8 ms·

I'm deeply skeptical of any explanation that claims that we have both a "shortage of labor" and "downward pressure on wages": > If men and women from the ages

by ekidd 9y ago

I'm deeply skeptical of any explanation that claims that we have both a "shortage of labor" and "downward pressure on wages": > If men and women from the ages 25 to 54 took part in the labor market... [t]hat would be more fuel for the U.S. economy and a bigger source of workers for businesses crying out about a shortage of labor... > Trade with China flooded the U.S. with cheap imports, forced domestic firms to shift operations overseas and put downward pressure on wages of less-skilled Americans. There's an obvious capitalistic answer to this problem: If you're "crying out" for labor, then you may need to offer more money. This will encourage more people to work, or to acquire the skills you want—look at all those coding bootcamps, for example. Claiming that there's a labor shortage and downward pressure on wages is an extraordinary claim, and it requires a detailed explanation. Otherwise, the obvious assumption is that somebody wants specialized skills for below-market prices. If markets are good at one thing, it's adjusting prices to balance supply and demand.

kmonsen 9y ago
We see this all the time in tech, cannot find people is usually cannot find people with the skills and experience we want for the price we are willing to pay. This will always be true if you offer less than the current market rate which startups seems to think they are entitled to.
- whereismypwd 9y ago
  I saw an ad here a few days ago on HN for a "Lead ML Researcher" for $85-100k + 0.5-2%.
  - PunchTornado 9y ago
    Exactly the point. And then people complain about labour shortages in ML.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >> current market rate Many of the new positions being created in startups have no defined market rate, which causes more malinvestment (overpaying workers who don't produce well enough) or shortage of labor due to insufficient perceived compensation. Businesses will almost always err on the side of shortage of labor and keeping costs down when they can (though you could argue otherwise in the current ridiculous VC-backed industry), so this will always be a "problem" in the market.
- psyc 9y ago
  What I've seen in tech is the idea that literally any number of false negatives is worth avoiding a single bad hire. It's fine to claim that trade-off is worth it to you, but it's ludicrous to simultaneously claim there's a shortage of talent. That's just a shortage of risk-free opportunity. Hey, I suffer from a shortage of risk-free opportunities too.
  - throwaway65536 9y ago
    In this age of ghosting people, it seems like everybody is just eyeing everyone else for a reason to stop talking to them or pull the trigger on the block button. We used to be socially-integrated enough to put up with people's foibles and correct them until we are all within a liveable range. Now you cannot confront or give feedback without it blowing up into hyperbole. I have been openly asked about my politics at an interview for a Y Combinator startup (Starsky Robotics). "We need to make sure you are not a horrible person." One of my references later told me that the co-founder was on the phone almost 20 minutes asking probing questions about me. No offer, no feedback. Who stands a chance with that level of scrutiny?
    - psyc 9y ago
      This hasn’t happened to me yet, but now it has a place in my thoughts, whereas 10 years ago I had no inkling of the possibility whatsoever.
    - hycaria 9y ago
      Well considering y combinator is not empty every year, there must be people who have a chance with that level of scrutiny.
      - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        And we have a word for those people: milquetoast. I'm not sure people would hire me after asking about my politics for 20 minutes. What, you're gonna employ someone after getting an earful about Marx and Bookchin?
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  I always hear people claiming tech is full of over-inflated salaries, then look at jobs in my area and see that people want a web-dev with 3-5 years of experience in specific frameworks and offer to pay about $82k/year. Yeah ok guys, that's pretty inflated, innit /s?
  - walshemj 9y ago
    I have in the UK seen a job add in an agency for an experienced php developer at £27k next to it was for a senior "ground worker" for > £35k. A ground worker is the PC term what's known in civil engineering as a "navvy" Oh and the ground worker would get OT
    - sjg007 9y ago
      You're going to have to translate what a navvy or ground worker is for us yanks.
      - walshemj 9y ago
        It's guy who digs a hole in the ground for civil engineering projects.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    The median personal income in the US is $31-35k. The median household income was $59k last year. What exactly are the requirements for a "web developer" with 3-5 years experience? More or less than a registered nurse with 3-5 years experience (~$60k)?
    - maxsilver 9y ago
      Except nursing is experiencing a major shortage too - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/nursing-shortage/459741/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/nursing-s... So if anything, the low wages for nurses just just further supports the parent comment -- wages are too low. If you want to fill a shortage, you need to start by raising wages substantially. If for no other reason than to at least allow new students some hope of ever repaying the always-increasing college costs required to enter these fields.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Often skills that could be learned in a week by an experienced practitioner, but we refuse to let you learn them on the job! Even if you'll be at the job for years. Rather wait a year instead for a unicorn to show.
