roachboy

this point:


is the jumpoff for this article from the march issue of atlantic:

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America - Magazine - The Atlantic

the basic point is that the economic transition/crisis, the primary function of which from the outset was to be something that was declared to be over, is both revealing the consequences of the longer-term restructurings of the manufacturing sector and through the tightening of commercial credit, creating new and improved employment problems at the same time. but the unnerving aspect of what is surfacing-to-view is that this "recovery" appears to be "jobless" in the sense that....well, that's what the article is about and it's worth reading.

what do you think of this piece?
does it describe the economic situation in your geographical area?
has this affected you directly? how are you managing? how are people around you managing who are affected if you are not?

what do you make of the history leading to this "jobless recovery" business?

what do you think can or should be done to generate more work for more people?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Craven Morehead

Does it affect me personally? YES. As of last week I've been out of a job for a year. My entire career has been selling/providing technology to financial institutions. Banks are in deep shit and its affecting their buying decisions. And that is affecting the hiring decisions of their vendors. I've had four job opportunities that I was in the interview/hiring process that were eventually shelved and not filled. No faith in the recovery. I have a good friend in Orlando who is 62 and he lost his job (same industry) last week. At least he can take early retirement if he chooses. I'm 57 and a long way from that consideration. I've got one year left of cushion on a very reduced budget and then I'm in trouble, really in trouble. Part time employment isn't an answer at this point. It may become an option but that will only slow the rate at which I'm sinking. I'll still sink, just not as quickly.

I don't see the market changing soon. The stock market has rebounded, primarily because companies have downsized to match the realities but the job market is still in sad shape. I know a handful of others that have been out of a job for well over a year. All in their 50s. This is changing our lives drastically.

flstf

I fear that there may not be enough decent paying jobs to accommodate the new people coming into the market. One thing that might help is to allow people to retire at 55 or so with social security benefits to make room for younger workers.

inBOIL

Social Security already has a solvency problem; this will just make it worse.

__________________
And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.

Hektore

To further drive that point home, I just got a letter from the SSA telling me I shouldn't rely on social security and now would be a good time to start saving on my own accord. In the letter they claimed by 2037 (at the latest) social security is only going to be able to pay out 75% of what a persons stated benefits are. Like I said, that was from the damn SSA themselves.

Maybe we should let the next flu 'epidemic' run its course, nothing will clear out some jobs like 15% mortality over the course of 18 months.

I jest. Sorta.

__________________
The advantage law is the best law in rugby, because it lets you ignore all the others for the good of the game.

Craven Morehead

We can't afford to retire. Even if the program were to remain solvent with the added burden of additional retirees, most of us need to save towards retirement in our last decade of employment.

Willravel

Jobless recovery = contradiction in terms. I hate to put it so simply, but there's really no two ways about it. Recovery is something which should take place across the proverbial board, including employment and income levels rising again. Until those things happen, the term recovery is quite simply incorrect. At best, we're currently in an inconsistent flux, where some areas are seeing recovery, some areas seeing stagnation, and even some areas continuing to deteriorate.

In the immediate future either things will remain as they were before and we'll continue to see periodic economic collapses as wealth distribution continues upward or there will be some unexpected change and we could at least stave off for the time being the next set of collapses.

dogzilla

This is an interesting but depressing article. I suspect that the author is right though. Between the offshoring activity of the past few years and what I think will be a fundamentally smaller economy due to the disappearance of easy credit, it's unclear how the economy can support a significant increase in employment in this country.

I think this decline has been going on for decades, and as the author points out, hidden by the boom years with easy credit. There has not been any significant manufacturing in this part of New York in years. Prior to living in New York, I lived in New England and watched the disappearance of manufacturing there. The company I work for closed down one location in New York about 15 years ago and the remaining locations are much smaller in size.

This is somewhat affecting me. My company has been offshoring work for a few years now. The team I lead was reduced by one person, by retirement. That person was replaced with people in India and I then additional people due to added workload. I expect my job will be gone within five years. I suspect sooner, but since the people India are not learning so quickly, maybe not. Currently, my finances are such that if I lost my job, I would be ok. If inflation rises significantly it might be a problem.

