
Across the rich world, an extraordinary jobs boom is under way - simonh
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/05/23/across-the-rich-world-an-extraordinary-jobs-boom-is-under-way
======
thatfrenchguy
> Over the past two decades the number of Britons receiving jobless benefits,
> as a share of those out of work, has fallen from 80% to 50%. That may, in
> turn, have made wages more flexible. Workers will take wage cuts if
> necessary in order to avoid unemployment

In other ways, people are taking bad underpaid jobs they would never take
otherwise to avoid starving. That’s not really something to be proud of as a
society.

~~~
antihero
Yeah absolutely fuck everything about this whole situation. Tories have
managed to manipulate stats about unemployment by including zero-hour jobs
that means that people are completely beholden to their "employer" to give
them enough hours to work. This government has absolutely shat on people,
especially the younger generation.

Anything you read about people that enjoy the "flexibility" of zero hours?
Absolute fucking shit. It's flexible if you are a consultant that is paid £700
a day. If you're on minimum wage then it's people fighting to the death just
be able to work enough to move out of their parents houses or pay rent.

Utterly exploitative and dishonest society.

------
taiwanboy
I am curious why the media seems to romanticize the country life and eschew
city life, when the growth of cities and mega cities are continuing trends of
the last 70 years. It seems that for the people with less resources, cities
with their abundant jobs and cheaper resources are where they should be. The
countryside and suburbs seems to be more for people with more resources and
money, which makes sense because it is far away from the centralized hub of
finance and logistics of the cities.

And yes, you may not be able to afford a house in the city in the beginning,
when a house is priced at 100x rent. But not all cities have housing
shortages, move to those cities that don’t. Or move to the countryside once
you can afford it. No one ‘deserves’ to live in the countryside

~~~
fullshark
Because people in cities romanticize it and they are the main
consumers/producers of media.

~~~
icebraining
"It's only the urban middle class who worry about the preservation of the
countryside, because they don't have to live in it."

\- Sir Humphrey, _Yes, Minister_

------
ravenstine
> The belief that people increasingly flit from job to job is also not borne
> out by fact. Over the past two decades the share of oecd workers who have
> been in their job for less than a year has hovered around 20%, with no clear
> trend up or down.

Who has ever said that people increasingly switch between jobs in _less than a
year_? Off the bat, I can't find an exact statistic, but what the author is
saying here seems like a gross exaggeration of the actual narrative.

My understanding of the narrative is that people used to stay at companies for
years or even _decades_. I know many of my parents generation whom have worked
at the same company for at least a decade. Most of my friends in my generation
are well educated(and not engineers), but have been changing jobs every 1 to 2
years. Generally, that seems to be the expectation of today. Changing
companies in less than a year is not the new normal, and I haven't heard
anyone suggest otherwise.

I don't see how what the author is saying here demonstrates that the "belief
that people increasingly flit from job to job is also not borne out by fact."

~~~
pavpanchekha
If you switch between jobs once every five years, then 20% of the time you've
been at your current job for under a year. That's what that 20% measures—not
people who left in under a year, but people who left within the last year
(which is easier to measure). If that rate goes up, people must be switching
jobs more often; if it goes down, people must be switching less.

------
RickJWagner
I agree, this is cyclical.

The jobs economy feels a lot like the late 80s to me. I graduated college
then, and entered into a roaring jobs market. Under leadership from right and
left (Reagan and Clinton), the American economy provided a great opportunity
to establish a baseline income and start saving for the future.

I feel this gave people of my generation a huge step up. I think that people
who graduated at other times (i.e. 2009) had a much rougher start. It's just
the luck of the game.

It feels about the same to me now. I hope so, for today's grads sake.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/Q9jZE](http://archive.is/Q9jZE)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190530151002/https://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190530151002/https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/05/23/across-
the-rich-world-an-extraordinary-jobs-boom-is-under-way)

------
thorwasdfasdf
Let's not forget that Unemployment numbers can be deceiving. Even the U6
number of 7.6% unemployment in the US is lower than certain sectors. I know
this is anecodatal, but amongst my non-engineer, MBA friends (producers,
managers, PMs, etc), their collective unemployment rate seems to be 30%+ and
that's here in the bay area. So, it can be quite different based on which job
sector your in and which location.

