6 ms·

America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

54 points by dataminer 13y ago

patrickg_zill 13y ago
Talking about unemployment numbers without talking about how they are routinely massaged, and the calculations changed, is either stupid (for the journalist not knowing about it) or evil (if the journalist does and is merely trying to toe a line). See shadowstats.com for instance - they (the BLS) have changed the way unemployment (and many other stats such as CPI) are calculated over the years, and are no longer very accurate.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  Sure but I actually think this article comes closer to talking about the real situation than most.
- adventured 13y ago
  Every time I read an article about our supposedly improving unemployment picture, I try to figure out if the author is ignorant or malicious, because it's the same story with every article. As though the 6.6% number were even remotely real. 13.5% U6 unemployment [1]. Down 5.x million full-time jobs [2] since the recession began (which even ignores population expansion and the expectation that we should have more full-time jobs now). Records on poverty, food stamps and SS disability fraud. A continuing plunge in the labor force participation rate [3] that makes it look like we're knee deep in a depression. We routinely drop a city the size of Pittsburgh out of our labor force. There has only been a recovery in asset prices, and that's strictly due to the Fed's QE programs [4] massively artificially suppressing the real cost of debt (which you can see in real-time effect when there's talk of, or an actual tapering to the QE program). [1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/full-time-vs-total-employment-chart-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/full-time-vs-total-employment... [3] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-06/sp-and-without-qe http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-06/sp-and-without-qe
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Prime age employment (18-54) is lower than it's been since around 1985. http://stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/2014/01/were-not-seeing-lot-of-progress-here.html http://stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/2014/01/were-not-seeing...
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Changing definitions? Citation needed. A detailed link, not a vague referral to a conspiracy site.
  - patrickg_zill 13y ago
    Are you trolling or just woefully underinformed to be throwing around the words "conspiracy site"? The computations were changed in a major way during the Clinton administration . http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      Read your link. The definition of unemployment didn't change. They just stopped calculating u3 and u4 and relabeled u5 to u3.
      - patrickg_zill 13y ago
        Try looking at the bottom of page 25 (as marked in the PDF), under the heading APPENDIX. The CPS, which the unemployment stats use, was redesigned in 1994; the last time it was changed was 1967. If I really wanted to debate with you I would point out the birth/death rate adjustments... but you are acting rather trollish. plonk
michaelochurch 13y ago
Something I've noticed is that companies have a level of technical morale that is not quite the same thing as general morale. If general morale is how much people like the organization and trust its moral decency, technical morale is the sense that the people and products are of high quality. They're correlated but not the same thing. General morale is a group's self-esteem (although, when low, it becomes us-versus-them against the leadership) and technical morale is its self-efficacy. Technical morale is also very slow to recover, and I think the U.S. has lost it over the past 30 years. People don't assume that others are capable. Rather, the prevailing assumption is that an as-yet-undetermined person is lazy, stupid, and incapable. People have this vague sense that things don't work as well as they used to; I don't know if that's actually true. On the matter of how they view each others' competency, groups tend to be either in a state of trust-density and trust-sparsity (a "group Bozo Bit") with no middle ground, and we've flipped that switch a long time ago.
ChuckFrank 13y ago
Contrary to the millennial gripes and the 'trophy kids' syndrome, I believe that there's a generation of highly specialized and highly educated people out there whose expertise is going to waste because they are not getting the first important steps to start working on the job. The work gap that most of these people are going to experience is going to have irreparable harm to the product, with regards to all the papers unwritten, projects unstarted, and lessons learned - for all of us.
- jared314 13y ago
  A few years ago, I believed outsourcing was the main culprit removing the bottom rungs on the career ladder. That was until someone, older than I was, told me: "A career is not a right." That's when I understood that it is a choice by business owners and business managers to only hire pre-trained workers. It is a choice to run at half staff while waiting for a "perfect fit". Despite the large number of skilled, and near-skilled, workers, businesses are choosing to hire fewer workers, all the while bemoaning a skills gap.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    This might be the longest period in a while where some fast-spreading illness hasn't killed large numbers of people across multiple demographics. Usually wars and sicknesses create a significant need to train new workers, but wars on their own aren't doing enough anymore and would only harm the demographics that are suffering anyway. It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy. If it comes to that, I prefer a French Revolution style class war. Fewer deaths, more gain for each death and in total, thus more efficient. Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick. I'm not sure I agree with your premise-- I don't think society ever needs traumatic death, and I wouldn't want the violent revolution or the flu pandemic-- but if it were true, there's a much better way of getting it, which is to rise up and depose the assholes running the world now. I think the problem is related to what you are saying but much more prosaic. For the most part, humans are myopic and reactive, and the people who tend to rise in organizations (in peace time) are even more that way than the general population. They make shitty leaders, though, due to their lack of vision. The result is that, when there is progress, such people would rather cut costs (and involve fewer people) than do more. That, in a nutshell, is why Corporate America is so depressing: it's run by mindless cost-cutters, not leaders. Couple this with the mean-spiritedness of the US society and you have long-term joblessness and, eventually, widespread, cancerous poverty of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
hristov 13y ago
Sorry I don't believe this. If it is true that we are close to maximum employment, there would be more pressure for wage inflation and more overall inflation. In places other than the bay area (which is its own world) inflation is really low nowadays. If you take into account various promotions, many prices are actually lower than last year. And other than in the STEM fields, there is pretty much no wage inflation. If job growth increases and wages increase, I guarantee you we will see many people entering the work force. No-one likes poverty.
- 1457389 13y ago
  Did you not comprehend the portion of the article which outlined a supply side problem? You don't see higher wages in that kind of scenario, you see a steady diminishing in the market.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- pessimizer 13y ago
  This is the Economist, and this is the party line. The economy was destroyed due to a demand crisis that we haven't even made an attempt to recover from yet. Crying about a supply problem is silly. It's like when they complain about the graying of America, and how there will be too many seniors to too few workers - and in the next breath about permanent structural unemployment. Both not enough and too many workers, depending on the argument they're trying to make.

