10 ms·

Youth unemployment: The outsiders

66 points by shrikant 15y ago

groby_b 15y ago
Time to once more point out that we are simply running out of unskilled/low-skilled labor. And even in the high-skills environment, there's only so much. That is not the only problem, for sure - the economy certainly is bad. But at some point, we will need to acknowledge that there is simply not enough work to keep everybody gainfully employed 40+ hours a week. And the lower the skill level, the less work there is that can't be automated. This is a problem that's looming for a long time - at least since Drucker talked about the Knowledge Economy (in 1966!) the writing has been on the wall. We've been failing to acknowledge that ever since, since it's considered classist/elitist to point out the problem.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  There is no shortage of work for people with low skill levels. There are simply structural impediments to employing people in low skill jobs. One of the biggest impediments is competition from government benefits. To induce a person to work, an employer needs to offer them enough to compete with their next best alternative. At low wage levels (i.e., low skill labor), this is extremely difficult. Consumption as a function of earned income is actually flat up to about $20k/year. Thus, it is economically rational for low skilled individuals to choose not to work, even if others are willing to pay for their labor. http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work
  - bandushrew 15y ago
    which is exactly as it should be. Expecting workers to work for lower-than-survival rates is a Bad Thing. The question we should be asking isn't "how can we make low skill workers work for less money?". That is a race to the bottom that results in bigger societal problems and overall, bigger societal costs as those dispossessed people who are expected to work longer hours for less money than they can survive on realise that its easier and more profitable (and therefore more economically rational) to mug people in their homes, strip copper from empty houses and bridges and generally turn to crime.
    - Duff 15y ago
      Lower than survival? Please. People need a purpose. Something to do. That's a big part of what work is -- and our society provides all sorts of incentives that take those opportunities away and destroy the communities (as in people communities) that people with less means once depended on. In the process, we make alot of other people rich. Crime like what you describe is evidence of desperation -- people are able to strip copper out of buildings because none of the neighbors give a shit, and the local government's policies make it viable for speculators to keep buildings vacant. Read "The Death and Life of American Cities". Poverty doesn't need to equal misery, and being provided with stuff doesn't equate to happiness. We forgot about that after World War 2.
      - bandushrew 15y ago
        "Lower than survival? Please." with no minimum wage limit, what is to stop pay dropping below the 'viable life' line, however you personally define it? "People need a purpose. Something to do." They also need money: to eat, to live, to feed their dependents, to transport themselves (to work!), to educate themselves, to clothe themselves and to warm themselves in winter. To medicate themselves. To participate in life. "Crime like what you describe is evidence of desperation -- people are able to strip copper out of buildings because none of the neighbors give a shit, and the local government's policies make it viable for speculators to keep buildings vacant." That may be why people get away with it. but people perform those acts out of desperation. because they need money to do all the above. "Read "The Death and Life of American Cities". Poverty doesn't need to equal misery, and being provided with stuff doesn't equate to happiness. We forgot about that after World War 2." Im not talking about buying them televisions. Im talking about being able to afford to take your daughter to the doctor, to buy yourself a book for school. If you can so easily brush off the sodding huge downsides of poverty, I am going to go out on a limb and claim that you have never experienced it in its real form. Poverty is brutal. It makes people hard, it makes people stupid and it makes them desperate.
        Duff 15y ago
        What is the "viable life line"? Minimum wage jobs are supplements to other income. The actual minimum wage required to support a small family without external assistance is probably more like $15-18/hour. I'm not white-washing and pretending that being poor is fun. But the combination of US economic, social and criminal policies in the United States has created great injustices that have destroyed millions of lives. 1 in 3 black men will find themselves incarcerated during their lives. (http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/14873_Chapter9.pdf http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/14873_Chapter9.pdf) That statistic is a national disgrace.
  - Joakal 15y ago
    I can see the sad result, employees relying on tips. To paraphrase a republican, if the minimum wage was abolished, everyone would have jobs.
  - rjbond3rd 15y ago
    > There is no shortage of work for people with low skill levels. yummyfajitas, are you somehow unaware that there are millions of people who desperately want to work, but can't find jobs? And that they would happily say goodbye to unemployment benefits in order to get back into a job? Or do you simply not believe them?
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Clearly you didn't read my blog post. I was analyzing the incentives of the poor, a group of people who are predominantly not looking for work. Also, are you somehow unaware that there are millions of people who illegally enter the US in order to do jobs that Americans are unwilling to do? One would think that if millions of people desperately wanted to work, that demand for illegal immigrant labor should be drying up.
      - rjbond3rd 15y ago
        Apologies, I didn't realize that was your blog (I think I understand where you're coming from, provocative language aside). But could you please clarify where the jobless person gets $22k per year for leisurely consumption?
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Savings, borrowing and unearned income (welfare, etc).
