7 ms·

Vox's headline is ridiculous, but the study in question is pretty neat. https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/yySyK7fd https://www.aeaweb.org

by imh 8y ago

Vox's headline is ridiculous, but the study in question is pretty neat. https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/yySyK7fd https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/yyS... (pdf warning) They show that even within a specific (job-title, company, state) tuple, higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way. That doesn't mean the skills gap is a lie, or any other nefarious bad behavior on the company's part. The study doesn't go into that.

partiallypro 8y ago
I knew as soon as I saw the source, this would be the case....Matt Yglesias isn't exactly...honest. He has a history of false claims and or really bad ideas. More of a commentator than a journalist, though somehow he is treated as one by Vox.
- sigil 8y ago
  He co-founded Vox, so bias in that direction isn't terribly surprising.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    What amazes me if that Vox has a show on Netflix that is supposed to explain things when their organization is notorious for getting basic things wrong. Look, everyone gets something wrong, but they sometimes do so with intent to mislead. I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary. I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Agreed on Vox and Fox. The thing I find most stunning when people bring Fox up is they still think it’s 2008 it seems. Fox News isn’t bad, Fox Opinion isn’t good, but it’s more fair than it was... largely because GOP-Actual doesn’t like and didn’t want Trump. I suppose it’s a bit funny to me that Vox articles often make it to the front page of HN, but FoxNews just don’t. But yea, Vox is worse.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Wait, who believes that Vox isn't opinion? Personally, I have always treated all their stuff as op-eds.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        I mean, it's kind of in the name.
      - partiallypro 8y ago
        Maybe the fact that they have a show on Netflix called "Explained" and Ezra, Matt, etc all list themselves as journalists.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- KerrickStaley 8y ago
  Could you post examples of when Matt has made false or misleading statements? The way you characterize his journalism doesn't seem accurate to me.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    I think the fact that he deleted almost all of his past tweets because they came under fire...including one that stated that the Nazis had some good ideas, is a solid example. He often strips things from MMFA and Think Progress (which he used to writer for!) without fact checking them at all. He helped perpetuate the idea that cross hairs on a map caused violence. When Obama was in office he falsely lowered the national debt by trillions of dollars to make things not sound so bad. So, so many examples. Don't even get me started on the "Voxsplainers." On Twitter he is basically considered a joke on both sides of the aisle.
    - fishtank 8y ago
      Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle? He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.
      - partiallypro 8y ago
        If that's what you want to believe, but it's not true. He is not really respected by anyone except the people that he brought over from Think Progress. Not sure what's respectable about things he's said in the past or continues to say. He deletes them...because he knows they were dumb. One of his "expert" economic reports was that the US should simply print its way out of debt, raise the minimum wage to $100 and let the Fed figure it out...all of which are laughable to any actual economist, yes including left wing economists, because it would actually impoverish the poor even more. His platform is to rile people up, not actually convey real ideas or solutions. That is why he's a running meme on both sides of the aisle and his flippant regard for facts has more than carried over to Vox.
wbl 8y ago
Yes it does: people were positing that high unemployment was due to structural frictions not macroeconomic problems. Then the macroeconomic problems got better, no effort was made to solve the structural frictions, and employers got less choosy.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way." Can you explain the causal bit? The sneaky detail that stands out to me is that this is the 'share' or '%' of jobs with high skills went down, but not necessarily the absolute number of high skills jobs. So during a recession, there are not a lot of low-end jobs available. As things warm up, more Ops. needed, so more jobs. But the 'long term view' R&D jobs may have always been there in absolute terms. They might have only changed in relative terms because of the number of regular jobs going up and down. It implies more causality between 'regular jobs' and 'the economy' but maybe less so between 'high end jobs' and 'the economy'. Ergo, the 'skills' gap still exists - companies still want high end folks and can't find them. Which makes sense as well because I believe one could crudely say there is a 'skills gap' - anyone hiring high-end people can feel this.
- imh 8y ago
  On the causal bit: So, you'd probably be better off skimming the paper for the details, but the gist is that they estimate the effect of unemployment on skills requirements in a few ways, and the results all come out about the same. They use state-to-state variation to take out some of the bigger macroeconomic factors. They use the return of a huge number of troops when we pull out of Afghanistan for another change that is mostly uncorrelated with economic conditions and do some other clever stats to make that assumption more solid. (I briefly skimmed it hours ago when I made the parent comment, so I might be a bit off now, but that's the gist of what stood out to me). Showing causality is generally about finding apples-to-apples comparisons and finding sources of randomness causally upstream of what you want to measure the effect of, to get a kind of mini-experiment. They do this. It's not proof, but it's some decent evidence. ------------ On your question about percent vs absolute: Your idea is totally plausible and doesn't contradict the study, as far as my skimming goes. There's no answer to to "why" just a decent argument if I suddenly made unemployment higher, more of the job postings you see would have higher skill requirements. My pet theory on "why" is that filtering out the noise gets really hard when tons of people start applying, so they up the bar.
- qqqwerty 8y ago
  > companies still want high end folks and can't find them Companies will always want the highest end folks, as it makes them more competitive and productive. The question is are they willing to pay competitively for that talent. More often than not, the answer is no. I feel that the 'skills gap' was just a convenient excuse during the recession. Companies and hiring managers will always want the best bang for their buck, so when unemployment is high, they aimed higher but still complained they weren't getting what they wanted. And now that unemployment is low, they are just blaming their hiring woes on that. This is just an anecdote, but during the depths of the recession, the company I worked for was hiring folks with PhDs for low level admin jobs. And at the same time we were 'struggling' to fill some of our technical roles because we couldn't find folks with the 'right skills'. The funny thing was, I had got hired into that technical role with absolutely no experience, fresh out of college, right before the recession started. [edit]: To be fair, I think it was partly done to help filter out resumes, as each job posting would get a TON of responses. And there was another issue (if I re-call correctly) where the rate of people changing jobs also dropped pretty dramatically (probably for job security reasons), so the job market for mid-level folks was pretty illiquid at the time. So combine those two things, and that could lead to the perception that there was a skills gap.

