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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#221

Post by mschuster91 »

graeme wrote: post #94
mschuster91 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

This is the lump of labour fallacy. Rest assured that life will be harder for young people if a sizeable portion of the population is old, out of the labour force, and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers. We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.

> and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers

And here is where it gets funny. I wonder how pension systems would look like if they were supported by the billions of dollars that especially FAANG but also other huge megacorps such as IKEA, McDonald's, Burger King "creatively avoid" in taxes. Or if minimum wages were set so high that a pension built on a life of minimum wage were enough to live on in old age (this is a problem that currently runs high in Germany, as many old people have not enough pension to get by and so require social welfare)?

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#222

Post by peisistratos »

smokeyj wrote: post #195
peisistratos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have fallen . That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from wo…

If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited? Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth?? The question was really simple. Your answer is the kind that inevitably ends with "you just have to read Das Kapital". That is not an answer.

> If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited? Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth??

As I said, when, after the electricity bill etc. is paid, created wealth is split between dividends to heirs and wages to those who worked and created the wealth.

If in your hypothetical situation there is no split - if the person who worked and created wealth keeps everything - there is no expropriation.

The expropriation is the last few hours of work he does, of the wealth he creates - none of it going to him, the one who created the wealth and did the work. All of the profit going to the heir. But if there is no split, this expropriation does not happen.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#223

Post by kevinskii »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #145
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I learn about Texas, the more it seems like they're doing everything right.

Hear hear. I found the “Draw Mohammed Contest” particularly amusing. Edit: I see we have some touchy SJW-types in the house this evening :)

I downvoted you not to express disagreement, but because I think your comment detracts from this particular conversation. I suspect others did for the same reason.

However: Some of your other recent comments are spot on. The upvotes are on me. Try not to spend them all in one place.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#224

Post by codinger »

coredog64 wrote: post #153
sudosteph wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What community college is charging $900 for a single class? That really is highway robbery. I just looked up costs at the community college classes I took, and its $76 per credit hour for in-state tuition. Also your characterization of community colleges only being for those too poor to attend a 4 year school is totally out of touch and frankly a little stigmatizing towards an important pieces of public education. I…

My wife and kids are all taking one class at the local community college. Tuition was nearly $400/student, plus a $200 book and a mandatory $200 online program. You can find the book used, and we economized by only buying 2 books for 4 people.

You can usually google the book and find a pdf on the first page of results. The online codes some of the professor's require is highway robbery.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#225

Post by randomdata »

sudosteph wrote: post #88
jnbiche wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turned out, college was partly a proxy for class. What college grad earnings in the 60s was actually saying is that upper-middle class kids grow into upper-middle class adults. I think this is a critical observation that lots of people--including some economists--have missed.

A college degree may not be a panacea for class mobility, but lets not forget that class mobility without a degree is pretty much not possible in the slightest. Per a Pew study Brookings cites ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/02... ): > children born in the lowest income quintile who do not earn a four-year degree are four times as likely to wind up in the bottom (47%) as those who earn a f…

> lets not forget that class mobility without a degree is pretty much not possible in the slightest.

While it is true that the school system acts as a filter that removes those who have almost no chance of upward mobility (those with crippling disabilities, for example) from completing higher and higher levels of schooling, we need to be careful to not reverse that observation. Attaining a degree is not going to undo the disability that limits one's economic growth.

With the great push for everyone to have a post-secondary education we've witnessed over the last decade or two, virtually everyone who is capable of attaining a post-secondary education has done so. Those who are not completing those levels of schooling now are those who had no chance in the first place, and they struggle equally in the rest of their life for the same reason they did not succeed in school.

That said, if you were born with what it takes to be top of the class in Harvard, but chose not to pursue that avenue of life, chances are you still have every bit of upward mobility potential as someone who did graduate from Harvard.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#226

Post by Eridrus »

gizmo686 wrote: post #179
Eridrus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is only true if an increase in the housing supply does not lead to an increase in the population. At a national level, this is probably true enough to assume. But, at the level of individual cities, it is not nessaserrily true. I can easily imagine scenarios where an increase in housing causes an increase in the local population greater than the increase in housing capacity.

