It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession | Hacker News Reader

It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession

business.theatlantic.com

18 pointsGoladus23 comments

I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the long term.

I would not see health care as a safe industry right now, what with the uncertainty of reform looming over our heads and what appears to be a bubble in health care in any case. Yet with job growth in healthcare, government, and education, the trend to notice isn't men and women, it's government and market. Government jobs, and jobs in highly regulated industries, seem safer at the moment than jobs in the market. Which is to be expected when government spending rises in an economic downturn.

If we see recovery soon, this short term trend will reverse itself and all this will be forgotten. But if we deepen into a depression, the other shoe will eventually drop once the federal government reaches a debt crisis. Then women (and, in fact, everyone in government/gov. regulated jobs) will be in the same boat. Neither outcome will really sustain this trend.

"the future employment prospects for men in the long term": That would be pretty bad, since most men don't have the ability to become engineers or programmers.

"the obvious feminist wet dream": thank you, that's the least appropriate metaphor I've seen on HN in quite a long time.

"... of degrading men through marginally higher unemployment rates": yeah, obviously feminists across the world are just drooling at the prospect of degrading men through marginally higher unemployment rates.

Most American men don't have the inclination or desire to become engineers or programmers, but cultures have changed due to economic pressures in the past.

In terms of ability, the population of potential engineers is very underutilized in the US thus far. If we fixed education in this country we'd have a higher population of potential engineers, but we tried that after Sputnik and it didn't stick. I don't think all men will become engineers or programmers, but many more will have to in the long run.

I am picking up a self-congratulatory feminist tone in some articles about the downtick in men's fortunes in this recession, but not this one, and it was distracting from my main point. I appreciate your pointing that out.

"I would not see health care as a safe industry right now"

In the longer term it will be a safe career move to enter this market though. With the sheer volume of baby boomers reaching retirment, the amount of national spending on healthcare is going to sky rocket regardless of any reforms that go through. This of course assumes that the recession doesn't turn into a depression forcing the government to feed the population with soylent green.

>I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the long term.

In the long term, can't a significant amount of engineering & programming be automated and/or offshored? Obviously not all, but I'm not sure engineering can be counted as a future-proof career path.

How many large-scale software projects have you worked on? ;-)

In the small scale, it always looks like a program is just a bunch of lines of code, and any monkey can type in lines of code. But in the large scale, there're lots of judgments calls and architectural decisions that require that you weigh competing factors, with incomplete information, and try to come up with a "least bad" solution with possibly unforseen results in the future. You can't automate this, and if you try to outsource it without open lines of communication, you'll probably end up with a solution that satisfies nobody.

The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated.

Isn't large scale software actually where most of the automation and offshoring take place?

The "judgments calls and architectural decisions" can be made just as well by software architects in India or China or Brazil.

>The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated

Absolutely. For example: 6502 Assembly -> C -> Java -> Python. Each step is exactly about that: Letting you focus on the interesting parts, and thus produce more value with less human effort. This is automation, we just call it abstraction or whatever. We didn't see a drop in the job market as result, since the demand for software had been rising even faster. The question is whether this will remain the case.

I'm not sure about automation (it seems unlikely to automate creative work) but offshoring, in the long run, won't eliminate jobs because there isn't a limited, set number of creative work that can be done.

That's one lousy graph. It makes it look like there's twice as many men unemployed as women. The reality is there's only 20% more.

No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5% a year and a half ago, unemployment for women has gone up about 60% while unemployment for men has gone up about 100% -- or not quite double the increase. It's a fair representation.

And even in absolute numbers, there are far, far more than 20% more men than women who are unemployed. It's the unemployment _rate_ for which the figure for men is about 20-ish% more than the rate for women.

"No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5.5%"

You're assuming that most people who look upon the graph understand concepts such as "baseline". I very much doubt that.

I think the intention of the graph is to illustrate that the unemployment rate for men has increased at about twice the rate as the unemployment rate for women. And it's successful.

Perhaps some definition of terms may be in order, given that some may not know that unemployment means those who don't work but do want to work. Stay-at-home moms, for example, would not be unemployed.

Yes: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#concepts

Misfortunate Mary who worked full time last month and made $10k in salary and benefits gets fired but reports that she now works two hours/month at a local hot dog stand making a total of $20 is considered employed.

Lazy Larry who sat on his couch and drank beer last month (and every month before that, yea back unto age 15) reports that he is looking for work (but really, who is he kidding?) is considered unemployed.

Homemaker Helen neither has nor is seeking a job so she is not considered employed or unemployed; she is not part of the workforce.

Startup Sam quit his job to work feverishly on the Next Big Thing. He reports not being employed but also not looking so he too is not part of the workforce (per the BLS).

Definitions like these are one major reason why the household unemployment figures diverge from the official BLS figures.

Another possible factor is that women who lose their job may be less likely to seek another. I've heard at least one anecdote already of a woman who lost her job and decided to just stay home for the time being.

Indeed, almost no one understands the 'unemployment' statistic. As I understand it, only people who are actively seeking employment and have no job are included.

While 'HealthEdGov' may have been the place to be over the past ten years, it's worth pointing out that that sector is basically a remora- a useful parasite to the shark, but still a parasite.

As a society, we need a stronger 'rest of the economy'.

To the extent that HealthEdGov is a proxy for just Gov (considering the amount of government money spent on Health and Ed), I suppose that's true. But Health and Ed definitely contribute a lot to productivity, I think. Sick, injured and dead people do not produce as much value as healthy people, and well educated people tend to produce more value than under educated people.

Disclaimer: this is being typed by someone whose paycheck comes directly from the EdGov sector.

Intuitively, we believe that health and ed contribute to productivity, wealth, etc. But the evidence that health and education (beyond the basics) contribute much is actually pretty weak.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/human-capital-p.html#m...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/medicine_as_sca.html

By basics, I mean vaccines/trauma care/birthing in medicine, and literacy/arithmetic in education.

Disclaimer: I also work in the Ed/NonGov sector, as well as in the Sci/Gov sector.

Good point but I disagree. Ed is more like an investment, and Health Care is an important industry. Demand for it is huge. Everyone has health problems, while fixing them is important and often nontrivial.

Also, a remora is typically considered a symbiote, not a parasite.

That's why in a recession, it's a good time to get "funemployed" . . .

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-funemployment4-2009j...

It's a class-cession. People from the less educated lower classes have limited employment opportunities mostly involving physical labor. Men tend to be overrepresented in such jobs, like constructions. And we're in a housing bust.

It's an age-cession, too. Overall teenage (16-19) employment is something like 24% now. For white teenagers it's now 21% (compare with an unemployment rate in the low to mid teens over the past 10 years) and 39% (!) for black teenagers (compare with unemployment rates in the high 20% and low 30% range over the past 10 years).

One of the aggravating reasons those figures are so high is that US employers were forced last month to raise wages for their least skilled/valuable employees.

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