
Millions of Unemployed Face Years without Jobs - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?hp
======
_delirium
It seems we have at least ~20 years of a serious transition problem, even if
in the long run it's a symptom of positive technological progress: there's a
large cohort of blue-collar workers in their 40s and 50s caught out by the
rapid decline in US blue-collar jobs. Some will find other skills, or go back
to school to acquire skills (and valuable pieces of paper), but can that
absorb millions of middle-aged people who have been blue-collar workers all
their lives and now find that to be a dead end?

~~~
marshallp
Unskilled workers can progress to doing tasks that involve labeling data for
machine learning - computer vision, sentiment analysis in audio and text are
examples currently being done on mechanical turk.

The only limiting factor currently is lack of imagination and investment from
so-called innovators - they'd rather 'innovate' by creating another social
network or incrementally improve a 1960s technology (microsoft) than do
anything truly useful to society.

Efforts in this area include google goggles/voice and microsoft project natal
(though it's woefully underfunded compared to it's potential).

------
Alex3917
One of my predictions for 2020 is that services like Mechanical Turk are going
to employ a significant number of people in the US. The only reason this
hasn't happened already is that there is a lot of friction once the tasks get
more complicated than checking whether or not an image is porn. But once
someone invents a 'programming language' for outsourcing that allows people to
easily Turk higher-wage tasks, I think we are going to see an explosion of
piecework knowledge workers.

The fact is that these people are never going to have jobs again, and once
their unemployment runs out there is going to be this huge unexploited
resource just waiting for someone to arbitrage.

------
michaelneale
The positive spin for HN folk: if you are an entrepreneur, get cracking ! This
is both opportunity for you, as well as a Good Thing to do for the economy
(yes yes, I know, unlikely to hire a long term unemployed person for a new
internet startup, but it still doesn't hurt !).

~~~
pg
Though you might not directly hire a long-term unemployed person, you could
indirectly, by causing growth in suppliers.

~~~
robryan
Yeah, the problem I see with direct hiring is that a lot of the work
entrepreneurs do is about creating efficiencies which remove these people from
the workforce.

Mechanical Turk would be a good counter example but I don't think anyone in
the US could realistically make a living from it.

Maybe the answer is a start up that aims on giving these people a new skill
set, which allows them to do something that is fairly procedural but something
that can't be automated. Some of the jobs we find boring and monotonous may
seem new and exciting to people just moving into tech.

------
xenophanes
how can she possibly be in danger of going homeless if her husband gets $1595
a month? it's b/c their rent is 1380.

just move to a cheaper apartment. if you're broke with no job prospects and
stay in a pricey apartment you can't afford, how is that a sob story that
should make us sympathetic to more welfare spending? why should i pay more
taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine?

~~~
F_J_H
You know, I don’t normally get into these types of debates, but the
heartlessness of your comment really bothers for some reason. It reminds me of
the fable of the ant and grasshopper (circulated by the teabaggers lately),
which basically states that the grasshopper, because of poor planning, should
be kicked to the curb to die in the cold rather than forcing the industrious
ant to lend a hand. (You would love the altered version descibed here:
<http://www.grist.org/article/the8/>)

And your comment further down that they should have set aside money for moving
when they still had it is completely unhelpful. I once heard of a person who
took his Pontiac to a mechanic because of a problem he was having with it. He
asked the mechanic "What should I do?" to which the mechanic replied, "Don’t
buy a Pontiac". Not really helpful.

So, your solution to Ms. Eisen’s problem is that they should simply move to a
cheaper apartment? Well, turns out that due to a work injury, her husband is
confined to the couch. So, not only would he not be able to help move, but
they type of apartment they could get would be restricted by his accessibility
requirements. And, their vehicle broke down, so they would have to rent a
moving van or rely on friends. Moving does cost money and it may not be an
option.

Oh right, they "should have thought of that when they had money". Well,
setting aside how completely unhelpful that comment is, maybe she didn’t think
she would be out of work for 2 years, and now the money they had set aside is
gone, and they never thought they would get to the point where they would have
to move? Maybe they live near by treatment centers for her husband and the
only places with cheaper apartments are too far way? There is not enough
information in the article to come to the conclusion that simply moving to a
cheaper apartment will solve all of their problems so that you won’t have to
"pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine."

So, what would you do if you were standing in front of you? Tell her "Too bad
so sad, you should have thought about all this when you had money", and then
throw her aside in disgust, but not before handing her a couple of Ayn Rand’s
books so she can learn how to pull herself up by her own bootstraps?

When society begins to suffer, we all ultimately suffer my friend, no matter
whose fault it is.

~~~
potatolicious
IMHO one of the greatest, and most misguided straw men we have as a society is
the boogeyman that is the lazy, stupid citizen. I've recently started working
with the homeless, and had the opportunity to live in an industrial, working-
class slum in Canada... what I see in those places is not maliciousness, nor
laziness.

Have I met the lazy, good-for-nothing freeloaders living in a shack in the
slums? Sure - but that guy is _really_ not as common as people seem to think.
It's a critical mistake that betrays the arrogance of the monied in this
country to assume that these people are anything but a minority in homeless
and poor population.

It's so easy to try and take full credit for your success, and try to push all
blame for failure to the individual. It's far too easy to judge people you
have never met using assumptions you have never truly tested. For everyone
railing against the poor, I'd highly recommend volunteering some time with
your local non-profit that handles these issues. Meet these people, put a face
and name to your wild accusations, and you will find it much harder to scream
about lazy, freeloading Americans - because they're actually kind of hard to
find.

Instead of being monied and ignorant, be monied and informed.

