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

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

#271
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why young people need to vote.

? Voting for the corrupt does nothing but legitimizes the process. Only money matters. Come up with a real solution because voting isn't it and I'm sick of hearing the same faulty advice.

Do you know why money matters in politics? Because it buys votes. Politicians are willing to sell their opinions for money because it is expensive to run a campaign convincing people who are otherwise apathetic to vote for you. And that is were most political campaigns are won because most people who aren't apathetic about an election have already made up their mind before the campaigns' marketing efforts even start up.

It all comes back to votes.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 numbe…

>There is no shame in slinging coffee.

The shame isn't in the work, the shame is in having no money to do anything: get a decent apartment, raise a family, go on vacation, provide for a spouse.

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

#273
post #81
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

To add to this: Applicant's who do spend time authoring a well formatted application are seemingly under served by the website-submission process that completely garbles and incorrectly re-formats their applicant documents. Very frustrating and demotivating for the next submitted app. Moreover, they may not even discover that the website ruins their document. I think there's a disruption opportunity here to provide a…

One solution to this is to create a plain text resume to be used when submitting through an applicant tracking system. You can still perform some basic formatting in plain text (e.g., string of hyphens for a horizontal line, asterisk for bullet, carriage return at 60 characters to prevent erroneous line wrapping, etc.).

At the top of the plain text resume include a line stating something like "MS Word/PDF formatted resume available at http://ExternalWebsite..."

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

#274
There are a few ways to create many openings:

1. Legislate a maximum working hours (probably 2. Allow humans to undercut automation in price competition (eg abolish minimum wage)

3. Expand government to employ people for whatever, just print the money you pay them.

Clearly these all come with unsatisfactory side-effects.

Maybe the fix is to end our obsession with creating jobs and jobs being the form of survival we offer our species. Imagine if we just created 600M jobs automating all the things so that those jobs would never (or nearly never) need to be done again? The future generations would need Billions of jobs! But no one would be worse off for it. Its like when a dishwasher became common place, suddenly kids were free to do more homework or facebook or xbox etc. Suddenly parents were more free not to have kids (to complete household chores). Etc etc. By automating and reducing the work that human kind has to do, we're enabling better lives all involved, including the displaced workers. Change hurts in the shortrun, but can bring utopia in the long run.

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

#275
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.

I agree that student loan debt seems like an asset bubble -- in that the price of an education greatly exceeds the valuation justified by the fundamentals. But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did. Unlike housing, you can't walk away from your education; student loans are designed to prevent debtors from ever escaping their obligations. They're also guarantee…

Hopefully the bubble popping looks like University of Phoenix and its for-profit brethren going out of business. The looming student loan crisis has been reported for a while, but what's more recently been reported is just how large a percentage of it is these for-profit schools.

We hear scary numbers and naturally associate them with expensive private school educations from the ivy schools or similar institutions. But there's really no crisis there...people graduating from an ivy league school will almost certainly pay off their loans, large as they might be. The bulk of the defaults will come from people who've gotten largely-meaningless degrees from those for-profit schools. It's sad, but job screening skills are so bad in most industries that they basically just use the college admission screening process as a proxy. And the fact that basically anyone can get into the University of Phoenix means that there's almost no value placed on having graduated from there.

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

#276
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that student loan debt seems like an asset bubble -- in that the price of an education greatly exceeds the valuation justified by the fundamentals. But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did. Unlike housing, you can't walk away from your education; student loans are designed to prevent debtors from ever escaping their obligations. They're also guarantee…

Back around 2000, when I saw education costs rising (and was a big believer in market forces), I figured more educators would enter the market, and things would stabilize. It's been 15 years, and I haven't seen any new colleges or universities formed. What happened?

Since 1980, the number of colleges has gone from roughly 2000 to roughly 3000. That doesn't account for increases in class size.

The demand is still very strong. The millennial generation was told, go to college or you'll have to flip burgers your whole life.

One huge problem is college demand is fairly inelastic. Another is that colleges are mostly non-profit institutions who aren't out for institutional profits. Instead they compete for prestige. If they spend a bunch of money on useless shit, USNEWs will rank them higher.

Students and parents aren't urged to consider price. In fact they are encouraged to ignore price. Just get in first! then worry about "financial aid." Which is mostly just loans at this point.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness. A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?

Good engineers can be bad at English. I've seen C-suite briefings and strategy docs with obvious errors in them. Unless you're working in publishing, I'd pay less attention to trivial errors than to evidence of an ability to get useful things done.

This is proof that you can counter-argument anything. Just proofread your damn resume (or engineer yourself a spellchecker).

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

#278
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education. Maybe. Not all college educations are created equal. Got a major in philosophy? You're not useful to the economy, there are no jobs and no one is wasting your education. Of course the example here is facetious, the point is this: If you have a college education/degree in something that is not marketable to…

I really dislike this kind of judgement of non-STEM majors. I used to make these kinds of judgements myself. The problem is the quality of education in America. Outside of certain, well-defined technical fields our universities have largely become degree mills.

A high quality education in philosophy or English, makes for effective communicators with excellent critical thinking skills. Outside of the very best universities students don't get that kind of education.

A STEM major isn't necessarily the answer either. It's often a struggle for highly educated math and science majors to find work in their industry. Sure they may have a leg up on getting certain jobs outside their industry, but it's by no means easy going for them either.

"American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields."

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myt...

Fact of the matter is that, there are largely just fewer jobs to go around. Part of this is that the older generation is working longer, not vacating their positions. Some of it is efficiency gains from software and other modern technology have let companies do more with fewer people, leading to a smaller workforce requirement.

We're very quickly nearing a point where not everyone needs to work full time in order to support our population and in fact not everyone CAN work full time in productive work. As a planet we're going to have to make some serious societal and economic decisions.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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.

http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS...

> Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

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