The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#231

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #215

ChuckMcM wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it is up to your generation to do a better job of it (no pun intended) so run for office!

I'm afraid I don't have the money to devote my life to politics and I'm much too idealistic to be a good politician. In any event, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to influence the system is to have a lot of money to throw around. Then you can hire a guy to go make speeches for you and spread your message, you can buy scientists to publish research that supports your agenda, you can buy lawyers to silenc…

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

We are the government, and if you choose not to help make it what you want, it gets made for you by people who don't appreciate your point of view.

Look no further than the "hell no" Republican tea-party caucus in the US Congress for a really visible example of people making the government the way they want it made while we sit on the sidelines.

You don't do it for the money, you do it because you believe the world can be better than it is. And if you do it right you can completely nullify the impact of people with a lot of money that try to force it to be different.

My grandfather told me that when the country was threatened by a Japanese invasion, the young men and women flocked to sign up to preserve their way of life. But when their way of life is threatened by their lack of participation in the governing of the country, they do nothing.

He was particularly disappointed with the youth of the 60's who would rather "drop out" than take their passion with them into public service and actually pull the US out of its sillyness in Vietnam.

Its a time horizon thing, one of the greatest strengths of Martin Luther King was that he could help people see that while it would take time, more than they wanted, they could achieve meaningful change. But if someone believes themselves to be helpless, they will live up to their own expectations of helplessness.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#232

Post by mikepurvis » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

jaredhansen wrote: post #114

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

>You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. True as far as it goes, and I too am concerned about the future of work, but I'm skeptical that we have ever seen, or will ever see, a future in which "no one is hiring". Today, there is tremendous demand for certain occupations, even as others are being hollowed out. The difference from historical expectations is that t…

I get nervous the way an argument like this makes efficiency a goal unto itself. Is that really what we want the future of society to be? Billions of software engineers, interspersed with some baristas, janitors, and gig economy workers scraping by?

Part of the point of BI schemes is to free up huge swathes of people to legitimately pursue the arts in all forms. Putting on dramas, creating music, learning for its own sake, philosophizing, cleaning up the environment, editing Wikipedia, working on open-source, etc... none of these things contribute much immediate economic value, but they do, I believe, make society incrementally wealthier in a way that creating the next derivative iOS game just doesn't.

The whole business of college as job-training vs. learning to think is an interesting one. There was a great piece on it in Harpers recently: http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/?sing...

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#233

Post by astrodust » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

lujim wrote: post #94

astrodust wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lived for at least fifty thousand years without any money at all, for around three thousand with some form of money, and the last two hundred years with the idea of hourly wages and bills and rent. It's entirely possible we'll find a better way to do this. Maybe we'll have to "undertake dramatic changes" to avoid an even bigger disaster.

Life before money was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In fact I wouldn't choose to live anytime before the last 100 or 200 years. 1950 or later would have been my preference had I been given a choice. For how much we all like to armchair quarterback our current system (yes.. capitalism), it's easy to forget how bad 99.9 percent of the human experience on this planet would have sucked comparatively. That's…

Don't forget the vast majority of this has been built on the abundant wealth not found from capitalism but in the form of fossil fuel. This has been an enormous boost to productivity, food production, and general well-being.

The importance of coal and oil in modern society cannot be understated. It has been enormously transformative.

I'm not saying things aren't good, or that capitalism hasn't been a factor, but that if we're not careful we'll get stuck with terrible legacies rather than more opportunity.

For example: Undoubtedly we have access to more resources than ever before, yet these resources seem to flow up to the 0.1% at a rate that's unprecedented, and the rate of depletion of essential resources is increasing even as supplies are becoming more constrained.

One by one we're hitting "peak" everything: Peak oil, peak water, peak education, peak fish. We really need to radically re-think how we're approaching things when unchecked geometric growth is no longer an option.

