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Economists React to the December Jobs Report: ‘Very Close to Full Employment’ WSJ

Visbek said:
My impression is that there probably are still people sitting on the sidelines, hoping for work. What is probably happening is that there is a skills and geography mismatch.

E.g. there are a fair number of low-skilled workers who had better job opportunities 10 or 20 years ago, whose jobs were largely automated out of existence and, to a lesser extent, offshored. No amount of nostalgic Tweets will bring those jobs back. So those people likely want jobs, but don't have the skills needed to fill the better-paying jobs we do need, or aren't interested in that type of work (e.g. taking care of the elderly).
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I think you're over-inflating the effects of automation and down-playing the effects of off-shoring. Zero jobs happen when it's off-shored but even a 50% reduction in the work force, due to automation, means there is still 50% remaining.

Who do you think is working in all those factories in China? China's GDP growth is 7%, and that's based off of manufacturing so this talk of manufacturing not being a valid driver for the economy anymore falls flat.
 
KevinKohler said:
I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you suggesting that we are not sliding into a part time **** job **** pay economy?
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Not really, just suggesting that blaming it on Obama might be misplaced or at least incomplete. I don't honestly know what the answer is but I don't see any from the GOP, who are opposed to unions, the recent changes in overtime pay for "managers", opposed to minimum wage increases, supportive of 'free trade' agreements, and generally opposed to programs like EBT, 'welfare', the ACA or something like the ACA to mitigate the problems of having low wage jobs without benefits. So I'm not really sure what Obama should have done that would have gotten through the GOP House or survived a filibuster in the Senate. Maybe Trump will turn the tide - I hope he does - but I'm not optimistic given his cabinet appointments.
 
Kushinator said:
The stock market is up over 200% during the Obama administration. By your own admission, this is as far from a disaster as could be.
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lol trumps winnin the election made everyone happy and the stock market skyrockets. trump aint even in yet and hes already better than obama hussien.
 
Ontologuy said:
Yes, we all know about the BLS "statistics" that say the unemployment rate is "very low".

But why is Sears and K-Mart -- cheap-price stores -- closing so many stores if there are supposedly so many employed Americans with money to spend?

And why is Macy's -- medium-price stores -- closing so many of their stores now if there are supposedly so many employed Americans with money to spend?

And, of course, why is the left so adamant that the minimum wage be raised and shored up, you know, the minimum wage, the wage paid to part-time considerably less than 40-hours/week employees?

Could it be that the vast majority of the new jobs under Obama paid considerably less money than the old job the person previously had?

Could it be that the vast majority of the new jobs under Obama were .. wait for it .. .. part-time jobs?

Hmmmm ...
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Nah. More to do with the fact that we now buy more and more things online rather than in brick and mortar.

C1fjyQ9W8AAkExH.jpg
 
Fishking said:
I think you're over-inflating the effects of automation and down-playing the effects of off-shoring.
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I'm pretty sure I'm not.

A major caveat: Research has shown that neither automation nor offshoring have really "killed jobs." Both tend to reduce prices of goods, which benefits consumers. Either way, I do think that some people are getting left behind. So....


In the 1930s, there were around 100,000 employees at The Rouge, Ford's massive factory complex. They cranked out somewhere between 1000 and 2000 autos per day. Today, there are 6,000 employees at The Rouge. They make around 1500 F-150 trucks per day.

Life in automated factories is not stellar, as show with the latest round of onshoring. Unions are shattered, so those benefits -- including higher wages, pensions, protections from firings etc -- are gone. Pay is far less, 1/3 to 1/2 of previous wages; manufacturing wages have fallen 14% since 2003. Many factories are moving to southern states, where wages are lower and labor laws are lax. Some hire temps instead of full-time employees, and temps don't get benefits.

Some of the manufacturing jobs pay better than in the past -- someone has to repair the robots, right? However, those jobs require more skills than you get with a high school degree.

Or, to put all of this another way: The average Mexican factory worker earns $3.25/hour, whereas the US worker earns an average of $20/hour. The only way to make that work is to squeeze at least 5 times more productivity out of the US worker -- and cut wages to the bone.

Manufacturing in 2017 is no longer a route to a decent middle-class life for low-skilled workers.


Another consideration? We attack offshoring because it's mentally easier than thinking about automation. Put simply, blaming China and Mexico (and fat-cat capitalists) for the pain of economic transitions appeals to our tribal mindsets.


Who do you think is working in all those factories in China?
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Whose jobs are getting replaced by robots?