I honestly don't know what people around here do to make a living. The area is basically shopping malls and tourism. There's towns in the Catskills and in the area along the NY/PA/NJ border that used to be tourist areas that now have nothing.

What led to this? I think two things. First, the unsustainable expansion of the economy by credit. People and business borrowed heavily, counting on future growth. Like a Ponzi scheme, the economy can't expand forever, and everything blew up.

Second, the cost of labor and government regulations has made US manufacturing much more expensive than in other countries. Reliable transportation that made it cheaper to manufacture offshore and pay shipping costs than to manufacture in the US was a contributor. The same thing happened with the Internet, where anything that can be represented as digital information can be moved around the world in seconds.

What to do about it? Somehow labor and regulatory costs need to be brought in line with the rest of the world. Setting trade barriers to enforce that won't work. Less government regulation and fewer government mandates on businesses might be a good start.

dksuddeth

if you really want to create actual economically positive jobs, then you need to do several things.

1) relax regulations so that new business in the manufacturing sector can be created.

2) encourage small manufacturing business by increasing small business loans for that specified area of business.

3) create or increase tax breaks and credits for however many jobs are created in these manufacturing sectors.

manufacturing has always been the pinnacle and mainstay of any economy. If you want to keep a steady or growing economy, you have to increase the manufacturing.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

rahl

The only way we are going to recover from this is if the American people start living well within their means and stop living in excess. We as a people are probably the most superficial people on the face of the planet. We constantly buy shit we don't need and homes that are WAY bigger than we could ever possibly need.

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"Your life is Yours alone...Rise up and live it"

ASU2003

I think it is a shift in society. I bought everything I need during the 'boom', and now do not need to spend any money. I have all the HDTVs I could want. I haven't bought a new computer or car in years. GM made a car that lasts too long and doesn't need repairing. I have reduced my fast food budget from $3,000/yr ($10/day) to $500. After I buy a new laptop later this year, I will probably not need to upgrade that for 10 years. I do free things for fun now.

I don't need to buy a new home, I like the place where I am living just fine. My whole goal is to reduce my monthly bills as low as possible, something the baby boomers should learn how to do again. They did it once as hippies, they can do it again.

And if I did lose my job, I have plenty of ideas of things to do on my own. I have not noticed any changes around my town to be honest. Traffic is just as bad, home prices haven't changed, and gas prices are still high.

Derwood

and the Republicans have voted against every one of those measures over the past 14 months. It's all a political game right now; go on talk shows and blast Obama/the Dems for the bad economy and double digit unemployment rate, and then head over to Congress and vote down every bill that could create jobs, create loans, or ease the burden on the unemployed.

Rinse and repeat

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

Baraka_Guru

You make valid points in terms of how people manage their finances and especially when faced with the realities of less-than-favourable employment stats. Here we have the Chinese with their double-digit savings rate, while in North America we have seen negative rates.

But there is the bigger picture, which I feel most tend to overlook. This isn't just about a shift in society at the household level; it's also a shift in the economic makeup on the national level, and society's refusal to shift along with it. Economies change, for the better and for the worse.

I find it rather curious that so many Americans want to reorganize and revitalize the manufacturing sector so badly when it was this very sector that was the most vulnerable in a globalized environment, where competition happens primarily on the level of labour cost. Can American labour compete with cheap Asian labour? Much of manufacturing is disposable, and much of this is due to cheap costs and low prices. If a "durable" good lasts only 2 or 3 years, so what? Buy another one. They're cheap enough. In a world of sub-$100 DVD players and "drive new every two" automobile ownership mentalities, what would you expect?

I don't see American manufacturing (or Ontario's even) returning to any "former glory." I think what's happened is inevitable. You have a nation with a high standard of living, and therefore a high cost of living, competing with nations with completely different standards. And a demand for cheaper goods (though not good or bad in and of itself) only drives the problem home. In a way, we did it to ourselves.

If we were so concerned about North America maintaining its competitiveness with regard to making shit, we should have kept in mind the costs and consequences of ensuring that we could continue making shit. You know, you have to perhaps buy the shit we make. If you don't want to pay a premium for locally made shit, whether it's just higher cost, or, perhaps, there is some sense that it's better quality, what do you do? You buy imported goods. This is no surprise, it's been happening for decades, only now such habits have come to a point: we no longer buy enough of our own shit. That, and exporting is difficult when so many make less money than you do.

