8 ms·

A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. It may be c

A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. It may be constitutionally incapable of considering that rising poverty and its ills are a result of mindless outsourcing and automation leading to structural unemployment.

dingbat 9y ago
i wouldnt put that much meaning into reasons for the misleading headline choice. simplest explanation is "Opioid Use Explains..." is better clickbait than "Not Sure if Opioid Use is Causal or Symptom"
- dv_dt 9y ago
  "Opioid use associated with.." would be better journalism. "Explains" is clickbait indeed.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    That's better journalism but to the average reader "associated with" means "causes".
pishpash 9y ago
Another example of externality not priced into costs -- if businesses had to bear retraining/unemployment costs to society, they may not outsource as much, or they may still outsource, but be better community citizens. It might also spur governments to do more to stay competitive in a sustainable way, e.g. investing more in education.
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  "The United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...
  - fao_ 9y ago
    That doesn't mean that that money is managed well, though.
    - replicatorblog 9y ago
      I totally agree, but any discussion of approaches that might improve the efficacy of the spend, e.g. more competition via charters/vouchers, or creating a merit pay system for teachers, is not permitted in polite society. The only solution in elite policy circles is to spend more. The reality is we spend plenty, but we have a structure that makes it difficult to experiment. The problem is exacerbated because the most influential members of the upper classes can bypass the problem by either paying for private schools or by taking advantage of our neo-feudal school districting system and buy into exclusive neighborhoods with "public schools" — which are open to anyone who can swing a $1M mortgage!
    - themaninthedark 9y ago
      Nor does it specifically help men. Currently the education system is geared to helping women and some of the policies actually punish men. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ Add in the fact that blue collar jobs are declining, most men are going to ask what is the point of trying. The answer they get back from society is one that they are unneeded.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    The US also spends more per person on healthcare, yet has worse outcomes[1]. Cost is not always a good indicator of quality. [1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20170715-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...
    - replicatorblog 9y ago
      Are you arguing the US Educational System is rigged to maximize corporate profits? Don't we largely have "single-payer" education? Is the issue local control? Do we need to federalize it? Nationalize Addison-Wellesley so they no longer profit from producing text books and curriculum packs?
- EGreg 9y ago
  They can. It's called the UBI TAX :)
  - ende 9y ago
    UBI isn't a tax, it's a payout. It's typically linked with a land value tax.
    - sverige 9y ago
      Why link it to land value, which could hurt retired people who own their homes but have fixed incomes? Wouldn't a better alternative be to tax corporate income and close loopholes that allow them to pretend they're Irish (or wherever) companies? Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.
      - EGreg 9y ago
        This. Corporations are where the money saved from automating jobs winds up. They are sitting on larger and larger cash stores. Facebook and others have one engineer per million people. Only corporate shareholders win, and only indirectly. Bernie would have been a great UBI candidate.
      - zardo 9y ago
        >Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners. Total private land value in the US is in the trillions. Google and Apple could hardly make a dent in paying for a UBI.
        EGreg 9y ago
        That's not the point. Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do. As automation grows, we capture that savings and redistribute it to the working class and unemployed class equally. Social Democracy!
        9y ago
- jstanley 9y ago
  Nonsense. Unemployed people in poverty is no more the fault of businesses who don't need their skills than it is the fault of workers who fail to provide skills that businesses need...
  - marnett 9y ago
    Yes. Complete non-sense. I, too, can't wait until society's only working class citizens unburdened by debt and above the poverty line are software engineers, lawyers, and doctors. Everyone else should have, upon becoming unemployed, mastered more economical skills. We are fortunate that labor force participation is actually just that simple.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    But they do need their skills, they've just found a way to get it a lot cheaper by manufacturing in countries that don't have much in terms of environmental or worker protections. One is our neighbor. All they had to do is give a little cash to some campaigns. The ROI on that must have been incredible.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    This isn't about fault or blame. This is about keeping a healthy surviving economy and society over the long term. The fact that many people are becoming unemployable is no fault of their own, and it's not the business' fault that don't need their labor. But as a society we need to decide what to do about it, because covering our ears and closing our eyes and yelling LALALALA and pretending it doesn't exist or will go away on its own is only going to make the problem worse.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    It's a fault of business for seeking to reduce the tax load that would provide society with the resources to retrain/etc.
  - vkou 9y ago
    When you offshore clothing production to a country where you can pay your employees $1/day, are you doing it because Americans are dumb and can't provide you with the skills you need? Which skills? The skill to survive in a homeless shelter? Never mind that if every other business followed suit, they would destroy their customer base...