        rjbond3rd 15y ago
        Could a homeowner with a six-figure 401k still qualify as poor? I'm trying to understand where the poor would get their savings and borrowing power.
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        As far as I know, assets are not taken into account when computing poverty. Only income (excluding capital gains). http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measure.html http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measur... Withdrawals from a 401k and SS count as income, so if that homeowner is a retiree they might not be poor.
  - kamagmar 15y ago
    I took a look at the data you cite in your blog post. You seem to imply people earning < $5k/yr receive on average ~$20k in welfare. However, in the BLS Expenditure Survey you used to create the figure, under the section marked "Sources of income and personal taxes", the real number is only $467.[0] This cohort doesn't appear to be very poor at all, in fact -- they report negative self-employment income. I wonder if you've confused low income with poverty. Or perhaps i'm confused, and haven't grasped your argument. [0] I'm taking welfare to be the sum of "Unemployment and workers' compensation, veterans' benefits" and "Public assistance, supplemental security income, food stamps".
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      That's interesting, I didn't notice it. It looks like the bottom income level is primarily people who took a business loss. As for my confusion, I'm only looking at people near or below the US poverty line. Business owners who take a loss are defined by the government as living in poverty. You might argue that the government overstates poverty, and I would agree with you. As for the sources of income section, it is clearly incomplete. If it weren't, consumption would be equal to income + change in net worth.
      - kamagmar 15y ago
        > Business owners who take a loss are defined by the government as living in poverty. The poverty line sets a minimum level of consumption. These people are consuming above that threshold, so i don't think the government counts them as poor. > If it weren't, consumption would be equal to income + change in net worth. You're forgetting change in asset prices. If i own a house, and consume all my income, my net worth can still change if the price of the house changes.
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        The poverty line sets a minimum level of consumption. Poverty is defined by income, not consumption. Please go read the link I provided explaining how the census calculates poverty. You're forgetting change in asset prices. Unless you are proposing that most poor people are homeowners, and that the value of their houses increased in 2009, that explanation doesn't carry much weight. Fun fact: only cash transfers are counted as income. A housing voucher, for example, pays for consumption, but does not count as income.
  - wazoox 15y ago
    This is the rationale behind the RSA in France : basically when you're living on state aid and get a job, you continue getting the state aid, decreasing gradually as the work income goes up. The goal is to give an incentive to these people to actually look for a job. That sort of worked, apparently.
- escanda 15y ago
  Indeed. A problem could be once knowledge becomes commoditized there won't be much left to walk the gap between middle class and upper class.
- pg 15y ago
  at some point, we will need to acknowledge that there is simply not enough work to keep everybody gainfully employed 40+ hours a week. Seems unlikely. We've been eliminating jobs with labor-saving devices for centuries. In the past they've always created as many jobs as they destroyed. What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    "What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?" The problem is that the amount of value that could hypothetically be created isn't the limiting factor. Rather, there are at least a dozen different structural forces that are all aligning to prevent people who want to work from connecting with companies that want to create jobs. And while these problems could theoretically be removed with the stroke of a pen, they probably won't be for another few decades, at least in the U.S.
    - danking00 15y ago
      Could you elaborate on these dozen or more structural forces?
      - Alex3917 15y ago
        I'm working on writing this up in a blog post, but it'll take a while. I'm trying to take a data-driven look at the major structural problems with America, but there are just way too many of them. But specifically for jobs there are a lot of limiting factors that stem from the ways we currently approach education, parenting, infrastructure, healthcare, mental health, the criminal justice system, immigration, poverty, the environment, the military, etc. E.g. if you look at the literacy levels in America, it should be pretty obvious why this is an issue: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
  - paulcedars 15y ago
    Yes, but these new jobs are often a long-term thing, and the economy must undergo enormous structural changes for them to form. The US underwent enormous economic and societal changes in its move from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing-based one.
- Duff 15y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. I do think that what we do today is set a price floor on both labor and family that makes things worse for people on the lower end of the income spectrum. I'll give you two examples. The first is housing and social services. In the US, social services, especially housing vouchers for hard-to-find apartments are only available to single mothers -- a household with an able-bodied male will almost never qualify. The result? Two-parent households are priced out of the market, as demands for the best low-income is driven by single mothers with housing vouchers. (A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single-parent households, which are more likely to remain in poverty. The second is the nature low-wage employment. We expect wage-earners to pay for alot of stuff that is really expensive for a low-wage person to afford. That $20 week health insurance premium with $20 co-pay is expensive when you make $30k/year -- and the coverage usually sucks. In the US, low-wage workers tend to get minimal vacation time as well, so you're basically one illness away from being indigent. Costs for events that tend to happen are out of hand. My wife found a cache of old bills and vouchers in her office. One was a reimbursement for worker who fell into a hole and broke his arm in 1950, resulting in an overnight hospital stay. The bill? $25. ($135 in 2010 money) In 2011, you'd be hard-pressed to find a motel for that price, and an ER visit for a broken arm would easily cost $10,000.