by imh 8y ago

partiallypro 8y ago

I knew as soon as I saw the source, this would be the case....Matt Yglesias isn't exactly...honest. He has a history of false claims and or really bad ideas. More of a commentator than a journalist, though somehow he is treated as one by Vox.

sigil 8y ago
He co-founded Vox, so bias in that direction isn't terribly surprising.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  What amazes me if that Vox has a show on Netflix that is supposed to explain things when their organization is notorious for getting basic things wrong. Look, everyone gets something wrong, but they sometimes do so with intent to mislead. I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary. I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Agreed on Vox and Fox. The thing I find most stunning when people bring Fox up is they still think it’s 2008 it seems. Fox News isn’t bad, Fox Opinion isn’t good, but it’s more fair than it was... largely because GOP-Actual doesn’t like and didn’t want Trump. I suppose it’s a bit funny to me that Vox articles often make it to the front page of HN, but FoxNews just don’t. But yea, Vox is worse.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Wait, who believes that Vox isn't opinion? Personally, I have always treated all their stuff as op-eds.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      I mean, it's kind of in the name.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      Maybe the fact that they have a show on Netflix called "Explained" and Ezra, Matt, etc all list themselves as journalists.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
KerrickStaley 8y ago
Could you post examples of when Matt has made false or misleading statements? The way you characterize his journalism doesn't seem accurate to me.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  I think the fact that he deleted almost all of his past tweets because they came under fire...including one that stated that the Nazis had some good ideas, is a solid example. He often strips things from MMFA and Think Progress (which he used to writer for!) without fact checking them at all. He helped perpetuate the idea that cross hairs on a map caused violence. When Obama was in office he falsely lowered the national debt by trillions of dollars to make things not sound so bad. So, so many examples. Don't even get me started on the "Voxsplainers." On Twitter he is basically considered a joke on both sides of the aisle.
  - fishtank 8y ago
    Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle? He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      If that's what you want to believe, but it's not true. He is not really respected by anyone except the people that he brought over from Think Progress. Not sure what's respectable about things he's said in the past or continues to say. He deletes them...because he knows they were dumb. One of his "expert" economic reports was that the US should simply print its way out of debt, raise the minimum wage to $100 and let the Fed figure it out...all of which are laughable to any actual economist, yes including left wing economists, because it would actually impoverish the poor even more. His platform is to rile people up, not actually convey real ideas or solutions. That is why he's a running meme on both sides of the aisle and his flippant regard for facts has more than carried over to Vox.