  - ghthor 9y ago
    This is pretty much why I won't give anywhere near 100% at a company that treats me or my co-workers like that.
golemiprague 9y ago
As if you don't know what the explanation is, illegal immigration and some dodgy legal immigration for the purpose of cheap labour, it is very simple.
jordanb 9y ago
One way to look at it is there is a ceiling on American wages imposed by globalization. Above that ceiling you're better off going overseas. But that ceiling is below the market-clearing price of labor in the us.
- Retric 9y ago
  That does not work. If you can substitute foreign labor then there is no shortage. If you can't substitute foreign labor then it's irrelevant. You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior.
  - Godel_unicode 9y ago
    I think"can but really don't want to" would explain part of it. What do people do when presented with a workable but unappealing solution? They complain a lot and then grudgingly do it.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior. Or insufficient capital investment and bad management holding down productivity. You can't pay a worker more than their productivity, but if the best you can get out of them is too little, it may not be worth their while. You could then plausibly see a shortage of workers, wage suppression, and stagnant productivity statistics at the same time.
    - Retric 9y ago
      You are describing insufficient demand, not insufficient workers. The reasons for low demand are more or less irrelevant to worker pay, just that demand is low.
    - dozzie 9y ago
      Yes, there are many curious effects and phenomena once we dispense with this silly expectation of business being sustainable.
SeanBoocock 9y ago
I would think then that companies who are understaffed because they cannot hire people with the specialized skills they need would lose out in the long run to competitors who are willing to pay market/above-market wages for talent. Anecdotally that doesn't seem to have been happening.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  There is no long run. The landscape is changing so fast that any competitive advantage that unfolds over multiple years, such as treating your employees well, fostering junior developers etc, doesn't have much of an effect. There's too much chaos and reinvention going on.
brightball 9y ago
Think professions where reimbursement is controlled by an outside entity like insurance or Medicaid. Even with supply and demand you can’t pay more than those will make possible. Additionally, in many cases you’ll end up with people working and providing services before finding out that they won’t be paid for it. That’s just off the cuff though.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  That only applies to companies accepting only (or virtually only) government health insurance, of which there are either few or none. In reality, it’s part of the reason treatment is so expensive. They charge private entities a lot more to make up for the government mandated rates. The law is that you can’t charge the government more than anyone else. And this is after we swore we would never let another Rwanda or another Serbia happen. Actually, this raises a very interesting point to parallel the author’s. By the same logic, a pacifist society must be willing to go to war to protect that pacifism.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > And this is after we swore we would never let another Rwanda or another Serbia happen. What on earth does this have to do with health insurance?
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      I’m sorry, I was editing another reply in a tab on my iPhone and something went wrong.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    US healthcare spending is almost equally split between government and private insurance. US government spends more per capita on healthcare than eg UK government, and doesn't have universal coverage and has worse results across a range of indicators. https://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-compare-internationally/ https://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-co... US tax-payers are subsidising the US's terrible healthcare.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
There was a much better article posted to HN not long ago that did a deeper dive into what's going on: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemploy... The overall conclusion was that automation (and, we can assume, globalization) was essentially digging away at "middle-skilled" jobs, like manufacturing. These are jobs where employees must invest a certain amount of time and training to be paid well, and then they find that their entire industry is drying up. They are faced with a few choices, and many of those lead towards a less attractive, lower-paying job than they had before. With a social safety net, many are simply exiting the job market and relying on disability or other means to get by rather than take a crap job at crap wages. Although the age group here is different, a lot of the same forces are likely at play. US employers do not see labor as an investment, and haven't for a long time (if ever); they are generally unwilling to hire lower-skilled employees and invest in training them. Instead, they cry constantly that there isn't a large enough pool of skilled labor to draw from (and in the tech sector, this is why they think they need lots of H-1Bs). Meanwhile, potential employees are faced with a market where, if they work very hard and teach themselves some skill at their own cost, they might be able to get a job working for an employer who will pay them as little as they can get away with paying them (the wage pressure), and potentially also having to pay off student loans. Alternatively, they can forego this rat race and get some middle-skill job -- something between food service and senior software developer -- and make enough to get by, and with less debt, and spend whatever extra money they've got left over on cheap entertainment. They certainly aren't going to be able to afford a house on their wages, that hasn't been possible since the 60s. This is a complex issue with manifold causes and effects and, as the article I linked points out, nobody seems to have a solid handle on all of it yet. There's lots of ideology but not clear enough data yet.
