Look at how the greater populace has effected America just in the past decade or so. Unemployment high, under employment high, homelessness high. What good would those perfect light bulbs do for those who can not afford them?
Are you suggesting that population growth causes higher unemployment?
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
@Illinest- We will need all of the Baby boomers that paid millions for the first generation nuclear plants across the country and were told they would never have to invest in more power plants. Communities just dont want nuclear plants in their towns.
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
Do you think that if there were fewer people, there would still be the same number of jobs?
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
That is a failure of the students to pick valuable degrees. There are plenty of jobs out there for educated individuals as long as they have the correct education.
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
Something may be wrong, but the suggestion that the problem is "too many people" is pretty silly. Maybe "too many people with the wrong skills", or "too many people unwilling to do jobs that are available", or perhaps "too many people looking for types of jobs that no longer exist in the numbers they used to" but not just straight too many people for the system to support.
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
Do you think that if there were fewer people, there would still be the same number of jobs?
Really depends on how many less you are talking.
Quote from brasswire »
Something may be wrong, but the suggestion that the problem is "too many people" is pretty silly. Maybe "too many people with the wrong skills", or "too many people unwilling to do jobs that are available", or perhaps "too many people looking for types of jobs that no longer exist in the numbers they used to" but not just straight too many people for the system to support.
Quote from Fluffy_Bunny »
That is a failure of the students to pick valuable degrees. There are plenty of jobs out there for educated individuals as long as they have the correct education.
First I will say not everyone has the ability to do everything.
Second, You are graduating from High school and are told the need for 'X' job is so much and should continue to be such till you graduate. In the 4-5 years you are in college, that field you have just spent thousands of dollars and years of your life getting educated on in gone or your education has become obsolete. How is that the students fault?
Another example, you get out of high school and every high school counselor is telling the kids 'X' field is in need. So kids from all over the country go to school and get degrees in said field. Now when they graduate, that field has gone from in need to being flooded with qualified applicants. Is that the students fault also?
College is a gamble, plain and simple. In 4-5 years the job market can change so much you have no job and mounting debt from college loans.
Now lets talk about the guy who has been doing the same job, in the same field, for 10 years. Now that job is obsolete. What is this person to do? He has no qualifications for any other field. Is he to go back to college?
In the end, no field is safe and there are very few 'safe' fields to get into. Most of those 'safe' fields are starting to get saturated and not as easy to get jobs in.
There are students that do pick the wrong path, I wont argue that, but not everyone of those 50% have picked a bad field. Things have changed over the time they were in school.
Someone explain to me why in the 80s and 90s it was an employee market. Employees moved around taking high bids for their services. To what we have now where a burger joint can put out they need 2 spots filled and they are only taking applications for 2 days and have almost 2500 people show up for those 2 jobs. The job market is so flooded with trained people in almost every field its hard to get a job, let alone keep one. People are under cutting others instead of taking a better salary, just so they can work.
Not to be the guy who takes you too literally, but...no. Even if the 5% of the people you took away were all unemployed, a reduction of 5% of the population would reduce the number of service jobs necessary to support that portion of the population, so it would probably end up around 3.2%.
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Not to be the guy who takes you too literally, but...no. Even if the 5% of the people you took away were all unemployed, a reduction of 5% of the population would reduce the number of service jobs necessary to support that portion of the population, so it would probably end up around 3.2%.
Right. When you take away population, you also take away demand as well as surplus workers. But it's not just service jobs. You also have fewer consumers, and so manufacturing can support fewer jobs. Fewer mouths to feed, so agriculture can support fewer jobs. Etc.
If unemployment is 8%, and then we took away 5% of the people, would unemployment end up at 3%?
No, but the whole market would change also if there was less people. There still needs to be jobs for those looking that they can do. If you rid of 5% of the population of all its doctors and lawyers, the unemployment rate probably wouldnt drop at all. Get rid of the 5% that is unskilled labor and unemployment could be less then 3%. Its not as easy as just saying remove 'x' amount so we will be at 'x' amount.
Quote from billydaman »
Quite simply...people do not buy trash.
Not true. People buy what they can afford. If they can only afford trash, they will buy trash. The problem comes from those who can afford better then those buying the trash and judge them and expect them to buy what they do with out knowing they cant afford the better product.
No, but the whole market would change also if there was less people. There still needs to be jobs for those looking that they can do. If you rid of 5% of the population of all its doctors and lawyers, the unemployment rate probably wouldnt drop at all. Get rid of the 5% that is unskilled labor and unemployment could be less then 3%. Its not as easy as just saying remove 'x' amount so we will be at 'x' amount.
