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America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

economist.com

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Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#61

Post by kamaal »

pcurve wrote: post #41
MereInterest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's when I understood that it is a choice by business owners and business managers to only hire pre-trained workers. It is a choice to run at half staff while waiting for a "perfect fit". I would say that it is entirely the prisoner's dilemma. It benefits everyone to have a supply of well-trained workers. However, if you can skimp on training by hiring workers that other companies have trained, you can an advanta…

Yep, once company trains you thoroughly, they have to spend even more money retaining you because you may jump ship. Good old days of lifetime employment where loyalty was two-way street had its benefits. Because of this mutual distrust, it's too hard to retain good employees these days. Irony is that, most good employees are completely wasted in corporate environment anyway.

>>Irony is that, most good employees are completely wasted in corporate environment anyway.

The biggest problem with the loyalty system was the contributions were in no way equal. Some employees contributed a lot and some nothing, yet both got equal rewards. The system was unfair.

The same continues till today's date. The benefactors are different. The system in large set ups is still by and large very unfair.

This is classic socialism with manifests in various forms.

And the result is obvious too, good people gravitate where rewards are in proportion to their efforts. Bootstrapping, start ups, side projects etc. A thing to note is like the hard working consider large set ups to be unfair to them, the system considers start ups/bootstrapping/side projects unfair to them. Because the assumption is some people must always sacrifice their lives for the larger good. The opposite behavior is called selfishness, greed etc

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#62

Post by ahomescu1 »

michaelochurch wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it frustrating that your argument, as mean-spirited as it is fallacious, can get traction just by being both those things simultaneously. The fall of the USSR initiated a period of privation that involved a significant population decrease through starvation. This event did nothing to improve their economy, indeed it hobbled it. You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the mass…

You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that. War creates demand for labor which means that people doing the work have leverage. (See: my note about dividing the 1000 richest people artificially into "Red" and "Blue" teams and putting them into war.) Without it, the world seems to be run by yes-men and visionless co…

> the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite

IMHO it's not just the elite that's getting parasitic and non-producing (how many people are on welfare these days?)

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#63

Post by ahomescu1 »

busterarm wrote: post #53
twoodfin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: tech entrepreneurs are not the 1%. Again, how do you expect the "class war" for which you have a "boner" to distinguish between entrepreneurs and "rent seekers"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking It's pretty obvious what they do and how they do it. If you think entrepreneurs have a lot of overlap here, I'd hate to think of what you consider being successful in business, because you'd have to either not be looking or be a sociopath. I already mentioned patent trolls as an obvious example of rent-seeking behavior here. You're fixated on the mechanics of how a class war…

> When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens

How does it "deny quality health care"? Not giving it away for free isn't "denying"; if you have money or good insurance, you get quality health care. The harsh reality is that health care costs money (in other words, resources), so it can't be free and plentiful.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#64

Post by busterarm »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #62
michaelochurch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that. War creates demand for labor which means that people doing the work have leverage. (See: my note about dividing the 1000 richest people artificially into "Red" and "Blue" teams and putting them into war.) Without it, the world seems to be run by yes-men and visionless co…

> the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite IMHO it's not just the elite that's getting parasitic and non-producing (how many people are on welfare these days?)

Back that shit up. Welfare in many ways is a wage subsidy for large employers like Walmart and McDonalds. Some other forms of welfare only buy things like baby food and diapers to make sure infants are cared for. Lots of people on welfare work full time and lots of other people are on welfare because they have a disability that prevents them from working.

What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they just die already to make you happy?

Every hard look into the idea that there are mostly "welfare queens" milking the system has come back to show it's bullshit. Plenty of the most needy people (in really poor states like Georgia) can't get any kind of assistance because of attitudes like the one you posted.

Georgia has fewer than 4000 (out of 10 million) residents receiving welfare and is 33rd in median income. Keep in mind that the state's income figures are being propped up by Atlanta, which only has half of the states' residents. In Savannah, many restaurants are closed on weekends or only open at all on weekends; that's how little economic activity there is in the state.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#65

Post by [deleted] »

1457389 wrote: post #12
hristov wrote: post #3

Sorry I don't believe this. If it is true that we are close to maximum employment, there would be more pressure for wage inflation and more overall inflation. In places other than the bay area (which is its own world) inflation is really low nowadays. If you take into account various promotions, many prices are actually lower than last year. And other than in the STEM fields, there is pretty much no wage inflation. I…

Did you not comprehend the portion of the article which outlined a supply side problem? You don't see higher wages in that kind of scenario, you see a steady diminishing in the market.