- Chyzwar 9y ago
  My uncle immigrant living in the US, working as a cleaner, very poor English (bad hearing) and his wife managed to get a terraced house in a decent area of Chicago. When I see teenagers with iPhones and their parents buying Tesla cars I can see why they will never afford a house. Average American is unable to save money, most overspend. Combine this with poor education and unwillingness to learn or relocate.
madaxe_again 9y ago
Indeed. One other factor which the study does not touch upon but I do wonder about - burnout - essentially "poor employment conditions". One thing which has substantially changed between '99 and now is employer expectation of availability. In '99, you may have worked 9-6, but when you left the office, you left the office. Sure, some tech folks, some traders, etc. may have had pagers back then - but now, the mobile phone is ubiquitous, and the universal expectation is that you are available and ready to work, even if it's 4am on Sunday and you got married yesterday. It's purely anecdotal, but I am "in my prime", and have opted out of being a productive member of society for now, as being broke beats being broken. I'm not alone in this - in the past 18 months of peripateticism, I've met many others, mostly tech folks, in the same boat. Bluntly, market price isn't enough to completely sacrifice any semblance of an existence outside of work.
- DougN7 9y ago
  Honest question: how do you survive. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had the option to opt out, unless I wanted to move home with Mom. The opportunity might be different than it used to be.
  - madaxe_again 9y ago
    I sold my equity back to the business when I left. It wasn't crazy money, but enough to tide me over while transitioning to self-suffiency - I'm now the proud owner of a shack and a few acres of halfway decent arable land in a remote corner of Uruguay. $25,000 outlay. Becoming a citizen and all that is easy here. I know it's not an option open to everyone, and I'll be honest and say that a lot of the folks I've met have trod a similar path - startup, decade of unsustainable grind, total burnout, with maybe 0.1% of what we dreamed of to show for it. I have however also met folks on the road who've thrown the towel in with no capital, who are finding ways of making it work - one couple even had two under-ten children, and were travelling, gigging, and educating their incredibly worldly and well informed kids, with a view to "maybe finding a ruin somewhere". It takes all sorts, but I think there are an increasing number of people "opting out".
    - 9y ago
8ytecoder 9y ago
There's a related problem. No company wants to be the first to raise wages either because their margin is already thin or they don't yet have faith in the economy to dive head first. Usually the latter. A lot about the economy is sentiment. When sentiment improves, companies will invest more in labor as well as other improvements. Until then they wouldn't want to look a fool.
walshemj 9y ago
Depends governments like to fiddle unemployment figures under reporting that actual unemployment rate.
echevil 9y ago
It's not an extraordinary claim at all as these two events co-exist: Too few people have skills that companies need; too many people having no skills or irrelevant skills are looking for jobs.
PatchMonkey 9y ago
Or, we have too many people for the jobs that are hiring Americans. That pretty well explains both. Trump would be right to constrict access to H1B1 visas for foreign workers in the US, in this case. But we also have a problem of access to those coding bootcamps - everyone has a smartphone, not everyone has a modern desktop/laptop. As far as coding bootcamps, there's also this: https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-developer-33e9da2dc58c https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-deve... The same in the field of law: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-students-too-few-legal-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-stud... Here's what employers are saying: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/28/surveys-find-employers-have-too-few-and-too-many-qualified-workers https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/28/surveys-find... But a realistic explanation? Monopsony: too few employers competing for workers with any given skill set. https://slate.com/business/2018/01/after-all-the-talk-about-a-u-s-skills-shortage-the-real-problem-may-be-an-employer-shortage.html https://slate.com/business/2018/01/after-all-the-talk-about-... Monopsony is getting some attention: https://www.thenation.com/article/does-monopoly-power-explain-workers-stagnant-wages/0 https://www.thenation.com/article/does-monopoly-power-explai... And here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/ask-the-headhunter-are-monopolies-on-jobs-keeping-pay-low https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/ask-...
shullbitt0r 9y ago
catch 22; you need workers to make money, but you need money to make workers.

