which is the thing I actually care about (gdp and unemployment numbers are basically pointless if people who have jobs are living in third world conditions). That said, I have zero hope that the current administrations policies will reverse that trend in any way.
The market started rising promptly after Trump's election, presumably in anticipation of the coming tax cut.
Also, impose tariffs as we're seeing with the last 24 hours.
Businesses don't have to worry about being the primary source of food or housing for their employees either, and somehow this is true without the government taking over agriculture and real estate.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y
Obviously it's not as simple as that but it certain implies that something uncommon is happening in the financial markets.
But I was happy when it showed up recently. It provides a good explanation about the yield curve and a more specific way to look at things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
There's no rigid guide that the US expansion has to end anytime soon just because ten years was the longest expansion in the prior century. Perhaps this one will last 19 years and set a new benchmark, who knows (answer: nobody).
Could we double or triple the length between recessions? Sure, but I doubt it.
For example, 10 years ago we had quantitative easing done by US/Europe, which led to subprime loans. Now, all of the major economies around the world is tapped out with QE, so deflation is the theme going forward
Also, 10 years ago the dollar prime rate was 0%. Now it's close to 2%. That drives the emerging market capital outflow back to United States, since there is a great need to pay back dollar-denominated loans before rates go up even higher . This means as opposed to 10 years ago where there was capital diffusion from US into the emerging markets, now there's capital consolidation back into US, leading to great FDI for US.
10 years ago, US had the dual threat of energy crisis and offshore/globalization. today, US is the major oil/energy exporter, and robotics/automation/tariffs is bringing factories back to US.
QE did not cause subprime loans - QE was the response to the effects of the subprime loan era.
There was no QE before the liquidity crisis and subsequent economic recession, although it had been discussed academically.
Please don't mistake me for some kind of commie, PG's essay on the necessity for income inequality to drive innovation is convincing. But that doesn't mean we should celebrate shameless cronyism, kickbacks, and rent-seeking either.
Growing middle class income is nice, but income is a very poor metric to use to determine economic class. Net worth is what really matters.
To explain the deflation story especially over the last 4 or 5 years, you need to look at the drop in Oil Prices - which as you point out, is primarily due to fracking and the US going from the #1 oil importer in the world to a small exporter. I wouldn't call the export aspect major statistically, but the change in oil trade terms certainly is.
Tapped out?
1. Kuroda and Draghi are merely taking a breather. BOJ and ECB balance sheets were still growing as recently as April 2018. SNB shows no signs of ending their relentless buying of the QQQs.
2. No global central banks are prevented from restarting QE or QE-like programs at any time of their choosing. The very second deflation again becomes a threat, you can bet your ass that Powell, Kuroda, and Draghi will step on the gas.
"Tapped out" implies limits to the volume of beer in the keg. Central banks have no limits. It is extremely trivial to begin printing money again if these governors/presidents will it so.
What happens when they buy all 100% of ETFs and bonds? Venezuela?
https://www.japanmacroadvisors.com/page/category/economic-in...
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/wtf-chart-day-boj-...
I sure haven't seen it. The price of gas, rent, food, etc. have gone nowhere but up for me. Is there any sector of the economy where deflation is actually happening right now?
1. The market, and the macroeconomic system in general, is not a purely stochastic process. This is a meme.
2. If by "naive chartism" you mean technical analysis, then sure, I agree. But if you're attempting to reduce the entirety of academic and industrial economic theory and practice to "naive chartism", then your middle brow dismissal here is both incorrect and breathtakingly arrogant.
Our entire economic system is predicated on the idea that there exist inefficiencies that can be profitably capitalized on through cause and effect. No one professionally or academically familiar with this idea claims it's a guarantee, but they also don't dismiss the concept of past data being a useful but imperfect measurement for the future state of things.
Even Fama walked back from the strong EMH, and to claim that we can derive no insight about the future from the past is to utterly dismantle everything we know about the credit debt cycle and market macrostructure. If you'd like to believe that then more power to you, but implicit in that belief is a fair amount of hubris.
You fail to grasp a fundamental reality: data about the past can only tell us about the past. Data about the present can be useful for making predictions. Some of it is so useful that using it is criminally prosecuted by the SEC.