  - dstorrs 15y ago
    >A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the >government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single- >parent households, which are more likely to remain in >poverty. Yes, there's an incentive here, but it seems unlikely to me that this is going to be enough to make people get divorced or probably even fail to get married if they meet the right person. More likely they would just fail to mention it to the government. I definitely agree on the rest of what you're saying, though.
    - pstack 15y ago
      Fail to mention what to the government? That they got married? I'm pretty sure that's impossible to hide from the government. Especially when tax time comes around.
- thret 15y ago
  Could this problem be solved with a global one-child policy?
  - pstack 15y ago
    That seems a little insane. How about a "we stop subsidizing breeders" policy? The rest of society no longer subsidizes and cares for your mistakes and desperate need to hump without a rubber and if you want to have a kid (just like if you want to own a car or a boat or a home or a pool table), you have to be able to afford it. I'm not for government involvement in things, so I'm hesitant to suggest they be taxed additionally for having children, but it's certainly reasonable to stop encouraging them to breed when they can't even afford rent as it is.
    - william42 15y ago
      If you want to do that, you'll have to also make it very easy to get an abortion. Unfortunately, due to the nature of political alliances, the people who wish to liberalize abortion and the people who wish to remove these sorts of subsidies often end up on opposite sides of the aisle.
- paganel 15y ago
  > We've been failing to acknowledge that ever since, since it's considered classist/elitist to point out the problem. That's what Marx was actually wishing for, i.e. more intensive work done by the machines equaling more free time for the laborers, who would use it to improve themselves etc. Of course, he was aware of the fact that were the machines to be owned by a select few (the "capitalists") then the profits would go mostly their way, this is why he said that the "means of production" should be owned by the workers.
- anamax 15y ago
  > Time to once more point out that we are simply running out of unskilled/low-skilled labor. It must be nice to live someplace where all of the parks and streets are clean. (There are plenty of other examples.) In my area, we "pay" folks far more than minimum wage to clean parks, which means that we have dirty parks AND pay people to do nothing.
killerswan 15y ago
This age range, 15-24, is really diverse, but here we have college graduates, college students, high school graduates, high school students, and younger dropouts, all mixed into the same statistic. What percentage of college grads are unemployed? What percentage of high school dropouts are unemployed? Several decades ago, when the 55+ crowd was under 24, what were their employment rates? What are these trends across gender? Given how few sectors feature competition between 55- and 15-year-olds for the same work, the given comparison is far less interesting...
- T-R 15y ago
  There was a somewhat related discussion a while back; you might find it interesting if you missed it. Granted, it's for a different demographic (25+ US citizens), and doesn't cover the gender aspect, just education level. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525621 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525621 There was also another discussion earlier today on youth unemployment in the US: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730268 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730268 which argued that youth unemployment is related to the 55+ demographic retiring later (as opposed to minimum wage laws).
latch 15y ago
I wonder how big a part looking down at trade workers is playing in this.
delackner 15y ago
Odd outlier in that graph is that Turkey appears completely unchanged. Possible but not at all likely.
jpr 15y ago
I think part of the problem is that most industrialized nations have pushed for high percentage of the population to have a college/university degree, while not considering whether the degrees are needed for the jobs that are going to be available. This means that there is a discrepancy between the supply and demand of workers and jobs and their education levels. People go to college to study something for which there is absolutely no demand, and end up unemployed, having used years of their life for something that didn't do them much good, and wasted a load of their own or tax payers' money.
- aristidb 15y ago
  Unemployment is much higher among the degreeless, AFAIK.
- natnat 15y ago
  In the US, the unemployment rate for people with at least a bachelor's degree is only a little above 4%. This includes journalism, history, and interpretive dance majors. Would unemployment be lower if these people got healthcare and engineering degrees instead? Of course. But I really don't think people with less practical degrees are nearly as big of a problem as people with no education at all are/
etaty 15y ago
Please read this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee This is the only way to change the world economy and stop the race to the bottom.
aristidb 15y ago
Germany is not affected, interesting. Maybe the fact that there is no minimum wage, and the labor market liberalizations of ~2000 help.
mstoehr 15y ago
Employers are probably unconvinced that younger applicants will be able to make them more profits. This is caused in part by the uselessness (for businesses) of the work students do in high-school and college--this is a group of people whose life has primarily consisted in consuming profits. Employers are also probably more risk-averse because the recession means that profit margins are tighter (if existent at all).