So then how, exactly, is the problem that we have too many people?
Look at how the greater populace has effected America just in the past decade or so.
No - getting rid of 5% of the people will not affect unemployment at all no matter which 5% you get rid of.
You're not just getting rid of workers - you're also getting rid of consumers. Jobs may be more plentiful for a little while but the companies will have smaller markets to sell their product to and they'll reduce their work force in accordance with the decreased business and eventually you'll have as many jobless as you ever had.
unemployment isn't tied to population at all. Rather it's a function of utilization, beaurocracy and sometimes trade imbalances.
You're going to read my post and say "but that's not what the politicians told me about hispanics stealing my jobs", but politicians lie. Note what Wall Street Journal writer Gordon Crovitz had to say about the issue:
Conservatives in the House should accept victory and pass a bill embracing the Senate's fundamental changes in immigration law that not even Ronald Reagan could accomplish: a focus on the economics of immigration and new legal routes to welcome more skilled immigrants, bolstering American competitiveness. This is the time to act, considering that the U.S. is losing the global competition for the best and brightest immigrants for the first time since the founding of the country—just as Washington needs all the new productive taxpayers it can find.
Not to mention Ronald Reagan in 1989:
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here."
No, but the whole market would change also if there was less people. There still needs to be jobs for those looking that they can do. If you rid of 5% of the population of all its doctors and lawyers, the unemployment rate probably wouldnt drop at all. Get rid of the 5% that is unskilled labor and unemployment could be less then 3%. Its not as easy as just saying remove 'x' amount so we will be at 'x' amount.
So then how, exactly, is the problem that we have too many people?
Look at how the greater populace has effected America just in the past decade or so.
Too many people, not enough jobs. Either you make more jobs to lower unemployment or remove people from the work force to lower the unemployment. Of course it has to be the right people that are removed.
Quote from Illinest »
You're not just getting rid of workers - you're also getting rid of consumers.
False, If you are unemployed, you are not a consumer in any way. You are buying essentials if at all, not luxury items. Given the entitlement programs, many unemployed are using the money they get to pay bills and not much else.
unemployment isn't tied to population at all. Rather it's a function of utilization, beaurocracy and sometimes trade imbalances.
Actually no, its simple math, not enough jobs for the working population we have right now. Add in the later retirement ages because of how the government screwed up social security, the flood of college graduates, not to mention the millions of unskilled high school graduates that enter the work force every year. Either we need more jobs or we need less people. A working person is a consumer. They can afford to buy things. An unemployed person is a drain on society.
You're going to read my post and say "but that's not what the politicians told me about hispanics stealing my jobs", but politicians lie. Note what Wall Street Journal writer Gordon Crovitz had to say about the issue:
When we have the unemployment rates we have right now, the last thing we need to do as a country is let more people in to take more jobs. Skilled or unskilled. Lets worry about our own first before giving a better life to immigrants.
On a side note, of course some guy with a 6 or 7 figure job is going to be all for immigrants coming to America, it doesnt effect him in the least.
Too many people, not enough jobs. Either you make more jobs to lower unemployment or remove people from the work force to lower the unemployment. Of course it has to be the right people that are removed.
So, to be clear, your position is that if a larger portion of the unemployed people in America emigrated to other countries, we would not lose a large number of jobs?
@ Bocephus - you don't seem to have thought this through enough. Here is a list of countries that have unemployment figures similar to that of the United States (~7.6) and the number of people living there (US pop ~ 316 million):
Great Britain - 63 million
Venezuela - 29 million
New Zealand - 4.5 million
Ecuador - 15 million
Canada - 33 million
Unemployment is not tied to the number of people living in a country. If it was, there'd be some kind of a trend wherein more populous countries would generally have higher or lower unemployment.
Unemployment in the U.S. has rarely dipped below 5%. People change jobs all the time. Layoffs happen, people get fired. The unemployment rate is not a measure of people who are 'drains on society' as you inelegantly put it - rather it's a measure of the flow of labor toward jobs. The economy has a great need for home health aides right now for example but there aren't enough people trained to fill the positions. There are millions of unemployed people who can't get employed as home health aides because they're only trained to do jobs that might never exist again. The issue isn't an abundance of people as you suggest, but a failure to match people with jobs.
This isn't just some thing that I came up with. You can get yourself caught up pretty quickly. I enjoyed Niall Ferguson's "Ascent of Money", though the liberals will give you a hard time about it if you use him as your only source.
