[lsc]

Hah. I thought I was giving a lot of credit to it being 1997. I mean, that was kinda the central point to my post. I'd have been in bad shape if I ended up looking for work with no experience in 2001.

>However I can tell you right here that if I had started out looking in 2001? I would have been fucked.

Which isn't to say it wasn't a self-absorbed comment... I was speaking from experience. A lot of time I try to stick to direct knowledge in my writing... which /is/ self-absorbed, but in some ways, I think, is less offensive, 'cause I'm writing about things I know (which is to say, myself and my experiences.) rather than spouting off about people I don't know anything about.

Edit:

The problem, I think, isn't anything cultural having to do with young men; the problem, I think, is simply low demand for labor. Shifting people around so that they can do different sorts of labor, sure, could be really good for the people in question, however, I don't think it would really solve the problem. There is simply more people of working age than there is demand for labor right now. Yes, there's demand for top-end computer folks... but for the bottom half of computer folks? yeah, still not so much demand.

This is the primary reason why I think it's not particularly productive to focus on group X or Y. With demand as it is, /someone/ is going to be unemployed; I think that societal effort is better focused on getting demand up in general vs. focusing on helping one group (potentially at the expense of others.)

Something needs to change this low demand. I don't know what that something is. Perhaps Entrepreneurs need to focus on finding new ways to profit from human labor? perhaps the government needs to spend money on WPA-style infrastructure projects that use a lot of labor? I don't know. Seems to me like we need the former solution for it to stick long-term, but the latter is often put forward as a way to jump-start that sort of thing. (Or maybe we do need a kind of government work-corps long-term, that do the sort of infrastructure work that private industry won't, and that employ many laborers?)

Going back to being self-absorbed: one thing I notice is that my local Safeway (the rivermark in santa clara) is always really busy, and always has a 5+ person line. There are plenty more checkout lanes, they are just empty. It's a fairly wealthy neighborhood, full of computer types. Why doesn't safeway bump their prices by a percent or so and hire a few more local kids to man some of the idle registers?

Something is wrong there, and I don't know what it is. It's possible that there is a cost to firing folks at safeway that I don't see. [1] It's also possible that my neighbors are more price sensitive than I think... but it's the only serious grocery store for miles, and the lot is always crowded with newish luxury vehicles. Fry's handles the same problem (varying levels of checkout demand) fairly well. When they get busy, they quickly put more folks on the register. The check-out line moves quickly all the time; when it's busy, they just have more registers open.

(but yeah. Talk about self-absorbed. "Oh no, I have to wait 10 minutes to buy my grass-fed beef, either that or drive 20 minutes to the whole foods, something is terribly wrong! I chuckled.)

[1]From what I've seen? the legal costs, unemployment, etc... don't explain the reluctance to fire people. I think there is a high social cost to firing folks because of this. It's possible that corporations are hesitant to respond to spikes in demand by hiring folks. Perhaps we need a 'temporary employee' category to set expectations? but... seasonal employers work that out under the current scheme, so why can't Safeway? I mean, population and demand, in silicon valley, might as well be seasonal (though, our seasons last half a decade) It's also possible that large corporations have firing costs that are simply way higher than small corporations; I really only have direct knowledge when it comes to the small shops.

[jnw2]

IIRC, Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman have both been arguing that an inflation target of 4% to 5% instead of the current 2% or so, and perhaps also another round of Congress passing an economic stimulus package, would help a lot with the overall economic demand.

But I've never been convinced that there's really a good solution to the problems that Michael Moore's Roger and Me discussed, where good paying factory jobs get replaced with automation. pg has suggested that overpaying for labor was something that only worked for the Big Three while they were in startup mode, until foreign cars became popular. It would be fascinating to watch pg discuss this with Michael Moore, because Moore seems to feel entitled to something being sustained that pg seems to argue was clearly unsustainable. And I think I've seen an article that seemed to imply that the Tesla Factory hasn't employed very many former NUMMI workers because Tesla wants more skilled folks than NUMMI needed.

Maybe you want to convince Whole Foods to come to Santa Clara. (Although recent experience in Massachusetts tells me that there are benefits in terms of team member competence to going to a store that's been open for a while instead of a new store.)

[lsc]

>pg has suggested that overpaying for labor was something that only worked for the Big Three while they were in startup mode, until foreign cars became popular.

Eh, I think that we see that as a 'golden age' of good-paying unskilled labor, but that's the thing; factory work, at that time, wasn't unskilled. It didn't require a degree, but it certainly required skill. I would actually compare working in manufacturing during that 'golden age' to working in the computer industry, now; It was a new industry, and demand was so high that they didn't have the option of requiring a college education.

(I mean, I think you require different base attributes to write CRUD apps vs. be a machinist; but still, being a machinist took a significant amount of skill. And just like in the computer industry, yeah, there were jobs that most people, once adequately trained, could do. There were other jobs, just like the computer industry, which required attributes only present in a small portion of the population.)

That was part of why I went into my own story in my post; when demand for labor is really high (as it was in the computer industry in the late '90s) it makes sense for companies to hire and train; Not everyone is going to make it through the training process, and those that do are going to be able to demand a higher wage.

I am arguing that the problem now is not a lack of good-paying unskilled labor, but an overall lack of demand for labor. (Some would argue that this is instead an oversupply of labor; we've got a larger percentage of our population that expects to work outside the home for decent wages now than we did then. Personally, I would not feel okay taking that position.)

That was part of why I went into my own story in my post; when demand for labor is really high (as it was in the computer industry win the late '90s) it makes sense for companies to hire and train. When demand for labor is low compared to the number of folks who can do the job, well, you might as well take someone proven.

>It would be fascinating to watch pg discuss this with Michael Moore, because Moore seems to feel entitled to something being sustained that pg seems to argue was clearly unsustainable.

Eh, 'entitled' is... kinda putting a negative slant on it. (I mean, I think it does describe Moore's emotional approach to the problem, but I don't think it's /useful/) I think that most all of us would benefit from a higher demand for our own labor (as most of us make most of our money from labor, rather than from rented labor)

I mean, as folks in a growing, high-demand industry, we're further up the labor food chain, and you could say we have an interest in maintaining a wage differential, but the massive levels of unemployment are good for... very few of us.