by ekidd 9y ago

kmonsen 9y ago

We see this all the time in tech, cannot find people is usually cannot find people with the skills and experience we want for the price we are willing to pay. This will always be true if you offer less than the current market rate which startups seems to think they are entitled to.

whereismypwd 9y ago
I saw an ad here a few days ago on HN for a "Lead ML Researcher" for $85-100k + 0.5-2%.
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  Exactly the point. And then people complain about labour shortages in ML.
icelancer 9y ago
>> current market rate Many of the new positions being created in startups have no defined market rate, which causes more malinvestment (overpaying workers who don't produce well enough) or shortage of labor due to insufficient perceived compensation. Businesses will almost always err on the side of shortage of labor and keeping costs down when they can (though you could argue otherwise in the current ridiculous VC-backed industry), so this will always be a "problem" in the market.
psyc 9y ago
What I've seen in tech is the idea that literally any number of false negatives is worth avoiding a single bad hire. It's fine to claim that trade-off is worth it to you, but it's ludicrous to simultaneously claim there's a shortage of talent. That's just a shortage of risk-free opportunity. Hey, I suffer from a shortage of risk-free opportunities too.
- throwaway65536 9y ago
  In this age of ghosting people, it seems like everybody is just eyeing everyone else for a reason to stop talking to them or pull the trigger on the block button. We used to be socially-integrated enough to put up with people's foibles and correct them until we are all within a liveable range. Now you cannot confront or give feedback without it blowing up into hyperbole. I have been openly asked about my politics at an interview for a Y Combinator startup (Starsky Robotics). "We need to make sure you are not a horrible person." One of my references later told me that the co-founder was on the phone almost 20 minutes asking probing questions about me. No offer, no feedback. Who stands a chance with that level of scrutiny?
  - psyc 9y ago
    This hasn’t happened to me yet, but now it has a place in my thoughts, whereas 10 years ago I had no inkling of the possibility whatsoever.
  - hycaria 9y ago
    Well considering y combinator is not empty every year, there must be people who have a chance with that level of scrutiny.
    - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
      And we have a word for those people: milquetoast. I'm not sure people would hire me after asking about my politics for 20 minutes. What, you're gonna employ someone after getting an earful about Marx and Bookchin?
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
I always hear people claiming tech is full of over-inflated salaries, then look at jobs in my area and see that people want a web-dev with 3-5 years of experience in specific frameworks and offer to pay about $82k/year. Yeah ok guys, that's pretty inflated, innit /s?
- walshemj 9y ago
  I have in the UK seen a job add in an agency for an experienced php developer at £27k next to it was for a senior "ground worker" for > £35k. A ground worker is the PC term what's known in civil engineering as a "navvy" Oh and the ground worker would get OT
  - sjg007 9y ago
    You're going to have to translate what a navvy or ground worker is for us yanks.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      It's guy who digs a hole in the ground for civil engineering projects.
- mcguire 9y ago
  The median personal income in the US is $31-35k. The median household income was $59k last year. What exactly are the requirements for a "web developer" with 3-5 years experience? More or less than a registered nurse with 3-5 years experience (~$60k)?
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    Except nursing is experiencing a major shortage too - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/nursing-shortage/459741/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/nursing-s... So if anything, the low wages for nurses just just further supports the parent comment -- wages are too low. If you want to fill a shortage, you need to start by raising wages substantially. If for no other reason than to at least allow new students some hope of ever repaying the always-increasing college costs required to enter these fields.
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Often skills that could be learned in a week by an experienced practitioner, but we refuse to let you learn them on the job! Even if you'll be at the job for years. Rather wait a year instead for a unicorn to show.
- ghthor 9y ago
  This is pretty much why I won't give anywhere near 100% at a company that treats me or my co-workers like that.

golemiprague 9y ago

As if you don't know what the explanation is, illegal immigration and some dodgy legal immigration for the purpose of cheap labour, it is very simple.

jordanb 9y ago

One way to look at it is there is a ceiling on American wages imposed by globalization. Above that ceiling you're better off going overseas. But that ceiling is below the market-clearing price of labor in the us.