@ Bocephus - you don't seem to have thought this through enough. Here is a list of countries that have unemployment figures similar to that of the United States (~7.6) and the number of people living there (US pop ~ 316 million):
Great Britain - 63 million
Venezuela - 29 million
New Zealand - 4.5 million
Ecuador - 15 million
Canada - 33 million
Unemployment is not tied to the number of people living in a country. If it was, there'd be some kind of a trend wherein more populous countries would generally have higher or lower unemployment.
Unemployment in the U.S. has rarely dipped below 5%. People change jobs all the time. Layoffs happen, people get fired. The unemployment rate is not a measure of people who are 'drains on society' as you inelegantly put it - rather it's a measure of the flow of labor toward jobs. The economy has a great need for home health aides right now for example but there aren't enough people trained to fill the positions. There are millions of unemployed people who can't get employed as home health aides because they're only trained to do jobs that might never exist again. The issue isn't an abundance of people as you suggest, but a failure to match people with jobs.
This isn't just some thing that I came up with. You can get yourself caught up pretty quickly. I enjoyed Niall Ferguson's "Ascent of Money", though the liberals will give you a hard time about it if you use him as your only source.
..and as I mentioned before, not everyone can work in the health field. It is not about matching people to what is needed, because not everyone can do the jobs that are needed. You can not take someone who has spent their life and their monies to be educated and trained in one field and just expect them to pick something else up or spend even more time and money to get retrained. It might work for a 20 something year old, but when you start to get into your late 30s and beyond, you just dont have the time or energy to start over. Hence why we have seniors fighting with high schoolers for minimum wage unskilled positions.
Its all fine and good to have a theory like the 'Ascent of Money', but the real life issues get in the way of the theory, its not as cut and dry as you make it.
It still comes down to simple math, too many workers to fill too little jobs. Even if every job across the country was filled, we would still have unemployed people.
Ascent of money isn't a theory. The book is more history than anything. I recommend it because it works through the transition from pre-agrarian to industrialized society and gives you a pretty clear understanding of why (for example) when cars started to be mass produced the carriage makers all soon had to find a new trade. Yes - even the 50 year olds.
It is a pretty interesting read, not as dry as you might assume considering the subject matter. It avoids delving too deeply into any one topic and instead provides a broad overview of everything from bartering to borrowing, bonds, stocks, labor, workforce and more.
Not true. People buy what they can afford. If they can only afford trash, they will buy trash. The problem comes from those who can afford better then those buying the trash and judge them and expect them to buy what they do with out knowing they cant afford the better product.
If what people are buying has value to them, it's not trash. People do not buy worthless objects with no value. This is why the "popularity" argument is worthless. It pretends to place the authors own value for certain goods and apply that to everyone while ignoring the value of a product is subjective. If product is "popular" it means it has value to a great many people. Kind of circular reasoning....the reason something is popular is because it's popular when in reality "popularity" is a result of a valuable product being a demandable good.
Heck, even if we considered the Apple i-Phone a "trend", there is intrinsic value to some to have the trendy phone but I stand by the assertion that most people do not make their purchasing decision on "popularity". The i-phone would of never became popular unless it was a quality product.
Ascent of money isn't a theory. The book is more history than anything. I recommend it because it works through the transition from pre-agrarian to industrialized society and gives you a pretty clear understanding of why (for example) when cars started to be mass produced the carriage makers all soon had to find a new trade. Yes - even the 50 year olds.
It is a pretty interesting read, not as dry as you might assume considering the subject matter. It avoids delving too deeply into any one topic and instead provides a broad overview of everything from bartering to borrowing, bonds, stocks, labor, workforce and more.
I have not read it, but I have added it to my reading list. But to compare what happened in this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s to todays job market is ridiculous. The skill sets back then were minimal compared to today. The amount of training/schooling needed to switch from one skill to another is not only measured in time, but money also. It costs people to retrain, go back to school. Money that at a certain age you just dont have. Do you pay the mortgage or go back to school? Do you feed your kids, or go back to school? Hence why some couple get divorced so the woman can get help from the state for her and the kids, more then they would receive if they were married.
Quote from billydaman »
If what people are buying has value to them, it's not trash. People do not buy worthless objects with no value. This is why the "popularity" argument is worthless. It pretends to place the authors own value for certain goods and apply that to everyone while ignoring the value of a product is subjective. If product is "popular" it means it has value to a great many people. Kind of circular reasoning....the reason something is popular is because it's popular when in reality "popularity" is a result of a valuable product being a demandable good.
I dont fully agree with this. People buy what they can afford (and sometimes what they cant) to keep up with the Jones's. Not to mention it is getting to the point you have to have a cell phone to get a job, which I find stupid personally. People get what they can. In most cases they know they are buying crap compared to something else, they just cant afford the something else.