[deleted]

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#66

Post by MaysonL »

magicalist wrote: post #46
michaelochurch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy. If it comes to that, I prefer a French Revolution style class war. Fewer deaths, more gain for each death and in total, thus more efficient. Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlati…

> Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick. While the most famous people executed during the French Revolution were from the…

Of course, but you have to realize that "nobles" represented much much less than 6.25% of the population.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#67

Post by MaysonL »

busterarm wrote: post #16
moocowduckquack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is it horrible, but it is also mean, wrong and stupid. Well done, you nearly have the full set.

How else do you propose removing a large group of people who also have the largest amount of wealth and political influence and a high life expectancy who are purposefully removing economic opportunity from younger, less fortunate generations? A deadly flu (which is something that used to be and will again be common) seems like the LEAST mean/stupid option to me.

Assuming its the right kind of flu, unlike the 1918 pandemic, which killed predominantly previously healthy young adults.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#68

Post by pjmorris »

bpodgursky wrote: post #14
ChuckFrank wrote: post #2

Contrary to the millennial gripes and the 'trophy kids' syndrome, I believe that there's a generation of highly specialized and highly educated people out there whose expertise is going to waste because they are not getting the first important steps to start working on the job. The work gap that most of these people are going to experience is going to have irreparable harm to the product, with regards to all the pape…

It's shocking that nobody mentions minimum wage increases as at least part of the cause here. When in some places the starting wage can't be lower than $10/hr, of course it's going to be challenging for college or high school students to get an employer to take a risk on them.

Barry Ritholtz, a Wall Street asset manager, posted links to a set of research papers on minimum wage recently [1]. The first paper in the bunch (co-authored by Alan Kreuger who is mentioned in the Economist article) compared employment in fast food restaurants between western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania after NJ raised its minimum wage.

Employment grew slightly faster in New Jersey. This appears to contradict the notion that increasing minimum wage reduces employment.

Can you point to empirical research that supports your position?

[1] http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/02/minimum-wage-research-p...

EDIT: Mis-stated paper finding, fixed.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#69

Post by selimthegrim »

michaelochurch wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it frustrating that your argument, as mean-spirited as it is fallacious, can get traction just by being both those things simultaneously. The fall of the USSR initiated a period of privation that involved a significant population decrease through starvation. This event did nothing to improve their economy, indeed it hobbled it. You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the mass…

You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that. War creates demand for labor which means that people doing the work have leverage. (See: my note about dividing the 1000 richest people artificially into "Red" and "Blue" teams and putting them into war.) Without it, the world seems to be run by yes-men and visionless co…

Not just this, war also happens when an ideology that the elite uses as its lodestone suddenly loses moral or ethical superiority or relevance (or just fails to serve the social needs of the people). Shorn of their ideological fig leaf for resource manipulation, their central membership affirming rituals, etc, the nomenklatura at issue decide to switch teams or get outhustled by the new new class (with apologies to Djilas). Cf, the Roman empire in Diocletian's era, post Tito Yugoslavia, political "Islam" in any number of countries, the Baath party in Syria and Iraq, etc.

Re: America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

#70

Post by ahomescu1 »

busterarm wrote: post #64
ahomescu1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite IMHO it's not just the elite that's getting parasitic and non-producing (how many people are on welfare these days?)

Back that shit up. Welfare in many ways is a wage subsidy for large employers like Walmart and McDonalds. Some other forms of welfare only buy things like baby food and diapers to make sure infants are cared for. Lots of people on welfare work full time and lots of other people are on welfare because they have a disability that prevents them from working. What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they ju…

> What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they just die already to make you happy?

I didn't say that, I'm all in favor of helping the truly needy, but are they really the majority? Are sick/disabled people really where most welfare goes? I don't have numbers for it, but it's hard to believe it; people in genuine need (because they're unable to work for health reasons) can't be more than 1-2% of the general population, and I feel it should be cheap to take care of them.

Regarding Savannah, if there's so little economic activity there, the solution is to take measures to boost activity, not keep everyone on welfare. What happens when the money runs out?

EDIT: Also, please keep it polite. I will not be intimidated out of my opinions, and will not "back that shit up".

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