7 ms·

Chomsky - Jobs aren't coming back

38 points by lewstherin 14y ago

jstalin 14y ago
"It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair." It's because we've been pacified through handouts and the welfare state. There's no longer a need to think about working hard and getting out of the unemployment morass we're in. Government will take care of you! Food stamp spending is at all-time record levels. Millions more people have gone on "disability" since 2007. The number of people in the work force continues to decline. Participation rate in the workforce is at multi-decade lows. The government-created housing bubble has made job mobility much more difficult, and of course both personal and public debt levels have reached saturation. So, why not get unlimited student loans, get food stamps, get yourself declared to have a disability, and then gorge on all the benefits of being "poor" like a free cellphone, and reduced cost internet. We've turned into a nation of dependents!
- knowtheory 14y ago
  Unless you can a) point to numbers indicating that your claim is true, and more importantly b) justify how this isn't just a teeeeny tiiiiiiny drop in the bucket compared to defense spending, tax cuts and health care costs, your post is essentially irrelevant noise in the grander scheme of federal budget politics. And come to think of it, even if food stamp spending is at an all time high, isn't that consistent with the idea that the economy is fucked and suddenly there are a lot more families dependent on food stamps because of the inability of the labor market to bring down unemployment?
  - jstalin 14y ago
    Food stamp usage breaking historical pattern of going down when joblesness decreases (and at an all time high): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-26/food-stamps-keep-going-up-as-unemployment-falls-bgov-barometer.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-26/food-stamps-keep-go... Two Charts Exposing America's Record Shadow Welfare State - Disability going up dramatically: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/two-charts-exposing-americas-record-shadow-welfare-state http://www.zerohedge.com/news/two-charts-exposing-americas-r... Oh, and I never said I support gigantic amounts of defense spending. I'm talking about dependence, not federal spending or budgeting. You've diverted what I said to another topic.
    - dlokshin 14y ago
      On top of that, the US Gov now accounts for ~25% of wages in this country: http://cl.ly/2a0p1T3a1B0y1B08050g http://cl.ly/2a0p1T3a1B0y1B08050g
      - jbooth 14y ago
        And that figure's been on a downward trend for the last several years. Take out military and it's been on a downward trend for a decade.
- tnuc 14y ago
  Given that the US spends over half its budget on "defence" I really don't know where you are getting your ideas from. Maybe some numbers and a source?
  - jstalin 14y ago
    Where did I support current or additional defense spending? Frankly, it's just another welfare scheme. Defense spending is largely a waste.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Maybe, but it's telling that you didn't mention it at all and instead focussed on blaming people on food stamps.
      - jstalin 14y ago
        It's telling of what exactly? That I didn't connect defense spending and dependence on handouts? You are reading more into what I'm saying than is there. Check your pre-conceived notions. And, AGAIN, where do I blame the people on food stamps? The system is the problem, not the people who take advantage of it.
        jbooth 14y ago
        Food stamps are a drop in the bucket compared to defense spending. If you're just a nonpartisan who's concerned about the budget, rather than a limbaughbeckbot, one would expect you'd be approximately 1,000x as outraged about defense (in numerical terms) as you are about food stamps.
        rhizome 14y ago
        It's telling that you choose to focus on moral issues, such as what you interpret as dependence, rather than the hard-numbers "this is what consumes the most tax dollars for the least benefit" of defense spending. Of course, "least benefit" is a value judgement, but the system, as you describe it, is actually concerned with maintaining the military and the financial industries much more than any idea of the country having its legs knocked out from under it by poor people. This is a fact, and is supportable by actual numbers, unlike your kicking of people while they're down.
- jbooth 14y ago
  jstalin? Really?
  - crusso 14y ago
    Says jbooth? Irony much? :)
    - jbooth 14y ago
      jbooth is my name. jstalin's a guy who killed about as many people as Hitler.
- lotides 14y ago
  Time to turn off the talk radio, buddy. People can't get jobs that don't exist. The people on unemployment, disability or other government benefits didn't conspire to ruin the economy. They're just trying to feed their families and survive long enough to find work. If you're looking for someone to blame, look at the people that got rich while the rest of America got poor. The ones the benefited from this disaster are the same ones that caused it.
  - jstalin 14y ago
    Did I say they conspired to ruin the economy? No. Did I say I blame them for the state of the economy? No. And I don't listen to talk radio. I'm blaming the excessive amount of debt in the system, both personal and public. It's crushing. Each additional dollar of public debt is having a negative real effect on the economy. Of course, the crushing level of bureaucracy and costs of running a small business are a big part of the problem as well. The economy is paralyzed by debt and regulatory uncertainty. If Japan can manage as a majority-services economy, we can too. Manufacturing doesn't make the world suddenly better.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  That isn't necessarily true. In general, some agree that the state should provide the basics, and as the centuries go by and the world gets richer, those basics become more and more. Reasonable welfare equals to higher productivity rather than laziness. If you are not convinced, look at the countries that provide the most in terms of welfare such as northern europe or japan and yet they are equally or more productive than the US.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- batista 14y ago
  >It's because we've been pacified through handouts and the welfare state. I call BS. As far as welfare states go, the US has one of the smallest and less pervasive of any modern western country. Actually, it's like in that field you're living in the medieval ages. A "welfare state" with your health system, close to a million people in the streets and tens of millions eating with coupons, is not a welfare state, it's a joke. Nobody in his right mind would call your "food stamps" a welfare support that makes people "dependents". We would actually think of it as an incompetent, half-arsed mockery of a welfare system... more like charity than welfare.
dkrich 14y ago
I think there is an ongoing obsession in this country to always live in fear and convince oneself that things are always at their worst and the bottom is always about to fall out at any moment. Maybe it's human nature. But I just don't buy this doom and gloom nonsense. Yes the economy is bad, there is no question about that, but the economy has been bad before. Probably the last comparable period was the late 70's. I think more than anything what's changed is our access to information. Before people never really knew how corrupt companies and politicians can be and they never had 24/7 access to the opinions of every person in the English-speaking world to reinforce their pessimism. The U.S. is losing manufacturing jobs, but that could be remedied by a number of changes- import tariffs, a reduction or freeze on minimum wage, an unforeseen economic boost from a new industry (such as auto manufacturing in the 50's or the internet boom of the 90's). One place where I wholly disagree with Chomsky is the unimportance of the deficit. That is a major, major problem. It is true that creating jobs would help shrink the deficit, but I think there is a lot of rampant spending by the U.S. government that does absolutely nothing to grow or maintain the economy or jobs and should be abolished.
- jstalin 14y ago
  Prepare to get down voted like crazy for pointing out the negative effects of deficits and debt...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- nhaehnle 14y ago
