
The New Face of American Unemployment - edward
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-new-unemployment/?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=politics&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid%253D=socialflow-twitter-politics
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Animats
The manager of the wire mill in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania (pop. 4200 and
dropping, 98% white, median income $32K, "archetypal Rust Belt town") says
“We’ll just about hire anybody that we can get our hands on if the person
comes in drug-free and they show up for work on time.” They still have
problems finding people. Who would move there?

This is the plight of small-town America.

~~~
throw_away_777
Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better
working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.

~~~
randomdata
I live in a small town myself, which has its own struggles finding enough
people for all the jobs. The biggest thing I've noticed when having
conversations with out-of-towners is that those people do not believe the jobs
exist at all, at any price point. Somehow we've collectively built up this
idea that there are simply no jobs to be found outside of the cities, period.
With that, nobody outside the local region even thinks to see what jobs are
available in these places while on the job hunt.

I have a feeling this idea of no jobs really was, more or less, true at one
point in time and the preconceived notions simply haven't kept up with the
ever changing landscape of the world. This isn't the only example of where
information seems to severely lag reality.

~~~
pnathan
> hose people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point.

I used to live in a small town rural area. There were 4 employers of software
engineers. I worked for one large one (~500? sw engineers), the other two were
universities with poor pay and uninteresting tech prospects, and the fourth
had 30 people total. I believe there's a fifth company now.

If I wanted to do more things with my career than work for one company for the
next 20 years, I had to move. Remote jobs aren't very good for people without
connections (because connections typically form through personal contact,
something difficult in rural areas), and freelancing/consulting at the
_junior_ end is excellent for someone who excels in marketing themselves and
building webapps.

Moving to a city lets me do things with my career as _I_ want, not what the
sole company wants. If the company crashes, my career is not in disarray and I
don't _have_ to move.

I simply can _not_ recommend to anyone who is looking to make something of
themselves to move to a rural area. The connections, niches, specialties,
opportunities are just not found in rural areas. You have to build them up
manually and it's simply not possible without deploying tremendous effort just
to _tread water_ in relation to the you-that-moved-to-a-city.

It's of course plausible that a senior person with a lifetime of connections
and a deep specialty can live in Nowhere, USA, and have a solid life. But
those simply don't hold true for junior/midlevel people.

~~~
randomdata
A software developer does not exactly seem representative of the general
population though, and especially not representative of the population that
are in need of work! If we're just talking about what careers we have, then as
a farmer, I imagine the employment prospects in the city are downright
horrible for someone like me.

~~~
pnathan
Employment prospects for farmers are dismal, as automation and modern methods
make possible more land farmed under fewer people.

There are just more jobs in cities. this is why housing is such a terrible
crunch in cities... crap regulations on housing development, but zillions of
jobs and people crowding in for them.

~~~
randomdata
_> Employment prospects for farmers are dismal_

You might be surprised, especially if you have the necessary skills. There is
a farm labour shortage going on. I feel like you are just echoing my point
here: That people don't even realize what jobs exist when they are outside the
city.

 _> There are just more jobs in cities._

Well, of course there are. There are more people. However, the unemployment
rate where I am is more than half that of the nearest large city (and
population isn't decreasing). If you don't already have a job, rural areas are
increasingly more likely to provide you one.

 _> this is why housing is such a terrible crunch in cities..._

Not really, because when housing becomes expensive, your profitability from
your job decreases to the point where it is no longer worth even doing. Sure,
if you are software developer making six figures in SF, you are still okay
(although possibly still selling yourself short[1]). But someone making
minimum wage in SF? They're paying to have a job!

In truth, people want to be in cities for the lifestyle, especially for the
large dating pool. Rural areas definitely fall short on those aspects.

[1] [https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017](https://hired.com/state-of-
salaries-2017)

------
rm_-rf_slash
1: Single-payer health care. Employer health care is a huge headache for any
company that wants to scale. The costs are also too high for individuals and
it depresses the economy as a whole. This really should be a no-brainer.

2: Bring back the WPA. Dismantling it was one of the biggest stupid mistakes
in American history. Just pay people to show up and work. It doesn't matter if
a private contractor is more efficient or if the work can be done more
effectively with expensive machines, just pay people to show up and work.

Here in Ithaca, NY, many of our beautiful gorge trails were built under the
WPA. They have lasted for nearly 100 years, and aside from the occasional
falling rock landslide, I bet they could last for 100 more.

