Post by jim <"sjedgingN0Sp"@Post by GunnerAyup...it was a hell hole indeed. I was working 40 hrs a week, putting
money in the bank, had 3 trucks and a car, 2 sailboats and could
afford new boots now and then.
But today..Hallaluyah!..Im down to one truck, no money in the bank, no
boats in the water and cant even afford to pick up used boots from the
Goodwill.
Your unemployment appears to be due to your incompetence.
It has nothing to do with who is in the White House.
Manufacturing is growing and is back to
pre 2008 meltdown levels, but the number employed
is shrinking. Only the strong survive.
the incompetent are weeded out.
The New Artisan Economy
Manufacturing jobs arent coming back. Neither are construction jobs.
Americas workers need to learn some new skills to stay ahead.
By Ray Fisman|Posted Monday, July 16, 2012, at 6:30 AM ET
House Under Construction.
The end of the housing boom may have revealed a deeper long-term
problem in low-skilled employment
Photograph by Thinkstock
The recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09 has been so anemic
that the average American would probably be surprised to hear that the
recession has officially ended. The National Bureau of Economic
Research declared that it was over by June 2009, but the economy
hasnt exactly come roaring back. In the 12 months that followed, GDP
grew by a modest 2.5 percent, less than one-half of the bounce
following the two previous recessions (in 1974-75 and 1981-82) that
pundits often compare to the most recent one.
As to the cause of the slow recovery, there has been much
finger-pointing: There is too little government stimulus; too much
government stimulus; tax rates are too high; tax rates are too low.
Erik Hurst, a macroeconomist at the University of Chicago, argues
thatin contrast to earlier recessions, when the economy temporarily
performed below its long-run capacitythe 2008 recession was a
necessary corrective for an economy overheated and distorted by a
credit-fueled housing bubble. If Hurst is right, were now adjusting
to a new normal, one in which there are fewer manufacturing jobs to go
around and no housing boom to absorb all the unskilled workers who
could have found work in a less globalized and computerized era.
While the recession reduced incomes and increased unemployment across
all socioeconomic groups, the poor have been hit harder than anyone
else. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the bottom 20
percent of American families earned less in 2010 than they did in
2006, the year before the recession began. Every other income quintile
is at least back at where they started, or even a little ahead. For
the bottom quintile, this is just the most recent setback in a series
of them: Their share of Americas economic pie has been shrinking for
decades.
Advertisement
There are two broad shifts that account for much of this decline:
globalization and computerization. From T-shirts to toys,
manufacturing jobs have migrated to low-wage countries like Vietnam,
Bangladesh, and of course China. Meanwhile, many of the tasks that
might have been done by middle-income Americans employed as
bookkeepers or middle managers have been replaced by spreadsheets and
data algorithms.
Hurst notes that fewer and fewer Americans with a high school
education or less are finding employment in manufacturing. This is a
trend that accelerated in the late 1990s. Some of those lost jobs
resulted in twentysomethings exiting the labor force. But a great many
were absorbed by a thriving construction sector. Between 1998 and
2007, the share of lower-education men employed in manufacturing fell
from 15 to 10 percent, virtually a mirror image of construction, where
the share increased from 15 to nearly 20 percent.
The wages of less educated menwhich had been in decline since the
1970salso enjoyed a brief reprieve in the late 1990s and into the
following decade. Working with University of Chicago colleagues Kerwin
Charles and Matthew Notowidigdo, Hurst found that these aggregate
statistics for the United States as a whole have played out in
miniature across the country (PDF), as one would expect if the housing
boom were really behind the short-lived uptick in the employment and
salaries for the bottom 20 percent. In regions where the housing booms
were greatest, the employment prospects of low-skilled workers fared
the best, while in places that the housing bubble passed by, the job
prospects of such workers continued their inexorable decline. (The
researchers also found that the increase in construction employment
was only part of the explanation: Low-skilled service employment also
went up in places with housing booms as local residents, feeling
wealthier as a result of the increased value of their homes, spent
more at restaurants, barber shops, and local retail establishments.)
Overall, Hurst and his co-authors estimate that roughly 40 percent of
the increase in nonemployment (those who are unemployed but still
looking for jobs, as well as those who have given up and exited the
labor force entirely) since 2007 involves manufacturing jobs that were
already lost during the earlier part of the decade. But the loss of
these jobs was temporarily obscured by the housing boom that allowed
low-skilled individuals to find work. (For the college-educated, there
was at most a modest connection between the housing booms and
employment.)
Do we expect the jobs that resulted from the housing boom to once
again come to the rescue of low-wage Americans? Hurst doesnt think
so. The run-up in home prices that triggered the jump in construction
and local spending was relatively short-lived, and home prices have
returned to the levels where one might expect them to be, based on the
moderate price growth that has prevailed over many decades in just
about every state in the Union. In New York, home prices grew at
around 2.4 percent a year from 2000 to 2010, once you add up the 5
percent annual growth of 2000-07 and the bust that followed. This is
not much different from the 2 percent annual growth that the state
experienced from 1980 to 2000. Similarly, Nevada home prices declined
slightly over 2000-10 despite the massive housing boom of the first
half of the decade, just as they did during the years 1980-2000.
So just as we probably shouldnt expect home prices to come roaring
back, dont hold your breath for a rapid recovery in employmenta lot
of those jobs were already lost before the boom started, as a result
of manufacturings long-term decline. This presents a bleak future for
low-skilled Americans: declining job prospects and wages with no
obvious reversal in sight. This isnt anything newHurst and his
colleagues emphasize that the housing bubble merely provided a brief
respite from this steady drop.