By "naive" I mean any approach that relies solely on trends rather than an actual understanding of underlying causal factors. Sadly there are so many of those factors that a correct analysis is virtually impossible, but that's no excuse not to try since some factors tend to dominate others and those can sometimes be found.
I feel obliged to downvote you because of the first two paragraphs, why did you add them? You were trying to refute what you considered an "accusation of arrogance" with the most arrogant opening paragraph possible?
We can agree to disagree on the exact definition of "virtually impossible", but in the broad strokes I think we're both saying some factor analysis can be sometimes productive. In particular, I definitely agree that 1) an "actual understanding of underlying causal factors" is imperative, and 2) an approach based on trends (and trend following) is naive.
[q] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/24/the-fed-launched-qe-nine-yea...
QE "Purchases were halted on 29 October 2014" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#US_QE1,_QE...
Think of the amount - trillions already spent on war. And trillions more in debt because of it.
Confused...
Tell me again how WWII helped all the various economies involved and was not a net loss to the majority of them?
Confused...
I think this sentiment has been repeated time and again here on HN.
I suspect the tech community is particularly attuned to it, as our sector has something like this employment situation even when the economy as a whole isn't doing as well.
- In 2017 the combined reshoring and related foreign direct investment (FDI ) announcements surged, adding over 171,000 jobs in 2017. he U.S. had gone from losing net about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year at the beginning of the last decade, to adding net 30,000 jobs in 2016. http://reshorenow.org/blog/reshoring-initiative-2017-data-re...
- Within the United States, growth also has become more balanced across industries. As in past years, the service sector, supported by growth in employment and real wages, has grown steadily with increases in retail trade, business services, personal services and construction activity. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/bbrbin/166/
- Job-hopping increases, in possible boon to wage growth and productivity https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-this-economy-quitters-are-wi...
I ask because my mom is a 68 year old woman with a high school education in a rural community and she's had probably 6 jobs in the last two years. They aren't awesome paying jobs but at least half of them were full time and enough to squeak by. She just tries them on for size and quits them if they don't fit. Definitely a job hopper, but I don't understand how she can get so many jobs in a depressed area in the midwest and folks like yourself remain unemployed.
Well, self-fulfilling prophecy: now I'm following my more heartfelt interests and doing a PhD in neuroscience. Turns out finding a lab that fit my interests perfectly worked great.
Which is to say: being the "spiky fit" actually sucks, but it seems to be what the labor market is targeting right now.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IAPCPI
In Iowa 2008 was the biggest drop in nominal personal income since 1955. The period 2009-2017 had the slowest nominal personal income growth since the end of the great depression in 1931. 2017 was one of 3 years to record negative income growth in the last 50 years (2008, 1993).
This all speaks of a labor market working far beneath capacity, one that hasn't yet made up the loss of income from the last recession. One no where close to full employment which leads to constant and substantial overall income gains.
It certainly doesn't seem like full employment, but it also doesn't seem like it can be extrapolated to the other 99% of the population in other states (not that I'm saying that's what you were implying).
"employers bidding more to attract new workers and offering raises to retain their existing staff." "The rate of wage growth has doubled of late"
> Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions
> Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages
> Low wages continue to be an extraordinary problem preventing workers from connecting with a good job and keeping potential employees on the sidelines — in Iowa and across the country.
> “But there’s still this cliff, around $13 or $15. If you are making less than that, you can’t take a job. And we are not seeing too many companies go over it.”
The economy is healthier with safety nets that prevent people from "dropping out" of the economy through homeless, excessive debt, being trapped under huge debt burdens that limit their options, etc.
But the economy is also healthier when it is fully participatory. When only a small slice of the public has any significant amount of discretionary spending the economy tends to stagnate.
Also, forcing employers to pay more is actually a supply/demand conundrum. If you want to buy unskilled labor for $8/hr but the going rate is $15/hr you're not going to have much luck.
>Also, forcing employers to pay more is actually a supply/demand conundrum. If you want to buy unskilled labor for $8/hr but the going rate is $15/hr you're not going to have much luck.
The issue I have is most people who want a living wage, want to be done by setting the minimum wage so that a 40 hr week job gets you their. The causes lots of problems because it eliminates everyone from the labor market that cannot produce that much value. So in the end, you negatively impact the young, the old, the disabled, those who want to work part time, even ex-cons by setting minimum wage at a living wage value.