Retric 9y ago
That does not work. If you can substitute foreign labor then there is no shortage. If you can't substitute foreign labor then it's irrelevant. You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  I think"can but really don't want to" would explain part of it. What do people do when presented with a workable but unappealing solution? They complain a lot and then grudgingly do it.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior. Or insufficient capital investment and bad management holding down productivity. You can't pay a worker more than their productivity, but if the best you can get out of them is too little, it may not be worth their while. You could then plausibly see a shortage of workers, wage suppression, and stagnant productivity statistics at the same time.
  - Retric 9y ago
    You are describing insufficient demand, not insufficient workers. The reasons for low demand are more or less irrelevant to worker pay, just that demand is low.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Yes, there are many curious effects and phenomena once we dispense with this silly expectation of business being sustainable.

SeanBoocock 9y ago

I would think then that companies who are understaffed because they cannot hire people with the specialized skills they need would lose out in the long run to competitors who are willing to pay market/above-market wages for talent. Anecdotally that doesn't seem to have been happening.

WalterSear 9y ago
There is no long run. The landscape is changing so fast that any competitive advantage that unfolds over multiple years, such as treating your employees well, fostering junior developers etc, doesn't have much of an effect. There's too much chaos and reinvention going on.

brightball 9y ago

Think professions where reimbursement is controlled by an outside entity like insurance or Medicaid. Even with supply and demand you can’t pay more than those will make possible. Additionally, in many cases you’ll end up with people working and providing services before finding out that they won’t be paid for it. That’s just off the cuff though.

ComputerGuru 9y ago
That only applies to companies accepting only (or virtually only) government health insurance, of which there are either few or none. In reality, it’s part of the reason treatment is so expensive. They charge private entities a lot more to make up for the government mandated rates. The law is that you can’t charge the government more than anyone else. And this is after we swore we would never let another Rwanda or another Serbia happen. Actually, this raises a very interesting point to parallel the author’s. By the same logic, a pacifist society must be willing to go to war to protect that pacifism.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > And this is after we swore we would never let another Rwanda or another Serbia happen. What on earth does this have to do with health insurance?
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    I’m sorry, I was editing another reply in a tab on my iPhone and something went wrong.
- DanBC 9y ago
  US healthcare spending is almost equally split between government and private insurance. US government spends more per capita on healthcare than eg UK government, and doesn't have universal coverage and has worse results across a range of indicators. https://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-compare-internationally/ https://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-co... US tax-payers are subsidising the US's terrible healthcare.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

There was a much better article posted to HN not long ago that did a deeper dive into what's going on: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemploy... The overall conclusion was that automation (and, we can assume, globalization) was essentially digging away at "middle-skilled" jobs, like manufacturing. These are jobs where employees must invest a certain amount of time and training to be paid well, and then they find that their entire industry is drying up. They are faced with a few choices, and many of those lead towards a less attractive, lower-paying job than they had before. With a social safety net, many are simply exiting the job market and relying on disability or other means to get by rather than take a crap job at crap wages. Although the age group here is different, a lot of the same forces are likely at play. US employers do not see labor as an investment, and haven't for a long time (if ever); they are generally unwilling to hire lower-skilled employees and invest in training them. Instead, they cry constantly that there isn't a large enough pool of skilled labor to draw from (and in the tech sector, this is why they think they need lots of H-1Bs). Meanwhile, potential employees are faced with a market where, if they work very hard and teach themselves some skill at their own cost, they might be able to get a job working for an employer who will pay them as little as they can get away with paying them (the wage pressure), and potentially also having to pay off student loans. Alternatively, they can forego this rat race and get some middle-skill job -- something between food service and senior software developer -- and make enough to get by, and with less debt, and spend whatever extra money they've got left over on cheap entertainment. They certainly aren't going to be able to afford a house on their wages, that hasn't been possible since the 60s. This is a complex issue with manifold causes and effects and, as the article I linked points out, nobody seems to have a solid handle on all of it yet. There's lots of ideology but not clear enough data yet.