Few economists feel that theres much hope in propping up
manufacturing businesses where they still exista lot of those jobs
will continue to migrate to lower-wage locales. But at the same time,
some leading labor economists are reasonably bullish on the long-term
prospects for American workersif we make the right policy choices to
prepare them for the new global economy.
While manufacturing jobs have long since departed for China and India,
the U.S. economy continues to grow and even manufacture products that
the world wants to buywe export more in dollar terms than we did a
decade ago. But what were sending (and how its made) is drastically
different today. As Enrico Moretti documents in compelling detail in a
recently released book, The New Geography of Jobs, even if we dont
assemble iPhones or sneakers in America, we supply their designs to
those who do. And we do still make thingsthings like precision
scientific instruments and jetliners. But the way were producing them
has changed as well: Even in sectors that have expanded production
over the last decade, there are fewer jobs to be hadthe so-called
productivity paradox. The reason? Production is increasingly
automated, requiring more computers and fewer human beings.
All this adds up to an economy that generates just as much income, but
with profits flowing into far fewer pockets than they did in the
previous century. Moretti suggests that the prognosis for the average
American worker need not be so gloomy if, as he predicts, America
continues to thrive as a hub of knowledge generation and innovation.
While the idea creatorsthose who design iPhones and develop new
drugswill continue to be the drivers of prosperity, more than a few
crumbs may fall to the workers who support them. For example, Moretti
estimates that Microsoft alone is responsible for adding 120,000
low-skill jobs to the Seattle area, where the company is based. This
is because of the support workers required to style the hair, cut the
grass, and yes, build the houses, of all those Microsoft engineers and
computer scientists. And they earn more doing ita barber in San
Francisco earns about 40 percent more than his counterpart in Detroit
or Riverside, Calif. So one way of boosting incomes of the bottom
quintile would be to provide incentives for them to pick up and move
from the rust belt to innovation hubs like Austin, San Francisco, and
Boston.
Of course, if people actually start moving in significant numbers, the
benefits of cutting hair or grass in Austin rather than Detroit will
quickly evaporatethe price of low-income housing will be bid up, and
the salaries of barbers bid down. In the longer run, the bottom 20
percentindeed the bottom 99 percentwill need to be retrained and
re-educated to get a larger share of U.S. GDP. Eminent Harvard labor
economist Larry Katz sees a future where many lower-skilled workers
are employed in the service sector supporting Americas innovative
class. But he sees it as an open question as to whether these service
jobs will be as sales clerks and lawn hands, or fashion consultants
and landscape designers. Katz refers to these would-be consultants,
designers, and other skilled service providers as forming the
foundation of the New Artisan Economy.
Advertisement
If jobs are being lost to low-wage Indians and computer programs, then
what todays worker needs is a set of skills that offers the personal
touch and judgment that cant be provided by a machine or someone 12
time zones away. Katz argues that this will be crucial for those with
only high school educations, who will need to learn a high touch
tradelike personal trainers, kitchen designers, and home health
aideswhere personal interaction is critical. He makes a similar
argument for the college educated as well: With many clerical and
lower-level management jobs made obsolete by advances in information
technology or lost to off-shoring, theyll have to reinvent themselves
as, say, IT support professionals or consultants. (In making the
argument that college graduates will also need to be retrained for the
job market of the future, Katz points out that middle-income earners
have gotten hammered the hardest in the past decadealso part of a
longer trend going back decadesparticularly in IT-intensive sectors.)
Katzs hope for the new economy is a workforce whose skills make their
services sufficiently desirable to Morettis idea-creators that the
bottom 99 percent do better than single-digit hourly wages in the job
market.
An artisan economy cant be built overnight. Weve spent the last
decade funneling too many workers into construction jobs that may
never come back. These workers now lack the skills required in Katzs
economy of the future. And perhaps the most depressing statistic that
Hurst points to in describing the plight of low-skill Americans is
that, after falling steadily for 15 years, the fraction of men who
stopped their educations by the end of high school went up by a few
percent between 1997 and 2006, before resuming its decline. Why?
Presumably more school looks less attractive to an 18-year-old if he
can get a decent job doing construction. Not exactly a lost
generation, but these are yet more young males who will need
retraining to get decent jobs or even stay in the workforce.
Is America up to the task of retraining its workforce to be artisans
rather than burger flippers? In recent congressional testimony, Katz
is critical of current government training schemes like those funded
under the Workforce Investment Act. He calls them fragmented and
difficult for many workers to navigate.
At the same time, professor Katz maintains a glimmer of hope. As he
observed in his testimony, there is emerging evidence that job
retraining can be effective in teaching older workers new skills when
done right. Amid the many failures, Katz points to some exceptional
retraining programs that have demonstrated promise in helping workers
to cost-effectively upgrade their earnings. For example, Per Scholas,
a 15-week program in New York that provides training for installing
and repairing computer networks, increased participants annual
incomes by nearly $5,000 within two years of beginning their training.
Programs like Per Scholas produce these large effects through a
combination of in-class instruction and on-the-job training, often
with a post-training middleman to help with placement in a job where
their skills are well-utilized. Katz calls for evidence-based funding
that rewards programs that do well by their clients.
Realistically, its going to be hard to transform an illiterate and
innumerate burger flipper into an IT support specialist overnightPer
Scholas, for example, will only take applicants with a high school
diploma or GED who also test at the 10th grade level or higher in math
and English. So Katz also sees improving basic educationupgrading
school quality and graduation rates, and channeling more graduates
into post-secondary trainingas essential to building a new artisan
economy.
Whether a gridlocked and partisan government can come together to
develop a sensible agenda for skills development and job creation is
an open question. But the future of the American worker depends on it.
The methodology of the left has always been:
1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie
