How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
theatlantic.com
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
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Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#2I wonder if there is a way to profitably exploit this?
Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ramen paid for for a few months must look pretty attractive. Granted, the vast majority of people capable of starting startups are probably much more employable than the average college graduate or the average inner-city dropout.
Is there anything the rest of us can do? "10% discount on lifetime wages if you hire during a recession" seems like it would matter if I were hiring, but I'm not. Does anybody have any other clever ideas?
I've got one: I can't offer anybody full-time employment but if somebody could vastly decrease the friction of employment I'd love to have employment available as a service. Something like what the India/Philippines virtual assistant companies perform, except with a more consistent level of quality.
Working for it wouldn't be the most fulfilling existence in the world, but it would pay for rent, food, and loan payments while folks look for more permanent opportunities, and the virtualized nature of it would make it more conducive to that than e.g. trying to get a job in food services. Plus, unlike your local On The Border, I'm not going to ask "So Joe, are you going to be available in 3 months or will you be going back to school?" because I have no particular need for Joe to be personally available in 3 months -- I don't have to train Joe, so it doesn't matter to me if I'm working with a new Joe come fall.
Currently I do a wee bit of this via freelancing, but freelancing requires friction from me -- I need to find freelancers, supervise them, pay them, find replacements when they flake out, file tax documents for them, etc etc. That's a whole lot of grunt work for something which is supposed to save me from doing the grunt work. I want the API to grunt work.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#3I wonder if there is a way to profitably exploit this? Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ra…
that was my first reaction, but this article is extremely long. wishing there was a "tl;dr;" section so i could figure out the conclusion in a sentence or two. bookmarked it for now, will come back to it.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#4I'm old and generally pessimistic. But I've seen enough recessions to know that when you've read the seventeenth article about the never-ending bottom (as I did during the reagan era, during the early 90s when Germany and Japan were going to destroy the US economy, and post dotcom collapse), I can't help but think it's time that the pundits will all be contradicted on the upside. Just like they were on the downside.
Nations that have demographics and immigration policies that promote population growth are going to succeed comparatively over the next 20 years. The US isn't at the top of the heap there, but its close.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#5I wonder if there is a way to profitably exploit this? Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ra…
that was my first reaction, but this article is extremely long. wishing there was a "tl;dr;" section so i could figure out the conclusion in a sentence or two. bookmarked it for now, will come back to it.
It's extremely long? Maybe I'm a bit older than most readers here (I'm 38), but has the average readers attention span shrunk that much?
Nuance cannot always come in bite-sized chunks. BTW, I read the article (on a plane - the print edition, no less) - it's worth the time.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#6My view is that the article is on the optimistic side.
It accurately describes the best case. It admits that nobody knows how bad it will be. But it fails to talk about known structural problems that we still face.
We have coming credit crunches in commercial real estate when ARM loans reset, prime home mortgages when ARM loans reset, private equity when principal comes due on a ton of LBOs, local government as their tax base continues to decrease, unfunded obligations increase, and they continue struggling under a major load of debt, and local governments as well as their pension funds suddenly lose large amounts of money due to overexposure to the private equity debacle.
Of course we have bright points like bank profits, right? Wrong. The only reason that banks are recording a profit is that during the credit crisis they were allowed to stop marking debt to market. The major banks are all sitting on a ton of future losses that are not properly accounted for. But since their unrealistic accounting recorded a profit, they are paying themselves enough money that the bankers (if not their employers) will ride out the coming crises.
I could say more but I'll stop. I'm depressing myself.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#7I'm old and generally pessimistic. But I've seen enough recessions to know that when you've read the seventeenth article about the never-ending bottom (as I did during the reagan era, during the early 90s when Germany and Japan were going to destroy the US economy, and post dotcom collapse), I can't help but think it's time that the pundits will all be contradicted on the upside. Just like they were on the downside.…
This too will pass.
On the other hand, for certain groups the last thirty to forty years have been a long, slow slide from the top of the economic heap to the bottom. Specifically, conditions for white men without college degrees have gone from great to exceedingly poor. It's had an enormous, perhaps defining impact on modern politics, and will continue to be one of the most important influences in the future.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#8I'm old and generally pessimistic. But I've seen enough recessions to know that when you've read the seventeenth article about the never-ending bottom (as I did during the reagan era, during the early 90s when Germany and Japan were going to destroy the US economy, and post dotcom collapse), I can't help but think it's time that the pundits will all be contradicted on the upside. Just like they were on the downside.…
This too will pass. On the other hand, for certain groups the last thirty to forty years have been a long, slow slide from the top of the economic heap to the bottom. Specifically, conditions for white men without college degrees have gone from great to exceedingly poor. It's had an enormous, perhaps defining impact on modern politics, and will continue to be one of the most important influences in the future.
My initial reaction to your comment is that specifically, conditions for white women with college degrees have gone from exceedingly poor to not too bad.
Just saying.
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
that was my first reaction, but this article is extremely long. wishing there was a "tl;dr;" section so i could figure out the conclusion in a sentence or two. bookmarked it for now, will come back to it.
It's extremely long? Maybe I'm a bit older than most readers here (I'm 38), but has the average readers attention span shrunk that much? Nuance cannot always come in bite-sized chunks. BTW, I read the article (on a plane - the print edition, no less) - it's worth the time.
What's this "print" you mention?
Re: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
This too will pass. On the other hand, for certain groups the last thirty to forty years have been a long, slow slide from the top of the economic heap to the bottom. Specifically, conditions for white men without college degrees have gone from great to exceedingly poor. It's had an enormous, perhaps defining impact on modern politics, and will continue to be one of the most important influences in the future.
My initial reaction to your comment is that specifically, conditions for white women with college degrees have gone from exceedingly poor to not too bad. Just saying.
The Economist ran a cover story on precisely this phenomenon a few weeks back:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...