- baddox 9y ago
  I'm not sure I would call that an externality. The newly-unemployed worker whose job was just outsourced is part of the transaction. I understand "externality" to refer to economic consequences to uninvolved parties, like when a company sells gas to an automobile owner which causes pollution which affects everyone else.
beepboopbeep 9y ago
bloomberg has some of the best reporting out there. I would not discount it just because it's business driven.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  I didn't discount its general reporting. I suggested its inherent bias on the subject might make it a poor source in this one case.
Pica_soO 9y ago
They want there customers to feel good. Shirking responsibilities for ones fellow human and redistributing blame feels good. Its a similar service as prostitution but for the consciousness. Im interested on what there stance towards the DAO is going to be. A Contract-golem replacing CEOs - that's there audience being replaced. Wonder if they are going to stay Neo-Liberal while the Revolution they spawned eats them.
darawk 9y ago
Its most likely though that the causality flows in all directions at once. Structural unemployment causes drug use, drug use causes unemployment. Unemployment causes more unemployment (if your friends are unemployed, it doesn't seem quite so bad, maybe you don't try as hard to get a job). Drug use causes more drug use (if your friend loves Oxycontin, maybe you'd like it too).
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  Not to mention that drug use tends to push you into con college (prison) and you can't find a good job after that.
  - macintux 9y ago
    The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.
    - munificent 9y ago
      And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".
      - darawk 9y ago
        That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?
        geofft 9y ago
        The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience. It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
        9y ago
jondubois 9y ago
Yes very good point. When I think about how ridiculously hard I've had to work just to maintain the lifestyle that my parents had and I compare that to how little my parents had to work (and how little ambition they had), it's very clear to me that the baseline amount of work and ambition required to get a decent modest lifestyle has become insanely high. Giving up actually makes sense. Drugs give back that feeling of satisfaction that has gone missing from people's lives.
- slg 9y ago
  I think that is dangerous mindset. It is unnecessarily idealizing the past while glossing over any potential flaws. It insinuates that people were happier in the past and it ignores that the standard of living for most Americans has gone up over the decades (due mostly to technology and globalization even with little to no increased income). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things, but lamenting about the good old days is further delaying that progress. EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.
  - toyg 9y ago
    But it is true that in the past a lower-middle-class family could live on one salary, and office workers would often work less than 36 hours per week. Nowadays two salaries per family are required to stay just above the poverty line, and jobs require a minimum of 40 hours everywhere. This not just in America btw, the same happened all over Western Europe too. It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.
    - slg 9y ago
      If you dig through the data here [1] you will see that the annual average hours worked by Americans has decreased over the years. The same is true for the French, British, and Germans. Some of that more recent decline might be due to underemployment, but I think it stands in contrast to your accusation that longer hours are some type of new norm. "We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on. [1] - https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
dominotw 9y ago
Would it be possible to setup 'no minimum wage' economic zones in the country. I know many ppl got their start in tech from doing tech support, perhaps that would help ppl build their skills ( and confidence) from the jobs that get in-sourced from India. Govt can prbly foot the bill to makeup for the wage loss. Just a thought. Empty mind is devils workshop.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dv_dt 9y ago
  That would be an interesting way to experiment with UBI, in a economic zone with sufficient UBI, you allow no min wage, no unemployment, etc...
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Given that corporate profits are higher than ever yet only very few are benefiting from that gain, it should be fairly obvious that trickle-down economics isn't working. Why not increase taxes while limiting imports from countries with minimum wages much lower than ours? That way the lower and middle classes would actually see an increase in quality of life, not a decrease that they would see if we removed the minimum wage.
  - methodover 9y ago
    I would definitely not vote for someone in favor of that idea. I see no reason to believe that lower and middle classes here would see an increase in QOL if we started enacting trade restrictions on countries with lower standards of livings than ourselves. What you're talking about is essentially mercantilism, and it's long been discredited in economics.
adekok 9y ago
Rising poverty, loss of manual labor jobs, and permanent injury from manual labor jobs. The men aren't working because they're either injured or unemployed. Then, because their life sucks, the are more likely to turn to drugs. Saying "opioids explain unemployment" has it exactly 100% backwards. The average guy with a job, a house, wife, and 2.2 kids isn't going to get hooked on opioids. His life is already full.
gumby 9y ago
> A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. Why? There's plenty of money to spread around in the drug wars too.

