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9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

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Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#41

Post by ZachPruckowski »

billybob wrote: post #22

"I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll." This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think t…

>Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.

It can also use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate demand, increasing the amount of work that needs to be done and resulting in more hiring.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#42

Post by quanticle »

AlisdairO wrote: post #15
pat2man wrote: post #11

This could have been said about the industrial revolution, invention of agriculture, etc. Each time in our history when a new technology has made our lives more efficient some people have lost their jobs. In their place more jobs have been created that would never have been thought of before. Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements…

I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined. I agree, there will pr…

Of course, definitions of skilled and unskilled labor change too. A reasonably skilled cotton picker is still "unskilled labor" to an economy that needs machinists. A highly trained machinist is equivalently unskilled in an economy that requires programmers.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#43

Post by b_emery »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10

Technological unemployment is part of the picture, but there isn't a 'magic bullet' to avoid it. We need Scientists? Ask the 1800 surplus Physics PhD's that get produced every year. It's clear that the academic system uses young and smart people, but not that it produces desirable or permanent employment for them. A wise person wouldn't get involved, unless they've got one (or preferably two) parent(s) that are alrea…

> 1800 surplus Physics PhD's

Do you have better data than this?:

"The physics PhD classes of 2007 and 2008 consisted of 1,460 and 1,499 PhDs, respectively. We received post-degree information on 54% of these degree recipients." ... resulting in 4% unemployed initially. Including the 7% temporarily employed that's around 150 excess Physics Phd's in 2008.

http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/phdinitial.pdf

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#44

Post by mcantelon »

Symmetry wrote: post #20
mcantelon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. More wealth, yes, but not necessary wealth that gets distributed (as productivity in the US has increased, real wages have decreased). http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp195/

Real wages may have decreased, but total compensation has been increasing steadily, at least on a per worker basis instead of a per-household one. A lot of that has been increases in the cost of health insurance paid for by employers, but some has been more vacation time, 401K matching, etc.

I think that may be true for a minority of the workforce, but not the workforce at large.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#45

Post by gaius »

chc wrote: post #23
AlisdairO wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined. I agree, there will pr…

If they have no skills, they never had very good prospects. Even "simple" farmhands need to have some skill at tending to the farm. It's not like you could just stand by a conveyor belt with a dumb look on your face and call yourself a factory worker for very long.

No-one who's ever farmed would say farming is unskilled. Just as I'm sure, programming would look just like typing to a farmer.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#46

Post by thyrsus »

ojbyrne wrote: post #19

So looking at this article - http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-pop... - my quick calculation shows that the US population is growing at about 1.3% annually. Which means there's somewhat more than 7 million new Americans since 2008 (back of the envelope produces a number of 8 million). Which, combined with the fact that GDP has barely recovered since 2008, kind of invalidates the article - i.e i…

This chart shows that there are now 5% fewer jobs than there were at the peak of employment 34 months ago - the lines are scaled relative to prior peak jobs, not relative to population.

http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html#category=Employment&...

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#47

Post by knieveltech »

"New developments in flooring, painting and construction are resulting in longer use of our homes."

I know that this is at best tangential to the OP's point but this poked me in the eye. Can the OP really be this naive about modern construction materials and practices?

150 years ago it wasn't uncommon to build a house out of hardwood planking, with a stone foundation. Post in beam construction using 2ft square timbers was also fairly common. This kind of construction is built to last and it does.

By comparison the largest driving factor in material selection on your average home construction project is cost. That's why you get vinyl siding, soft pine 2x4's, and the cheapest interior hardware money can buy. So in this instance innovation is a euphemism for selecting poor materials. Great.

How many people really think their stick built McMansion is going to be standing in 150 years? I mean, really?

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#48

Post by georgieporgie »

Splines wrote: post #32
billybob wrote: post #22

"I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll." This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think t…

There's a great podcast about this exact topic by Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/05/135151990/the-tues...

One of the best Planet Money episodes I've heard. Summary (from memory): the one and only way government can create jobs is to invest in infrastructure. Everything else is hot air.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#49

Post by WalterBright »

pak wrote: post #31

grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemplo…

>A much better take would be an examination of why our education system churns out so many college grads with few marketable skills.

Queue the recent discussion about rampant cheating in college. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#50

Post by sixtofour »

pak wrote: post #31

grellas, you're the man when it comes to assiduous comments on legal topics, but why this article? It's just a bunch of hard-nosed Valley boardroom hot air that namedrops from the NASDAQ-100 and tells middle america to suck it up. The only salient point was that the government has no easy way of producing more jobs, but there's no solution offered and it's buried in a sea of other BS. "Hey poor and struggling unemplo…

> "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?

That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business should be expected to do so.

Given that, people do need to suck it up and learn new skills. The article made a good argument for that, and did it in the context of the new reality.

Some people won't be able to develop new needed skills, for various reasons. For some people technology and society will just move faster than they can keep up with. Others have some other impediment. As this trend continues, we need to get better as a society at dealing with those people.

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