Where did the Boomer women go?
marketplace.org
marketplace.org
"The largest single bloc of “missing workers” -- 2.4 million of them -- are of prime working age, 25-54. Another 1.3 million are under the age of 25. The smallest bloc of "missing workers" is aged 55-plus -- 700,000 workers. Of that group, the overwhelming majority are women. In the other two age cohorts, more men than women have left the workforce than were expected."
As such, this seems less of a mystery. Why wonder why some women nearing retirement decided to basically retire early, when the economy is bad? Surely it is a much bigger mystery why younger men, in the prime work years, have left the labor force?
No doubt the bad economy explains the shrinking labor force, but focusing on older women, rather than younger men, focuses on a small issue and misses a much bigger issue.
http://collegestats.org/articles/2013/05/why-men-are-falling...
Well, I can't speak to the 'education' part, as I don't have one, myself. I think that education is overrated; I mean, If, for instance, a competent party with money came in and bought my company tomorrow? Yeah, I might go get a history degree. It would be a lot of fun. but, really, of little commercial utility. Clearly, some people do learn useful things in school, while others get little (aside from 'personal growth') from the experience.
However, the 'job skills' part? that /is/ youth unemployment. You can't get work experience... without a job. And getting a job when unemployment is high and you have no education or experience... is difficult.
I was able to get a programming gig at 17, in part, yeah, 'cause I was a smart kid, because my father and stepfather were programmers, and because I had worked through high school as an IT monkey. (My "programmer" title was a little misleading. While I did do some programming, the bulk of my work was systems administration.) But a huge factor was that it was 1997. Standards, quite simply, were lower. (I was shotgunning resumes; The one that landed me my first programming gig was me accidentally sending my resume to the place I currently worked as a call-center tech rather than the local university where I actually intended to apply. Oops.)
Now, I was able to turn my work during the dot-com into really good experience that I was able to leverage to get jobs through the crash. However I can tell you right here that if I had started out looking in 2001? I would have been fucked.
I mean, yeah, there were a bunch of factors that lead to me becoming employable. But without timing? without the economy demanding a huge number of workers with my skillset? I, as a kid with no education and no experience would very likely have not gotten a chance.
But yeah... that's the point. High unemployment rates mean that you have a large and growing segment of the population without job skills... You get job skills from... your job. It's quite difficult to come up with job skills without a job.
Hell, even if you have had a job in the past... those skills are perishable. You need to have recent experience.
So yeah; the national attention, I think, needs to be switched away from rich people problems, and focused back on the unemployment problem. Well, that or they need to figure out how to run a society with a large number of permanently unemployed folks. Some people think the natural consequence of automation is unemployment. I'm not sure I agree, but either way, Yes, long-term unemployment has long-term consequences.
Self-absorption level: God mode.
>However I can tell you right here that if I had started out looking in 2001? I would have been fucked.
Which isn't to say it wasn't a self-absorbed comment... I was speaking from experience. A lot of time I try to stick to direct knowledge in my writing... which /is/ self-absorbed, but in some ways, I think, is less offensive, 'cause I'm writing about things I know (which is to say, myself and my experiences.) rather than spouting off about people I don't know anything about.
Edit:
The problem, I think, isn't anything cultural having to do with young men; the problem, I think, is simply low demand for labor. Shifting people around so that they can do different sorts of labor, sure, could be really good for the people in question, however, I don't think it would really solve the problem. There is simply more people of working age than there is demand for labor right now. Yes, there's demand for top-end computer folks... but for the bottom half of computer folks? yeah, still not so much demand.
This is the primary reason why I think it's not particularly productive to focus on group X or Y. With demand as it is, /someone/ is going to be unemployed; I think that societal effort is better focused on getting demand up in general vs. focusing on helping one group (potentially at the expense of others.)
