7 ms·

US Underemployment 28.4% for young people, 18.4% in all Age Groups

53 points by startuprules 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- phaedrus 16y ago
  Edit: The post I quoted from was deleted. "The other usage that is common is using "underemployed" to describe people who want to work more hours. I want to work five million hours in a week, but I am constrained by the laws of physics." You're making up a ridiculous exaggeration that has nothing to do with the issue. Someone may want to and be capable of working full time, yet only able to find part time work. That has nothing to do with constraints of physics. "After consulting all the experts, and doing some very serious reading on the topic, I just don't believe it has any real semantic meaning." "Who is this authority that has decided that people's "skills" are "underutilized", and by what standard?" Just because an issue may have ambiguity or shades of grey at its border cases doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real. "But that specific problem is not underemployment, but overeducation." Wow. Just, wow. That's like pointing at a broken machine or a broken system and saying, "The problem is not that the system should be fixed, but that you should abandon your expectation of it working."
jhamburger 16y ago
How is a young person with little or no work experience and no college education "underemployed"? That is basically the least qualified group possible.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Least qualified for what? In previous decades young people with little work experience and no college education had a solid blue-collar track available to them. Nowadays, not so much.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    My point is if you're lucky enough to get a solid union unskilled blue-collar job, great. If you get stuck doing a similar job without a union for much less money, that sucks but it isn't underemployment.
    - sprout 16y ago
      I suppose, but it will cause deflation, and whatever you want to call that deflationary pressure, we're getting dangerously close to it.
- _delirium 16y ago
  By definition, someone who wants full-time work but is unable to find it is "underemployed". It's not really a value judgment about whether they deserve more employment or anything, just a statistical category tracking people who cannot find a full-time job (much like "unemployment" is a category tracking people who cannot find any job at all).
joelmichael 16y ago
The minimum wage makes it difficult to hire unskilled workers. If it didn't exist, there would be a lot less unemployment for young people just starting out.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Is that true? My understanding is that classical economic theory predicts this, but empirical evidence has been very mixed.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- lsc 16y ago
  Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people who work part time, but would like full time work. the idea being if one guy with one of those parking lot cleaning trucks can clean my parking lot in an hour and it takes, say 10 man hours to clean my parking lot with brooms, if the guy with the truck costs $50/hr to clean my parking lot and a guy with a broom costs $10/hr, it's cheaper for me to hire the guy with the truck. If I can get guys with brooms to work at $4/hr, suddenly it makes sense for me to hire 10 guys with brooms (assuming I need it done in an hour, and the work scales that way) rather than one guy with a truck. On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour. I mean, even my company. right now, most of the provisioning is done by hand... this is because I'm able to obtain fairly cheap (well, quite a bit over minimum wage, but still, cheap by the standard of such things) SysAdmins who /can/ provision people by hand. If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins, and my current mostly-manual situation would be untenable. Granted, either way, automation is a high priority, but with current market conditions, 'just do it by hand' is an option, and that simply wouldn't be the case if the job market was in better shape.
  - 16y ago
jsz0 16y ago
I've been wondering how many of these jobs are just gone for good due to higher efficiency and permanently increased productivity? We assume most of the unemployment & underemployment is caused directly by the recession but I'm not so sure about that. It seems possible to me we had sort of a jobs bubble where companies were overstaffing and the recession just exposed this. If you lay off 20% of your staff and magically the other 80% pickup the slack what incentive is there to re-expand by 20%? My theory is modern technology and communications have just made certain positions inherently more productive. I can think of a time not that long ago where I may have lost an hour a day driving back to my office just to check my e-mail. Now I do that throughout the day on my SmartPhone while working on other projects. For a less skilled job I look at how grocery stores now scan products by UPC. There goes the job of the 19 year old tagging every can of corn with a little price tag sticker. When you run out of corn your computer inventory (tracked by UPC) knows about it. You spend 30 seconds re-ordering more through a computer instead of 15 unproductive minutes on the telephone waiting for the supplier to take your order. If these scenarios are being repeated in different ways all over the economy I think we need to consider that the rise in worker productivity is permanent and these jobs are gone for good.
- dantheman 16y ago
  Their is always more work than that which can be accomplished. Unfortunately right now, we don't know what that work is and what its value will be. This makes it extremely risky for people to jump careers since they don't know where to go, and it makes it hard to invest capital/start a business because the future payments are unknown. If the housing market was at the correct value - not insanely overpriced as it is now people could be employed building bigger/new houses. If certain resources are limited (high price) then investments can be made to harvest them more cheaply. It takes time for people to experiment and for knowledge/price information to make its way around the market. Unfortunately, we also have some government policies that are actively distorting market signals and also increasing uncertainty of the future. So while jobs disappear for good, new ones will be created -- unfortunately it is not quick or painless. I believe Ned Ludd's town took ~50 years to achieve the same level of success after the introduction of the automatic loom.
- jdminhbg 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

