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Imagine a different world where firms took care of their employees, and loyalty was reciprocal. Would employees be job hopping to the extent they are now?”
Coding is as hot as it’s ever been and yet we graduated more students with CSci degrees in The Year of Our Orwell as we do today? What’s going on here exactly? A little more from the same blog post:
In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
We are raising a generation of American Idols and So You Think You Can Dancers when what we really need is a generation of Gateses and Zuckerbergs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF download) computer and mathematical occupations are expected to add 785,700 new jobs from 2008 to 2018. It doesn’t take a math major to see that we’re graduating students at a far lower rate than required to meet demand.
But what’s important is not just what is happening but also why it’s happening. If there’s both security on the downside (computer science majors experience rock-bottom unemployment rates) and untold riches on the upside, it seems the rational economic choice for people to flock to majoring in computer science and engineering. And yet, that’s not what’s taking place.
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People don’t get excited by technology. The glamour and glitz of Hollywood that attracts thousands of Midwestern prom queens every year is undeniable. And the stereotype of the lone coder sitting alone in a cube somewhere can’t quite match up to the thrill, however unlikely, of one day performing in front of Steven, Randy and Jennifer.
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Technology is hard. OK, now perhaps we’re getting a little closer to the truth. It’s not that learning how to program has gotten noticeably more difficult over the years. If anything, frameworks like Rails for Ruby make it easier. But there is a basic level of understanding that, if you don’t have it, drastically reduces the likelihood that you’ll become an engineer.
Indeed, at each level of our education there’s a chance to miss out on fundamental knowledge that, if not acquired at that point, becomes progressively more difficult to pick up later in life. Salman Khan said it best in his TED talk that should be mandatory viewing:
“…you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it’s usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation.”
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These young folks don’t want to spend a lot of money and time training to do a specific job they might not get only to get laid off when some private-equity slicks (where the real money’s at) buy out the company and ship the jobs to China.
That’s what happens when owners and management have shredded the social contract. They find workers can’t or won’t do what they need them to. A flexible workforce has its downsides too.
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In Europe, for instance, training is often mandated, and apprenticeships and other programs that help provide work experience are part of the infrastructure.
The result: European countries aren’t having skill-shortage complaints at the same level as in the U.S., and the nations that have the most established apprenticeship programs—the Scandinavian nations, Germany and Switzerland—have low unemployment.
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the businesspeople quoted here know how a market works. If you put out a want ad for something and you don’t find it, you need to think about upping your bid.
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The defining characteristic of a job is an exchange between and employer and an employee, of wages (or some other compensation) for services (economists like to call such services "labor," defined variously in terms of skills, knowledge, capabilities, etc.). Governments regulate such services in many ways (e.g., some services may be disallowed -- think hit men, drug dealing or prostitution) and the terms of employment are also regulated (e.g., minimum wage, occupational safety, etc.).
All jobs are thus service jobs. With that as a starting point, we are in a position to ask ourselves, in what ways should we categorize and classify jobs in order to help realize the various objectives of public policy? The answer to this question is not obvious, and it is not clear to me that the official government categories are necessarily the most useful or helpful for thinking about policies related to jobs -- recent discussions here related to "manufacturing" are one example.
Those who decry the decline of U.S. manufacturing too often point at the offshoring of assembly for electronics goods like the iPhone. Our analysis here and elsewhere makes clear that there is simply little value in electronics assembly. The gradual concentration of electronics manufacturing in Asia over the past 30 years cannot be reversed in the short- to medium-term without undermining the relatively free flow of goods, capital, and people that provides the basis for the global economy. And even if high-volume assembly expands in North America, this will likely take place in Mexico where there is already a relatively low-cost electronics assembly infrastructure.
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The question that we should be asking is not how can we get Apple to hire more Americans, but rather, how do we get America to create more Apples?
Is there a crisis in manufacturing in America? Looking just at the dollar value of manufacturing output, the answer seems to be an emphatic no. Domestic manufacturers make and sell more goods than ever before. Their success has been grounded in incredible increases in productivity, which is a positive way of saying that factories produce more with fewer workers.
Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat.
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No one sector is going to dig the United States out of the jobs hole we currently find ourselves. But manufacturing is a particularly poor candidate.
Part of the misconception is likely driven by the notion that America's manufacturing base has been in steep decline. The truth, surprising to many, is that real manufacturing output today is near an all-time high. What's dropped precipitously in recent decades is manufacturing employment. Technology and automation has allowed American manufacturers to build more stuff with far fewer workers than in the past. One good example: In 1950, a U.S. Steel (NYSE: X ) plant in Gary, Ind., produced 6 million tons of steel with 30,000 workers. Today, it produces 7.5 million tons with 5,000 workers. Output has gone up; employment has dropped like a rock.
When Roz Tuplin graduated in 2010 she thought that a post-graduate degree in English Literature would be good grounding for a job in the media.
She knew she would have to gain work experience, but after a year of trying to get a placement, she has decided to pay employers £65 a day to let her through the door.
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Access to internships, many said to have been arranged through well-connected parents, has been an area of controversy.
In April, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the schemes were unfair on the less well-off and the common practice of making young people work for nothing is barring entry to those from poorer backgrounds.
Although Ms Tuplin has saved to pay for the work experience she recognises that she is in a privileged position.
As improvements in computers, robotic technologies, and other forms of job automation continue to accelerate, more workers are certain to be displaced, and job creation will become even more challenging. Most economists dismiss concern that this might lead to long-term structural unemployment. Indeed, the idea often elicits outright derision. The conservative media in the United States recently mocked President Barack Obama for suggesting that automation might hurt employment growth. But Obama was right to raise the question.
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A very large percentage of jobs are, on some level, essentially routine and repetitive. It seems likely that, as computer hardware and software continue to improve, many of these job types will become susceptible to automation, particularly to machine learning.
This is not far-fetched science-fiction technology, but rather a simple extrapolation of the expert systems and specialized algorithms that currently land jet airplanes, trade autonomously on Wall Street, or beat nearly any human being at chess. IBM’s Watson – the computer that prevailed on the television game show Jeopardy! – suggests that machine-learning algorithms could soon be able to take on a number of cognitive tasks.
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when developed countries’ agricultural sectors shed workers, long-term structural unemployment did not result. Workers were eventually absorbed by other sectors, particularly with the growth of industrial manufacturing, and average wages and overall prosperity increased dramatically – an excellent illustration of the so-called “Luddite fallacy.” This is the idea – generally accepted by economists – that technological progress will never lead to significant rates of long-term unemployment.
The reasoning is roughly as follows: as labor-saving technologies improve, some workers lose their jobs in the short run, but production becomes more efficient. That leads to lower prices for the goods and services produced, which in turn leaves consumers with more money to spend on other things, boosting demand – and employment – across nearly all industries
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we seek to reconcile the fact that the 2000s has been the best decade since the 1960s for productivity growth, better than the roaring 1990s even. And yet median wages have largely stagnated and employment actually has fallen since 2000. We attribute this in part to the fact that tech. progress is driving productivity even has it leaves many types of workers behind. In fact, a large group has been made worse off, even as those with education and talent have gained immensely, and opportunities for entrepreneurs are better than ever. In my judgment, the underlying trends are on track to accelerating in coming years.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged - as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science - more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.
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"The demise of philosophy, and, more generally, of the liberal arts, is grossly exaggerated," said Jeff Robbins, a professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
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The word philosophy comes from the Greek philosophia, meaning "love of wisdom," and its study is defined as, well, even philosophers can't agree on an exact interpretation. Plato described it as "the science of the idea."
The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online. For instance, this sample they provided was flagged for "Demonstrating potentially violent behavior" because of "flagrant display of weapons or bombs."
The FTC said that the file, which will last for up to seven years, does not violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The company also says that info in your file will be updated when you remove pictures from the social media sites. Forbes reports, "new employers who run searches through Social Intelligence won't have access to the materials if they are completely removed from the Internet."
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