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> The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can

> The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill. This is what a strong economy actually looks like. It's hard (in my experience) to get Americans to understand this, because our economy here has been so bad for so long, most people here have never experienced anything like this.

CalRobert 8y ago
It's like you need to grab Plato for a search and rescue mission to the cave.
lkrubner 8y ago
Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power. In a strong economy, the percentage of national income going to workers would increase, as it did from 1935 to 1973.
- jhoechtl 8y ago
  This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    See this graph: http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-26-at-11.30.08-AM.png http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree... A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-college-degree http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike-if-they-do-not-have-women http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-1958 http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?
  - rory096 8y ago
    The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits. https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-thirty-years https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Additionally, in 1973, there was a good chance you had a partner who could stay at home to watch the kid(s). Now you have both people working whether you like it or not, because you're competing with two-income households for housing. Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing, but making it (on average) necessary for two people to work to afford a home when before it took one is a bad thing.
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    > Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing Any reason you used the term servitude which implies a negative connotation, when many women were happy with that arrangement? It also implies none of the women received positive utility from staying at home with the kids and it was always a chore, which seems a little ridiculous. We should be embracing every opportunity for more personal involvement with our children and family, not calling it servitude. It does all families, past, present and future, a huge disservice.
    - rcxdude 8y ago
      the term presumably is used because at that point it was not a choice. Many women may have been happy with it, but there was scant alternative for those who were not.
      - CalRobert 8y ago
        It depends on a lot on where you were, but there are places that literally fired women when they got married. https://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-things-have-changed-ten-things-that-irish-women-could-not-do-in-1970s-183526621-237593131 https://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-things-have-changed-te... This has changed, but it reveals a lot. It also might relate to why it's so hard to find teachers for the price government is accustomed to paying - if you were a well-educated woman in the 1950's you had far fewer options (aka bargaining power) than you do today, and teaching was likely to be one of the few options with a bit of prestige and mental stimulation available to you. It's true that women weren't FORCED to not work, but to suggest that they didn't face a strong disadvantage is disingenuous. Hell, it's still a rampant problem - how many tech bros get off an interview and then say "ah but she's 32, she'll want to take maternity soon". This is a good reason for making maternity and paternity leave equal, incidentally... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/podcasts/the-daily/pregnancy-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/podcasts/the-daily/pregna... Though for all that, my wife stays home with our kid by choice. She went back to work when our daughter was 6 months old, and after six months of barely seeing her outside of the weekends she just couldn't bear it (I didn't much like it either). The only reason we can do that is because I have a good paying job in tech making something over the 90th percentile of incomes in my country. I wish other people had that choice. Hell, I wish I had that choice. But few do.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist. Overall, it's still been a VERY strong economy since '73. The US has been either first or second in GDP growth EVERY YEAR FOR 40 years! China has been killing it recently, but over the given time period, the US is still by far the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_growth_1980%E2%80%932010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_growt... A real weak economy would look like Japan, Ukraine, Russia, Zimbabwe, etc. Life for the laborer has been under systemic attack since Reagan, but the US economy as a whole has been doing swimmingly.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist. Replace capitalist with monopolist and I'd agree. How many capitalists make losses for 20 years and not only stay in their job, but actually become the world's richest person? Where would Uber be if they couldn't use VC money to undercut taxi companies, and subsidize hundreds of millions in losses. And let's not even get started on the issue of offshore tax avoidance, something your local hardware store will never have access to.
  - mbrodersen 8y ago
    GDP is a very bad target to aim for.
- refurb 8y ago
  Total compensation has almost doubled since 1970, adjusting for inflation. Looking at wages alone is only half the picture.
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    You are thinking of average compensation. Most reasonable people avoid talking about average compensation, since income has concentrated into the hands of the top workers. The top 1% of Hollywood actors, sports athletes and Wall Street hedge fund traders make several million dollars a year, and therefore they grossly distort the average. Their income hides the reality. If we focus on median income, of all forms, total real compensation for men has declined since 1973.
2019ideas 8y ago
>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. No mention of wages and jobs. In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. Vacation policy? Unpaid, but at 60$/hr, I just afford to take 3 weeks of vacation, but 2 weeks of holidays too.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Congratulations on being in a high-demand field. It’s pretty great. But it’s definitely not the experience for most American workers.
  - hpkuarg 8y ago
    Is the Swedish case the same even for non-high demand fields? I suppose by definition every job (irrespective of compensation or skill needed) would be a high demand field if it takes 12 months to fill; at which point I suggest that what Sweden has is a demographics problem, not a strong economy.
    - deogeo 8y ago
      It's not a demographics problem from the point of view of the workers.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. When did that start? I left EE in about 2006 because I felt like all the employers were very demanding of specific skillsets and treated engineers like they were easily replaceable.
hopefulengineer 8y ago
No, the US economy is strong. The problem is that big business lobbies for more H1B and illegal immigration to increase supply of labor and thus reduce wages and benefits. You also have cases of collusion like FAANG working together to suppress wages The State of the Union is a prime example of how they rationalize it, with Trump saying "Our unemployment rate is too low" and that's why we need more immigration. That's how you get 40 years of stagnant wages and rising income inequality, every time the labor market tightens up we bring in more people Meanwhile our workforce participation rate is below 70%. If wages rose people might actually come back into the workforce.
Mirioron 8y ago
>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. Is it actually though? Couldn't it also be a sign of an aging population? Sweden's population is growing, but it's mostly due to immigration. Considering the type of immigration that's mostly happening it's not bringing in lots of skilled workers.
- netjiro 8y ago
  Partially anecdotal: The problem with hiring is from what I've seen not due to ageing population. Instead, due to very protective employment regulation employers in Sweden are absurdly slow and picky when hiring. Resulting in a very large temp staffing sector. They are also surprisingly conservative in expectations. Contrasting anecdotal rant: In 2014-2018 I was trying to help a Swedish company get a tech dev project going. They needed to bring in about five experts. For years this project was delayed until it was no longer relevant, because they had a pointlessly limited view on who they needed to hire, at what cost and under which structure. They would not accept a 15% salary increase above their opinion of the norm, and neither a distributed project nor a collaborative partner network construct. This loss of opportunity was huge for them. During the same time I was staffing, running, and completing two projects in Switzerland, total of 25ppl. No issues, quick handling, excellent outcome. The Swiss investors understood that it's ok to run a project distributed across five countries and pay an extra 20-50% if it's difficult to find good people locally in a given field. Skill and speed is more important than location, cost, surname, language[2], etc. This is not the only such situation I've come across in Sweden. I work as an R&D consultant specialised in setting up and running distributed collaborative high risk tech projects. Despite being a native Swede it's easier for me to run projects in Switzerland than in Sweden. Kind of sad. For your second point: For skilled immigrants (stem university degree) the situation is quite good. From what I've heard, 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and onward tend to outperform the "native" population. This may change in Sweden after the large influx of unskilled refugees in the last 20-30 years, vs the predominantly work based immigration of 1950-1980s. Statistically [1]: Sweden has one of the highest gaps in unemployment between European and non-European unskilled immigrants. If you're uneducated you _really_ should migrate to somewhere else if you _ever_ want to get a job. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigration_to_Sweden/0/034d473a17022b320351362d653c1fe34b0bccf0.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigrat... 2: as long as they know English well enough :)