So what do we do? We compete otherwise. We reorganize and revitalize our economy, not our manufacturing sector alone. How can we compete? With research & technology, various services, cultural products, and perhaps a type of manufacturing that makes sense to our competitive advantages (e.g. it's not easy competing in the electronics industry, so perhaps focus more on automobiles and the like).

Rather than pine for the former days of a manufacturing golden age, we have to wake up and realize that an economy is only as strong as its self-awareness allows it to be. You can't fit a square peg into a round hole. Do what makes sense. Do what you do well. Retrain, retool, regroup: become competitive where it makes sense.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

aceventura3

We know jobs are a lagging indicator. A point I have been emphasizing is that there is a lagging cost to fiscal policy stimulus, if the economy fails to creates jobs or if there is jobs growth in 2011 and then a reversal around 2012 here is why:

A picture is worth a thousand words.





However, if there is a focus on the federal government creating a environment friendly to business and real job creation we will see real and lasting job growth. We control our destiny.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

well, it's often a good idea to read the article cited in an op before you opine on it, ace, but whatever that's fine.

the article is more about outlining the magnitude of the un and under-employment phenomena that are out there (and in many cases here and out there are the same place) and the consequences psychological and social of not addressing these problems. because of the fact that much of the "jobless recovery"---a nonsensical term of course---is as it is as a result of structural transformations in the geography and organization of manufacturing, it is not a simple matter trying to figure out what solutions might be functional. there's probably a whole range of things that should be tried out some of which won't work, some of which will. but clearly "the market" aint gonna do anything to resolve the problems of excess human beings that "the market" has created in the first place. so this is a political matter. and as a political matter, it is something that the state should undertake to address. this sooner rather than later as well.

it's not a novel idea to think that the state could direct resources at industries, could underwrite new ventures, could divert money to do so from bloated and unnecessary defense spending...the state could be acting to ease commerical credit problems in order to spur expansion of existing businesses and all this within a general kind of new deal-like logic.

the republicans of course will stand in the way of anything like that because that's all they have to offer at this point, standing in the way of things, playing to news cycles, hoping that their reactive and reactionary politics these days will enable a kind of separation to be made between the republicans themselves and the economic ideology which enabled most of these problems to take shape, take hold, deepen and persist.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aceventura3

Your assumption that I did not read the article is incorrect.

I tend to focus on the key points that are most relevant. On this subject it is the question of job growth. I chose not to comment on the false premise that there is a new jobless era, other than to say we control our own destiny in this regard. The flaws in measuring real unemployment and under-employment are well documented and they have been consistent over time. Job growth being a function of real economic growth based on real demand per-capita increases, organic demand increases based on population growth, trade, and productivity can easily turn positive generating all the jobs we want. The choice is ours, it is in our control. There is not some hidden force dictating a "new era". So, my first response is to direct our focus on fiscal policy and the impact it may have in the next 2 to 3 years.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

first off, it's fine to criticize or reject the premise of an article, but it's usually good form to indicate that you're doing it rather than post what appears to be a non-sequitor. just a note.

i'm not at all sure what actual information you're basing your positions on there, ace. what it sounds to me informs it is more market metaphysics.
for example: on what basis are you arguing, if you are doing that and not simply asserting, that because measures of unemployment are quirky that therefore there is no problem with unemployment? anything? because it flies in the face of empirical reality and most data that purports to describe that reality. or maybe you can explain away something like what's happening in detroit as being driven by something other than massive, sustained unemployment? for example.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aceventura3

The line I included from your post in my first post indicated that by 2014 there is good reason to believe the 10% unemployment rate will decline only a little. My post provided a reason why that may be true and then included an editorial comment about the rate being in our control.

I don't understand your comment about a non-sequitor.

If you do not accept the view that government can impact employment that is one thing, to pretend that underlying principles that govern markets, including labor markets, do not exist is something else. Given, that I am not clear on your actual position perhaps you can clarify.