54 points by dataminer 13y ago

Talking about unemployment numbers without talking about how they are routinely massaged, and the calculations changed, is either stupid (for the journalist not knowing about it) or evil (if the journalist does and is merely trying to toe a line). See shadowstats.com for instance - they (the BLS) have changed the way unemployment (and many other stats such as CPI) are calculated over the years, and are no longer very accurate.

joe_the_user 13y ago
Sure but I actually think this article comes closer to talking about the real situation than most.
adventured 13y ago
Every time I read an article about our supposedly improving unemployment picture, I try to figure out if the author is ignorant or malicious, because it's the same story with every article. As though the 6.6% number were even remotely real. 13.5% U6 unemployment [1]. Down 5.x million full-time jobs [2] since the recession began (which even ignores population expansion and the expectation that we should have more full-time jobs now). Records on poverty, food stamps and SS disability fraud. A continuing plunge in the labor force participation rate [3] that makes it look like we're knee deep in a depression. We routinely drop a city the size of Pittsburgh out of our labor force. There has only been a recovery in asset prices, and that's strictly due to the Fed's QE programs [4] massively artificially suppressing the real cost of debt (which you can see in real-time effect when there's talk of, or an actual tapering to the QE program). [1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/full-time-vs-total-employment-chart-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/full-time-vs-total-employment... [3] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-06/sp-and-without-qe http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-06/sp-and-without-qe
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Prime age employment (18-54) is lower than it's been since around 1985. http://stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/2014/01/were-not-seeing-lot-of-progress-here.html http://stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/2014/01/were-not-seeing...
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Changing definitions? Citation needed. A detailed link, not a vague referral to a conspiracy site.
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  Are you trolling or just woefully underinformed to be throwing around the words "conspiracy site"? The computations were changed in a major way during the Clinton administration . http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Read your link. The definition of unemployment didn't change. They just stopped calculating u3 and u4 and relabeled u5 to u3.
    - patrickg_zill 13y ago
      Try looking at the bottom of page 25 (as marked in the PDF), under the heading APPENDIX. The CPS, which the unemployment stats use, was redesigned in 1994; the last time it was changed was 1967. If I really wanted to debate with you I would point out the birth/death rate adjustments... but you are acting rather trollish. plonk