dingbat 9y ago

i wouldnt put that much meaning into reasons for the misleading headline choice. simplest explanation is "Opioid Use Explains..." is better clickbait than "Not Sure if Opioid Use is Causal or Symptom"

dv_dt 9y ago
"Opioid use associated with.." would be better journalism. "Explains" is clickbait indeed.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  That's better journalism but to the average reader "associated with" means "causes".

pishpash 9y ago

Another example of externality not priced into costs -- if businesses had to bear retraining/unemployment costs to society, they may not outsource as much, or they may still outsource, but be better community citizens. It might also spur governments to do more to stay competitive in a sustainable way, e.g. investing more in education.

replicatorblog 9y ago
"The United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...
- fao_ 9y ago
  That doesn't mean that that money is managed well, though.
  - replicatorblog 9y ago
    I totally agree, but any discussion of approaches that might improve the efficacy of the spend, e.g. more competition via charters/vouchers, or creating a merit pay system for teachers, is not permitted in polite society. The only solution in elite policy circles is to spend more. The reality is we spend plenty, but we have a structure that makes it difficult to experiment. The problem is exacerbated because the most influential members of the upper classes can bypass the problem by either paying for private schools or by taking advantage of our neo-feudal school districting system and buy into exclusive neighborhoods with "public schools" — which are open to anyone who can swing a $1M mortgage!
  - themaninthedark 9y ago
    Nor does it specifically help men. Currently the education system is geared to helping women and some of the policies actually punish men. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ Add in the fact that blue collar jobs are declining, most men are going to ask what is the point of trying. The answer they get back from society is one that they are unneeded.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  The US also spends more per person on healthcare, yet has worse outcomes[1]. Cost is not always a good indicator of quality. [1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20170715-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...
  - replicatorblog 9y ago
    Are you arguing the US Educational System is rigged to maximize corporate profits? Don't we largely have "single-payer" education? Is the issue local control? Do we need to federalize it? Nationalize Addison-Wellesley so they no longer profit from producing text books and curriculum packs?
EGreg 9y ago
They can. It's called the UBI TAX :)
- ende 9y ago
  UBI isn't a tax, it's a payout. It's typically linked with a land value tax.
  - sverige 9y ago
    Why link it to land value, which could hurt retired people who own their homes but have fixed incomes? Wouldn't a better alternative be to tax corporate income and close loopholes that allow them to pretend they're Irish (or wherever) companies? Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      This. Corporations are where the money saved from automating jobs winds up. They are sitting on larger and larger cash stores. Facebook and others have one engineer per million people. Only corporate shareholders win, and only indirectly. Bernie would have been a great UBI candidate.
    - zardo 9y ago
      >Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners. Total private land value in the US is in the trillions. Google and Apple could hardly make a dent in paying for a UBI.
      - EGreg 9y ago
        That's not the point. Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do. As automation grows, we capture that savings and redistribute it to the working class and unemployed class equally. Social Democracy!
        9y ago
jstanley 9y ago
Nonsense. Unemployed people in poverty is no more the fault of businesses who don't need their skills than it is the fault of workers who fail to provide skills that businesses need...
- marnett 9y ago
  Yes. Complete non-sense. I, too, can't wait until society's only working class citizens unburdened by debt and above the poverty line are software engineers, lawyers, and doctors. Everyone else should have, upon becoming unemployed, mastered more economical skills. We are fortunate that labor force participation is actually just that simple.
- Clubber 9y ago
  But they do need their skills, they've just found a way to get it a lot cheaper by manufacturing in countries that don't have much in terms of environmental or worker protections. One is our neighbor. All they had to do is give a little cash to some campaigns. The ROI on that must have been incredible.
- infogulch 9y ago
  This isn't about fault or blame. This is about keeping a healthy surviving economy and society over the long term. The fact that many people are becoming unemployable is no fault of their own, and it's not the business' fault that don't need their labor. But as a society we need to decide what to do about it, because covering our ears and closing our eyes and yelling LALALALA and pretending it doesn't exist or will go away on its own is only going to make the problem worse.
- rhizome 9y ago
  It's a fault of business for seeking to reduce the tax load that would provide society with the resources to retrain/etc.
- vkou 9y ago
  When you offshore clothing production to a country where you can pay your employees $1/day, are you doing it because Americans are dumb and can't provide you with the skills you need? Which skills? The skill to survive in a homeless shelter? Never mind that if every other business followed suit, they would destroy their customer base...
baddox 9y ago
I'm not sure I would call that an externality. The newly-unemployed worker whose job was just outsourced is part of the transaction. I understand "externality" to refer to economic consequences to uninvolved parties, like when a company sells gas to an automobile owner which causes pollution which affects everyone else.

beepboopbeep 9y ago

bloomberg has some of the best reporting out there. I would not discount it just because it's business driven.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rainbowmverse 9y ago
I didn't discount its general reporting. I suggested its inherent bias on the subject might make it a poor source in this one case.