CalRobert 8y ago

It's like you need to grab Plato for a search and rescue mission to the cave.

lkrubner 8y ago

Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power. In a strong economy, the percentage of national income going to workers would increase, as it did from 1935 to 1973.

jhoechtl 8y ago
This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?
- lkrubner 8y ago
  See this graph: http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-26-at-11.30.08-AM.png http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree... A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-college-degree http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike-if-they-do-not-have-women http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-1958 http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...
merpnderp 8y ago
I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?
- rory096 8y ago
  The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits. https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-thirty-years https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...
CalRobert 8y ago
Additionally, in 1973, there was a good chance you had a partner who could stay at home to watch the kid(s). Now you have both people working whether you like it or not, because you're competing with two-income households for housing. Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing, but making it (on average) necessary for two people to work to afford a home when before it took one is a bad thing.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  > Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing Any reason you used the term servitude which implies a negative connotation, when many women were happy with that arrangement? It also implies none of the women received positive utility from staying at home with the kids and it was always a chore, which seems a little ridiculous. We should be embracing every opportunity for more personal involvement with our children and family, not calling it servitude. It does all families, past, present and future, a huge disservice.
  - rcxdude 8y ago
    the term presumably is used because at that point it was not a choice. Many women may have been happy with it, but there was scant alternative for those who were not.
    - CalRobert 8y ago
      It depends on a lot on where you were, but there are places that literally fired women when they got married. https://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-things-have-changed-ten-things-that-irish-women-could-not-do-in-1970s-183526621-237593131 https://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-things-have-changed-te... This has changed, but it reveals a lot. It also might relate to why it's so hard to find teachers for the price government is accustomed to paying - if you were a well-educated woman in the 1950's you had far fewer options (aka bargaining power) than you do today, and teaching was likely to be one of the few options with a bit of prestige and mental stimulation available to you. It's true that women weren't FORCED to not work, but to suggest that they didn't face a strong disadvantage is disingenuous. Hell, it's still a rampant problem - how many tech bros get off an interview and then say "ah but she's 32, she'll want to take maternity soon". This is a good reason for making maternity and paternity leave equal, incidentally... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/podcasts/the-daily/pregnancy-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/podcasts/the-daily/pregna... Though for all that, my wife stays home with our kid by choice. She went back to work when our daughter was 6 months old, and after six months of barely seeing her outside of the weekends she just couldn't bear it (I didn't much like it either). The only reason we can do that is because I have a good paying job in tech making something over the 90th percentile of incomes in my country. I wish other people had that choice. Hell, I wish I had that choice. But few do.
onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist. Overall, it's still been a VERY strong economy since '73. The US has been either first or second in GDP growth EVERY YEAR FOR 40 years! China has been killing it recently, but over the given time period, the US is still by far the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_growth_1980%E2%80%932010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_growt... A real weak economy would look like Japan, Ukraine, Russia, Zimbabwe, etc. Life for the laborer has been under systemic attack since Reagan, but the US economy as a whole has been doing swimmingly.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist. Replace capitalist with monopolist and I'd agree. How many capitalists make losses for 20 years and not only stay in their job, but actually become the world's richest person? Where would Uber be if they couldn't use VC money to undercut taxi companies, and subsidize hundreds of millions in losses. And let's not even get started on the issue of offshore tax avoidance, something your local hardware store will never have access to.
- mbrodersen 8y ago
  GDP is a very bad target to aim for.
refurb 8y ago
Total compensation has almost doubled since 1970, adjusting for inflation. Looking at wages alone is only half the picture.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  You are thinking of average compensation. Most reasonable people avoid talking about average compensation, since income has concentrated into the hands of the top workers. The top 1% of Hollywood actors, sports athletes and Wall Street hedge fund traders make several million dollars a year, and therefore they grossly distort the average. Their income hides the reality. If we focus on median income, of all forms, total real compensation for men has declined since 1973.