  One place where I wholly disagree with Chomsky is the unimportance of the deficit. That is a major, major problem. It is true that creating jobs would help shrink the deficit, but I think there is a lot of rampant spending by the U.S. government that does absolutely nothing to grow or maintain the economy or jobs and should be abolished. Take a step back and note that you don't actually point out or argue how the deficit is supposedly a problem. So there are spending programs by the government that you disagree with. Fair enough, I'm sure everybody has some government program that they disagree with. [1] That's what politics is about: disagreement about what the extent of government should be, and in which areas it should be active. What that doesn't give you is an argument that the deficit is bad. If you genuinely think certain government programs are undesirable and should be cut, then it makes sense to simultaneously cut taxes somewhere so that the deficit remains the same. Otherwise you would effectively be squeezing the private sector by reducing the government deficit. [1] Though it seems weird that you would only support government spending that grows or maintains the economy or jobs. What about national parks as an example of a pretty obvious good that has no economic benefit?
locopati 14y ago
The first chart comparing productivity and income is pretty telling http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-american...
acslater00 14y ago
I don't know why I keep bothering to point this out, but the notion that "America no longer makes things" is absolutely, empirically, unassailably false. See this: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS And a prior discussion of the topic. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022 Anybody who starts a discussion decrying the death of manufacturing in America is selling you something, and it's not a manufacturing job. Sidebar: This quote! "The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness." Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
- glimcat 14y ago
  "Taking Any Rand seriously" seems to be something of a persistent folly.
- mcantelon 14y ago
  >Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Profit-seeking corporations aren't immune to stupidity and pettiness. Another reason not to sell it is to prevent the emergence of a competitor.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    Case in point - Yahoo deciding to shut down del.icio.us - at the very least the brand name and bookmark list was worth something to someone... why shut it down?
    - AndrewDucker 14y ago
      They didn't. They sold it to Avos.
pudakai 14y ago
Peculiar article - I'd read a couple of sentences and think, "wow, Noam's spot on here". Then after the next few sentences or major point, I'd think, "what a moron". Seems like there is something for everyone to love and hate in this one. Probably the one thing everyone can agree on is the concentration of wealth and stratification of society isn't a good thing. Like a lot of these analyses, it is often hard to sort out cause/effect, I'm not so sure that this article didn't make some wrong conclusions in this regard. I do have to say his contention that OWS is the first push-back against the concentration & corruption of power in the U.S. is sort of naive. There are plenty of people and movements that have been railing about this at least since the early 90's - I'm not going to mention specific ones because I don't want to seem like I'm touting them.
serverascode 14y ago
On one hand, I do feel like things are going fairly well compared historically, but it also, somehow, at the same time feels like everything is going wrong, and I'm not going to be able to have a job in my field very long, (retirement, what?), given outsourcing and companies moving jobs to whatever country has the cheapest labor this year. I also feel like we, as a country (Canada), are going to lose a lot of expertise to outsourcing and multi-national job movement, ie. pay for the cheaper outsourcing in other ways later. That said I am trying to do something about it by getting involved in the local startup community and try to create my own job, but that is quite difficult.