Something needs to change this low demand. I don't know what that something is. Perhaps Entrepreneurs need to focus on finding new ways to profit from human labor? perhaps the government needs to spend money on WPA-style infrastructure projects that use a lot of labor? I don't know. Seems to me like we need the former solution for it to stick long-term, but the latter is often put forward as a way to jump-start that sort of thing. (Or maybe we do need a kind of government work-corps long-term, that do the sort of infrastructure work that private industry won't, and that employ many laborers?)
Going back to being self-absorbed: one thing I notice is that my local Safeway (the rivermark in santa clara) is always really busy, and always has a 5+ person line. There are plenty more checkout lanes, they are just empty. It's a fairly wealthy neighborhood, full of computer types. Why doesn't safeway bump their prices by a percent or so and hire a few more local kids to man some of the idle registers?
Something is wrong there, and I don't know what it is. It's possible that there is a cost to firing folks at safeway that I don't see. [1] It's also possible that my neighbors are more price sensitive than I think... but it's the only serious grocery store for miles, and the lot is always crowded with newish luxury vehicles. Fry's handles the same problem (varying levels of checkout demand) fairly well. When they get busy, they quickly put more folks on the register. The check-out line moves quickly all the time; when it's busy, they just have more registers open.
(but yeah. Talk about self-absorbed. "Oh no, I have to wait 10 minutes to buy my grass-fed beef, either that or drive 20 minutes to the whole foods, something is terribly wrong! I chuckled.)
[1]From what I've seen? the legal costs, unemployment, etc... don't explain the reluctance to fire people. I think there is a high social cost to firing folks because of this. It's possible that corporations are hesitant to respond to spikes in demand by hiring folks. Perhaps we need a 'temporary employee' category to set expectations? but... seasonal employers work that out under the current scheme, so why can't Safeway? I mean, population and demand, in silicon valley, might as well be seasonal (though, our seasons last half a decade) It's also possible that large corporations have firing costs that are simply way higher than small corporations; I really only have direct knowledge when it comes to the small shops.
But I've never been convinced that there's really a good solution to the problems that Michael Moore's Roger and Me discussed, where good paying factory jobs get replaced with automation. pg has suggested that overpaying for labor was something that only worked for the Big Three while they were in startup mode, until foreign cars became popular. It would be fascinating to watch pg discuss this with Michael Moore, because Moore seems to feel entitled to something being sustained that pg seems to argue was clearly unsustainable. And I think I've seen an article that seemed to imply that the Tesla Factory hasn't employed very many former NUMMI workers because Tesla wants more skilled folks than NUMMI needed.
Maybe you want to convince Whole Foods to come to Santa Clara. (Although recent experience in Massachusetts tells me that there are benefits in terms of team member competence to going to a store that's been open for a while instead of a new store.)
Eh, I think that we see that as a 'golden age' of good-paying unskilled labor, but that's the thing; factory work, at that time, wasn't unskilled. It didn't require a degree, but it certainly required skill. I would actually compare working in manufacturing during that 'golden age' to working in the computer industry, now; It was a new industry, and demand was so high that they didn't have the option of requiring a college education.
(I mean, I think you require different base attributes to write CRUD apps vs. be a machinist; but still, being a machinist took a significant amount of skill. And just like in the computer industry, yeah, there were jobs that most people, once adequately trained, could do. There were other jobs, just like the computer industry, which required attributes only present in a small portion of the population.)
That was part of why I went into my own story in my post; when demand for labor is really high (as it was in the computer industry in the late '90s) it makes sense for companies to hire and train; Not everyone is going to make it through the training process, and those that do are going to be able to demand a higher wage.
I am arguing that the problem now is not a lack of good-paying unskilled labor, but an overall lack of demand for labor. (Some would argue that this is instead an oversupply of labor; we've got a larger percentage of our population that expects to work outside the home for decent wages now than we did then. Personally, I would not feel okay taking that position.)
That was part of why I went into my own story in my post; when demand for labor is really high (as it was in the computer industry win the late '90s) it makes sense for companies to hire and train. When demand for labor is low compared to the number of folks who can do the job, well, you might as well take someone proven.