53 points by startuprules 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
phaedrus 16y ago
Edit: The post I quoted from was deleted. "The other usage that is common is using "underemployed" to describe people who want to work more hours. I want to work five million hours in a week, but I am constrained by the laws of physics." You're making up a ridiculous exaggeration that has nothing to do with the issue. Someone may want to and be capable of working full time, yet only able to find part time work. That has nothing to do with constraints of physics. "After consulting all the experts, and doing some very serious reading on the topic, I just don't believe it has any real semantic meaning." "Who is this authority that has decided that people's "skills" are "underutilized", and by what standard?" Just because an issue may have ambiguity or shades of grey at its border cases doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real. "But that specific problem is not underemployment, but overeducation." Wow. Just, wow. That's like pointing at a broken machine or a broken system and saying, "The problem is not that the system should be fixed, but that you should abandon your expectation of it working."

jhamburger 16y ago

How is a young person with little or no work experience and no college education "underemployed"? That is basically the least qualified group possible.

potatolicious 16y ago
Least qualified for what? In previous decades young people with little work experience and no college education had a solid blue-collar track available to them. Nowadays, not so much.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  My point is if you're lucky enough to get a solid union unskilled blue-collar job, great. If you get stuck doing a similar job without a union for much less money, that sucks but it isn't underemployment.
  - sprout 16y ago
    I suppose, but it will cause deflation, and whatever you want to call that deflationary pressure, we're getting dangerously close to it.
_delirium 16y ago
By definition, someone who wants full-time work but is unable to find it is "underemployed". It's not really a value judgment about whether they deserve more employment or anything, just a statistical category tracking people who cannot find a full-time job (much like "unemployment" is a category tracking people who cannot find any job at all).

joelmichael 16y ago

The minimum wage makes it difficult to hire unskilled workers. If it didn't exist, there would be a lot less unemployment for young people just starting out.

_delirium 16y ago
Is that true? My understanding is that classical economic theory predicts this, but empirical evidence has been very mixed.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
lsc 16y ago
Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people who work part time, but would like full time work. the idea being if one guy with one of those parking lot cleaning trucks can clean my parking lot in an hour and it takes, say 10 man hours to clean my parking lot with brooms, if the guy with the truck costs $50/hr to clean my parking lot and a guy with a broom costs $10/hr, it's cheaper for me to hire the guy with the truck. If I can get guys with brooms to work at $4/hr, suddenly it makes sense for me to hire 10 guys with brooms (assuming I need it done in an hour, and the work scales that way) rather than one guy with a truck. On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour. I mean, even my company. right now, most of the provisioning is done by hand... this is because I'm able to obtain fairly cheap (well, quite a bit over minimum wage, but still, cheap by the standard of such things) SysAdmins who /can/ provision people by hand. If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins, and my current mostly-manual situation would be untenable. Granted, either way, automation is a high priority, but with current market conditions, 'just do it by hand' is an option, and that simply wouldn't be the case if the job market was in better shape.
- 16y ago

jsz0 16y ago

I've been wondering how many of these jobs are just gone for good due to higher efficiency and permanently increased productivity? We assume most of the unemployment & underemployment is caused directly by the recession but I'm not so sure about that. It seems possible to me we had sort of a jobs bubble where companies were overstaffing and the recession just exposed this. If you lay off 20% of your staff and magically the other 80% pickup the slack what incentive is there to re-expand by 20%? My theory is modern technology and communications have just made certain positions inherently more productive. I can think of a time not that long ago where I may have lost an hour a day driving back to my office just to check my e-mail. Now I do that throughout the day on my SmartPhone while working on other projects. For a less skilled job I look at how grocery stores now scan products by UPC. There goes the job of the 19 year old tagging every can of corn with a little price tag sticker. When you run out of corn your computer inventory (tracked by UPC) knows about it. You spend 30 seconds re-ordering more through a computer instead of 15 unproductive minutes on the telephone waiting for the supplier to take your order. If these scenarios are being repeated in different ways all over the economy I think we need to consider that the rise in worker productivity is permanent and these jobs are gone for good.

dantheman 16y ago
Their is always more work than that which can be accomplished. Unfortunately right now, we don't know what that work is and what its value will be. This makes it extremely risky for people to jump careers since they don't know where to go, and it makes it hard to invest capital/start a business because the future payments are unknown. If the housing market was at the correct value - not insanely overpriced as it is now people could be employed building bigger/new houses. If certain resources are limited (high price) then investments can be made to harvest them more cheaply. It takes time for people to experiment and for knowledge/price information to make its way around the market. Unfortunately, we also have some government policies that are actively distorting market signals and also increasing uncertainty of the future. So while jobs disappear for good, new ones will be created -- unfortunately it is not quick or painless. I believe Ned Ludd's town took ~50 years to achieve the same level of success after the introduction of the automatic loom.
jdminhbg 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]