wbl 8y ago

Yes it does: people were positing that high unemployment was due to structural frictions not macroeconomic problems. Then the macroeconomic problems got better, no effort was made to solve the structural frictions, and employers got less choosy.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way." Can you explain the causal bit? The sneaky detail that stands out to me is that this is the 'share' or '%' of jobs with high skills went down, but not necessarily the absolute number of high skills jobs. So during a recession, there are not a lot of low-end jobs available. As things warm up, more Ops. needed, so more jobs. But the 'long term view' R&D jobs may have always been there in absolute terms. They might have only changed in relative terms because of the number of regular jobs going up and down. It implies more causality between 'regular jobs' and 'the economy' but maybe less so between 'high end jobs' and 'the economy'. Ergo, the 'skills' gap still exists - companies still want high end folks and can't find them. Which makes sense as well because I believe one could crudely say there is a 'skills gap' - anyone hiring high-end people can feel this.

imh 8y ago
On the causal bit: So, you'd probably be better off skimming the paper for the details, but the gist is that they estimate the effect of unemployment on skills requirements in a few ways, and the results all come out about the same. They use state-to-state variation to take out some of the bigger macroeconomic factors. They use the return of a huge number of troops when we pull out of Afghanistan for another change that is mostly uncorrelated with economic conditions and do some other clever stats to make that assumption more solid. (I briefly skimmed it hours ago when I made the parent comment, so I might be a bit off now, but that's the gist of what stood out to me). Showing causality is generally about finding apples-to-apples comparisons and finding sources of randomness causally upstream of what you want to measure the effect of, to get a kind of mini-experiment. They do this. It's not proof, but it's some decent evidence. ------------ On your question about percent vs absolute: Your idea is totally plausible and doesn't contradict the study, as far as my skimming goes. There's no answer to to "why" just a decent argument if I suddenly made unemployment higher, more of the job postings you see would have higher skill requirements. My pet theory on "why" is that filtering out the noise gets really hard when tons of people start applying, so they up the bar.
qqqwerty 8y ago
> companies still want high end folks and can't find them Companies will always want the highest end folks, as it makes them more competitive and productive. The question is are they willing to pay competitively for that talent. More often than not, the answer is no. I feel that the 'skills gap' was just a convenient excuse during the recession. Companies and hiring managers will always want the best bang for their buck, so when unemployment is high, they aimed higher but still complained they weren't getting what they wanted. And now that unemployment is low, they are just blaming their hiring woes on that. This is just an anecdote, but during the depths of the recession, the company I worked for was hiring folks with PhDs for low level admin jobs. And at the same time we were 'struggling' to fill some of our technical roles because we couldn't find folks with the 'right skills'. The funny thing was, I had got hired into that technical role with absolutely no experience, fresh out of college, right before the recession started. [edit]: To be fair, I think it was partly done to help filter out resumes, as each job posting would get a TON of responses. And there was another issue (if I re-call correctly) where the rate of people changing jobs also dropped pretty dramatically (probably for job security reasons), so the job market for mid-level folks was pretty illiquid at the time. So combine those two things, and that could lead to the perception that there was a skills gap.