Just to point out, this article is focused on the US only.
The rent prices in slums of big cities in Latin America can blow your mind.
Are they unexpectedly high or low?
Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
101–110 of 430 posts
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found these briefly: " Recent years have witnessed widespread public concern and increased policy attention to issues of housing affordability. In 2015 a full one-half of U.S. households were paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. We identify multiple channels by which individual or family outcomes are inferior when rents increase faster than income. Research further suggests that rising rent burdens ma…
Can't read the first one, but the second one focuses on foreclosure rates which seems more indicative of an economic shock rather than general low affordability.
Yes; it was a sub-5-minute google scholar search to potentially get someone started on what seems to exist in the field. I'm sure if one wanted more specialized information either someone on HN will know more than me or someone else can take more time to search more effectively.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#103" 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?…
College doesn't necessarily make people more productive. Rather it acts as a filter to knock unproductive people out of the hiring pool. And in economics terminology, completing a degree acts as a signal for candidates to demonstrate intelligence and persistence to employers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
The signaling isn't just for intelligence and grit (although those are factors); as Caplan argues in The Case Against Education, a college degree also signals capacity for obedience and conformity.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The huge mass of voters who can't get jobs?
At 1$/vote , those masses will be swayed by the social and "news and commentary" media at whomever pays to focus their ire. And that very news media can also sway people that 'their vote doesnt count'. I remember when Fox News was running "ObamaCare is Evil Socialism", at the same time talking how the ACA was helping people. Or how they were railing about "illegals" while at the same time discussing Southern farmers'…
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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As someone who's been on employment insurance before. I can't understand the appeal of ubi. Getting a small amount of money to do nothing is excruciating. It's really not a fun way to live.
It's not meant to be solely sustainable. Lots of people get this wrong though, which means the name Universal Basic Income probably isn't the best name for it. Maybe Universal Supplemental Income? Could very well be the idea needs a rebranding before a larger adoption ever happens.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?
Quite a few people. The returns are generally poor, which is why I chuckled at the post to which you replied; as a consultant I consistently found myself doing more work (and costing more) coming in after such credentialed-but-not-taught folks to fix the mess of "well, I know AWS, so all I'll use are AWS-recommended AWS solutions whether or not they actually fit what my project needs. AWS!". Which isn't, I stress, a knock on AWS--AWS is fine. Its managed services aren't appropriate for every situation, but the AWS certs that I've taken have never-not-once entertained the idea of not using a proper-nouned hosted service at any point. There are plenty of places where those services are fine, if sometimes overpriced even taking into account people costs...but there are plenty of places where they're not and no AWS cert I've seen has even nodded at the idea.
As it happens, I use stuff I learned in my distributed systems courses--in that oh-so-awful university, hiss--on a weekly basis, if not daily, to solve those problems. (I use stuff I learned in my microeconomics and my political science and my sociology classes daily, but you can't put that on a resume, so obviously it doesn't exist.)
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#107“The goal [of government] is to have an economy which makes it possible for normal, average young people to marry and have kids.”
From: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/tucker-carlson...
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?
More employers than you would think. The professional certs are legit. Also, 50% of some cloud native DevOps and infrastructure engineering roles are covered by the pro certs.
Covered pretty poorly. I've let my AWS certs lapse because they're not worth the time to keep them up. The hard parts of my job have very little to do with "these AWS services exist", which is the extent of what I've gotten out of AWS certs.
(Nobody cares about SWF.)
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I disagree with that first part. At least in software engineering. Remember when you just had software engineers? Eventually we got things like game programmers and web developers. Now every game has at the very least an audio programmer, gameplay programmers, network programmers, graphics programmers, platform engineers, etc. Web Developers are even more specialized, walk into any web development shop and you can find people that only ever work with say React on mobile, or one person that specializes on browser compatibility, or analytics engineering.
Part of it is the size and scope of the projects and the general complexity added to the field, but 20 years ago 1-2 people would have done all of these.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#110" 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?…
Sure, I'm not sure anyone actually denies this. College education was something only upper class folks could receive (especially a liberal arts degree with dubious value in society) due to it's expense. With the emergence of things like state schools, the barrier became lower. But the fact of the matter is higher paying jobs required college degrees, and the best chance for most people at a middle class lifestyle are…
> College education was something only upper class folks could receive (especially a liberal arts degree with dubious value in society) due to it's expense. With the emergence of things like state schools, the barrier became lower.
This is not factually correct - tuition at non-state schools increased 10X in the last 30 years, way ahead of the pace of inflation. College education is significantly much less affordable than it was years ago.