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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#151

Post by C1sc0cat »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #24
netcan wrote: post #10

" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…

> I'm also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school. At one time there was an argument that general skills had value. We as a society have become super specialized and those general skills relatively ubiquitous that those general skills aren't terribly valued any more. Your employer d…

American degrees and education are much more general than many countries in the UK an entrant into STEM degrees will have specialised in relevant classes for the last two years of high school as well as for the two years prior to that at GCSE level.

Yes the occasional maverick will also study outside their target degree but that is rare my mate who is a classics teacher (public school) has a class size of two

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#153

Post by coredog64 »

sudosteph wrote: post #142
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the plebes can't afford to take classes to further ones academic horizons. When a class at a community college (read:too poor to go to a proper uni) is $900 and 30 students and no equipment needed, that class had better have strong income assurances. Else its a waste of money and further burdening of student loans. And taking classes also means giving up time wise something else. Opportunity cost is also a thin…

What community college is charging $900 for a single class? That really is highway robbery. I just looked up costs at the community college classes I took, and its $76 per credit hour for in-state tuition. Also your characterization of community colleges only being for those too poor to attend a 4 year school is totally out of touch and frankly a little stigmatizing towards an important pieces of public education. I…

My wife and kids are all taking one class at the local community college. Tuition was nearly $400/student, plus a $200 book and a mandatory $200 online program. You can find the book used, and we economized by only buying 2 books for 4 people.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#155

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #151
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school. At one time there was an argument that general skills had value. We as a society have become super specialized and those general skills relatively ubiquitous that those general skills aren't terribly valued any more. Your employer d…

American degrees and education are much more general than many countries in the UK an entrant into STEM degrees will have specialised in relevant classes for the last two years of high school as well as for the two years prior to that at GCSE level. Yes the occasional maverick will also study outside their target degree but that is rare my mate who is a classics teacher (public school) has a class size of two

That almost seems a shame. It's a thing of beauty to hear those with a classical education speak. The ability to be able to put together clear, cogent, complicated paragraphs of thought on the fly is awesome to hear.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#156

Post by hindsightbias »

e40 wrote: post #47
netcan wrote: post #10

" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…

A lot has been written about people with college degrees working at Starbucks, having a lot of student loan debt, and never being able to save for retirement. So, I agree, have a college degree is only a proxy for skill if that degree is in something that is marketable. Comp Lit is not marketable, hence the reason a lot of people at Starbucks have degrees.

They could have started at Starbucks and gotten the degree for free from ASU online.

https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/educa...

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#157

Post by NeonVice »

jrhurst wrote: post #135
alkibiades wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“not enough money to go around” Where do people get this strange idea that if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? Bill Gates got rich with an invention that also generated probably a trillion dollars in economic growth for everyone. Including most people on this sites income.

Likely because money and wealth is a zero sum game. There is only so much land, food, and materials to go around.

Money is just a tool to represent value. Value is not a zero-sum game. If a person creates something of value, she is creating something that did not exist before.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#158

Post by dragonwriter »

fastball wrote: post #134
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

The top 1% of American's own more wealth than the bottom 90% and this concentration is only increasing. Soon no cities regardless of size will deliver for low skilled workers as there will simply not be enough of the proverbial pie to go around. As wealth is concentrated and rents and property values rise the vast majority of this country will (does?) live paycheck to paycheck. This is unsustainable and will either n…

Repeat after me: Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game.

That's, at best, extremely misleading; outside of the most extreme absolute deprivation, relative deprivation (or prosperity) appears to be much more of a contributor to experienced disutility (or utility) than absolute deprivation or prosperity, such that, in practice, and modulo alleviating the most crushing poverty (which isn't where marginal gains go in the developed world, even where such poverty still remains) and maintaining illusions which shield the less well off from the prosperity of th well off (consumer-oriented capitalism actively seeks the opposite), wealth is, in practice, zero sum [0] in terms of impact on ezperienced utility, even if it isn't in measures of absolute possessions or consumption.

[0] or, at least, rivalrous, in that for anyone to gain utility from wealth compared to an alternative scenario, someone else must lose; it's not real clear that utility can be meaningfully aggregated across individuals.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#159

Post by zkms »

jamiek88 wrote: post #123
CydeWeys wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The over-arching point I believe the parent comment is making is that the kinds of people who didn't get college degrees back then because they weren't needed are getting college degrees now, because they are needed as qualifications for jobs. They weren't incapable of it back then, it just wasn't necessary nor widespread. Now it is. So it's the same kinds of people doing police work then as now, with the same aptitu…

Just a point on the population of Manhattan, it’s be careful with those numbers and applying them to modern day. People used to cram into death trap tenements 10 to one windowless room in some cases. Hundreds of thousands would live on a street that now houses a thousand people. I don’t think that density is coming back or desirable.

> Hundreds of thousands would live on a street that now houses a thousand people.

> I don’t think that density is coming back or desirable.

I think there's plenty of examples of dense cities (certainly far denser than most US cities) that aren't full of death-trap tenements and it's borderline intellectually dishonest to equate density with that.

In fact, letting NIMBYs have free rein to obstruct/delay/interdict housing construction is far more likely to cause overcrowded/unsafe living situations (which include homelessness) than the other way around.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#160

Post by logfromblammo »

zanny wrote: post #50
SamuelAdams wrote: post #26

> So what’s to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. This is a nice idea in theory, but isn't this a temporary fix? For the first five years, housing prices will lower. But as more companies (demanding higher-educated individuals) realize more people are availa…

So five years later you build more housing . We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want those people living here".

The one thing that boggles me most about Disney World's Magic Kingdom theme park is that it is essentially one giant building, and the park guests and some vehicles all walk around on its roof. And that reminds me of the time when the entire city of Chicago was elevated, one building at a time, with jacks. And that reminds me of the Merchandise Mart, which was the largest building in the world by floor area when it was built (now surpassed by 40 or 50 buildings, often airport terminals), and at only 100m tall. And that reminds me that the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) has only 10% more floor area, but has to go more than 4 times taller to get that much.

So that gives me the idea that one could make a single building with a footprint of one square mile, with its foundation at 0m, floors at 3.5m, 7m, 10.5m, 14m, and roof at 17.5m . That would be 3.5 times as large as the largest building by volume, five times as large as the largest building by footprint, and 7 times as large as the largest building by usable floor area. It could easily hold 50000 housing units, plus enough support infrastructure for 100000 residents. And one could still build additional floors above roof level. Nothing would be more than 2 miles away from anything else (by Manhattan distance). It could all be built for $6 billion.

The reason why our cities aren't giant Borg cubes is because of all the individuality, and the capacity for one person's individual preferences to override another's. In most US cities, you currently can't build right up to the property line, and cantilever your third floor out over center of the street. Doing that, building by building, in a city that allows it, would solve any housing crisis in short order.

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