Heck, even if we considered the Apple i-Phone a "trend", there is intrinsic value to some to have the trendy phone but I stand by the assertion that most people do not make their purchasing decision on "popularity". The i-phone would of never became popular unless it was a quality product.
The iphone is what it is because of competition and nothing more. Motorola dropped the ball hard about a decade ago and left room for Apple to get a foothold. In the early 90s the only phone worth having was produced by Motorola. If the competition never happened we still would be using analog flip phones of the 90s.
By the way, cell phones are not a trend, they are here to stay.
In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
That is a failure of the students to pick valuable degrees. There are plenty of jobs out there for educated individuals as long as they have the correct education.
Peter Thiel covered that fairly quickly about incentives and the like, when he was young you'd be a fool to go into many engineering fields versus finance and tech.
Burt Rutan on CSPAN gave a good overview of the aviation industry and it's production cycle going from research and development to production cycles with incremental improvements over time but no new large scale designs in aviation since the 1940's and 50's. And there was during the Q@A segment some people that worked in the aviation field that agreed it was deadlocked on innovative design.
Taking Rutan and Thiel into account, I agree with Rutan that the government needs to use NASA to do "big things" not just have elderly astronauts go from school to school to impress people. If you look at the generations and what inspired them, you had the engineers of the Great Wars followed by the Space Race.
Then we have to further develop that the deindustrialization of specific areas like the Rust Belt also focused more people into the service economy. And with grandparents and parents having a large influence on children telling them to not go into certain fields like mechanical engineering because "Daddy lost his job" there's a boom bust system that follows backwards that leaves these majors untrained for good reason. So when those industries have recovered, they're finding it difficult to find specific kinds of engineers.
But we also have to go back and look at another topic; the lack of on the job training. Traditionally if you say had a degree in some bull **** major you could get a job paying slightly under, and get some job training and use some pocket cash to retrain yourself for a new job within your company. Say learning HTML and then go to work at a different company, but as complexity and resistance towards that kind of training have encumbered the job market more and more.
And even Jobs cited that you could have a mechanical engineer that loses his job in Detroit, but lacks the retraining necessary that could take two years to go into a different kind of engineering. The same with the "Tom Fool" who went into a "bad major" in college, but then was trained for something else. This is what we did in the 1990's, but today this has shifted towards paid on the job training towards internships. But then we've created a system of perpetual temp for hires and interns, because older workers such as myself have taken the entry level positions and middle level positions.
But we also have another problem; unrealistic expectations from employers. The expectation to go with the "perfect candidate" and willing to sit on that position for months and sometimes years while the responsibilities of that single position are outsourced towards current employees that fear getting fired. However, that is starting to backfire as the economy recovers and that new job experience and responsibility means more pay or more experience to be able to change jobs more readily for employees. Which for upper and some middle level jobs has created more incentives to try and bid up those jobs, which is why in some circumstances you do see wage growth on the middle and top end from that competition. Which is often an indicator that the job market has begun to really thaw.
My own personal opinion on this is a combination of new regulations and uncertan taxes creates some problems. But we've had times of uncertain times all the time in the 80's and 90's which to me is just the old habit of "blame the government." It's far more simpler than that; people copy each other based on their actions. This is called information cascade, where at first the entrepreneur starts with the experiment to "try something new" and it catches on and people copy the activity without thinking it through all the way using reasons that they adopted out of what someone read, said, or did.
Which basically culminates into why we never have a "perfect system of labor and employers." I agree that having more tech degrees and science would be great, but we also do not employ the science majors we have now. Factually certain science degrees right now are a kiss of death like being a pure chemist. The daughter of a friend of mine has a masters in chemistry, who himself has a fine job, and cannot find stable work herself in her field. And when looking at the data and the advertising for "engineers" as a label seems to reinforce this.
We've basically oversold the title of engineer, while underemploying other kinds of scientists in the process. So it's not just the English majors getting the shaft, which quite frankly from the English majors I've seen that have learned programming skills and can do both website stuff and write well have gotten good jobs. Whereas the scientist majors I've met such as my friend's daughter, have been shafted. Some of the undergraduate science majors are going into business and finance for their masters. Which is a shame, but they do what they can to survive.
I see the business community being overly hostile to young educated persons as a problem, that can lead to some animosity towards the capitalist system and current institutions that will last a life time. This was seen in Japan during their Lost Decade, and it's created a lackluster cluster of youth called parasite singles that basically watch anime and live in their parents basements. Which absolutely scares the hell out of me, especially when we factor in returning veterans with PTS. Sure there are some veterans that have been treated successfully and others in the process and the like that are fully employed.
