I wrote previously about a debate within the intellectuals of the Democratic party.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/02/morgan-warstlers-cyb-or-let-them-eat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29
Yes, you can, as Laurence Mishel does represent it as battle from within between different Friends of Hillary but I do think it's a healthy debate with over a year till the election begins in earnest.
http://prospect.org/article/failed-theory-posed-wall-street-dems-puts-hillary-clinton-bind
As I've said in previous discussions over the issue of things like technology displacement I'm not entirely sure who's side I come down on. As I related in my post linked to above, my own personal history seems to suggest technology displacement. As someone who unfortunately seems to have come into the job market at the worst time back in 2001 I saw things literally change over night in around June of 2001 where one day you could find whatever job you needed if you had a college degree, many places would hire you with no questions asked-you could basically lie or fabricate to your heart's content and they'd only really figure this out after about 2 to 3 weeks and then the next day it became really hard to get hired without really good verifiable on a stack of Bibles by your listed references experience.
In retrospect it seems hard even for me to believe how night and day this was but I remember it. We went from an employee friendly 'tight labor market' of the 90s to a very unfriendly 'loose labor market' overnight.
Based on my own experience-anecdotal though it may be but also based on lots more anecdotes of others; just check out the supermarket today that half the counters at least are now automated and that you will find about 2 or 3 kids at the checkout lanes whereas there used to be 10 or 15 or more-it seems axiomatic that we've seen a big change in the nature of the labor market-not just less jobs; and remember that even though today we have a seemingly healthy low unemployment rate the participation rate is at a historical low-but in the type of jobs.
I'd like to see a study on to see if the data jibes with the anecdotes of so many but I imagine there must have been a big increase of the percentage of Americans in the service sector. One reason why the Democratic party is becoming more liberal-'even Bob Rubin'-is because we really aren't the middle class country we were from the postwar period through the 90s.
So many Americans today work in the service sector that is often part time, always lowly paid and never offers overtime. This is thanks to two things:
1. Technology displacment
2. Globalism, though with wages in China and some of the rest of Asia starting to rise we are getting a little relief here one might hope.
However, this is not in my mind because of declining skills and the need for more higher education. As my own story and countless others relates you can get all the education you want but it's basically useless unless you already have tremendous experience. Employers hiring for these fields with such loose labor markets can afford to be very choosy. Degrees are too commonplace to really impress them these days.
A lot of kids go to college now and have nothing to show for their efforts but huge student loans. This is why one of the best ideas I've heard from Obama is that in the future these loans will have to be paid back on a more 'performance basis' where if the student in question doesn't get the big high paying job they were promised then they don't pay it or at least don' t pay it all.
I don't consider education as an answer to tech displacement. It seems to me that the number of high paying jobs is decreasing. I agree with Mishin wholeheartedly here:
"The education-only solution wasn’t appropriate when it was first put forward, and it is not even remotely plausible now given developments since the mid-1990s—and especially since 2000. Wages for the college-educated have been stagnant for the dozen years since 2000 (when the wage boom of the late 1990s receded). That stagnation has affected the bottom 70 percent of all college graduates both in the last recovery and throughout the Great Recession and the recovery from 2009 through 2014.
"Moreover, the college wage advantage has grown very little since the mid-1990s: This means that the continuously growing wage gap between high-wage and middle-wage workers since then has had very little to do with education wage gaps."
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/02/morgan-warstlers-cyb-or-let-them-eat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29
Yes, you can, as Laurence Mishel does represent it as battle from within between different Friends of Hillary but I do think it's a healthy debate with over a year till the election begins in earnest.
http://prospect.org/article/failed-theory-posed-wall-street-dems-puts-hillary-clinton-bind
As I've said in previous discussions over the issue of things like technology displacement I'm not entirely sure who's side I come down on. As I related in my post linked to above, my own personal history seems to suggest technology displacement. As someone who unfortunately seems to have come into the job market at the worst time back in 2001 I saw things literally change over night in around June of 2001 where one day you could find whatever job you needed if you had a college degree, many places would hire you with no questions asked-you could basically lie or fabricate to your heart's content and they'd only really figure this out after about 2 to 3 weeks and then the next day it became really hard to get hired without really good verifiable on a stack of Bibles by your listed references experience.
In retrospect it seems hard even for me to believe how night and day this was but I remember it. We went from an employee friendly 'tight labor market' of the 90s to a very unfriendly 'loose labor market' overnight.
Based on my own experience-anecdotal though it may be but also based on lots more anecdotes of others; just check out the supermarket today that half the counters at least are now automated and that you will find about 2 or 3 kids at the checkout lanes whereas there used to be 10 or 15 or more-it seems axiomatic that we've seen a big change in the nature of the labor market-not just less jobs; and remember that even though today we have a seemingly healthy low unemployment rate the participation rate is at a historical low-but in the type of jobs.
I'd like to see a study on to see if the data jibes with the anecdotes of so many but I imagine there must have been a big increase of the percentage of Americans in the service sector. One reason why the Democratic party is becoming more liberal-'even Bob Rubin'-is because we really aren't the middle class country we were from the postwar period through the 90s.
So many Americans today work in the service sector that is often part time, always lowly paid and never offers overtime. This is thanks to two things:
1. Technology displacment
2. Globalism, though with wages in China and some of the rest of Asia starting to rise we are getting a little relief here one might hope.
However, this is not in my mind because of declining skills and the need for more higher education. As my own story and countless others relates you can get all the education you want but it's basically useless unless you already have tremendous experience. Employers hiring for these fields with such loose labor markets can afford to be very choosy. Degrees are too commonplace to really impress them these days.
A lot of kids go to college now and have nothing to show for their efforts but huge student loans. This is why one of the best ideas I've heard from Obama is that in the future these loans will have to be paid back on a more 'performance basis' where if the student in question doesn't get the big high paying job they were promised then they don't pay it or at least don' t pay it all.
I don't consider education as an answer to tech displacement. It seems to me that the number of high paying jobs is decreasing. I agree with Mishin wholeheartedly here:
"The education-only solution wasn’t appropriate when it was first put forward, and it is not even remotely plausible now given developments since the mid-1990s—and especially since 2000. Wages for the college-educated have been stagnant for the dozen years since 2000 (when the wage boom of the late 1990s receded). That stagnation has affected the bottom 70 percent of all college graduates both in the last recovery and throughout the Great Recession and the recovery from 2009 through 2014.
"Moreover, the college wage advantage has grown very little since the mid-1990s: This means that the continuously growing wage gap between high-wage and middle-wage workers since then has had very little to do with education wage gaps."
"As documented by the New York Federal Reserve Board, we have seen accelerating underemployment of young college graduates. Recent cohorts of college graduates have been taking jobs at lower wages and with fewer benefits ever since 2000. Besides that, the observation that there are multitudes of college graduates working as free interns should tell us that there is no widespread shortage of college graduates. So the idea of education as cure-all is absurd."
http://prospect.org/article/failed-theory-posed-wall-street-dems-puts-hillary-clinton-bind
Not much to add here except, Amen. I think if education helps today it has to be very targeted: it's not like the old days when a general education helped you a lot. There was a time when just having a college degree guaranteed you a good job. That time is long over.
As I touched on above, one area that could help would at least to be to bring down the ever-rising cost of education. Certainly there is a law of diminishing returns here: the more young students and their parents spend and go into debt for the cost of education the less they get for their money. Not only does the good career not materialize but they have to pay back the lenders from their wages they make at Dunkin Donuts.
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