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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
51–60 of 430 posts
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#52" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…
In my view, there's some survivorship bias going on there. Somebody has to know that the cert is in demand, and that they have a good chance of getting it. We think it's easy because we're the ones for whom learning computer skills was in fact easy. But it's not easy for everybody.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we do see the same problem in several European cities. For instance there's been some debate about how nurses can't really afford to live in Oslo anymore due to the discrepancy between income and rent.
I've long thought the same about London. How does a teacher, nurse, or policeman rent anywhere within a 60 minute commute? Probably many delay having a family and are able to share a house, but eventually that's going to get old for a lot of people.
Europe as a whole has a large mitigating factor in that there is really good public infrastructure buses and trains there. Sure, an hour commute a day isn't preferable but if you can spend it reading or watching netflix it impacts your life a lot less negatively than having to drive a car the whole time.
So no, the baristas, janitors, etc of London can't live in London. But at least most of their commutes aren't as terrible as the majority of US workers driving individual cars over great distances every day to go to work.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#54" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
> I'm also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school. At one time there was an argument that general skills had value. We as a society have become super specialized and those general skills relatively ubiquitous that those general skills aren't terribly valued any more. Your employer d…
Jobs have become less specialized not more.
Being able to effectively communicate over email takes more writing skills than most people assume. The internet adds a lot of flexibility in the kind of things the average office worker will do.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#55> So what’s to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. This is a nice idea in theory, but isn't this a temporary fix? For the first five years, housing prices will lower. But as more companies (demanding higher-educated individuals) realize more people are availa…
So five years later you build more housing . We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want those people living here".
I agree that you need to keep building housing, but I also think it's important to not concede the point that it will have no effect on housing prices.
The GP is flat out wrong in their assessment that prices will just return to what they were.
Even if you build more housing, and then stop, the prices will be lower than if you hadn't built anything at all.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#56My tinfoil hat theory is that this is being caused by the increasing concentration of wealth. Which is being enabled by increasing levels of automation and efficiency.
The only tinfoil part is the last sentence. It's being enabled by decades of policy dominated by the benefactors of such wealth.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for the unskilled workers out of a job.
In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average. I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen: • We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford coll…
> If there is less work to be done in the world, everyone will work less on average.
Another solution would be that we end up with fewer people, through any of several rather nasty mechanisms.
I'm not as optimistic as you that society values animals which don't provide anything -- horses haven't gone extinct, but they're certainly not doing well either.
In the age of thinking machines, monkeys are the new horses.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#58> So what’s to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. This is a nice idea in theory, but isn't this a temporary fix? For the first five years, housing prices will lower. But as more companies (demanding higher-educated individuals) realize more people are availa…
So five years later you build more housing . We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want those people living here".
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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#59" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
Only a couple generations ago, college was not a proxy for "middle class". Lots of blue-collar jobs (especially industrial ones) paid enough for a "middle class" lifestyle and financial security. Small businesses were competitive and many of their owners were not college educated either. College wasn't a necessary qualification for most blue-collar jobs, including some for which it now is (such as police work, in man…
> you could start out as a file clerk with a high school degree and work your way up into middle or even upper management (at least if you were white and male).
That upwards mobility depends on one thing: that old people drop out of the workforce either by death or by pension, so that young people can rise up the ranks.
Now, given that people in their 80s need to work (!) to survive, this "generational contract" is broken. People are stuck with shit jobs until well in their 30s, so how are they supposed to procreate or save for their own retirement?
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#60And yet we see this huge push in the intelligentsia for how cities “increase creativity” and promote value “x y and z” and how “we should be like China and build planned mega cities”. Cities that are very walkable and have a thriving downtown / mixed business areas can be a ton of fun and very good, but it’s very hard to ever make that affordable, and basically impossible to do in America which has large space demand…
You make cities affordable by unrestricting building height way beyond the "projected" demand for residential construction in the core. Then as dense, cheap residential fills up you will see the natural build out of more of it. Keeping space to grow / build public transit and infrastructure is also critical. That doesn't mean overbuild now, it means don't try to stop it when the time comes.