I don't know about you, but I would be far more comfortable with the idea of
starting companies if my backup plan included a state guarantee of work and
health care. I may be a software developer but nobody is above picking up a
shovel and doing honest work for honest pay.

~~~
pnathan
I would like to see the WPA redone - we have a lot of infrastructure to work
on - the American Civil Engineering Society gives the US a D+ grade on our
infrastructure
([http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/)).
Since it's a public benefit, having people in public service to do that would
be pretty grand.

------
467568985476
My heart is broken by individual stories like this one, but I have a hard time
sympathizing with these overwhelmingly conservative areas who lectured us "tax
and spend liberals" about welfare queens and bootstraps when times were good
for them. They were offered retraining and reeducation by the Clinton campaign
and overwhelmingly rejected it. I'm happy to help these net-entitlement-
consumers via my taxes, but their plight is hardly a priority given that they
seem to have no interest in taking proactive steps to fix it.

~~~
mythrwy
Possibly these people don't want help and retraining from the Clinton
campaign.

What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the
point their labor is worth something again.

Will this happen? And if it does will they be able to step in and fill the
jobs? I'm not confident but I think that's what is desired. Not government
programs.

~~~
dragonwriter
> What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the
> point their labor is worth something again.

No, what they want is time to rewind to where it was when they were doing
well. They've been sold the lie that immigration restrictions and tariffs will
achieve (or at least approximate) that.

> Will this happen?

No. In fact, rising tariffs will (indirectly) make their labor worth _less_.

~~~
mythrwy
"the lie"

debatable.

~~~
dragonwriter
You are free to present your argument.

~~~
mythrwy
That is my argument.

------
theptip
The first chart is a good example of why a pie chart is usually not the
correct choice for data visualization. Pie charts are usually quite hard to
read, but this one is particularly bad as it has an animation looping through
different years' data; it's impossible to discern the actual trends at a
glance.

Much better would be a simple line graph with the trends for each series. More
fancy, and perhaps a slightly better way to emphasize the narrative of the
article, would be plotting the relative change from the first year (2007) for
each series.

~~~
danthemanvsqz
+1 I was thinking the same thing myself. Pie charts are for elementary school
kids.

------
drpgq
"Nearly half of U.S. children now have at least one parent with a criminal
record." That's somewhat dystopian.

~~~
watty
They're including everything from traffic violations to felonies. I guess it
wouldn't be as interesting of a statistic if they explained what it actually
was.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Traffic violations now count as "criminal record"? According to what
definition of "criminal"?

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is so intuitively wrong that I
wonder if you (or the article) is using a non-standard definition of
"criminal". If not, is this a change? Has it always been defined this way?

~~~
gizmo686
There are two types of crimes: criminal and civil. In most states, traffic
violations are covered by criminal law. This is why many forms that ask about
a criminal record say 'excluding traffic violations', or something to that
effect.

~~~
drpgq
Even a speeding ticket?

~~~
gizmo686
Yes.

Kind of. Speeding tickets are generally under criminal law. However, they are
in a procedural limbo where they are treated in many respects as civil. There
is a concern that things like speeding cameras would not hold up under
criminal law if they were significantly challenged, but to my knowledge, that
has not happened at a high enough level yet.

[http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/](http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/)

------
lgleason
Note one of the white elephants in the room. Ageism.

~~~
dimgl
Scares the hell out of me to be frank...

~~~
city41
Scares the hell out of me too. I think the ageism problem will eventually get
solved. But my concern is will it get solved in time for me?

In the meantime, I try to think up things I can do to combat it and I pretty
much completely draw blanks. I'm seriously considering exploring small
bootstrapped start ups in my free time for no other reason than to hopefully
have an income stream I can use should I find myself out of a job due to age.

------
vinhboy
I don't understand. Are those five stories suppose to be representative of
today's unemployment problems?

Because if they are. We need more social programs to help these people. Not
more "job creators".

~~~
sp332
Social programs aren't self-sustaining. You can't count on them to exist for
longer than an election cycle. Setting up some businesses would make a medium-
to-long term difference, and people wouldn't have to constantly worry about
their benefits being cut.

Edit: I don't mean that concentrating capital and picking winners is good
either. Helping individuals start their own small businesses would be better,
and it would probably lead to less inequality than dumping cash into a single
big "job-creating"... thing.

~~~
pm90
This is exactly right. I would also add that culturally, living on "benefits"
is highly frowned upon in American society today so this probably has
psychological effects on the recipients as well. Conversely, the ability to
get a job and keep it is the source of much pride and admiration.

------
AKifer
Seen from that optics, the war on drugs makes all its' sense.