>It would be fascinating to watch pg discuss this with Michael Moore, because Moore seems to feel entitled to something being sustained that pg seems to argue was clearly unsustainable.
Eh, 'entitled' is... kinda putting a negative slant on it. (I mean, I think it does describe Moore's emotional approach to the problem, but I don't think it's /useful/) I think that most all of us would benefit from a higher demand for our own labor (as most of us make most of our money from labor, rather than from rented labor)
I mean, as folks in a growing, high-demand industry, we're further up the labor food chain, and you could say we have an interest in maintaining a wage differential, but the massive levels of unemployment are good for... very few of us.
The people with the hardest time finding new jobs are the large cohort of blue-collar workers caught in the rapid evaporation of the entire category of "well-paid blue-collar job": they have solid job experience, perhaps 20 years experience doing something mid- to high-skilled in an auto factory, but due to shifts in the economy and automation, that experience is no longer relevant, and they have no formal education in another field to fall back on.
One angle could be to try to get some job experience in a different field, but computing and starting a business are two of the few paths where you can just go directly into that. You can get hired as a programmer or sysadmin with no degree, and you can start any kind of business you want with no degree. But Dupont, say, is not going to hire a chemical engineer with no degree, and that goes for a large segment of the economy.
Is that really true? (that's not rhetorical.) I mean, sure, it's true in the sciences, in part because scientists outside of the computer industry don't have it so great; employers get their pick, but is it true in management/business/sales/accounting? If it is true, how much of that 'truth' has to do with the expectation that it's true rather than any required knowledge? Are folks without those degrees not trying for the position, because they think they need school, first?
(I see that a lot in my industry; kids think they need degrees, so they go to school rather than working. I mean, it's hard to argue if the parental units are paying now and won't pay later, but... you don't want to pass up your personal 1997. I think the number of folks in my field who go to school is inflated by the belief that you need a degree to get in.)
now, I'm again stepping outside of my immediate sphere of knowledge, but I'm pretty sure degrees are not needed in sales. I mean, you've gotta be able to pretend to be middle class, and a degree helps for that, but...
And management? Come to think of it... I can't remember working under guys who didn't have degrees /or/ hadn't gotten their start with their own company, so you might be right there. However, I have worked under guys with degrees from for-profit schools... I have a hard time imagining a degree from one of those places counting in your favor, and I've met a lot of management types who could give the sales folks a run for their money when it came to reading comprehension.
We will need to completely restructure the way our economy works to at least provide basic things like a house to live in electricity,etc and money for food to all members of the population without requiring them to work or this situation will reach a tipping point for a revolution.
Working members of the population would obviously be able to get more but at least the basic needs for survival are taken care of without the need to work.
Having a lot of people with tons of time on their hands may just be a blessing in disguise. Who knows what they come up with if they have so much time to think.
I'm certain a large part won't do anything productive with their time but you can count on human competitiveness and their desire of the working class's freedoms to drive the economy.
Problem is this basically means that companies would be supporting the entire population most likely forced through taxes and such.
This is going to present some interesting problems but it's either this or a revolution destroying everything and replacing it with something that will most likely be less efficient. Could actually ban automation which would definitely be a step backwards.
Well it's just a theory but we as a society are approaching something like this.
Many people see 50-year-olds as "old dogs who can't/don't want to learn new tricks", regardless of past achievements/tricks.
And many mid-size to large employers still harbor the illusion that they can hire someone who will stay with the comapny for life, or close to it. Thus, they don't want to "waste time" on someone who will "retire" soon anyway. They want someone to "invest in" and for them, that translates into a younger person.
Finally, some people simply don't want to hire someone who knows more/is more experienced than they. Sometimes it's because they fear that person will have an attitude; sometimes it's because they have a need to always be - or perceive themselves to be - the smartest kid on the block.