China's GDP growth is 7%, and that's based off of manufacturing so this talk of manufacturing not being a valid driver for the economy anymore falls flat.
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Egads. That doesn't even start to make sense.

The economy of the US circa 1850 was almost exclusively agricultural. Should the US have forsaken the Industrial Revolution? Should we refuse to import food because once upon a time, agriculture was the backbone of the US economy?

You do know that US manufacturing output is at record highs?

You do know that around 10% of the US labor market is in manufacturing? And that figure has been steadily declining since 1950?

The attachment to manufacturing is nostalgic nonsense, with an increasingly tenuous connection to reality. Manufacturing as a major source of labor has been over for decades. It's time to move on.
 
Kushinator said:
I am just wondering where all the Trump supporters are. But when you think about it, picking and choosing what aspects of reality to which they adhere is their specialty.
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I think the Trump supporters are aware that 94% of the jobs created were low paying part time jobs. They aren't impressed with the government numbers.
 
fmw said:
I think the Trump supporters are aware that 94% of the jobs created were low paying part time jobs. They aren't impressed with the government numbers.
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Ahh, you are also misrepresenting the study released.

Here is the reality:

fredgraph.png
 
11Bravo said:
no we worship trump cause it skyrocketed when he won.
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fredgraph2.png


I think this graph is a little easier to understand. FYI your god emperor is the guy with the tiny hands tweeting in the top right.
 
fmw said:
I think the Trump supporters are aware that 94% of the jobs created were low paying part time jobs. They aren't impressed with the government numbers.
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That's because Trump supporters don't understand that InfoWars is a conspiracy theory website. I doubt any of them read the actual Princeton paper.

The paper talks about alternative jobs, not "crappy part-time jobs." It includes people who are on-call; independent contractors; freelancers; temp workers; "gig economy" workers (Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit etc).

50% of these alternate workers are self-employed. About 20% are temps, 15% are on-call.

The 94% figure, by the way, is for 2005 through 2015 -- a full 3 years before Obama took office, and during a period of massive job destruction due to a recession that, as a friendly reminder, hit before Obama took office. It is not saying that "94% of all people who got back to work during that time were stuck in crappy part-time jobs." If that were the case, then that would be screamingly obvious in the U3 and U6 unemployment. Millions who got back to work went into traditional jobs.

Most of those workers are in professional and business services, education, and health care. (Note: 700,000 of them work for the DoD as contract workers... and are paid better than federal employees.)

Neary 40% of the workers have a college degree. (We already know that everyone else had a very tough time in the wake of the recession.)

Contractor workers, independent contractors, and freelancers are paid more than traditional workers for similar jobs. They also appear to work fewer hours. 80% of these workers prefer those arrangements. There are some (especially temp workers) who are not doing well with these arrangements, and prefer traditional work.

While BLS hasn't captured some of this detail, these workers were not left out of the statistics. If the alternate workers have part-time jobs, they're counted as part-time. If their pay was less, that was captured in the wage data.

Somehow, I doubt these nuances got a lot of play on Breitbart. Just a guess.
 
Visbek said:
I'm pretty sure I'm not.

A major caveat: Research has shown that neither automation nor offshoring have really "killed jobs." Both tend to reduce prices of goods, which benefits consumers. Either way, I do think that some people are getting left behind. So....


In the 1930s, there were around 100,000 employees at The Rouge, Ford's massive factory complex. They cranked out somewhere between 1000 and 2000 autos per day. Today, there are 6,000 employees at The Rouge. They make around 1500 F-150 trucks per day.

Life in automated factories is not stellar, as show with the latest round of onshoring. Unions are shattered, so those benefits -- including higher wages, pensions, protections from firings etc -- are gone. Pay is far less, 1/3 to 1/2 of previous wages; manufacturing wages have fallen 14% since 2003. Many factories are moving to southern states, where wages are lower and labor laws are lax. Some hire temps instead of full-time employees, and temps don't get benefits.

Or, to put all of this another way: The average Mexican factory worker earns $3.25/hour, whereas the US worker earns an average of $20/hour. The only way to make that work is to squeeze at least 5 times more productivity out of the US worker -- and cut wages to the bone.

Manufacturing in 2017 is no longer a route to a decent middle-class life for low-skilled workers.
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I'm not sure where you're getting your information. Maybe it's just assumption and opinion based on belief or bias.

Take the paragraph I bolded above.

Review the new 4 year GM-UAW contract agreed to months ago.

https://uaw.org/app/uploads/2015/10/64171_UAW-GM-Hourly-Highlights-Revp-11-final.pdf

As the new contract proves, little of what you wrote is true.