I don't think you can say that when they're the ones who set those rates. Especially when they constantly complain about not being able to find qualified workers.
"I would say there are much better second order effects from focusing on bringing prices down than the second order effects of focusing on forcing employers to pay more."
Maybe, maybe not. But that's not an argument for not increasing wages.
>Maybe, maybe not. But that's not an argument for not increasing wages.
The initial comment was about paying a living wage. There are two ways to make a non-living wage a living wage. Make the wage higher or make the living cheaper. I think way to much political energy is focused on making wages higher when I think it would be more productive in the long run to focus on making living cheaper.
Somewhat related, but sometimes the issue is an unreasonable definition of "qualified". I feel like there are a lot of choosing beggars, particularly in the tech industry.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
In this case, I think you make a valid point. Why is the labor force participation rate not climbing back to 2008 levels?
A sister-comment mentioned baby boomers-- there's a second index called prime age male labor force participation rate (PAMLFPR) that corrects for that by only looking at working-age men. We've gone down from 97% PAMLFPR in 1948 to 88% PAMLFPR in 2016.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...
For example, there have been huge upticks in 55+ labor participation rates and huge downtrend of teenager participation over the last 20 years.
Still, feels odd to see the metrics begin at 16. While some people I know (myself included) had part time jobs at that point, most didn't. 21-22 seems like a more reasonable starting point, given time off for people who went to college - or 18 for people who didn't.
Seems like they should isolate these such that when they say "The unemployment rate is X and the participation rate is Y" they acknowledge most 16 y/o are not primary breadwinners.
Another part is people staying in college longer (or going back to college) to get more education which is needed for a modern workforce, and the result of that is more lifetime earnings, not less.
A third part is many people are opting for one income, since many couples can now live on one income. More people moving from the middle class did so by moving up rather than down.
I beg to differ, its quite the opposite actually. More people are in debt compared to past. Not sure if that's what you mean by 'climbing up'
[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-sh...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-middle-class-...
[Citation Needed]
[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-sh...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-middle-class-...
Probably because the boomers are 10 years older than in 2008?
60% of Americans can't afford a $500 unplanned expense [1]. That alone forces many to take crappy job(s) to just stay afloat.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings...
Do they just mean 'savings'? Or liquid cash? I can never find the actual text of the questions asked, and any clarifications on this point, although I see pop media references to these sorts of surveys regularly
Really? It's fairly common advice to store an emergency fund in something akin to a savings account (or at least something with FDIC backing). Either way, it seems bizarre for a high net worth individual not to have at least $500 in something extremely liquid like a checking/savings account.
Either way, it's fair to assume it means liquid cash, since the question is basically "could you afford an unexpected $500 expense?".
If you want to take that study to task, I think the far more interesting statistic is the 20% who would put it on their credit card: While those could be people who are just going into debt to afford the bill, it could also be people who just pay their card off in full every month and want whatever rewards they might be entitled to from using the credit card.
That’s where I have my emergency fund (earning nearly zero interest of course). If OP knows of some other type of account with enough liquidity to use as an emergency fund AND generates significant interest, you have my full attention!
Some banks, like Ally, also offer a "no penalty" CD, which has lower interest rates than a regular CD, but you can pull your money out at any time without paying a penalty, like you would on a regular CD.
Increased fed fund rates and tapering off QE has been having effects. Retail customers generally are unaware of this, so retail banks are still able to not pay any actual interest.
A lot of the weirdness in the market (from Tesla to GE and others) is due to increased returns from 'safe' investments causing easy money for risky ventures to start to dry up. Expect failures as companies built on nearly free money start having to pay up or fold. Some will survive, many won't.
how precarious is it? any thoughts/guesstimates on the percentage that will fail because of higher rates?
If you can hold off on needing the funds for a year, then US I-Bonds can be purchased from TreasuryDirect. I-bond rates are adjusted semi-annually so they always yield more than inflation and currently at 2.52%. Treasury T-bills can be purchased in 4, 8, 13, 26, and 52-week terms. Current rate for 4-week bills is around 1.89%.
Obviously, this might not work as a single solution if your monthly expenses are much higher than mine, but it could still be a decent supplement.