38 points by lewstherin 14y ago

"It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair." It's because we've been pacified through handouts and the welfare state. There's no longer a need to think about working hard and getting out of the unemployment morass we're in. Government will take care of you! Food stamp spending is at all-time record levels. Millions more people have gone on "disability" since 2007. The number of people in the work force continues to decline. Participation rate in the workforce is at multi-decade lows. The government-created housing bubble has made job mobility much more difficult, and of course both personal and public debt levels have reached saturation. So, why not get unlimited student loans, get food stamps, get yourself declared to have a disability, and then gorge on all the benefits of being "poor" like a free cellphone, and reduced cost internet. We've turned into a nation of dependents!

knowtheory 14y ago
Unless you can a) point to numbers indicating that your claim is true, and more importantly b) justify how this isn't just a teeeeny tiiiiiiny drop in the bucket compared to defense spending, tax cuts and health care costs, your post is essentially irrelevant noise in the grander scheme of federal budget politics. And come to think of it, even if food stamp spending is at an all time high, isn't that consistent with the idea that the economy is fucked and suddenly there are a lot more families dependent on food stamps because of the inability of the labor market to bring down unemployment?
- jstalin 14y ago
  Food stamp usage breaking historical pattern of going down when joblesness decreases (and at an all time high): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-26/food-stamps-keep-going-up-as-unemployment-falls-bgov-barometer.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-26/food-stamps-keep-go... Two Charts Exposing America's Record Shadow Welfare State - Disability going up dramatically: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/two-charts-exposing-americas-record-shadow-welfare-state http://www.zerohedge.com/news/two-charts-exposing-americas-r... Oh, and I never said I support gigantic amounts of defense spending. I'm talking about dependence, not federal spending or budgeting. You've diverted what I said to another topic.
  - dlokshin 14y ago
    On top of that, the US Gov now accounts for ~25% of wages in this country: http://cl.ly/2a0p1T3a1B0y1B08050g http://cl.ly/2a0p1T3a1B0y1B08050g
    - jbooth 14y ago
      And that figure's been on a downward trend for the last several years. Take out military and it's been on a downward trend for a decade.
tnuc 14y ago
Given that the US spends over half its budget on "defence" I really don't know where you are getting your ideas from. Maybe some numbers and a source?
- jstalin 14y ago
  Where did I support current or additional defense spending? Frankly, it's just another welfare scheme. Defense spending is largely a waste.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Maybe, but it's telling that you didn't mention it at all and instead focussed on blaming people on food stamps.
    - jstalin 14y ago
      It's telling of what exactly? That I didn't connect defense spending and dependence on handouts? You are reading more into what I'm saying than is there. Check your pre-conceived notions. And, AGAIN, where do I blame the people on food stamps? The system is the problem, not the people who take advantage of it.
      - jbooth 14y ago
        Food stamps are a drop in the bucket compared to defense spending. If you're just a nonpartisan who's concerned about the budget, rather than a limbaughbeckbot, one would expect you'd be approximately 1,000x as outraged about defense (in numerical terms) as you are about food stamps.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        It's telling that you choose to focus on moral issues, such as what you interpret as dependence, rather than the hard-numbers "this is what consumes the most tax dollars for the least benefit" of defense spending. Of course, "least benefit" is a value judgement, but the system, as you describe it, is actually concerned with maintaining the military and the financial industries much more than any idea of the country having its legs knocked out from under it by poor people. This is a fact, and is supportable by actual numbers, unlike your kicking of people while they're down.
jbooth 14y ago
jstalin? Really?
- crusso 14y ago
  Says jbooth? Irony much? :)
  - jbooth 14y ago
    jbooth is my name. jstalin's a guy who killed about as many people as Hitler.
lotides 14y ago
Time to turn off the talk radio, buddy. People can't get jobs that don't exist. The people on unemployment, disability or other government benefits didn't conspire to ruin the economy. They're just trying to feed their families and survive long enough to find work. If you're looking for someone to blame, look at the people that got rich while the rest of America got poor. The ones the benefited from this disaster are the same ones that caused it.
- jstalin 14y ago
  Did I say they conspired to ruin the economy? No. Did I say I blame them for the state of the economy? No. And I don't listen to talk radio. I'm blaming the excessive amount of debt in the system, both personal and public. It's crushing. Each additional dollar of public debt is having a negative real effect on the economy. Of course, the crushing level of bureaucracy and costs of running a small business are a big part of the problem as well. The economy is paralyzed by debt and regulatory uncertainty. If Japan can manage as a majority-services economy, we can too. Manufacturing doesn't make the world suddenly better.
zerostar07 14y ago
That isn't necessarily true. In general, some agree that the state should provide the basics, and as the centuries go by and the world gets richer, those basics become more and more. Reasonable welfare equals to higher productivity rather than laziness. If you are not convinced, look at the countries that provide the most in terms of welfare such as northern europe or japan and yet they are equally or more productive than the US.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
batista 14y ago
>It's because we've been pacified through handouts and the welfare state. I call BS. As far as welfare states go, the US has one of the smallest and less pervasive of any modern western country. Actually, it's like in that field you're living in the medieval ages. A "welfare state" with your health system, close to a million people in the streets and tens of millions eating with coupons, is not a welfare state, it's a joke. Nobody in his right mind would call your "food stamps" a welfare support that makes people "dependents". We would actually think of it as an incompetent, half-arsed mockery of a welfare system... more like charity than welfare.