66 points by shrikant 15y ago

Time to once more point out that we are simply running out of unskilled/low-skilled labor. And even in the high-skills environment, there's only so much. That is not the only problem, for sure - the economy certainly is bad. But at some point, we will need to acknowledge that there is simply not enough work to keep everybody gainfully employed 40+ hours a week. And the lower the skill level, the less work there is that can't be automated. This is a problem that's looming for a long time - at least since Drucker talked about the Knowledge Economy (in 1966!) the writing has been on the wall. We've been failing to acknowledge that ever since, since it's considered classist/elitist to point out the problem.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
There is no shortage of work for people with low skill levels. There are simply structural impediments to employing people in low skill jobs. One of the biggest impediments is competition from government benefits. To induce a person to work, an employer needs to offer them enough to compete with their next best alternative. At low wage levels (i.e., low skill labor), this is extremely difficult. Consumption as a function of earned income is actually flat up to about $20k/year. Thus, it is economically rational for low skilled individuals to choose not to work, even if others are willing to pay for their labor. http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work
- bandushrew 15y ago
  which is exactly as it should be. Expecting workers to work for lower-than-survival rates is a Bad Thing. The question we should be asking isn't "how can we make low skill workers work for less money?". That is a race to the bottom that results in bigger societal problems and overall, bigger societal costs as those dispossessed people who are expected to work longer hours for less money than they can survive on realise that its easier and more profitable (and therefore more economically rational) to mug people in their homes, strip copper from empty houses and bridges and generally turn to crime.
  - Duff 15y ago
    Lower than survival? Please. People need a purpose. Something to do. That's a big part of what work is -- and our society provides all sorts of incentives that take those opportunities away and destroy the communities (as in people communities) that people with less means once depended on. In the process, we make alot of other people rich. Crime like what you describe is evidence of desperation -- people are able to strip copper out of buildings because none of the neighbors give a shit, and the local government's policies make it viable for speculators to keep buildings vacant. Read "The Death and Life of American Cities". Poverty doesn't need to equal misery, and being provided with stuff doesn't equate to happiness. We forgot about that after World War 2.
    - bandushrew 15y ago
      "Lower than survival? Please." with no minimum wage limit, what is to stop pay dropping below the 'viable life' line, however you personally define it? "People need a purpose. Something to do." They also need money: to eat, to live, to feed their dependents, to transport themselves (to work!), to educate themselves, to clothe themselves and to warm themselves in winter. To medicate themselves. To participate in life. "Crime like what you describe is evidence of desperation -- people are able to strip copper out of buildings because none of the neighbors give a shit, and the local government's policies make it viable for speculators to keep buildings vacant." That may be why people get away with it. but people perform those acts out of desperation. because they need money to do all the above. "Read "The Death and Life of American Cities". Poverty doesn't need to equal misery, and being provided with stuff doesn't equate to happiness. We forgot about that after World War 2." Im not talking about buying them televisions. Im talking about being able to afford to take your daughter to the doctor, to buy yourself a book for school. If you can so easily brush off the sodding huge downsides of poverty, I am going to go out on a limb and claim that you have never experienced it in its real form. Poverty is brutal. It makes people hard, it makes people stupid and it makes them desperate.
      - Duff 15y ago
        What is the "viable life line"? Minimum wage jobs are supplements to other income. The actual minimum wage required to support a small family without external assistance is probably more like $15-18/hour. I'm not white-washing and pretending that being poor is fun. But the combination of US economic, social and criminal policies in the United States has created great injustices that have destroyed millions of lives. 1 in 3 black men will find themselves incarcerated during their lives. (http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/14873_Chapter9.pdf http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/14873_Chapter9.pdf) That statistic is a national disgrace.
- Joakal 15y ago
  I can see the sad result, employees relying on tips. To paraphrase a republican, if the minimum wage was abolished, everyone would have jobs.