However, not everyone can be successful under pressure and depending on severity, availability of this or that, and ect. Too many factors to really go into on the "solving the job market" but it's going to go beyond a "save the whales campaign" for youths and ex-military. It's going to mean that manager whose been "getting by without someone for years" to knuckle down and bring in some new blood and train them from the ground up.
I've always said you can find people willing to train and out of that pool a few that are good at training that are willing to take the extra time and patient to teach. The problem is that you turn away the "good guy" when you sort of need them, you settle on the brigand when you need a warm body. Which is why keeping a "bare bones work force" is sometimes dumb.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I dont fully agree with this. People buy what they can afford (and sometimes what they cant) to keep up with the Jones's.
You put no value on "keeping up with the Jones's" while other people do. I think it'd be a good idea to stop asserting your value system on other people.
Not to mention it is getting to the point you have to have a cell phone to get a job, which I find stupid personally.
You prefer snail mail?
People get what they can. In most cases they know they are buying crap compared to something else, they just cant afford the something else.
Again, what you label as "crap" is only expressing your own personal value system that can not possibly be applied to everyone else.
Heck, even if we considered the Apple i-Phone a "trend", there is intrinsic value to some to have the trendy phone but I stand by the assertion that most people do not make their purchasing decision on "popularity".
I do too but I'm sure you've heard the term "fanboy" before
The iphone is what it is because of competition and nothing more. Motorola dropped the ball hard about a decade ago and left room for Apple to get a foothold. In the early 90s the only phone worth having was produced by Motorola. If the competition never happened we still would be using analog flip phones of the 90s.
Any your point?
By the way, cell phones are not a trend, they are here to stay.
Comically, I said nothing about "cell phones" being a trend.
I dont fully agree with this. People buy what they can afford (and sometimes what they cant) to keep up with the Jones's.
You put no value on "keeping up with the Jones's" while other people do. I think it'd be a good idea to stop asserting your value system on other people.
Its not my value system, it is societies. People compare all the time.
Not to mention it is getting to the point you have to have a cell phone to get a job, which I find stupid personally.
You prefer snail mail?
You dont need a cell phone to be contacted about a job. But society is forcing those who dont have cell phones, have to get one. and no I dont own a cell phone. Never have, never will.
People get what they can. In most cases they know they are buying crap compared to something else, they just cant afford the something else.
Again, what you label as "crap" is only expressing your own personal value system that can not possibly be applied to everyone else.
Again, not my value system, it is societies.
The iphone is what it is because of competition and nothing more. Motorola dropped the ball hard about a decade ago and left room for Apple to get a foothold. In the early 90s the only phone worth having was produced by Motorola. If the competition never happened we still would be using analog flip phones of the 90s.
Any your point?
Sigh, if you would read the statement, you would understand the point. The technology boon of cell phones didnt come from the consumer, but competition. We would all still be using analog flip phones of the 90s and we all would have the same tech, unlike today.
By the way, cell phones are not a trend, they are here to stay.
Comically, I said nothing about "cell phones" being a trend.
cell phones....or more aptly...smart phones create commerce. competition=innovation=demand=commerce Why you resist innovation, I'm unsure becasue most cases, in a somewhat free economy, normally results in good things.
cell phones....or more aptly...smart phones create commerce. competition=innovation=demand=commerce Why you resist innovation, I'm unsure becasue most cases, in a somewhat free economy, normally results in good things.
I have never needed one. I dont buy things just because someone else does.
Again you are missing the point. If Motorola didnt drop the ball, none of what you mention would have happened, at least in this tie frame.
Now that you brought up cell phones,
Tracphones are considered crap compared to an iphone, yet people still go the tracphone route because thats all they can afford. Those people know they are crap compared to the rest.
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In America with a combination of other things, yes. Too many people, not enough jobs. Its quite simple. When the unemployment rate of your college graduates is roughly 50%, there is something wrong.
@Illinest- We will need all of the Baby boomers that paid millions for the first generation nuclear plants across the country and were told they would never have to invest in more power plants. Communities just dont want nuclear plants in their towns.
Do you think that if there were fewer people, there would still be the same number of jobs?
That is a failure of the students to pick valuable degrees. There are plenty of jobs out there for educated individuals as long as they have the correct education.