dkrich 14y ago

I think there is an ongoing obsession in this country to always live in fear and convince oneself that things are always at their worst and the bottom is always about to fall out at any moment. Maybe it's human nature. But I just don't buy this doom and gloom nonsense. Yes the economy is bad, there is no question about that, but the economy has been bad before. Probably the last comparable period was the late 70's. I think more than anything what's changed is our access to information. Before people never really knew how corrupt companies and politicians can be and they never had 24/7 access to the opinions of every person in the English-speaking world to reinforce their pessimism. The U.S. is losing manufacturing jobs, but that could be remedied by a number of changes- import tariffs, a reduction or freeze on minimum wage, an unforeseen economic boost from a new industry (such as auto manufacturing in the 50's or the internet boom of the 90's). One place where I wholly disagree with Chomsky is the unimportance of the deficit. That is a major, major problem. It is true that creating jobs would help shrink the deficit, but I think there is a lot of rampant spending by the U.S. government that does absolutely nothing to grow or maintain the economy or jobs and should be abolished.

jstalin 14y ago
Prepare to get down voted like crazy for pointing out the negative effects of deficits and debt...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nhaehnle 14y ago
One place where I wholly disagree with Chomsky is the unimportance of the deficit. That is a major, major problem. It is true that creating jobs would help shrink the deficit, but I think there is a lot of rampant spending by the U.S. government that does absolutely nothing to grow or maintain the economy or jobs and should be abolished. Take a step back and note that you don't actually point out or argue how the deficit is supposedly a problem. So there are spending programs by the government that you disagree with. Fair enough, I'm sure everybody has some government program that they disagree with. [1] That's what politics is about: disagreement about what the extent of government should be, and in which areas it should be active. What that doesn't give you is an argument that the deficit is bad. If you genuinely think certain government programs are undesirable and should be cut, then it makes sense to simultaneously cut taxes somewhere so that the deficit remains the same. Otherwise you would effectively be squeezing the private sector by reducing the government deficit. [1] Though it seems weird that you would only support government spending that grows or maintains the economy or jobs. What about national parks as an example of a pretty obvious good that has no economic benefit?

locopati 14y ago

The first chart comparing productivity and income is pretty telling http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-american...

acslater00 14y ago

I don't know why I keep bothering to point this out, but the notion that "America no longer makes things" is absolutely, empirically, unassailably false. See this: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS And a prior discussion of the topic. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022 Anybody who starts a discussion decrying the death of manufacturing in America is selling you something, and it's not a manufacturing job. Sidebar: This quote! "The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness." Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

glimcat 14y ago
"Taking Any Rand seriously" seems to be something of a persistent folly.
mcantelon 14y ago
>Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Profit-seeking corporations aren't immune to stupidity and pettiness. Another reason not to sell it is to prevent the emergence of a competitor.
- r00fus 14y ago
  Case in point - Yahoo deciding to shut down del.icio.us - at the very least the brand name and bookmark list was worth something to someone... why shut it down?
  - AndrewDucker 14y ago
    They didn't. They sold it to Avos.

pudakai 14y ago

Peculiar article - I'd read a couple of sentences and think, "wow, Noam's spot on here". Then after the next few sentences or major point, I'd think, "what a moron". Seems like there is something for everyone to love and hate in this one. Probably the one thing everyone can agree on is the concentration of wealth and stratification of society isn't a good thing. Like a lot of these analyses, it is often hard to sort out cause/effect, I'm not so sure that this article didn't make some wrong conclusions in this regard. I do have to say his contention that OWS is the first push-back against the concentration & corruption of power in the U.S. is sort of naive. There are plenty of people and movements that have been railing about this at least since the early 90's - I'm not going to mention specific ones because I don't want to seem like I'm touting them.

serverascode 14y ago

On one hand, I do feel like things are going fairly well compared historically, but it also, somehow, at the same time feels like everything is going wrong, and I'm not going to be able to have a job in my field very long, (retirement, what?), given outsourcing and companies moving jobs to whatever country has the cheapest labor this year. I also feel like we, as a country (Canada), are going to lose a lot of expertise to outsourcing and multi-national job movement, ie. pay for the cheaper outsourcing in other ways later. That said I am trying to do something about it by getting involved in the local startup community and try to create my own job, but that is quite difficult.