So let's learn from our successes and failures and show a little forward thinking. In the 1900s people would go to work day after day for their whole life building things designed to last a hundred years. Today we smack together something over the course of a weekend and spin it off into an IPO a year later. A little long-term thinking would be nice.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#234

Post by collyw » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

Or just redistibute the wealth more equally.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#235

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:53 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #205

maxerickson wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some hand wavy statistical sense, those old people you see bagging groceries probably would have been dead 50 years ago. If that is true (I don't know if it is, I'm speculating), they aren't evidence of scarcity. It's hard to measure quality of life, but if you look at things like housing, people in the US have more households now, with the average dwelling having increased in size (I'm sure McMansions pull up the…

"In some hand wavy statistical sense, those old people you see bagging groceries probably would have been dead 50 years ago." No, some proportion of them would have been dead between 0 and 3 years old (which is what brings down the life expectancy numbers dramatically) but 100 years ago those 50 year olds would still be living to 60, just like they do now.

Life expectancy at middle ages has expanded quite a bit:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

A 20 year old can expect to live well into their 70s rather than just reaching 60 (so an expectancy of ~55 years compared to 40 years).

But sure, the gains are mostly from early survival rates.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#236

Post by astrodust » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #204

astrodust wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lived for at least fifty thousand years without any money at all, for around three thousand with some form of money, and the last two hundred years with the idea of hourly wages and bills and rent. It's entirely possible we'll find a better way to do this. Maybe we'll have to "undertake dramatic changes" to avoid an even bigger disaster.

Wages, bills, rent, and taxation easily date back to classical times, and predate coinage (coinage being introduced in large part to make collecting taxes easier). Indeed, I believe the earliest writing that we've deciphered is an accounting bill or receipt.

Within cities this was common, yet the vast majority of the population did not live there and was "employed" in other ways.

For someone living an agricultural lifestyle things weren't great, you did have to appease your land-owner, but usually that was facilitated by paying a portion of your crop as rent. During the winter months when you had little to do other than care for livestock, things were pretty laid back.

We're a lot less self-sufficient than we used to be, and this is perhaps irreversible. Nobody can be expected to make their own medication, to build their own computer from sand.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#237

Post by rhino369 » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

cryoshon wrote: post #90

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money. Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education. It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.

>Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education.

But there have never been enough "good" white collar to employ the current number of Americans getting a college education. The difference was there were enough good, white collar jobs for the college graduates back then. But the number of college graduates has exploded.

You can train another 20k Physicists, but we wouldn't have any use for them.

And the quality of the degrees are lower too because colleges are accepting (and then graduating) worse and worse students.

Not everyone is cut out to do great things. There is no shame in slinging coffee.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#238

Post by zanny » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #25

maresca wrote: post #3

Student loan debt surpassed credit card and auto loan debt in the US last year. Many college grads graduate with large sums of debt and can't find relevant jobs. Since student loan debt isn't forgivable, it'll be interesting to see the effect of this over the next decade. I have a hunch that the next big market crash will be caused by student loan debt.

Student loan debt isn't dischargeable in bankruptcy, but their are income based repayment plans. You can pay back either 10% of your discretionary income, for 20 years and then the remaining balanced is forgiven (if a balance remains). Discretionary income is defined as the difference between your income and 150% of the federal poverty level. If you have 200k in student loans, but only make 30k a year because you can…

Yet if you are below the poverty level (unemployed) those monthly minimums can be overwhelming.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#239

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

cryoshon wrote: post #90

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money. Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education. It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.

[deleted]

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#240

Post by morgante » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

drabiega wrote: post #188

morgante wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would look like tens of millions of young people realizing that they have fallen under the yoke of life-long indentured servitude to the older generation Nobody forced them to take out loans. There are lots of options which don't involve crushing debt.

Could you elaborate?

On which part? That there aren't roving bandits forcing people to take on huge loans? Or that there are other options?

In terms of other options, there is (a) community college—very cheap, (b) state school—much cheaper usually, especially if you live at home, (c) attending a slightly less prestigious college when they offer a substantial merit scholarship.