Chyzwar 9y ago
My uncle immigrant living in the US, working as a cleaner, very poor English (bad hearing) and his wife managed to get a terraced house in a decent area of Chicago. When I see teenagers with iPhones and their parents buying Tesla cars I can see why they will never afford a house. Average American is unable to save money, most overspend. Combine this with poor education and unwillingness to learn or relocate.

madaxe_again 9y ago

Indeed. One other factor which the study does not touch upon but I do wonder about - burnout - essentially "poor employment conditions". One thing which has substantially changed between '99 and now is employer expectation of availability. In '99, you may have worked 9-6, but when you left the office, you left the office. Sure, some tech folks, some traders, etc. may have had pagers back then - but now, the mobile phone is ubiquitous, and the universal expectation is that you are available and ready to work, even if it's 4am on Sunday and you got married yesterday. It's purely anecdotal, but I am "in my prime", and have opted out of being a productive member of society for now, as being broke beats being broken. I'm not alone in this - in the past 18 months of peripateticism, I've met many others, mostly tech folks, in the same boat. Bluntly, market price isn't enough to completely sacrifice any semblance of an existence outside of work.

DougN7 9y ago
Honest question: how do you survive. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had the option to opt out, unless I wanted to move home with Mom. The opportunity might be different than it used to be.
- madaxe_again 9y ago
  I sold my equity back to the business when I left. It wasn't crazy money, but enough to tide me over while transitioning to self-suffiency - I'm now the proud owner of a shack and a few acres of halfway decent arable land in a remote corner of Uruguay. $25,000 outlay. Becoming a citizen and all that is easy here. I know it's not an option open to everyone, and I'll be honest and say that a lot of the folks I've met have trod a similar path - startup, decade of unsustainable grind, total burnout, with maybe 0.1% of what we dreamed of to show for it. I have however also met folks on the road who've thrown the towel in with no capital, who are finding ways of making it work - one couple even had two under-ten children, and were travelling, gigging, and educating their incredibly worldly and well informed kids, with a view to "maybe finding a ruin somewhere". It takes all sorts, but I think there are an increasing number of people "opting out".
  - 9y ago

8ytecoder 9y ago

There's a related problem. No company wants to be the first to raise wages either because their margin is already thin or they don't yet have faith in the economy to dive head first. Usually the latter. A lot about the economy is sentiment. When sentiment improves, companies will invest more in labor as well as other improvements. Until then they wouldn't want to look a fool.

walshemj 9y ago

Depends governments like to fiddle unemployment figures under reporting that actual unemployment rate.

echevil 9y ago

It's not an extraordinary claim at all as these two events co-exist: Too few people have skills that companies need; too many people having no skills or irrelevant skills are looking for jobs.

PatchMonkey 9y ago

Or, we have too many people for the jobs that are hiring Americans. That pretty well explains both. Trump would be right to constrict access to H1B1 visas for foreign workers in the US, in this case. But we also have a problem of access to those coding bootcamps - everyone has a smartphone, not everyone has a modern desktop/laptop. As far as coding bootcamps, there's also this: https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-developer-33e9da2dc58c https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-deve... The same in the field of law: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-students-too-few-legal-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-stud... Here's what employers are saying: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/28/surveys-find-employers-have-too-few-and-too-many-qualified-workers https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/28/surveys-find... But a realistic explanation? Monopsony: too few employers competing for workers with any given skill set. https://slate.com/business/2018/01/after-all-the-talk-about-a-u-s-skills-shortage-the-real-problem-may-be-an-employer-shortage.html https://slate.com/business/2018/01/after-all-the-talk-about-... Monopsony is getting some attention: https://www.thenation.com/article/does-monopoly-power-explain-workers-stagnant-wages/0 https://www.thenation.com/article/does-monopoly-power-explai... And here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/ask-the-headhunter-are-monopolies-on-jobs-keeping-pay-low https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/ask-...

shullbitt0r 9y ago

catch 22; you need workers to make money, but you need money to make workers.