Something may be wrong, but the suggestion that the problem is "too many people" is pretty silly. Maybe "too many people with the wrong skills", or "too many people unwilling to do jobs that are available", or perhaps "too many people looking for types of jobs that no longer exist in the numbers they used to" but not just straight too many people for the system to support.
Really depends on how many less you are talking.
First I will say not everyone has the ability to do everything.
Second, You are graduating from High school and are told the need for 'X' job is so much and should continue to be such till you graduate. In the 4-5 years you are in college, that field you have just spent thousands of dollars and years of your life getting educated on in gone or your education has become obsolete. How is that the students fault?
Another example, you get out of high school and every high school counselor is telling the kids 'X' field is in need. So kids from all over the country go to school and get degrees in said field. Now when they graduate, that field has gone from in need to being flooded with qualified applicants. Is that the students fault also?
College is a gamble, plain and simple. In 4-5 years the job market can change so much you have no job and mounting debt from college loans.
Now lets talk about the guy who has been doing the same job, in the same field, for 10 years. Now that job is obsolete. What is this person to do? He has no qualifications for any other field. Is he to go back to college?
In the end, no field is safe and there are very few 'safe' fields to get into. Most of those 'safe' fields are starting to get saturated and not as easy to get jobs in.
There are students that do pick the wrong path, I wont argue that, but not everyone of those 50% have picked a bad field. Things have changed over the time they were in school.
Someone explain to me why in the 80s and 90s it was an employee market. Employees moved around taking high bids for their services. To what we have now where a burger joint can put out they need 2 spots filled and they are only taking applications for 2 days and have almost 2500 people show up for those 2 jobs. The job market is so flooded with trained people in almost every field its hard to get a job, let alone keep one. People are under cutting others instead of taking a better salary, just so they can work.
If unemployment is 8%, and then we took away 5% of the people, would unemployment end up at 3%?
Wit and wisdom from my four-year-old son. Recommended for anyone who enjoys a good belly laugh.
Right. When you take away population, you also take away demand as well as surplus workers. But it's not just service jobs. You also have fewer consumers, and so manufacturing can support fewer jobs. Fewer mouths to feed, so agriculture can support fewer jobs. Etc.
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No, but the whole market would change also if there was less people. There still needs to be jobs for those looking that they can do. If you rid of 5% of the population of all its doctors and lawyers, the unemployment rate probably wouldnt drop at all. Get rid of the 5% that is unskilled labor and unemployment could be less then 3%. Its not as easy as just saying remove 'x' amount so we will be at 'x' amount.
Not true. People buy what they can afford. If they can only afford trash, they will buy trash. The problem comes from those who can afford better then those buying the trash and judge them and expect them to buy what they do with out knowing they cant afford the better product.
So then how, exactly, is the problem that we have too many people?
You're not just getting rid of workers - you're also getting rid of consumers. Jobs may be more plentiful for a little while but the companies will have smaller markets to sell their product to and they'll reduce their work force in accordance with the decreased business and eventually you'll have as many jobless as you ever had.
unemployment isn't tied to population at all. Rather it's a function of utilization, beaurocracy and sometimes trade imbalances.
You're going to read my post and say "but that's not what the politicians told me about hispanics stealing my jobs", but politicians lie. Note what Wall Street Journal writer Gordon Crovitz had to say about the issue:
Not to mention Ronald Reagan in 1989:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328204578573682677483870.html
Too many people, not enough jobs. Either you make more jobs to lower unemployment or remove people from the work force to lower the unemployment. Of course it has to be the right people that are removed.
False, If you are unemployed, you are not a consumer in any way. You are buying essentials if at all, not luxury items. Given the entitlement programs, many unemployed are using the money they get to pay bills and not much else.
Actually no, its simple math, not enough jobs for the working population we have right now. Add in the later retirement ages because of how the government screwed up social security, the flood of college graduates, not to mention the millions of unskilled high school graduates that enter the work force every year. Either we need more jobs or we need less people. A working person is a consumer. They can afford to buy things. An unemployed person is a drain on society.
When we have the unemployment rates we have right now, the last thing we need to do as a country is let more people in to take more jobs. Skilled or unskilled. Lets worry about our own first before giving a better life to immigrants.
On a side note, of course some guy with a 6 or 7 figure job is going to be all for immigrants coming to America, it doesnt effect him in the least.
So, to be clear, your position is that if a larger portion of the unemployed people in America emigrated to other countries, we would not lose a large number of jobs?
Great Britain - 63 million
Venezuela - 29 million
New Zealand - 4.5 million
Ecuador - 15 million
Canada - 33 million
Unemployment is not tied to the number of people living in a country. If it was, there'd be some kind of a trend wherein more populous countries would generally have higher or lower unemployment.
