We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by Unseelie » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 7:06 PM UTC

achompas wrote: post #111

dxbydt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've been through this many times before 'past predicts future' is not exactly commensurate with a point of inflection. perhaps a real-life example can help - a medical transcription firm in India hires 25 Indians to transcribe medical records. I then sell the CEO a copy of voice recognition software. He is so happy with the results, he fires 24 and keeps 1 Indian to fix the occasional transcription typos! After o…

Those housewives and Indians will not be out of work for long. They are experiencing frictional unemployment right now; they'll retrain and take on a new role soon enough. You don't see the happy ending yet because this was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We love to trash finance types, but banks facilitate a lot of transactions--including home purchases and capital expenditures. When they hurt…

Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking.

If you assume that for a portion of the people in the transcribing job, that the transcribing job was the best marginal fit, then some of them don't re-enter the job market. Others have to take a worse job. If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been. So their employment has gotten worse. May be quality, may be compensation, may be available time. Something's worse for them.

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

#232

Post by sixtofour » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

ChristianMarks wrote: post #10

The OP's post could use some context. Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage was forged in a world where labor and capital were essentially fixed. England could weave cloth more efficiently than Spain, but Spain could make wine more efficiently than England. Therefore, they would both benefit from trade given that each of these countries had a comparative benefit or efficiency to offer. The assumption under compa…

I sympathize with your post. But if it's a reasonable approximation of reality, I have a problem with this:

"The problem for the elites is that these are not sustainable political or economic policies because eventually unemployment will reach unacceptable levels and the right leader will come along and tell the real story to the American people."

How are the American people supposed to recognize this unique truth and distinguish it from the "truth" that all current and former leaders and politicians have been telling to date?

If the American people are the lawn, how do we know when to trust the lawnmower when it says "this time it will be different?"

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

#233

Post by justin_vanw » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 7:14 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

I don't know the answer, but I can see it as being something like:

In 1100's europe, there was land that was cleared for cultivation and forest. Most land holdings had areas of wilderness. They cleared it as the population increased. If the landholder could have instantly increased the population, he would have put the new people to work clearing land and planting crops (probably via leasing it to them as a landlord, or some kind of serfdom, but the mechanics of that don't matter here). So, the number of 'jobs' available on a given landholders property might have been 5000, while the population at the time was 400. There were more job openings than there were people.

Later, factories pulled population away from farms and improved farming allowed the land to feed more people than actually lived on it. This reduced the number of farmers needed as a proportion of the population, so if the population were the same as in 1100, the 5000 jobs we had before might have dropped, perhaps to 2000 jobs, or rather, food prices would have dropped so that lots of people no longer saw farming as the best idea. However, the population had increased greatly. My hypothesis here is that the number of jobs that could have been productively filled was still higher than the population.

This process can't continue forever. Sooner or later, the number of jobs simply crosses over the number of people looking for work. In history, I can imagine a leader, seeing lots of able bodied, desperate, and incredibly cheap manpower seeing an opportunity to raise an army and attempting to expand their own wealth by expanding their lands. That was a natural brake on the population line. Today, thankfully, we don't have any mechanisms that drastically reduce the population whenever people get desperate, there isn't wide areas of undeveloped land that can absorb as many people as we have over above the jobs line, and technology continues to increase productivity at a respectable rate.

So that is how I explain why the jobs line can cross over the population line now, and why we may now be in a situation where we might expect to have less jobs than people who want jobs for a long time.

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

#234

Post by kahirsch » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

watmough wrote: post #187

lionhearted wrote: post #149

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. What odds would you bet on? I'll lay you 10:1 that world GDP continues to trend up b…

I'll take your bet, but you might want to look at this chart before you hand me your money. http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#... And this one. http://wastedenergy.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/20080301worl...

> I'll take your bet, but you might want to look at this chart before you hand me your money.

Yes, there was a serious recession in 2009. In 2010, world GDP increased by 3.9%, according to preliminary World Bank figures.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 8:55 PM UTC

Troll_Whisperer wrote: post #215

lsc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by steins » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 9:00 PM UTC

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…

For an example of 100% unemployment watch Idiocracy.

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

#237

Post by steins » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

sachinag wrote: post #175

achompas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, we could start charging the banks for carrying excess capital. I know, I know, everyone will start screaming about crappy balance sheets and all, but they're just sitting on boatloads of cash.

The problem isn't cash, its capital goods, and flooding the system with cash will just cause damage to companies who are to small to move fast enough to acquire large amounts of the flood.

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

#238

Post by Troll_Whisperer » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #235

Troll_Whisperer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

My disagreement was with the claim that "the Flynn Effect is in full swing". The recent small downwards trend you acknowledge is incompatible with that claim. From everything I've read on the topic, the Flynn Effect ended in the US about 20 years ago. FWIW, I administer Raven's APM tests in the course of my work.

Please speak for yourself about trolling wikipedia. I simply responded to the lazy GP's need for a citation with a google search of a relevant phrase. That said, the very article from which you quoted a sub-section has this in the header:

"Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations"

This claim carries a citation on wp.

Your link at the bottom about educational attainment is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Intelligence and formal schooling are two different things.

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

#239

Post by SoftwareMaven » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 9:43 PM UTC

CamperBob wrote: post #155

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment would imply the cause was wealth disparity. What were the rich doing to exploit the poor (other than not giving them money).

I can't even begin to do credit to the causes of the French Revolution in a HN post. There are a million better sources, but I think you'll find most of them will agree that "not giving the poor enough money" is not on the list of causes. Taking excessive amounts of money from the poor (and everybody else) is closer to the mark, but you still can't ignore the political climate. The lessons of the American Revolution…

Are we not being bankrupted by run-away corporate greed? Probably not, but more importantly, will the average American think we are? That has a much greater chance to be yes.

If some sort of revolutionary spirit starts in the US, corporations will be targeted just as much as the government. Big if, but we are much closer than we were 20 years ago.

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

#240

Post by JeffL » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 9:44 PM UTC

zoomzoom wrote: post #212

JeffL wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does reducing wealth inequality have to do with stimulating the economy? (I haven't heard that argument before.)