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  > There is no shortage of work for people with low skill levels. yummyfajitas, are you somehow unaware that there are millions of people who desperately want to work, but can't find jobs? And that they would happily say goodbye to unemployment benefits in order to get back into a job? Or do you simply not believe them?
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Clearly you didn't read my blog post. I was analyzing the incentives of the poor, a group of people who are predominantly not looking for work. Also, are you somehow unaware that there are millions of people who illegally enter the US in order to do jobs that Americans are unwilling to do? One would think that if millions of people desperately wanted to work, that demand for illegal immigrant labor should be drying up.
    - rjbond3rd 15y ago
      Apologies, I didn't realize that was your blog (I think I understand where you're coming from, provocative language aside). But could you please clarify where the jobless person gets $22k per year for leisurely consumption?
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Savings, borrowing and unearned income (welfare, etc).
        rjbond3rd 15y ago
        Could a homeowner with a six-figure 401k still qualify as poor? I'm trying to understand where the poor would get their savings and borrowing power.
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        As far as I know, assets are not taken into account when computing poverty. Only income (excluding capital gains). http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measure.html http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measur... Withdrawals from a 401k and SS count as income, so if that homeowner is a retiree they might not be poor.
- kamagmar 15y ago
  I took a look at the data you cite in your blog post. You seem to imply people earning < $5k/yr receive on average ~$20k in welfare. However, in the BLS Expenditure Survey you used to create the figure, under the section marked "Sources of income and personal taxes", the real number is only $467.[0] This cohort doesn't appear to be very poor at all, in fact -- they report negative self-employment income. I wonder if you've confused low income with poverty. Or perhaps i'm confused, and haven't grasped your argument. [0] I'm taking welfare to be the sum of "Unemployment and workers' compensation, veterans' benefits" and "Public assistance, supplemental security income, food stamps".
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    That's interesting, I didn't notice it. It looks like the bottom income level is primarily people who took a business loss. As for my confusion, I'm only looking at people near or below the US poverty line. Business owners who take a loss are defined by the government as living in poverty. You might argue that the government overstates poverty, and I would agree with you. As for the sources of income section, it is clearly incomplete. If it weren't, consumption would be equal to income + change in net worth.
    - kamagmar 15y ago
      > Business owners who take a loss are defined by the government as living in poverty. The poverty line sets a minimum level of consumption. These people are consuming above that threshold, so i don't think the government counts them as poor. > If it weren't, consumption would be equal to income + change in net worth. You're forgetting change in asset prices. If i own a house, and consume all my income, my net worth can still change if the price of the house changes.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        The poverty line sets a minimum level of consumption. Poverty is defined by income, not consumption. Please go read the link I provided explaining how the census calculates poverty. You're forgetting change in asset prices. Unless you are proposing that most poor people are homeowners, and that the value of their houses increased in 2009, that explanation doesn't carry much weight. Fun fact: only cash transfers are counted as income. A housing voucher, for example, pays for consumption, but does not count as income.
- wazoox 15y ago
  This is the rationale behind the RSA in France : basically when you're living on state aid and get a job, you continue getting the state aid, decreasing gradually as the work income goes up. The goal is to give an incentive to these people to actually look for a job. That sort of worked, apparently.
escanda 15y ago
Indeed. A problem could be once knowledge becomes commoditized there won't be much left to walk the gap between middle class and upper class.
pg 15y ago
at some point, we will need to acknowledge that there is simply not enough work to keep everybody gainfully employed 40+ hours a week. Seems unlikely. We've been eliminating jobs with labor-saving devices for centuries. In the past they've always created as many jobs as they destroyed. What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?" The problem is that the amount of value that could hypothetically be created isn't the limiting factor. Rather, there are at least a dozen different structural forces that are all aligning to prevent people who want to work from connecting with companies that want to create jobs. And while these problems could theoretically be removed with the stroke of a pen, they probably won't be for another few decades, at least in the U.S.