So I think you need to step back and rethink this theory you've been pushing. No other industry in the world can provide the economic benefits that manufacturing can, and will.

With the right leadership in Washington, manufacturing can and will return as a major industry in the United States, and the middle class will benefit most from this effort.
 
And yet Obama will not get any credit for this. :lamo
 
JasperL said:
Not really, just suggesting that blaming it on Obama might be misplaced or at least incomplete. I don't honestly know what the answer is but I don't see any from the GOP, who are opposed to unions, the recent changes in overtime pay for "managers", opposed to minimum wage increases, supportive of 'free trade' agreements, and generally opposed to programs like EBT, 'welfare', the ACA or something like the ACA to mitigate the problems of having low wage jobs without benefits. So I'm not really sure what Obama should have done that would have gotten through the GOP House or survived a filibuster in the Senate. Maybe Trump will turn the tide - I hope he does - but I'm not optimistic given his cabinet appointments.
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No one and nothing is going to stop under employment. Not Obama, nor Trump, or anyone else after.

The question, knowing this, what's the best way forward? The GOP standard solution...retrain everyone to be engineers, robot techs, and software developers? Or the DNC standard solution...increase minimum wages, welfare, etc, in efforts to force employers and business owners to pay staff enough to keep a consumer economy affloat?


Neither seem terribly appealing to me, but frankly, I offer no alternative.
 
Visbek said:
That's because Trump supporters don't understand that InfoWars is a conspiracy theory website. I doubt any of them read the actual Princeton paper.

The paper talks about alternative jobs, not "crappy part-time jobs." It includes people who are on-call; independent contractors; freelancers; temp workers; "gig economy" workers (Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit etc).

50% of these alternate workers are self-employed. About 20% are temps, 15% are on-call.

The 94% figure, by the way, is for 2005 through 2015 -- a full 3 years before Obama took office, and during a period of massive job destruction due to a recession that, as a friendly reminder, hit before Obama took office. It is not saying that "94% of all people who got back to work during that time were stuck in crappy part-time jobs." If that were the case, then that would be screamingly obvious in the U3 and U6 unemployment. Millions who got back to work went into traditional jobs.

Most of those workers are in professional and business services, education, and health care. (Note: 700,000 of them work for the DoD as contract workers... and are paid better than federal employees.)

Neary 40% of the workers have a college degree. (We already know that everyone else had a very tough time in the wake of the recession.)

Contractor workers, independent contractors, and freelancers are paid more than traditional workers for similar jobs. They also appear to work fewer hours. 80% of these workers prefer those arrangements. There are some (especially temp workers) who are not doing well with these arrangements, and prefer traditional work.

While BLS hasn't captured some of this detail, these workers were not left out of the statistics. If the alternate workers have part-time jobs, they're counted as part-time. If their pay was less, that was captured in the wage data.

Somehow, I doubt these nuances got a lot of play on Breitbart. Just a guess.
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I have no idea. I don't read blogs.
 
fmw said:
I think the Trump supporters are aware that 94% of the jobs created were low paying part time jobs. They aren't impressed with the government numbers.
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fmw said:
I have no idea. I don't read blogs.
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Then where did you get the demonstrably untrue idea that 94% of the jobs created were part time? I'm assuming that you do not subscribe to DA60's odd interpretation that any work that isn't Monday-Friday 9-5 is part time regardless of how many hours worked.
 
pinqy said:
Then where did you get the demonstrably untrue idea that 94% of the jobs created were part time? I'm assuming that you do not subscribe to DA60's odd interpretation that any work that isn't Monday-Friday 9-5 is part time regardless of how many hours worked.
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I read it here on the forum. As I remember it was a privately made statement made by a department of labor official. If that is untrue then what is the right number? If we had full employment - truly full employment - college grads would be finding good jobs and people would stop complaining about the job market. I would certainly tend to believe the 94% before I would believe a government number.
 
KevinKohler said:
No one and nothing is going to stop under employment. Not Obama, nor Trump, or anyone else after.

The question, knowing this, what's the best way forward? The GOP standard solution...retrain everyone to be engineers, robot techs, and software developers? Or the DNC standard solution...increase minimum wages, welfare, etc, in efforts to force employers and business owners to pay staff enough to keep a consumer economy affloat?


Neither seem terribly appealing to me, but frankly, I offer no alternative.
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Genuinely curious, where do you get that the GOP solution is to retrain everyone to be engineers, etc?
 
fmw said:
I read it here on the forum. As I remember it was a privately made statement made by a department of labor official. If that is untrue then what is the right number? If we had full employment - truly full employment - college grads would be finding good jobs and people would stop complaining about the job market. I would certainly tend to believe the 94% before I would believe a government number.
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Who says college grads aren't finding good jobs? I haven't really heard much whining about the job market in the last year or two? The people we have entrusted to measure these statistics you say you won't believe so I have no idea what you are basing your idea of reality on. Is it the tiny segment of the population you personally know? Ramblings on an internet forum or facebook? How about you look at unemployment claims? People are doing just fine in my area. I found a job in 2 days making a six figure salary. My girlfriend just got a job with a 55% pay increase. We are both college grads. My hospital is offering huge bonuses for nurses. In my liberal brainwashing factory (ie: college) educated friends group, I've seen 4 postings on facebook this week by people advertising for jobs that need filling at their companies. The only person who is unemployed in my family is my sister who is a dead beat drug addict with no education. I think this narrative that was true 6 years ago you and your lot have have been unwilling to let go off (because it doesn't give you any of the blame for not doing well economically) is preventing you from seeing the truth that our economy is doing okay and education is still the path to a middle class life now that we are out of the recession.

We cannot win economically by going nativist and protectionist just because segments of our population (who largely won't vote for a person offering to raise the minimum wage) won't get with the times and realize they need to finish high school and at least go to community college or tech school to learn a skill. Our government, federal, state, and local, can be doing a lot more to make this easier for people, but its still a choice people are not making.

Look at the labor participation rate and unemployment rate with less than high school and only high school education vs having some college or a degree. Bachelors degree = 2.5% unemployment

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Your entire narrative is 100% off base.
 
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vash1012 said:
Genuinely curious, where do you get that the GOP solution is to retrain everyone to be engineers, etc?
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Because that is the response you'll get from them here. They'll pose the question, what happened to all the horse buggy makers when the car came into its own. And some will come right out and say, all those people will have to retrain to become robot technicians.
 
vash1012 said:
Who says college grads aren't finding good jobs? I haven't really heard much whining about the job market in the last year or two? The people we have entrusted to measure these statistics you say you won't believe so I have no idea what you are basing your idea of reality on. Is it the tiny segment of the population you personally know? Ramblings on an internet forum or facebook? How about you look at unemployment claims? People are doing just fine in my area. I found a job in 2 days making a six figure salary. My girlfriend just got a job with a 55% pay increase. We are both college grads. The only person who is unemployed in my family is my sister who is a dead beat drug addict with no education. I think this narrative that was true 6 years ago you and your lot have have been unwilling to let go off (because it doesn't give you any of the blame for not doing well economically) is preventing you from seeing the truth that our economy is doing okay and education is still the path to a middle class life now that we are out of the recession.
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College grads are getting jobs.



In retail.
 
vash1012 said:
Who says college grads aren't finding good jobs? I haven't really heard much whining about the job market in the last year or two? The people we have entrusted to measure these statistics you say you won't believe so I have no idea what you are basing your idea of reality on. Is it the tiny segment of the population you personally know? Ramblings on an internet forum or facebook? How about you look at unemployment claims? People are doing just fine in my area. I found a job in 2 days making a six figure salary. My girlfriend just got a job with a 55% pay increase. We are both college grads. My hospital is offering huge bonuses for nurses. In my liberal brainwashing factory (ie: college) educated friends group, I've seen 4 postings on facebook this week by people advertising for jobs that need filling at their companies. The only person who is unemployed in my family is my sister who is a dead beat drug addict with no education. I think this narrative that was true 6 years ago you and your lot have have been unwilling to let go off (because it doesn't give you any of the blame for not doing well economically) is preventing you from seeing the truth that our economy is doing okay and education is still the path to a middle class life now that we are out of the recession.

We cannot win economically by going nativist and protectionist just because segments of our population (who largely won't vote for a person offering to raise the minimum wage) won't get with the times and realize they need to finish high school and at least go to community college or tech school to learn a skill. Our government, federal, state, and local, can be doing a lot more to make this easier for people, but its still a choice people are not making.

Look at the labor participation rate and unemployment rate with less than high school and only high school education vs having some college or a degree. Bachelors degree = 2.5% unemployment

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Your entire narrative is 100% off base.
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If you believe it then it must be true. ;)
 
KevinKohler said:
Because that is the response you'll get from them here. They'll pose the question, what happened to all the horse buggy makers when the car came into its own. And some will come right out and say, all those people will have to retrain to become robot technicians.
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When have they said that? The GOP response to job questions is deregulate and lower taxes. I haven't heard them say a thing about government getting involved in retraining citizens for the new economy. That's been a democrat position the last few elections.
 
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