2019ideas 8y ago

>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. No mention of wages and jobs. In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. Vacation policy? Unpaid, but at 60$/hr, I just afford to take 3 weeks of vacation, but 2 weeks of holidays too.

mikeash 8y ago
Congratulations on being in a high-demand field. It’s pretty great. But it’s definitely not the experience for most American workers.
- hpkuarg 8y ago
  Is the Swedish case the same even for non-high demand fields? I suppose by definition every job (irrespective of compensation or skill needed) would be a high demand field if it takes 12 months to fill; at which point I suggest that what Sweden has is a demographics problem, not a strong economy.
  - deogeo 8y ago
    It's not a demographics problem from the point of view of the workers.
vonmoltke 8y ago
> In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. When did that start? I left EE in about 2006 because I felt like all the employers were very demanding of specific skillsets and treated engineers like they were easily replaceable.

hopefulengineer 8y ago

No, the US economy is strong. The problem is that big business lobbies for more H1B and illegal immigration to increase supply of labor and thus reduce wages and benefits. You also have cases of collusion like FAANG working together to suppress wages The State of the Union is a prime example of how they rationalize it, with Trump saying "Our unemployment rate is too low" and that's why we need more immigration. That's how you get 40 years of stagnant wages and rising income inequality, every time the labor market tightens up we bring in more people Meanwhile our workforce participation rate is below 70%. If wages rose people might actually come back into the workforce.

Mirioron 8y ago

>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. Is it actually though? Couldn't it also be a sign of an aging population? Sweden's population is growing, but it's mostly due to immigration. Considering the type of immigration that's mostly happening it's not bringing in lots of skilled workers.

netjiro 8y ago
Partially anecdotal: The problem with hiring is from what I've seen not due to ageing population. Instead, due to very protective employment regulation employers in Sweden are absurdly slow and picky when hiring. Resulting in a very large temp staffing sector. They are also surprisingly conservative in expectations. Contrasting anecdotal rant: In 2014-2018 I was trying to help a Swedish company get a tech dev project going. They needed to bring in about five experts. For years this project was delayed until it was no longer relevant, because they had a pointlessly limited view on who they needed to hire, at what cost and under which structure. They would not accept a 15% salary increase above their opinion of the norm, and neither a distributed project nor a collaborative partner network construct. This loss of opportunity was huge for them. During the same time I was staffing, running, and completing two projects in Switzerland, total of 25ppl. No issues, quick handling, excellent outcome. The Swiss investors understood that it's ok to run a project distributed across five countries and pay an extra 20-50% if it's difficult to find good people locally in a given field. Skill and speed is more important than location, cost, surname, language[2], etc. This is not the only such situation I've come across in Sweden. I work as an R&D consultant specialised in setting up and running distributed collaborative high risk tech projects. Despite being a native Swede it's easier for me to run projects in Switzerland than in Sweden. Kind of sad. For your second point: For skilled immigrants (stem university degree) the situation is quite good. From what I've heard, 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and onward tend to outperform the "native" population. This may change in Sweden after the large influx of unskilled refugees in the last 20-30 years, vs the predominantly work based immigration of 1950-1980s. Statistically [1]: Sweden has one of the highest gaps in unemployment between European and non-European unskilled immigrants. If you're uneducated you _really_ should migrate to somewhere else if you _ever_ want to get a job. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigration_to_Sweden/0/034d473a17022b320351362d653c1fe34b0bccf0.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigrat... 2: as long as they know English well enough :)