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We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

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Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#211

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

defen wrote: post #82
cjy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand comparative advantage. As long as there is scarcity, comparative advantage matters. There were 24 hours in a day when Ricardo was around and there still are today. There are theoretical cases under which trade can make a country worse off, but they are rare situations and cannot be simplified down to "inputs flow around today but didn't during Ricardo's days". That doesn't even make sense. But wh…

> But what bugs me most about your post is your belief that we should work to keep wages high for overpaid middle class American by prohibiting poor Chinese and Indians from having access to world markets where they might actually earn their marginal product. Rather than ascribe sinister motives to a person (a desire to oppress Chinese/Indian workers in order to keep American salaries high), maybe you could consider…

Sinister motives are not necessary to produce a negative outcome and making a decision to save these worker protections for Americans also amounts to making a decision to deprive workers from poorer nations of access to markets that will allow their standard of living to rise.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#212

Post by zoomzoom »

JeffL wrote: post #192
achompas wrote: post #101

Don’t fill potholes. That won’t fix the economy. Uh, yes. Yes it will. The workers that fill those potholes will earn wages, which they can then use to pay for goods. By purchasing those goods, they pay other workers' wages, and the virtuous cycle continues. Listen HN, I love your knowledge of technology and entrepreneurship. But the economics posts on here are deplorable. We've seen disruptive technologies many time…

Don't fall for the broken window fallacy. If the government wasn't taking money from people via taxation to pay for pothole fillers, then the taxpayers would have their money to spend on what they really want, which would also maintain the virtuous cycle. What you see is the pothole fillers spending money, but what you don't see is all the people who had their money taxed spending less. (If the taxpayers weren't spen…

if cutting taxes went to actual working people, that would be true. cutting taxes even more on rich people and companies leads to higher wealth inequality and not to economic stimulus.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#213

Post by Estragon »

achompas wrote: post #104
sachinag wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would improve faster if your bosses would engage in QE3 and started to inflate the economy. [Edit: that's an attack on the Board of Governors, certainly not you.]

Well, they're not my bosses anymore. I'm moving into software and applied stats now. :) I'm torn about QE3. There's little evidence that businesses are waiting on it specifically to make capital expenditure decisions; it seems, from reading the Beige Book and other anecdotes that companies might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. QE3 would just adjust the shoe on the foot a bit.

Whatever its actual economic merit it seems obvious that there will be another QE3 as soon as the derivatives and bad loans still in play cause another liquidity crisis. My personal investment strategy is exactly in line with what you describe businesses doing: stay out of the market until there's another crunch which looks severe enough that the USG will feel forced to intervene. (And stay out of USD in the meantime.)

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#214

Post by Troll_Whisperer »

lionhearted wrote: post #149
Eliezer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (a…

> PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. What odds would you bet on? I'll lay you 10:1 that world GDP continues to trend up b…

It's hard not to see bringing up GDP as anything other than an attempt to derail the discussion. The author was talking about employment. Implying that the claim was that GDP would go down (which is much less likely), and defeating that claim would have no logical bearing on whether employment will recover.

But it might confuse people into thinking it will.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#215

Post by Troll_Whisperer »

lsc wrote: post #177
temphn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6) The educational level (or mean cognitive ability) of the US population has been decreasing just as the cognitive thresholds for gainful employment are steadily increasing. You'd say education if you were on the left and might say cognition if you were on the right. Someone should plot the time series of BLS occupational statistics, with the minimum required education/IQ levels for each job. On the one hand the IQ…

"the IQ profile of the US is trending down." citation needed. Last time I looked, the flynn effect was still in full swing.

Citation needed? There's only one response to that:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=recent+flynn+effect

Right at the top is this excerpt from wikipedia: "Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations"

This from neuroanthropology.net: "A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance"

and so on

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#216

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ellyagg wrote: post #106
Eliezer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (a…

I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing. Plenty of reasonable sounding explanations are offered elsewhere in this thread for why this time is different, but then lots of reasonable sounding explanations were offered in the past. I'd say it's…

>I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing.

// It's like peak oil isn't it. We keep getting "we're at [or passed] peak oil" but then a new oil field or new extraction method makes this seem less likely. Thing is that oil will run out.

To me technological changes haven't converted in to less jobs because we've exploited those changes to increase resource use, and hence production. As natural resources falter then we can no longer have the increased resource use and so the removal of jobs via technological improvements can't be mitigated by the addition of jobs in new areas.

There are various resource pressures and financial problems that suggest to me that we're at the turning point. It would be nice to be wrong about that in some ways.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#217

Post by achompas »

JeffL wrote: post #192
achompas wrote: post #101

Don’t fill potholes. That won’t fix the economy. Uh, yes. Yes it will. The workers that fill those potholes will earn wages, which they can then use to pay for goods. By purchasing those goods, they pay other workers' wages, and the virtuous cycle continues. Listen HN, I love your knowledge of technology and entrepreneurship. But the economics posts on here are deplorable. We've seen disruptive technologies many time…

Don't fall for the broken window fallacy. If the government wasn't taking money from people via taxation to pay for pothole fillers, then the taxpayers would have their money to spend on what they really want, which would also maintain the virtuous cycle. What you see is the pothole fillers spending money, but what you don't see is all the people who had their money taxed spending less. (If the taxpayers weren't spen…

Yes, I'm talking about Keynesian economic stimulus. The economic jury is still out on whether tax cuts or deficit spending are more effective.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#218

Post by jgmmo »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #181
jgmmo wrote: post #96

This is a classic economic fallacy. Invention of the plow improved efficiency and killed jobs, invention of the sewing machine improved efficiency and killed jobs, invention of the computer improved efficiency and killed jobs. They killed jobs in the short run but they made everyone in society better off on the whole. Sure, some workers had to be retrained -- and some workers could never find a job again. However suc…

I agree it's a long-term improvement, but if "some workers could never find a job again" happens to the majority all at once, they aren't going to quietly starve.

Anyone who is willing and able to transition to another way of earning a living, will. The majority of workers being replaced are not unwilling to find a new way earn a living, it's only the very old and the very stubborn that will have a difficult time finding their career 2.0

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#219

Post by achompas »

illumen wrote: post #184
achompas wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say how many workers have less than a HS degree. A trip to bls.gov would help, but I'm on an iPhone. I imagine the majority of American workers have a HS degree, at least.

There's no such thing as a HS degree. There is such a thing as a high school diploma.

Funny, I even called it a diploma above.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#220

Post by justincormack »

com wrote: post #189
ChristianMarks wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany and Japan pursue their own national industrial policies--unlike the United States, which doesn't really have one. The industrial policy of Germany and Japan is to compete in high-value, highly specialized niches, where there are few competitors. This way they maintain high profit margins to support middle class wages at home. Germany's exporters get rebates on the VAT taxes of the goods they export. The Unite…

Can you find references for these German government subsidies for exporters and their percentage value per exported unit? The US also runs a very complex series of industrial subsidies too, but it seems to be somewhat ad-hoc and therefore difficult (outside of WTO complaints such as Boeing-Airbus) to explore.

VAT is a sales tax, so it is not charged on exports outside the EU. It might technically be a rebate but it is not a subsidy.

Not sure about the extent of real subsidies.

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