For increase supply to have no effect on price, the demand curve has to be highly inelastic, but this just isn't true. People very much do make decisions about where to live based on the cost.

At the margin, people may be more likely to move if you build more housing, but this would be because they can get a better deal on housing, not because there is some abstract idea of more housing.

Without a reduction in price/increase in housing quality, there is no mechanism that would cause more people to show up.

The main exception to this is if you have rent control capping prices, but this isn't really a big part of any market where this discussion is taking place.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#227

Post by codinger »

the_fuzzyone wrote: post #220
ausjke wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Texas is overwhelmed by migrants from CA and Mexico that is, that joint-force is changing TX from red to purple, and to blue soon. At the moment, Austin is more liberal than most CA cities already. When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past. People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however…

I couldn't hear you over your dog whistling

No kidding, wait until he finds out Texas was formerly Mexico and many of the brown people are descendant of US citizens when Texas became a part of the US.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#228

Post by Retric »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #144
Retric wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an outgrowth of the same rise in general competency. Inside a company programmers such as my self have been assigned to work on React without ever having seen it before with the expectation they will pick it up. It's only when looking for new employees that these differences have much weight. PS: I have been told to pick up low level network programming, frameworks such as React, new langues, even jumped into…

Programming is a specialized, incredibly dynamic, role. Do you think it's fair to assume that all positions in a company act like that?

All jobs past and present involve some very specific domain knowledge and a range of more general skills.

A car salesman needs to know a lot about the product, more general sales tactics, more general skills like email, and even more general skills like just speaking. But, as you narrow down into the ultra specific niche the percent of time working in that domain decreases. What percentage of the time is the sales guy dredging up specific horsepower numbers etc related just to the car they are selling?

Over time what we could consider generalists jobs like secretary have been cut while the tasks have not. So, by handing out those tasks to others those other jobs have in turn become more generalist on a day to day basis. Dev-Ops for example is in many ways the opposite of specialization.

PS: Put another way, if my last job had been using Java instead of C# I would have done the same thing with ~80% of my time. You would be reading the same requirements of the code was in another language.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#229

Post by thaumasiotes »

netcan wrote: post #10

" 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?…

A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?

http://www.unz.com/anepigone/average-iq-of-college-undergrad...

> Today’s bachelor’s degree is the equivalent of a high school graduation certificate from fifty years ago, and today’s graduate degree falls short of a bachelor’s degree from a generation ago.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#230

Post by drawkbox »

New business idea for transportation: HeliHelp.

HeliHelp flies in low skilled workers via helicopter, quicker than commutes and allows you to keep paying "market wages" that don't allow employees for retail/restaurants/etc to live anywhere near the place of upscale upperclass community where you need your employees to be during work. Fly them in, then fly them out, way out. HeliHelp is not only an expense, but it can be part of your employees "real compensation" to further not give any sort of wage increase.

"HeliHelp: Better to buy a helicopter than to pay above market wages" /s

On a serious note:

Workers share of GDP has been in constant decline since the 70s [1].

Velocity of money is at all time lows and off a cliff [2].

Household income has been normalized, sideways [3]. Middle class is not getting richer but flat.

Those are signs that wages are not growing as fast as they could or should. A better economy comes when more people have consumer spending supply and that increases demand across the board. Demand brings investment.

Wage increases have essentially been efficiently worked out of the system, and at a certain point that is a more stagnant economy than we could have which affects lower, middle and upper classes.

Wealth does not spend enough to fuel an economy, you need the middle and lower to be consumers that have demand, with money in their pockets before the rich will invest.

Middle class is still getting pummeled and nothing has changed.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

[3] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/12/the-puzzle-of-real-m...

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