  - danking00 15y ago
    Could you elaborate on these dozen or more structural forces?
    - Alex3917 15y ago
      I'm working on writing this up in a blog post, but it'll take a while. I'm trying to take a data-driven look at the major structural problems with America, but there are just way too many of them. But specifically for jobs there are a lot of limiting factors that stem from the ways we currently approach education, parenting, infrastructure, healthcare, mental health, the criminal justice system, immigration, poverty, the environment, the military, etc. E.g. if you look at the literacy levels in America, it should be pretty obvious why this is an issue: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
- paulcedars 15y ago
  Yes, but these new jobs are often a long-term thing, and the economy must undergo enormous structural changes for them to form. The US underwent enormous economic and societal changes in its move from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing-based one.
Duff 15y ago
I couldn't disagree more. I do think that what we do today is set a price floor on both labor and family that makes things worse for people on the lower end of the income spectrum. I'll give you two examples. The first is housing and social services. In the US, social services, especially housing vouchers for hard-to-find apartments are only available to single mothers -- a household with an able-bodied male will almost never qualify. The result? Two-parent households are priced out of the market, as demands for the best low-income is driven by single mothers with housing vouchers. (A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single-parent households, which are more likely to remain in poverty. The second is the nature low-wage employment. We expect wage-earners to pay for alot of stuff that is really expensive for a low-wage person to afford. That $20 week health insurance premium with $20 co-pay is expensive when you make $30k/year -- and the coverage usually sucks. In the US, low-wage workers tend to get minimal vacation time as well, so you're basically one illness away from being indigent. Costs for events that tend to happen are out of hand. My wife found a cache of old bills and vouchers in her office. One was a reimbursement for worker who fell into a hole and broke his arm in 1950, resulting in an overnight hospital stay. The bill? $25. ($135 in 2010 money) In 2011, you'd be hard-pressed to find a motel for that price, and an ER visit for a broken arm would easily cost $10,000.
- dstorrs 15y ago
  >A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the >government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single- >parent households, which are more likely to remain in >poverty. Yes, there's an incentive here, but it seems unlikely to me that this is going to be enough to make people get divorced or probably even fail to get married if they meet the right person. More likely they would just fail to mention it to the government. I definitely agree on the rest of what you're saying, though.
  - pstack 15y ago
    Fail to mention what to the government? That they got married? I'm pretty sure that's impossible to hide from the government. Especially when tax time comes around.
thret 15y ago
Could this problem be solved with a global one-child policy?
- pstack 15y ago
  That seems a little insane. How about a "we stop subsidizing breeders" policy? The rest of society no longer subsidizes and cares for your mistakes and desperate need to hump without a rubber and if you want to have a kid (just like if you want to own a car or a boat or a home or a pool table), you have to be able to afford it. I'm not for government involvement in things, so I'm hesitant to suggest they be taxed additionally for having children, but it's certainly reasonable to stop encouraging them to breed when they can't even afford rent as it is.
  - william42 15y ago
    If you want to do that, you'll have to also make it very easy to get an abortion. Unfortunately, due to the nature of political alliances, the people who wish to liberalize abortion and the people who wish to remove these sorts of subsidies often end up on opposite sides of the aisle.
paganel 15y ago
> We've been failing to acknowledge that ever since, since it's considered classist/elitist to point out the problem. That's what Marx was actually wishing for, i.e. more intensive work done by the machines equaling more free time for the laborers, who would use it to improve themselves etc. Of course, he was aware of the fact that were the machines to be owned by a select few (the "capitalists") then the profits would go mostly their way, this is why he said that the "means of production" should be owned by the workers.
anamax 15y ago
> Time to once more point out that we are simply running out of unskilled/low-skilled labor. It must be nice to live someplace where all of the parks and streets are clean. (There are plenty of other examples.) In my area, we "pay" folks far more than minimum wage to clean parks, which means that we have dirty parks AND pay people to do nothing.

