The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
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Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#2The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work.
The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- but there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build?
Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle...
Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have generational creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That is generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines.
The generational cultural poverty, coupled with actual material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#3The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is goin…
The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling.
I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#4Not surprising at all.
Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a factor but a house on the market to long gets stale).
Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker to less attractiveness all else held equal.
The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor.
Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#5The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is goin…
> The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
[Citation needed]
I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.
Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed.
Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#6So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#7Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?
"Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#8Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? "Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?
This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#9Two things.
First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, and there's high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing for jobs via resume blasts.
Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers that routinely needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#10Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? "Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.
Startuplandia myopia is myopic. Even for software developers, if you apply for a bunch of BigCo jobs, you're going to find that a long stretch without formal employment is an obstacle.
The "I've been freelancing for the past year" trick probably does not work as well for med techs or paralegals.