Major shifts in employment are not a new phenomenon. The movers behind those shifts are well known. The dynamics of the current shifts in employment are also known, discounting the short-term nature of typical recessions, like the one we are in now, broadly speaking there are shortages and surpluses in various labor market segments. Detroit will never be the industrial power it once was, but far too many hold on to that hope, and government action, I argue, has contributed to the sluggish transition in Detroit to the "new economy".

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

james t kirk

I wonder if the Chinese will ever get sick and tired of being our slaves? Working for 2 bucks a day and a bowl of rice. When do they get pay back? Or is it that there are so many freaking people in China, they can just go out in the back woods and get more slaves to work in the factories.

Or maybe as the Chinese start to want to buy shit it will create a domestic market for their crap and the prices will increase.

My personal belief is that North Americans did it to ourselves. We all want cheap crap and huge bottom lines so that our share values go up. So they ship the manufacturing to China. Ironically, the union guys are the guys going to Walmart and buying the cheap shit figuring that they will never be affected but surprise, they are.

So they end up working at Walmart.

Only instead of generating wealth like they did when they worked in the Steel Mill for $20.00 an hour, now they're working at Walmart for $8.00 an hour and they're just moving shit around.

We used to build things in North America. Some of the best things in the world. Now we just buy crap that was made somewhere else.

aceventura3

What if that person got training to become a masseuse? They could make close to $30,000 with flexible hours and a virtual endless supply of potential clients.

http://www.salaryexpert.com/Masseur-...urvey-2242.htm

What if they became a nurse?

Nurse Salaries - Nursing Salary Surveys

Or maybe they could become powersellers on EBAY:

How Much Money Can You Make on eBay?

Oh, and if they work at Wal-Mart, they might start at $8 per hour as a part-time employee, but they could get a few raises, go full-time, get a few promotions and before you know it they might even start saving, buying stock in the company, contribute to their retirement, and enjoy a happy life having worked at Wal-Mart.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

Derwood

yes, because every part time worker at Wal Mart has that career path available to them.

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

roachboy

nice work, ace. classic. so what you're saying here so far is that there's nothing about this current situation insofar as employment is concerned that's not understandable as normal for Magic Capitalism, that infinitely expandable and contractible imaginary system in which everything is always fine because the boundaries that we're talking about move in and out arbitrarily. so in this world, the 30 year pattern of fragmentation of what once were basic manufacturing operations is of no real consequence. it doesn't even register because now normal can be expanded to include that, no problem, because in the end normal is arbitrary. so looking at detroit, say, where housing values have collapse entirely because the fucking economy has more or less disappeared, what you're saying is:

1. this is normal.
2. what isn't normal is the fault of the government
3. the consequences are really the fault of the unemployed who can always get jobs at walmart.

so what you're offering is the same old conservative capitalism-cannot-be-a-problem so the problem is either the government or you. so exactly the same "thinking" that got us collectively here in the first place.

in general, we have the simple reality of the change of organization and by extension geography of manufacturing.
we have an educational system which has never caught up with these changes really, so which continues to produce an outmoded class profile, an outmoded labor pool. but conservatives dont care because they dont fucking live in the same neighborhoods as are really affected by this and besides its their fault anyway.

the effects of this had been forestalled by all kinds of goofball devices, not least of which was conservative economy ideology itself which functioned for 30 years as the lingua franca, the "washington consensus" blah blah blah---and about the consequences of this ideology, conservative economic ideology has nothing, at all, to say.

this is compounded by the consequences of the conservative-inspired debt bubble, an economic idea that has to have been put into place with one or another idea of the end times behind the scenes somewhere.

then there's the credit contraction--uh, yeah---in commercial lending that's in the way of anything like expansion of jobs so long as the private sector is the main source of money.

and we have a centrist administration that continues to act as though conservatives have fuck all to say about anything that's any different from the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

no wonder you prefer to pretend nothing's broken, ace.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

flstf

It seems to me that a country's wealth must be generated from something other than performing services for each other. We can't all make a good living by delivering each other pizzas, giving each other massages, selling junk on eBay, or stocking WalMart stores, etc..