killerswan 15y ago

This age range, 15-24, is really diverse, but here we have college graduates, college students, high school graduates, high school students, and younger dropouts, all mixed into the same statistic. What percentage of college grads are unemployed? What percentage of high school dropouts are unemployed? Several decades ago, when the 55+ crowd was under 24, what were their employment rates? What are these trends across gender? Given how few sectors feature competition between 55- and 15-year-olds for the same work, the given comparison is far less interesting...

T-R 15y ago
There was a somewhat related discussion a while back; you might find it interesting if you missed it. Granted, it's for a different demographic (25+ US citizens), and doesn't cover the gender aspect, just education level. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525621 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525621 There was also another discussion earlier today on youth unemployment in the US: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730268 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730268 which argued that youth unemployment is related to the 55+ demographic retiring later (as opposed to minimum wage laws).

latch 15y ago

I wonder how big a part looking down at trade workers is playing in this.

delackner 15y ago

Odd outlier in that graph is that Turkey appears completely unchanged. Possible but not at all likely.

jpr 15y ago

I think part of the problem is that most industrialized nations have pushed for high percentage of the population to have a college/university degree, while not considering whether the degrees are needed for the jobs that are going to be available. This means that there is a discrepancy between the supply and demand of workers and jobs and their education levels. People go to college to study something for which there is absolutely no demand, and end up unemployed, having used years of their life for something that didn't do them much good, and wasted a load of their own or tax payers' money.

aristidb 15y ago
Unemployment is much higher among the degreeless, AFAIK.
natnat 15y ago
In the US, the unemployment rate for people with at least a bachelor's degree is only a little above 4%. This includes journalism, history, and interpretive dance majors. Would unemployment be lower if these people got healthcare and engineering degrees instead? Of course. But I really don't think people with less practical degrees are nearly as big of a problem as people with no education at all are/

etaty 15y ago

Please read this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee This is the only way to change the world economy and stop the race to the bottom.

aristidb 15y ago

Germany is not affected, interesting. Maybe the fact that there is no minimum wage, and the labor market liberalizations of ~2000 help.

mstoehr 15y ago

Employers are probably unconvinced that younger applicants will be able to make them more profits. This is caused in part by the uselessness (for businesses) of the work students do in high-school and college--this is a group of people whose life has primarily consisted in consuming profits. Employers are also probably more risk-averse because the recession means that profit margins are tighter (if existent at all).