Unemployment in the U.S. has rarely dipped below 5%. People change jobs all the time. Layoffs happen, people get fired. The unemployment rate is not a measure of people who are 'drains on society' as you inelegantly put it - rather it's a measure of the flow of labor toward jobs. The economy has a great need for home health aides right now for example but there aren't enough people trained to fill the positions. There are millions of unemployed people who can't get employed as home health aides because they're only trained to do jobs that might never exist again. The issue isn't an abundance of people as you suggest, but a failure to match people with jobs.
This isn't just some thing that I came up with. You can get yourself caught up pretty quickly. I enjoyed Niall Ferguson's "Ascent of Money", though the liberals will give you a hard time about it if you use him as your only source.
..and as I mentioned before, not everyone can work in the health field. It is not about matching people to what is needed, because not everyone can do the jobs that are needed. You can not take someone who has spent their life and their monies to be educated and trained in one field and just expect them to pick something else up or spend even more time and money to get retrained. It might work for a 20 something year old, but when you start to get into your late 30s and beyond, you just dont have the time or energy to start over. Hence why we have seniors fighting with high schoolers for minimum wage unskilled positions.
Its all fine and good to have a theory like the 'Ascent of Money', but the real life issues get in the way of the theory, its not as cut and dry as you make it.
It still comes down to simple math, too many workers to fill too little jobs. Even if every job across the country was filled, we would still have unemployed people.
It is a pretty interesting read, not as dry as you might assume considering the subject matter. It avoids delving too deeply into any one topic and instead provides a broad overview of everything from bartering to borrowing, bonds, stocks, labor, workforce and more.
Alternately, read these.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labor
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment
You're skipping the foundations this way but it's easier than reading a book.
If what people are buying has value to them, it's not trash. People do not buy worthless objects with no value. This is why the "popularity" argument is worthless. It pretends to place the authors own value for certain goods and apply that to everyone while ignoring the value of a product is subjective. If product is "popular" it means it has value to a great many people. Kind of circular reasoning....the reason something is popular is because it's popular when in reality "popularity" is a result of a valuable product being a demandable good.
Heck, even if we considered the Apple i-Phone a "trend", there is intrinsic value to some to have the trendy phone but I stand by the assertion that most people do not make their purchasing decision on "popularity". The i-phone would of never became popular unless it was a quality product.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
I have not read it, but I have added it to my reading list. But to compare what happened in this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s to todays job market is ridiculous. The skill sets back then were minimal compared to today. The amount of training/schooling needed to switch from one skill to another is not only measured in time, but money also. It costs people to retrain, go back to school. Money that at a certain age you just dont have. Do you pay the mortgage or go back to school? Do you feed your kids, or go back to school? Hence why some couple get divorced so the woman can get help from the state for her and the kids, more then they would receive if they were married.
I dont fully agree with this. People buy what they can afford (and sometimes what they cant) to keep up with the Jones's. Not to mention it is getting to the point you have to have a cell phone to get a job, which I find stupid personally. People get what they can. In most cases they know they are buying crap compared to something else, they just cant afford the something else.
The iphone is what it is because of competition and nothing more. Motorola dropped the ball hard about a decade ago and left room for Apple to get a foothold. In the early 90s the only phone worth having was produced by Motorola. If the competition never happened we still would be using analog flip phones of the 90s.
By the way, cell phones are not a trend, they are here to stay.
Peter Thiel covered that fairly quickly about incentives and the like, when he was young you'd be a fool to go into many engineering fields versus finance and tech.
Burt Rutan on CSPAN gave a good overview of the aviation industry and it's production cycle going from research and development to production cycles with incremental improvements over time but no new large scale designs in aviation since the 1940's and 50's. And there was during the Q@A segment some people that worked in the aviation field that agreed it was deadlocked on innovative design.
Taking Rutan and Thiel into account, I agree with Rutan that the government needs to use NASA to do "big things" not just have elderly astronauts go from school to school to impress people. If you look at the generations and what inspired them, you had the engineers of the Great Wars followed by the Space Race.
Then we have to further develop that the deindustrialization of specific areas like the Rust Belt also focused more people into the service economy. And with grandparents and parents having a large influence on children telling them to not go into certain fields like mechanical engineering because "Daddy lost his job" there's a boom bust system that follows backwards that leaves these majors untrained for good reason. So when those industries have recovered, they're finding it difficult to find specific kinds of engineers.