Transisting from manufacturing to service jobs may be a race to the bottom. Even those jobs will be harder to find if people continue to work longer. I sometimes wonder what society would do with all the surplus workers if we really eliminated all the unnecessary paper shufflers in government, healthcare, and industry.

Baraka_Guru

Ontario's manufacturing industry was the hardest hit in Canada. For generations, Ontario has been a steady "have" province, but has been the talk of the nation as becoming a "have-not" as a result of their decimated sector.

Just yesterday, it was announced by the premier that there will be a new focus on education as an export: they want to boost enrolment of international students by 50% over five years.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. The post-secondary education industry in Ontario is strong, so the province is leveraging that to help pull it out of its economic doldrums. Boosting the enrolment like this will require more education-related workers, but it will also require indirect workers to support that sector.

It's not like the premier could have as easy a time convincing American auto manufacturers to make more cars. (He's already been doing that.) So he does something else. Changing times, changing strategies. Find out what you do well, and do more of it.

The key thing here is what the government will do to ensure the workforce is ready for these changes. There should be accessible programs for training, re-education, and other vocational support. If these types of programs are lacking in the U.S., that should be a pressing concern for just about everyone at this point.

---------- Post added at 12:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:35 PM ----------

This is what I'm getting at. Services need to be an export industry too.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

see this is the problem, really. the idea that there can be a "recovery" of any kind with this type of unemployment abroad in the land is entirely absurd. the only viewpoint from which it makes sense is one that presupposes the activities of the stock market reflect the well-being of all, as if there is only one economic class in the united states and that understood along lines that the beginning of lake wobegone stories make fun of.

the underlying problems that the new geography of capitalist organization--which is not that new, but we're only waking up to it---include the increasing irrelevance of nation-states. one of the central problems created by this irrelevance is the limitations this places on a nation-state's abilities to act to assure its own socio-economic well-being. you'd think that faced with un-and under-employment numbers of **anything** like those outlined in the article that the united states would be acting, and acting quickly, to spur new job creation as a matter of great urgency...spot funding activity in economic sectors, supporting new start-ups, easing credit for expansion, mandating that technological infrastructures be modified so as not to exclude actual human beings from working---all this in addition to the public-sector oriented actions that i hear about but have so far seen nothing come of.


-----

addendum: let's say that there's a kind of scaling cycle characteristic of contemporary manufacturing concerns, that they move to a medium-scale and then end up fragmented, more often than not a distribution hub that remains viable through its control of intellectual property (god i hate that category)/patents and maybe assembly points, but **definitely** clients---and that these larger-scale fragmentations tend to conform to the new world order of a race to the bottom in terms of wages, working conditions, social responsibility on the part of suppliers etc...because supply pools allow from the endless replacement of suppliers one for the other, all context is stripped out of the relation of purchaser (firms, once-upon-a-time manufacturer) to supplier...so no responsibility at all really....anyway: you'd think that even if this were the case that such a scale-cycle exists that it'd **still** make sense for national governments to actively plan and/or fund smaller-to-medium size concerns in all kinds of areas as a way of generating employment and revenue and that maybe around this planning area new types of education could be worked out that'd make flexibility something more than a word you read in management literature.

there are things that can be done.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

roachboy, problems of under- and unemployment are usually a greater concern on the left. So in the U.S., you have this kind of apathy for unemployment issues outside of it as an economic indicator. It's a different situation in Canada, you know, where you actually have left politics.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

aceventura3

Not every Wal-Mart employee wants a career path. Some just want a part-time job. Those that do want a career path, it is available. All they have to do is work hard, learn new skills and let their desires be known.

---------- Post added at 07:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:30 PM ----------

You mock the fundamentals we learn in Econ 101, then you ignore those fundamental principles or what you consider "market metaphysics" - well here is some basic "market metaphysics" for you to chew on.