Pica_soO 9y ago

They want there customers to feel good. Shirking responsibilities for ones fellow human and redistributing blame feels good. Its a similar service as prostitution but for the consciousness. Im interested on what there stance towards the DAO is going to be. A Contract-golem replacing CEOs - that's there audience being replaced. Wonder if they are going to stay Neo-Liberal while the Revolution they spawned eats them.

darawk 9y ago

Its most likely though that the causality flows in all directions at once. Structural unemployment causes drug use, drug use causes unemployment. Unemployment causes more unemployment (if your friends are unemployed, it doesn't seem quite so bad, maybe you don't try as hard to get a job). Drug use causes more drug use (if your friend loves Oxycontin, maybe you'd like it too).

godzillabrennus 9y ago
Not to mention that drug use tends to push you into con college (prison) and you can't find a good job after that.
- macintux 9y ago
  The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.
  - munificent 9y ago
    And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".
    - darawk 9y ago
      That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?
      - geofft 9y ago
        The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience. It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
      - 9y ago

jondubois 9y ago

Yes very good point. When I think about how ridiculously hard I've had to work just to maintain the lifestyle that my parents had and I compare that to how little my parents had to work (and how little ambition they had), it's very clear to me that the baseline amount of work and ambition required to get a decent modest lifestyle has become insanely high. Giving up actually makes sense. Drugs give back that feeling of satisfaction that has gone missing from people's lives.

slg 9y ago
I think that is dangerous mindset. It is unnecessarily idealizing the past while glossing over any potential flaws. It insinuates that people were happier in the past and it ignores that the standard of living for most Americans has gone up over the decades (due mostly to technology and globalization even with little to no increased income). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things, but lamenting about the good old days is further delaying that progress. EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.
- toyg 9y ago
  But it is true that in the past a lower-middle-class family could live on one salary, and office workers would often work less than 36 hours per week. Nowadays two salaries per family are required to stay just above the poverty line, and jobs require a minimum of 40 hours everywhere. This not just in America btw, the same happened all over Western Europe too. It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.
  - slg 9y ago
    If you dig through the data here [1] you will see that the annual average hours worked by Americans has decreased over the years. The same is true for the French, British, and Germans. Some of that more recent decline might be due to underemployment, but I think it stands in contrast to your accusation that longer hours are some type of new norm. "We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on. [1] - https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

dominotw 9y ago

Would it be possible to setup 'no minimum wage' economic zones in the country. I know many ppl got their start in tech from doing tech support, perhaps that would help ppl build their skills ( and confidence) from the jobs that get in-sourced from India. Govt can prbly foot the bill to makeup for the wage loss. Just a thought. Empty mind is devils workshop.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dv_dt 9y ago
That would be an interesting way to experiment with UBI, in a economic zone with sufficient UBI, you allow no min wage, no unemployment, etc...
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Given that corporate profits are higher than ever yet only very few are benefiting from that gain, it should be fairly obvious that trickle-down economics isn't working. Why not increase taxes while limiting imports from countries with minimum wages much lower than ours? That way the lower and middle classes would actually see an increase in quality of life, not a decrease that they would see if we removed the minimum wage.
- methodover 9y ago
  I would definitely not vote for someone in favor of that idea. I see no reason to believe that lower and middle classes here would see an increase in QOL if we started enacting trade restrictions on countries with lower standards of livings than ourselves. What you're talking about is essentially mercantilism, and it's long been discredited in economics.

adekok 9y ago

Rising poverty, loss of manual labor jobs, and permanent injury from manual labor jobs. The men aren't working because they're either injured or unemployed. Then, because their life sucks, the are more likely to turn to drugs. Saying "opioids explain unemployment" has it exactly 100% backwards. The average guy with a job, a house, wife, and 2.2 kids isn't going to get hooked on opioids. His life is already full.

gumby 9y ago

> A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. Why? There's plenty of money to spread around in the drug wars too.