michaelochurch 13y ago

Something I've noticed is that companies have a level of technical morale that is not quite the same thing as general morale. If general morale is how much people like the organization and trust its moral decency, technical morale is the sense that the people and products are of high quality. They're correlated but not the same thing. General morale is a group's self-esteem (although, when low, it becomes us-versus-them against the leadership) and technical morale is its self-efficacy. Technical morale is also very slow to recover, and I think the U.S. has lost it over the past 30 years. People don't assume that others are capable. Rather, the prevailing assumption is that an as-yet-undetermined person is lazy, stupid, and incapable. People have this vague sense that things don't work as well as they used to; I don't know if that's actually true. On the matter of how they view each others' competency, groups tend to be either in a state of trust-density and trust-sparsity (a "group Bozo Bit") with no middle ground, and we've flipped that switch a long time ago.

ChuckFrank 13y ago

Contrary to the millennial gripes and the 'trophy kids' syndrome, I believe that there's a generation of highly specialized and highly educated people out there whose expertise is going to waste because they are not getting the first important steps to start working on the job. The work gap that most of these people are going to experience is going to have irreparable harm to the product, with regards to all the papers unwritten, projects unstarted, and lessons learned - for all of us.

jared314 13y ago
A few years ago, I believed outsourcing was the main culprit removing the bottom rungs on the career ladder. That was until someone, older than I was, told me: "A career is not a right." That's when I understood that it is a choice by business owners and business managers to only hire pre-trained workers. It is a choice to run at half staff while waiting for a "perfect fit". Despite the large number of skilled, and near-skilled, workers, businesses are choosing to hire fewer workers, all the while bemoaning a skills gap.
- busterarm 13y ago
  This might be the longest period in a while where some fast-spreading illness hasn't killed large numbers of people across multiple demographics. Usually wars and sicknesses create a significant need to train new workers, but wars on their own aren't doing enough anymore and would only harm the demographics that are suffering anyway. It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy. If it comes to that, I prefer a French Revolution style class war. Fewer deaths, more gain for each death and in total, thus more efficient. Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick. I'm not sure I agree with your premise-- I don't think society ever needs traumatic death, and I wouldn't want the violent revolution or the flu pandemic-- but if it were true, there's a much better way of getting it, which is to rise up and depose the assholes running the world now. I think the problem is related to what you are saying but much more prosaic. For the most part, humans are myopic and reactive, and the people who tend to rise in organizations (in peace time) are even more that way than the general population. They make shitty leaders, though, due to their lack of vision. The result is that, when there is progress, such people would rather cut costs (and involve fewer people) than do more. That, in a nutshell, is why Corporate America is so depressing: it's run by mindless cost-cutters, not leaders. Couple this with the mean-spiritedness of the US society and you have long-term joblessness and, eventually, widespread, cancerous poverty of a kind not seen since the 1930s.

hristov 13y ago

Sorry I don't believe this. If it is true that we are close to maximum employment, there would be more pressure for wage inflation and more overall inflation. In places other than the bay area (which is its own world) inflation is really low nowadays. If you take into account various promotions, many prices are actually lower than last year. And other than in the STEM fields, there is pretty much no wage inflation. If job growth increases and wages increase, I guarantee you we will see many people entering the work force. No-one likes poverty.

1457389 13y ago
Did you not comprehend the portion of the article which outlined a supply side problem? You don't see higher wages in that kind of scenario, you see a steady diminishing in the market.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 13y ago
This is the Economist, and this is the party line. The economy was destroyed due to a demand crisis that we haven't even made an attempt to recover from yet. Crying about a supply problem is silly. It's like when they complain about the graying of America, and how there will be too many seniors to too few workers - and in the next breath about permanent structural unemployment. Both not enough and too many workers, depending on the argument they're trying to make.