When the price of a good or service (labor) is kept artificially above equilibrium (i.e. - minimum wages, prevailing union wages, forced employer mandates, etc.) there will be a surplus of that good or service (entrenched unemployed or full employment defined as any number greater than 0%). The only way to address the situation is to remove the reasons the price is forcibly maintained above equilibrium, i.e. - the government creating an environment friendly to employers actually employing. You can play pretend games that there is a magical unknown force at work, and you can pretend there is some magical way to address unemployment without addressing the supply/demand/price question - but it is clearly fantasy. This is not complicated stuff.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

what is equilibrium ace? i mean beyond that arbitrary intersection of supply and demand curves in those simple-minded diagrams from econ 101.
do any actually existing socio-economic systems tend toward equilibrium? of course they don't.
metaphysics, ace. it's a therapeutic exercise. it appeals to a sense of an ordered world. it doesn't appeal when you're looking at actual reality.


the is nothing at all to back up either clause here and still less to justify the leap from the first to the second.
in the present situation, you seriously believe that it is state policy that is the cause of unemployment rates at around 10% officially?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aceventura3

What else is there? We typically separate "goods and services" but isn't a "good" actually something that is of "service" to someone?


What is happening is that the "man" hours needed to produce something like a ton of steel has been greatly reduced, just like we went through a reduction in the "man hours needed to produce a bushel of corn. Society benefits by productivity gains, it frees up "man" hours to serve man-kind in other ways. This is a good thing. What is wrong with fewer farmers and more artists? Or, fewer steel workers and more masseuses?

No, it is a race to the top. We can be a nation that owns capital or we can be capital. Education is the key, a nation with the highest educated population will be a nation that owns capital, others will be employed. We need to shift the way we look at this stuff. Stop wanting a "job", want "ownership".

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

Derwood

assuming that those who already have those jobs (asst. managers, managers, supervisors, regional managers, etc.) aren't clinging to their jobs in a bad economy. there aren't an infinite amount of "promotable" jobs in Wal-Mart or anywhere else. Hard work, desire, etc. aren't enough alone. Opportunity is a huge part of the equation

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

aceventura3

It is a "market metaphysics" argument. I think you know that. There is a theoretical equilibrium, but no human will ever be able to calculate it -because of the millions of variables in the market and the fact that it is infinitely dynamic. Is your question really about the underlying principle of the supply/demand/price relationships? I think you know, at best, all we could do is illustrate the point using a very simplified example, is that what you want?

I am curious, do you consider calculus, "metaphysics"?

---------- Post added at 08:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM ----------

Come now. Where do you want to go with this? I agree there will only be one CEO at Wal-Mart at a time, even though many in the company may be qualified. If I am one of those people, I may still have a very satisfactory career at Wal-Mart, or I might start my own company or go work for a competitor. With the proper skills, the choice is mine. That is my primary point, do you disagree?

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

Derwood

yes, I disagree. hard work, wherewithal and gumption alone are not enough to be successful in any business, whether it be someone else's or your own. There are hundreds of factors out of your control that contribute to whether you can advance within a company

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

aceventura3

The only thing missing is a person actually being able to "add value". A person can work hard, not adding value - and the work is meaningless. To the degree we have people willing to work hard, but not knowing how to translate the work to "adding value" or something that is marketable is a problem. In one regard we may agree if you think a company will purposefully act in ways to minimize or prevent people they employ from having transferable marketable skills. Just like Apple doesn't want Itunes enriching other MP3 player companies they would prefer the employees they develop not go to work for Microsoft.

Every person has to understand they have to lookout for their own interests in the market place - it is a dog eat dog world. Those who don't want to compete, get exploited. But, that is their choice. In the end that is the point where we part ways.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

flstf

Good point. As I recall, back in the 1960's there were those like Buckminster Fuller who speculated that in the future productivity increases would require fewer and fewer workers and society would have to figure out a way to distribute wealth to the masses. As the wealth concentrates at the top, I don't think it is realistic to expect them to support all the new artists and masseuses, etc.

roachboy

i will say at the outset that i almost agree with a portion of a sentence that ace wrote in that last post. more once fistf ran it through buckminster fuller.

to my mind, the question that follows is: how do these artists live? you know, eat day to day? where's the funding come from? conservatives oppose funding for the arts for some reason...no doubt there's a preference for landscapes involving important people following through on their golf swing as opposed to formal experimentation or other stuff....but fact is that without funding---and trust me there's very little----being an artist is basically something you talk to yourself about as you go to your day job. so unless this idea of other kinds of labor being rendered unnecessary is accompanied by some proposals about how to make the lives of these new artisans viable, i think it's just more gas from the right.

