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The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

nytimes.com

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Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#31

Post by hessenwolf »

jsilva wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…

What do you mean by "privileged classes", not sure i understood your idea ?

Personal availability of risk capital. I mean, if I make a mistake with my cashflow stream, I don't eat. It has happened three times in my life, and not in twelve years.

This means that I make decisions differently to somebody who has a buffer of parental emergency capital injection. For example, I would love passionately to quit my job right now. I would love to set up a consultancy specialising in data analysis for capital management for insurance companies, and have more than the required skill set, but if I take too much risk my family could be hungry. That would be decidedly uncool.

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#32

Post by hessenwolf »

brandonmenc wrote: post #3

> The places with the highest rates of male nonwork include parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas and Michigan. The areas of high unemployment in Arizona and New Mexico overlap almost exactly with the Indian reservations. A problem deserving its own analysis.

Does that mean that more Indians are unemployed, or that the reservations were placed in the greatest economic crapholes that could be found?

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#33

Post by venomsnake »

barry-cotter wrote: post #28
shutupalready wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies hoarding cash instead of spending it I've heard this sentiment many times but I've wondered if there's an economic fallacy there. Would the economy be better off if lots of companies stopped hoarding cash and hired lots of new employees? Or would there be side-effects like inflation, or some effect of pulling out cash from whatever it was invested in, etc.? Serious question.

> I've heard this sentiment many times but I've wondered if there's an economic fallacy there. There is, it's a confusion between money and capacity. That money is an option, the possibility of getting people to do things for you. Unused money is paper. > Would the economy be better off if lots of companies stopped hoarding cash and hired lots of new employees? The economy is an abstraction. It can't be better off. B…

But we cannot produce more, because the unemployed don't consume. So we lay of people. It is a death spiral.

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#34

Post by Axsuul »

jsilva wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…

What do you mean by "privileged classes", not sure i understood your idea ?

He means those that belong to "privileged classes" usually don't have liabilities such as student loans to pay off and therefore have the freedom to pursue endeavors such as startups which don't pay the bills upfront. Furthermore, their support network is also a significant factor.

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#35

Post by aragot »

hessenwolf wrote: post #30

That's an awesome graph. I mean, we could say some things like that the thickness of the gray bit is not so clear, or that it might be better if smoothed, perhaps the legend would be better elsewhere than in the coloured areas, but... it is still a totally expressive and elegant graphic.

Yes it made me realize the rise of retirement-aged persons who don't retire. "Can't" retire? What a shift, in only 14 years!

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#36

Post by asgard1024 »

shutupalready wrote: post #22
rtpg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…

> companies hoarding cash instead of spending it I've heard this sentiment many times but I've wondered if there's an economic fallacy there. Would the economy be better off if lots of companies stopped hoarding cash and hired lots of new employees? Or would there be side-effects like inflation, or some effect of pulling out cash from whatever it was invested in, etc.? Serious question.

First of all, you have to understand that "state where everybody is better off" is not something that's given. Everybody can be rational and still be worse off - prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example.

Economic fallacy there is, but it's in standard economic theory. Standard economics claims that only sensible things to do are investment and consumption, and considers savings to be a waste. But the savings are not waste for individual economic entities; savings are a way of gaining power in economics.

Let me give a couple examples, consider two companies, company A which saves (has large quantities of liquid capital), the other B which doesn't (and invests everything into machinery, better production, etc.).

First example: A stealthy startup appears with a completely new ("disruptive") technology. Company B cannot buy it, so the company A is at advantage.

Second example: Workers decide to strike for higher wages. Company A can survive the long strike by taking hit on it's monetary reserves, perhaps pay strikebreakers, etc. Company B cannot do anything and have to give in to the strikers demands.

In other words, savings are a way to break out of the market system, and so people do it and race who does it better, because they want power (which comes from ability to react). Economy as a whole suffers; but why should the winning actor care?

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#37

Post by hessenwolf »

aragot wrote: post #35
hessenwolf wrote: post #30

That's an awesome graph. I mean, we could say some things like that the thickness of the gray bit is not so clear, or that it might be better if smoothed, perhaps the legend would be better elsewhere than in the coloured areas, but... it is still a totally expressive and elegant graphic.

Yes it made me realize the rise of retirement-aged persons who don't retire. "Can't" retire? What a shift, in only 14 years!

I did a lot of work a while back doing longevity projections, i.e., stochastic models of the rate of change of mortality rates at different ages as time goes by. It is a bit of a trend that pension funds might choose to offset their risk by entering into longevity swaps, which work like interest rate swaps, swapping floating payments for fixed payments.

Anyway, I attended a few conferences on aging, and all that fun. One thing that stuck out was that, in Germany at least, the ratio of workers to retirees of 4:1 will be more like 2:1 when I reach the current age of retirement.

Another is that you need to consider years of abled life.

A last is that I will never retire, and probably you won't either.

Note that, in Bismarck's time, life expectancy was about 55:

One persistent myth about the German program is that it adopted age 65 as the standard retirement age because that was Bismarck's age. This myth is important because Germany was one of the models America looked to in designing its own Social Security plan; and the myth is that America adopted age 65 as the age for retirement benefits because this was the age adopted by Germany when they created their program. In fact, Germany initially set age 70 as the retirement age (and Bismarck himself was 74 at the time) and it was not until 27 years later (in 1916) that the age was lowered to 65. By that time, Bismarck had been dead for 18 years.

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#38

Post by yen223 »

jsilva wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…

What do you mean by "privileged classes", not sure i understood your idea ?

For one thing, you need savings. If you absolutely need a paycheck this month to make it through to next month, you simply cannot afford the risks involved in doing the whole startup thing.

Another thing, you need skills. But it's very difficult to get a decent education (formal or otherwise) if your family isn't able to support you during your formative learning years. It's not easy to learn programming if your family can't afford a computer. It's not easy learning financial management when the largest amount of money you ever had is $500.

Basically, if you want to do a startup, you had better not be poor or uneducated.

Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work – And What They Do Instead

#39

Post by briandear »

jsilva wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…

What do you mean by "privileged classes", not sure i understood your idea ?

All it takes is a computer, hard work and dedication. The 'poor' manage to find the time to surf the net, why not spend the time learning how to build the net?

It's a simplistic idea, but it is definitely possible. I lived out of my car for months until I was able to turn it around by using my computer for something besides surfing MySpace.

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