But we also have to go back and look at another topic; the lack of on the job training. Traditionally if you say had a degree in some bull **** major you could get a job paying slightly under, and get some job training and use some pocket cash to retrain yourself for a new job within your company. Say learning HTML and then go to work at a different company, but as complexity and resistance towards that kind of training have encumbered the job market more and more.
And even Jobs cited that you could have a mechanical engineer that loses his job in Detroit, but lacks the retraining necessary that could take two years to go into a different kind of engineering. The same with the "Tom Fool" who went into a "bad major" in college, but then was trained for something else. This is what we did in the 1990's, but today this has shifted towards paid on the job training towards internships. But then we've created a system of perpetual temp for hires and interns, because older workers such as myself have taken the entry level positions and middle level positions.
But we also have another problem; unrealistic expectations from employers. The expectation to go with the "perfect candidate" and willing to sit on that position for months and sometimes years while the responsibilities of that single position are outsourced towards current employees that fear getting fired. However, that is starting to backfire as the economy recovers and that new job experience and responsibility means more pay or more experience to be able to change jobs more readily for employees. Which for upper and some middle level jobs has created more incentives to try and bid up those jobs, which is why in some circumstances you do see wage growth on the middle and top end from that competition. Which is often an indicator that the job market has begun to really thaw.
My own personal opinion on this is a combination of new regulations and uncertan taxes creates some problems. But we've had times of uncertain times all the time in the 80's and 90's which to me is just the old habit of "blame the government." It's far more simpler than that; people copy each other based on their actions. This is called information cascade, where at first the entrepreneur starts with the experiment to "try something new" and it catches on and people copy the activity without thinking it through all the way using reasons that they adopted out of what someone read, said, or did.
Which basically culminates into why we never have a "perfect system of labor and employers." I agree that having more tech degrees and science would be great, but we also do not employ the science majors we have now. Factually certain science degrees right now are a kiss of death like being a pure chemist. The daughter of a friend of mine has a masters in chemistry, who himself has a fine job, and cannot find stable work herself in her field. And when looking at the data and the advertising for "engineers" as a label seems to reinforce this.
We've basically oversold the title of engineer, while underemploying other kinds of scientists in the process. So it's not just the English majors getting the shaft, which quite frankly from the English majors I've seen that have learned programming skills and can do both website stuff and write well have gotten good jobs. Whereas the scientist majors I've met such as my friend's daughter, have been shafted. Some of the undergraduate science majors are going into business and finance for their masters. Which is a shame, but they do what they can to survive.
I see the business community being overly hostile to young educated persons as a problem, that can lead to some animosity towards the capitalist system and current institutions that will last a life time. This was seen in Japan during their Lost Decade, and it's created a lackluster cluster of youth called parasite singles that basically watch anime and live in their parents basements. Which absolutely scares the hell out of me, especially when we factor in returning veterans with PTS. Sure there are some veterans that have been treated successfully and others in the process and the like that are fully employed.
However, not everyone can be successful under pressure and depending on severity, availability of this or that, and ect. Too many factors to really go into on the "solving the job market" but it's going to go beyond a "save the whales campaign" for youths and ex-military. It's going to mean that manager whose been "getting by without someone for years" to knuckle down and bring in some new blood and train them from the ground up.
I've always said you can find people willing to train and out of that pool a few that are good at training that are willing to take the extra time and patient to teach. The problem is that you turn away the "good guy" when you sort of need them, you settle on the brigand when you need a warm body. Which is why keeping a "bare bones work force" is sometimes dumb.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
You put no value on "keeping up with the Jones's" while other people do. I think it'd be a good idea to stop asserting your value system on other people.
You prefer snail mail?
Again, what you label as "crap" is only expressing your own personal value system that can not possibly be applied to everyone else.
I do too but I'm sure you've heard the term "fanboy" before
Any your point?
Comically, I said nothing about "cell phones" being a trend.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
Its not my value system, it is societies. People compare all the time.
You dont need a cell phone to be contacted about a job. But society is forcing those who dont have cell phones, have to get one. and no I dont own a cell phone. Never have, never will.
Again, not my value system, it is societies.
Sigh, if you would read the statement, you would understand the point. The technology boon of cell phones didnt come from the consumer, but competition. We would all still be using analog flip phones of the 90s and we all would have the same tech, unlike today.
I-phone, cell phone, one in the same.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
I have never needed one. I dont buy things just because someone else does.
Again you are missing the point. If Motorola didnt drop the ball, none of what you mention would have happened, at least in this tie frame.
Now that you brought up cell phones,
Tracphones are considered crap compared to an iphone, yet people still go the tracphone route because thats all they can afford. Those people know they are crap compared to the rest.