From an employer standpoint, educated and experienced = expensive
And everyone is looking for a deal. And sometimes people have to be burned by going cheap. Although sometimes they do get lucky and get someone decent for a pittance.
Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
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Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#22The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
> The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
Please define what "making full use of it" means, without referring to profit.
Because without that definition your sentence doesn't actually say anything.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#23I find it amazing how much US cares about employment rate. Then people start talking about U3 vs U*. I know they mean something... they always come up. What I'm curious about these statistics is: how do the statistics track the self-employed? Seems to me the gig-economy is not about part-time jobs but about part-time self-employment. So, if you are self-employed and you pay your taxes, from the government's point of…
> that doesn't mean you are profitable or making a living wage
These statistics are tracked to a pedantic level of detail by the BLS. You can get numbers of people by industry and zip code and earnings bucket and quarter for most categories of self employment going back to the early 1980s. Moreover, unemployment isn’t mean to measure if people are getting a liveable wage. It measure if they’re getting any wage. The problem you cite is an issue, but it would quickly resolve itself into unemployment as the cash stores ran out.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#24From an employer standpoint, educated and experienced = expensive
and maybe too opinionated ?
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#25I am having hard time understanding the problem articulated in this article. Can someone with English as first language summarise the actual technical arguments ?
For example I see that there is one graph with part-time, full-time graph. The full time employment has increased rapidly while the part-time graph remains the same. How is that possible ? Also, sharing economy is a new thing where a lot of people who would be "unemployed" in past are now doing part time work. A lot of work can be done online today staying at home and hence more people might have taken up part time work.
Another graph shows how part time and full time wages have grown and it claims part-time wages have been stagnant. The graph does not show that.
-- “I’m overqualified for these jobs, but they don’t think that I would be happy to do them,” Corcoran said. “I’m not finding any interest in a 60-year-old guy with gray hair and, honestly, kind of a limited shelf life.” --
Aren't these people actually the perfect candidates for part time experimental work positions where you could fire them easily ? (In almost all countries old people have hard time finding new employment)
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#26> And once we knew where to look, we found their stories hiding in plain sight, in the Labor Department’s data.
In other words, you began your research with conclusion already in mind, and then looked for a way to present this data to show this conclusion.
Excellent statistical work. That's exactly how such research should be done.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#27The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
You have to work out a system, then, to figure out who pays to employ the people doing unprofitable work. Not as easy as it sounds.
The government should become a temporary employer of last resort for workers who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. They could clean up parks, tutor children, paint over graffiti, update public records, provide child care for other workers, etc. Stuff that would be of value to society but which we often can't afford to pay regular government workers to do. This would help to keep unemployed people in the workforce and doing something productive while they retrain for jobs in higher demand.
And we should subsidize vocational training to a greater extent so that students aren't forced to take on financially crippling loans.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#28The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
Human Potential is worthless if it is not profitable. A lot of third world countries have jobs programs where they pay one group to dig holes and another group to fill up those holes.
What US currently lacks is the entrepreneurs who would come up with new products and services and then employe the unemployed, old people etc. But given the restrictions on immigration of highly skilled individual this is going to be tough to achieve.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#29It is time for Universal Basic Income. https://www.yang2020.com/
That's always the easy answer, isn't it?
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#30The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying you what you need to pay off that debt.
I don't have a solution. I just see that I know plenty of people who have GREAT degrees, are very intelligent and are working in a field where their success is more defined by who they are then how they were educated. I think whatever solution we do have, needs to take a look at both the economy as well as the education system and how we prepare our young for a life in the workforce. Because at the end of the day that's what we're doing, we're educating our young to be able to step into our economy and profit.
Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Regulate jobs so that we force jobs to accomodate the degrees? Unionize alternate jobs so working at walmart / factories becomes profitable again? I don't know I just worry about what my children will do when they enter the economy and how will they stay in the middle class.