but i'd prefer that there were far more money available for far more artists to have lives in which they can do far more work because they have time and access to resources than american cultural barbarism allows for now. and this is even more the case if the trend buckminster fuller pointed to turns out to be accurate.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

The government should fund the arts; the funding should come from a progressive tax system.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

i have alot of conversations with various of my circle who do the artist thing about the problems with getting funding for projects and the simple reality that if you are able to do the art thing full time chances are good that much of that full time is spent chasing other grants. but the logic of the funding system overall is that artwork is good but that enabling the people who make that work to live and/or have a decent life for making that work is really not a priority. the result is that being-an-artist is either an aristocratic game or its a patronage game. same as it ever was. but to suggest that a labor market which makes space of more artists without providing them anything remotely like a way to live is disengenuous.

but you read alot about some alternative notion of art making as an aspect of what the "new creative class" does inside this thing they call the "new creative economy.."which seems mostly something that allows art-related non-profits/mediating institutions to talk back and forth to each other and to generate more grant revenues for themselves. not a whole lot seems to get through them to actual working artists. the relatively few that do support actual art-making end up being inundated with applications.


the other main patronage system was academic institutions, but there are problems there as well over the past few years in particular.

so it means nothing to say this stuff. it's really another sector of maybe-economic activity that could be made into something really interesting and productive and positive that is none of those things at the moment and is unlikely to be any time soon so long as conservative views of state funding have any credibility. we really need a whole lot more social democracy.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

james t kirk

---------- Post added at 05:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:10 PM ----------

I saw that bit about foreign students and I wondered, "Will it be at the expense of Canadian Students?"

When I went to McMaster in the late 80's in my faculty - Engineering, it was solidly Chinese students. Not 5%, not 10%, but probably 50% (at least in first year) I remember the trick of the day was for them to have their Landed Immigrant Status and avoid any sort of number restrictions on foreign students and the high cost that goes with.

Thing is - when they graduate, they virtually all leave the Country.

So we paid for their education in part (I was told at the time that we only paid 1/12'th of the cost of our education, the gov't paid the rest.

I don't think the Universities are currently set up to take so many foreign students. All that will happen is that they will take the place of the Canadian students, then leave when they graduate. The suspicious person in me figures this is simply a way for a broke province to get their higher education budget paid for.

As to the Auto Industry, I've thought about that and my line of thinking is that Ontario should be helping the Japanese manufacturers to locate here more so than the North American ones. Chrysler is dying no matter what anyone says. GM, well, the jury is outon them still. I know for a fact that Toyota would rather build cars in Canada than the US because our workforce is better educated (in the US, they have to have pictorials for their assembly line workers to put the cars together), and our health care system eliminates that huge cost burden.

People are still going to buy cars going forward, the only question is where are they going to be made.

At the end of the day, if North American consumers were more in tune with supporting local industry (as they do in Japan actually) we'd be better off.

---------- Post added at 05:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:22 PM ----------

Store Managers at Walmart actually make a pretty good buck.

aceventura3

Is NASCAR art?

I think the problem is that conservatives don't want tax dollars used to "support the arts", because generally "the arts" involve something conservatives don't like or things that don't actually need a government subsidy. But, as a conservative, I use my dollars to support what I like all the time.

So, what if snooty North Eastern liberals were being asked to support NASCAR with their tax dollars, what would their response be?

---------- Post added at 01:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:35 AM ----------

The human race has been realizing major steps in productivity gain since the dawn of human history, starting with developing the ability to generate food surpluses. When there have been problems with wealth distribution we have seen revolts, mass migrations and some cultures "leap frogging" the dominate culture, etc. This issue is not a new phenomenon.

Sorry for my poor attempts at subtle humor. I don't really think more masseuses is the answer to our employment needs, but the point is real - as the economy changes, people need to adapt. Our real problem is in education. We are ending up with people who are going to be permanently unemployed because they lack the skills in demand in the new economy. The increasing drop-out rates is a big problem. In the past a person like that could make a living - in the future (and to a degree now) they will not be able to find any kind of a job. Even the complexity of being a janitor has increased significantly in the past 20 years.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

you cannot be serious.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite