Wall Street Unoccupied as 200,000 Job Cuts Bring ‘Darkest Days’. Schadenfreude, especially considering:
The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress
But the level of dislocation is disconcerting, especially as it continues to demonstrate how jobless this “recovery”" really is – even the bankers are out of work.
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/hUNlGE2aFB8/
Wall Street Unoccupied as 200,000 Job Cuts Bring ‘Darkest Days’. Schadenfreude, especially considering:
The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress
But the level of dislocation is disconcerting, especially as it continues to demonstrate how jobless this “recovery”" really is – even the bankers are out of work.
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/hUNlGE2aFB8/
Andrew McAfee points to this passage from economist Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics in 1975:
The widespread use of high school diplomas and college degrees as employment screening devices by employers has led to a belief that increasing education will increase opportunities, and/or that the reason for escalating educational “requirements” is a corresponding increase in the knowledge necessary to perform a given job. The well-organized education lobbies exploit these beliefs to the fullest. In fact, however, educational ”requirements” are often used by employers who are wholly unconcerned about the specific content of the education, but who regards a diploma or degree as an indication of the job applicant’s willingness to persevere and his grades as a rough index of his mental capability. The educational requirements are a hurdle which eliminates enough job applicants to narrow the employer’s choice down to manageable proportions. By making it possible for more young people to go over a given hurdle, society also makes it necessary for employers to raise the hurdle in order to weed out the same proportion of applicants. The result has been an upward spiral of credentials and requirements with more and more young people being forced to endure more and more years of education that they do not want in order to qualify for jobs where the education is not needed. As more and more jobs have been put beyond the reach of those without the necessary credentials, whether or not such individuals can do the work itself, those ethnic minorities who are not traditionally oriented toward formal education are particularly hard hit.
McAfee adds: “Higher education has become much more expensive, student loans now account for more debt in America than do credit cards, and a lot of diploma mills (by which I do not just mean for-profit universities) have sprung up.”
Andrew McAfee: Education and Employment: Some Thoughts Against the Conventional Wisdom
I would add to the list of woes the sorry amount of actual learning that seems to go on in universities.
McAfee also discusses briefly potential solutions.
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/ZPdTQ9jFFd8/
Meghan O’Halloran was one of those who had her career derailed by the timing of her graduation.
She left Cornell University with a degree in architecture and six summers of internships at top firms in New York, Milan and London.“I thought getting a job would be a snap,” she said.
But after graduating in December 2008, just as job losses in the economy were reaching a high point, she was confronted with a very cold reception into the labor force.
She followed her boyfriend to China for a year, and found architecture work plentiful in the building boom there. But when she returned home at the end of 2009, not much had improved, and no one was hiring.
“I’ve applied for temporary work,” she said. “The answer is always the same, ‘We wish we could hire you.’”
She’s decided to leave behind her hopes for a career as an architect and has started her own business making custom fabric, carpets and furniture.
Money: The Great Recession’s lost generation
The kids mentioned in this article seem relatively lucky. They have jobs, or businesses. What’s only hinted at in the article is trickle down unemployment – as college graduates settle for jobs for which no college degree is required, it makes life more difficult for those without degrees.
See also:
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
Here’s my coverage of how information technology may be hurting the economy:
Forrester released today a report called Caution: IT Investment May Be Hurting US Job Growth. The report’s authors – Andrew Bartels, Christopher Mines and Sarah Musto – note that despite record corporate profits, unemployment remains unchanged. Forrester notes that poor job growth both causes and is caused by poor economic growth. It’s a vicious cycle.
The report suggests that corporations are investing in IT instead of hiring workers. The analysts looked at research from 62 industries to find out what’s going on. The report says that the industries with the highest IT investment are also the ones with the biggest decline in jobs. The analysts conclude that there is a causal connection between IT investment growth and the lack of employment growth.
Forrester is not the first to suggest this. Gartner VP and fellow Tom Austin’s blog post on the same subject lead us to ask last year “What Can IT Do To Stimulate the Job Market?” And AMI Partners claimed last year that cloud computing would result in 200,000 – 250,000 job losses over the next decade. [...]
“Looking across these 62 private sector industries, we found a modest but statistically significant inverse or negative correlation between IT investment and employment,” the report says. The effect was most pronounced in manufacturing.
ReadWriteWeb: Forrester: Is IT Investment Hurting US Job Growth?
See also:
Great Demands from Employers Mean Jobs Go Unfilled Even with High Unemployment
What Can IT Do To Stimulate the Job Market?
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/9fL9StLGeoA/