~~~
xenophanes
In other words, you've met countless people who could easily live on $1595 per
month? Cool. I have no doubt they exist. And that they could have handled the
situation from the article better. Why can't welfare policy focus on helping
those people? Competent slum people are more effective to help, and much more
sympathetic, than incompetent people getting a monthly check for more than
full time minimum wage work.

~~~
xiaoma
According to the article, Mr. Eisen gets a $1,595 monthly disability check
each month _because he has diabetes, hypertension and liver failure_. Surely
you realize that medical care for these kinds of conditions costs something,
especially in the US. Calling him and his 57 year-old wife "incompetent" and
implying that an elderly couple with medical issues could live off of a single
minimum wage salary is heartless.

It's important to make sure that welfare policy doesn't become a disincentive
to work, but we're talking about a disability check that doesn't even bring
them up to the poverty line.

~~~
xenophanes
Hello? They are spending 1380/month on rent. That's what I said. Did you read
it? Obviously if they stopped doing that they'd have far more money.

And I'm saying I don't want them to be given more money, not to take away his
check. If you don't find a job or a cheaper place for 2 years you shouldn't go
"omg i'm gonna be homeless, we need help, we're the perfect sob story, write
about us in the NY times and then mention how obama wants to extend
unemployment so i could get more checks that i totally deserve for not working
or managing my budget for 2 years".

~~~
potatolicious
Please keep it civil - the other poster didn't sling any mud at you, it would
help your credibility if you did the same.

~~~
xenophanes
What mud? He ignored what I said. I pointed this out. I didn't say anything
about him.

------
aresant
Is there any average-skill, reliable way that people can make an income during
a down turn like this?

I'm thinking outside of the internet-set like istockphoto / writing articles /
etc.

Tangible, GDP positive tasks.

Farming?

~~~
_delirium
Cottage industry, possibly? Farming is difficult to pull off at more than
subsistence levels without significant machinery, even if you're targeting the
relatively high value hand-picked/local/organic market.

A lot of the obvious cottage industries _also_ decline during a downturn, like
miscellaneous arts and crafts, but I've run across people making decent
livings from textile work that they sell on ebay. For smallish amounts of
money, one step up the farming chain to baking is fairly profitable. However
it gets complicated fast if you want to make a full income doing it, because
there's all sorts of health regulations for being a baker or confectioner that
pretty much prevent you from doing it out of your home kitchen. Can probably
get away with ignoring them if you're selling cookies and bread to <50 friends
and friends-of-friends.

~~~
aresant
That's an interesting idea.

Locally I've seen a variety of people springing up offering to do meal
services (eg they'll cook for you and your family, as well as their own).

------
rms
I only see this getting worse in the future. There just isn't enough work to
go around anymore. How many white collar/service jobs don't involve any actual
work? I just hope our economic system can adjust so we don't have a perpetual,
growing underclass.

~~~
pg
I believe this is an illusion. It always seems like technology is eliminating
jobs, but it has always tended to create as many as it kills, which is why
after hundreds of years of new labor-saving inventions, the number of jobs is
still close to the number of people who want them.

~~~
natrius
[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21un...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21unemployed_graphic2/21unemployed_graphic2-articleInline.jpg)

That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think
it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different.

I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what _new_ jobs
can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next
decade, and many _existing_ jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time
before people start smashing self-checkout machines.

~~~
pg
Definitely a scary graph. But surely it's more likely that it is a graph of a
bad recession happening than a sign that a trend that has run for hundreds if
not thousands of years has stopped at this exact point in history.

What was the number like in 1933?

~~~
wheels
The unemployment rate in the US peaked out at about 2.5x what it is now in the
Great Depression. Even now the US is the US isn't really in that bad of shape
for a developed nation; it's about 2% higher than most EU countries.

The US has just had very low unemployment for the last 15 years or so, so it
feels more dramatic. It was actually higher than now at one point in the early
80s.

------
greenlblue
What I don't understand is why people aren't calling for massive restructuring
of the financial system that leads to fucked up situations like this, i.e.
collapsing bubbles caused by greedy investors looking to get something out of
nothing. A CEO gives himself a multimillion dollar bonus and nobody flinches
and chalks it up to the way the market works. If the cognitive dissonance
doesn't make your head explode well then there isn't much point to making up
sob stories like this.

------
hop
I've been thinking of hiring a bunch of commission based salespeople for our
startup. Has anyone done similar? Can people still receive their unemployment
until they start making some sales or would they have to stop immediately when
they started calling on prospective buyers?

We can't afford to put them on a salary yet, but it could be a good
opportunity to help get some unemployed people going.

~~~
patrickgzill
It is based on the time period, at least in the state that a friend has worked
in. So if the time period is 2 weeks, then if you pay once a month, that will
be a 2-week period where they were employed, and a 2-week period they were
not. For individuals it is run on a cash basis, that is, if you cut them
checks every 3 months, they would only lose benefits for 1 period each 3 month
interval.

------
holdenc
The day of reckoning for an entitlement-based economy is coming. Many people
will have a hard lesson to learn: no one _deserves_ a job or unemployment
benefits. This idealism is a product of good times.

~~~
scythe
Yeah, some people deserve to starve. Fuck 'em.

~~~
noonespecial
Nobody deserves by virtue of existing to be supported by someone else. Nature
dictates that the least fit die. We humans have decided to disagree. We named
it "civilization".[1]

[1] We haven't got it quite perfected yet, but we're working on it. So far, it
hasn't been half bad.

------
waterlesscloud
But the Obama graph shows massive improvement since Bush left office!!!!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898>

~~~
jcdreads
No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people
are losing jobs much more slowly.

