Linkage is good for you
Entry posted by Lord GVChamp
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Various links from the economics blogosphere and some others. Emphasis today on the Labor Market, to correspond with the somewhat positive jobs report (192,000 jobs added, 8.9% unemployment, 15.9% broad-based unemployment)
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=9174
Sumner takes on the notion of "jobless recoveries." He says that the current recession recovery and the post-2000 recovery are not true jobless recoveries, because there is no actual recovery in GDP growth. We are at best digging sideways, sometimes digging downwards. In this environment, it is normal to see unemployment staying at high levels. The 1990s remain a curious case of "jobless recovery," but not as bad as portrayed
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/falling-demand-for-brains/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/
Krugman in a two-parter discusses the oddities of the job market. First, he says that the college premium (the extra money you get for a degree) has stagnated recently, after soaring rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. Information Technology can make many jobs obsolete that used to be done by skilled labor (Watson now kicks ass at Jeopardy and can probably write these blog posts better than I can!), and this may show up as a falling demand for education and brains.
He then points in the second post that this has been predicted: IT is not a substitute for low-skilled labor, but for any routine labor, which can include positions once though "skilled" to some extent. The flipside is that unskilled but difficult to automate jobs will see INCREASED demand (think janitors). Krugman posts a graph showing that extremely high-skilled and extremely low-skilled jobs are gaining in this economy.
The question is whether education can really improve our economy, or are we just training people for jobs that aren't going to exist.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-struggles-of-men/
Leonhart quotes a MIT economist talking about wage stagnation since the 60s. It is often been said that wages for men have been stagnant for decades. The graph in the second link points this out on the red line. Economist Greenstone, though, points out that large numbers of men have been leaving the labor force, and the remaining men that DO have jobs are higher skilled than the labor force of the past. If you factor in the men that have dropped out of the job force, you get the blue line, showing that median wages for men have been in free-fall.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/31524
BigThink summarizes a recent McKinsey study on future economic growth. The picture is not good. Because of the decline in the number of workers thanks to an aging population, US GDP growth is expected to fall to a 2.2% long-term trend, even with a healthy productivity growth. Trying to lift economic growth back to what we are used to would require productivity gains not seen the 1960s, which is about impossible.
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/sleep-is-more-important-than-food
If you're looking to become one of those experts with great negotiation power and awesome wages, take note: high performers sleep substantially more than Americans on average. While the majority of us struggle to get even 7 hours a night, the best violinists in that study Gladwell made famous sleep 8.5 hours a night, with an additional catnap during the day.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/too_young_not_to_work_too_old.html
Long-term unemployment is getting worse.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/03/getting_used_to_high_unemploym.html
And we're getting more and more used to it, too.
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