

No Recovery in Sight - winanga
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/opinion/27herbert.html?_r=3

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ardit33
My company shut down two weeks ago (with little drama), and I was back in the
job market. I got three jobs offers within two weeks, all with a significant
raise what I was making, and one "name your price" type of offer.

If you are a really good engineer with special skills, there is no recession
for you.

If all you did is some php app, or some bug fixing here and there (mediocre
engineer in a big corp), then you probably gonna have trouble finding a job.

It is a skilled based economy right now, and people with skills either find
jobs right away, or just start their own companies.

------
aharrison
_The economy can’t be re-established on a sound basis without aggressive
efforts to put people back to work in jobs with decent wages._

As a college student who will be in the job market before too long, I have
been keeping a decently close eye on these economic recession stories. Time
and again people have claimed for strong measures, aggressive efforts, and
assertive changes. Never have I seen an actual recommendation. Is it just
common knowledge what should be done? Bob Herbert says "decent wages" like it
is a commonly understood legal term...but what is the market value of their
labor? I am not asking this as a free-market capitalist libertarian devotee,
but more from the perspective of "Ok, so what do you want
[me|theGovernment|bigCorp] to do?"

Also, why the hell don't journalists cite sources? "...and most analysts now
expect it [unemployment] to hit 10 percent or higher." Says whom? How many is
"most"? Why is it they get away with this?

~~~
gojomo
The vagueness and hand-waving here is frustrating... but as a once-upon-a-time
op-ed columnist, I understand why Herbert's pieces are intermittently weak.

Op-ed writers only have about 800 words to try to make a point or two. So the
concrete suggestions and detailed citations are often thin, as a matter of the
form.

And they may have to write to exactly that word budget (as here with Herbert)
on schedule twice a week. He can't tell his editor, "I've only got 600 words
today", or "Here's 1200 words you can run a day early." So sometimes they've
got more to say than fits, and other times have to stretch half-thoughts as
filler.

This one is 804 words, and seems worse than most such columns in its
generalities. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if it's just an initial
'expression of concern' that gets followed up with his pet recommendations in
future columns. (The same clockwork word budget that hurts the form in some
ways helps in others -- no one column should be thought of as standing
completely apart from the series, even though it may get forwarded that way.)

Still, blogs are rightly crushing this op-ed form. Blogs give greater
flexibility of pace, size, interactivity, citation-via-linking, etc. --
meaning smarter, deeper discussion.

~~~
aharrison
Thank you for your perspective on the matter. I had assumed something along
those lines, but it is still frustrating to see someone making an argument as
important as this without two fundamental parts:

1\. Data to back the argument up.

2\. Some recommendation.

Which reminds me: does anyone, anywhere, actually have a _recommendation_? I
know the HN crowd would say "start a million startups!" but realistically,
what can we as a society do?

~~~
RobGR
1\. While it is easy to find egregious examples of unsubstantiated claims on
the New York Time's Op-Ed page, this is not one of them. I don't read about
the economy obsessively, but I am perfectly aware that most pundits,
forecasters, and in general the whole national peanut gallery expect
unemployment to continue to rise, save for the usual suspects on the stock-
pumping circuit. Herbert's remaining assertions were attributed and partly in
quotes, indicating he talked to the person in question and they said that.

2\. A recommendation is not necessary. In the real world, away from the
relentlessly optimistic and "going forward" business-speak, every observation
of bad news does not have to be followed by a powerpoint slide titled "Lessons
Learned" with a bullet point list of glib generalities only unknnown to
retarded people even before the shit hit the fan. It is even possible that
there is nothing we can do to change the economic course of the next few
years, although that is a topic separate from guessing at what that economic
course is most likely to be.

It is perfectly ok to simply observe where we are gonig withou having a
suggestion on how to turn. For example, let's say a couple of guys were
working on a startup; one of them figures out that something has fallen
though, and there is no way to win. You have to tell the other guy, and argue
with him if he doesn't believe it, even if you don't know how to avoid
whatever impending disaster is on the horizon.

Personally, I don't see a way around a prolonged period of reduced consumer
spending and employment. Furthermore, those that do have jobs will save much
of what they earn but it will be inflated away or used to cover the recent
loses of financial institutions, so they won't even get full benefit of it.
The government policies that will be best in the long term will likely make
this period even worse -- balancing the Federal budget to reduce inflation
will put more federal workers in the job market and cut benefits right when
they are needed, for example.

I think the best thing for me to do is to focus on building a better business,
and be fairly conservative in saving and spending now, os that if thing sget
worse I am not forced to make really stupid choices by lack of resources. I
think planning on the future having a lot of unemployed young males, and thus
an oversupply of freelancers, is smart.

One trend that I think is worrisome, and I don't know of anything to do to
prepare for it, is the combination of large numbers of unemployed, under
employed, or generally economically insecure young males, and the fact that it
seems to me (most obviously on reddit, but also from other places) that this
same demographic has a fascination with police brutality, tasering, outrage at
idiotic TSA goons, etc. (All of which is probably justified.) It seems to me
that there is higher than usual likelihood that some large gathering, such as
a concert or political event, will result in a riot with lots of pissed guys
who want to fight the cops and have been thinking about how to do it for a
while. That won't be good.

------
bwd
I've been kind of worried about this for a while. Week economic conditions
place selection pressure on companies to learn to do more with less, and
technology steadily improves the tools that are available to reach that goal.
When the economy starts to turn around these companies may not need to hire
more workers to meet rising demand. The recovery from the recession was called
"jobless" and I suspect that this one will be even worse.

------
miked
"The first step in dealing with a crisis is to recognize that it exists."

The rest of Bob Herbert's article is just as insightful.

------
johnohara
_What does it mean, he asked, when kids are under stress because there is no
money in the household, or people have to move more, or are combining
households, or lose their health insurance? I believe this is going to leave a
permanent scar on a generation of kids._

I've believed for quite some time that the current generation of kids is
closer in thought and deed to their grandparents than to their parents.
Circumstances are increasingly showing that to be true.

~~~
RobGR
My observations agree with yours. I have noticed that many of my age group
(late 20s to early thirties) seem to be more socially conservative, especially
with regards to divorce, sex, and drugs (but more accepting of homosexuality
and especially race than the older friends).

In particular I have noticed on an anecdotal basis that the children of
divorced parents marry later and more cautiously.

Most of the fiscal old-fasionedness is in males who feel unsure of their
careers, which jives with Herbert's observations on gender.

------
jackmoore
As if the topic wasn't scary enough, they mixed up Bob Herbert's photo with
that of Frankenstein.