I was asking specifically if the surveys mean actual "savings" account, which often have some restrictions on them ("Make a total of 6 transfers and withdrawals each monthly statement cycle with no Withdrawal Limit Fee"). If you're getting a grand total of 0.01% interest, there's not much reason to also restrict activity as well.
That said, I realize I do have a 'savings' account, via an online-only bank, getting about 50x what my local bank's savings account rate is. I just didn't think of it as a 'savings' account as I'm so accustomed to thinking of 'savings acct'='brick and mortar location'.
Given that the median American household has $1000/month in discretionary income -- money they can spend on beer or savings -- it wouldn't make sense that 60% of Americans don't have $500 to cover an emergency. Unless it was defined as cash in a "savings account", which most people (myself included) don't use.
Wages grew at the fast rate on record in 2015. [1] Nearby years are similar.
Here's FRED real median household income [2]. Real wages have been growing for several years.
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/13/the-m...
Real wages have been stagnant since the mid 60s. The short term picture is most likely a blip.
Most people working today were not working in the 1960s. They have seen their wages grow. Also as working demographics skew younger as boomers retire, the median worker is earlier in their career, so they earn less, making it look like wages are lower, yet for each person wages have increased. The higher paid cohort is retiring.
All this is covered in Census reports.
And again, most workers were not working 50 years ago. Many have seen real wage growth in their working lifetime.
You're still ignoring that there has been demographic changes also over the past 50 years. At the start of that many people didn't work, and were not counted in median wages. They were not looking for work and were not in the workforce. Since 1960 women and minorities entered the workforce in mass. Both of those groups have seen tremendous wage growth over the past 50 years.
So simply taking the median as you do, ignoring changes in the age and make up of the workforce, you miss a lot of gains.
You also ignore that total compensation, as measured by BLS stats, has increased far faster than wage growth. Currently wages only make up about 70% of total compensation [1]. Healthcare costs borne by employer are the simplest one to recognize - 50 years ago employers didn't pay much and costs were low. As healthcare costs increased, cost to employer increased far faster than wages, but this is still a benefit to the employee.
You also ignore that total cost to employ, again as measured by BLS has increased, due to regulations (many good) passing costs onto employer, things that also benefit workers. There has been significant federal legislation passed in the past 50 years that benefit workers, at a cost to employers. This cost results in benefits to workers but at a reduced wage.
BLS tracks all this in various indices.
So, if you simply look at median wage, ignore demographics, ignore increased benefits, ignore regulatory costs that benefit workers, then sure, things are not magically increasing. But all those other things are benefits to workers that do not show up in median wages. Adding them in gives a pretty big increase in total benefits to workers over the past 50 years.
So if you really want to argue more than I initially wrote, then let's do. But at least don't ignore factors counter to the narrative you want to spread.
You want to argue something else than what I posted.
The article discusses this briefly:
> The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in. Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages, with growth barely keeping pace with inflation even as the unemployment rate has dropped to 4 percent.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if those industries start to get really desperate for employees. My guess in some of them is a hard push for automation (esp. in trucking), but we'll see.
There's no single, simple metric that can fully encompass everything when it comes to unemployment. So they rely on six different metrics, which tend to correlate closely. When they don't, it's obvious in the alternative measures . When politicians talk about U-3, they're comparing it to the same measure in previous periods. Politically, the trend is the focus. In no way is this a case of "statistical smoke and mirrors." Brightlines have to be drawn, and U-3 does just that in way that's fairly straightforward and usable by the public at large.
More importantly, trying to focus on U-6 (for example) as your main unemployment rate has significant drawbacks. While these different cases are all related to one another, the economic policy proscriptions for targeting general unemployment aren't necessarily the same as trying to ameliorate involuntary part-time workers (U-6) who want to work full-time and would if the opportunity presented itself.
Finally, BLS also collects wage data by area and occupation[3] that addresses your final concern. It just doesn't get mentioned as much in the press, or by politicians, because wage data isn't easily boiled down into a single number; it's a bit more involved to deal with. It's still used in econometric modeling and to inform fiscal and monetary policy. It's not something that's ignored.
0. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
1. https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
either that or the working conditions are so bad that there's a high turnover.