------
MichaelMoser123
I don't know if you can trust unemployment statistics and too much - if you
don't find a job in due time then they tend to strike you out if the total. I
would guess you might also have to look at overall employment figures to get a
clear picture.

~~~
0xffff2
I believe the term you're looking for is "labor force participation rate".
Unemployment measures the percentage of people looking for a job that are
unable to find one. To get a complete picture, you have to also understand how
many people have stopped looking for work entirely.

------
jdhn
There may be more job openings, but based on my admittedly small sample size
of one (myself), it appears that companies aren't acting like there's a lot of
positions to be filled. The vast majority of my applications go unanswered,
and when companies do respond, there's no real sense of urgency at all.

------
Isamu
Non-paywalled: [https://outline.com/2EpVPh](https://outline.com/2EpVPh)

~~~
Joe-Z
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Just recently I read that HN
guidlines encourage posting non-paywalled links. I used yours, thank you!

~~~
0xffff2
There's a difference between posting a link to original content on a non-
paywalled site and posting a link to a site that circumvents a paywall, which
AFAICT is just blatant copyright infringement.

~~~
Joe-Z
Well, now I'm confused. Did I not understand this correctly?:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

It says it's okay to help other users to read an article and even to ask for
links (under the point "Are paywalls ok?")

~~~
0xffff2
The wording is inherently vague anyway, but I wasn't really commenting on the
HN guidelines so much as legally and ethically. If someone posted a link to
some non-free software and I "helped others" to use the software by posting a
link to a torrent for the cracked version of the software I think most people
would find that to be unacceptable. I'm struggling to figure out how this is
any different.

~~~
Joe-Z
I get your point. However, the flipside is how sensical it would be to share a
link on a forum like this if most of the users can't see the content of it

~~~
tzs
If I'm at a party and I find a group of people discussing "Game of Thrones", I
don't tell them to stop because I don't have an HBO subscription and so don't
know enough to follow the discussion. I go find a different discussion that is
about something I do know about.

I don't see why it should be any different with discussions on a link sharing
site like HN. Unlike with the GoT discussion at the party, I've found that the
HN discussion of articles that I do not have easy access to (such as at The
Economist or the Wall Street Journal) are usually interesting and informative
even without having read the article. All that not reading the article usually
means is that more caution is needed when commenting.

If there is some topic I'm interested in, but find that I frequently can't
enjoy the discussion here on that topic because of frequent posts of articles
behind a particular paywall--then that's a pretty good sign that I should
actually subscribe to that publication.

~~~
Joe-Z
I never told anyone to stop discussing anything, I was just pointing out an
alternative view to 0xffff2's argument. I'm completely with you that only
reading HN-comments can be very interesting too.

That said, I'm glad HN-rules support non-paywall links. To use your logic: If
you don't support them, don't use them.

------
python_gt_r3
Yet living standards aren't improving an inch. Housing price to income ratios
are higher than at any time on record. Outside the city, populations are
decaying year after year, and the only chances of benefiting from global
economic trends are in the city. There's a housing bubble in virtually every
major city of Europe due to speculation and migration from smaller towns.

To put an example, in London median house price hovers around half a million,
while median London salary is about 30k. Sure, your washing machine is cheaper
than 40 years ago, but the basic element in any economy -housing- has become
more expensive. Cities are saturated in every sense.

Except maybe the idea The Economist wants to push is somehow that we need
millions and millions more ex-EU immigrants? Because they have seen a spike in
underpaid IT vacancies.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Outside the city, populations are decaying year after year, and the only
> chances of benefiting from global economic trends are in the city.

We keep expecting the internet to change this, and it keeps not happening. Why
doesn't it? Why haven't remote workers or remote teams spread into the smaller
towns and countryside?

~~~
tehbeard
Ignoring internet access issues in rural areas, What is there to do in your
free time in smaller towns and the countryside?

That's the reason.

~~~
switchbak
I've got gigabit fibre running to my house, and some of the best natural
beauty and outdoor activities available anywhere just minutes away. Mountain
biking, climbing, white water paddling, kite surfing, trail running, sailing,
hiking, etc.

Let me assure you, there is plenty to do if you're into this lifestyle. Don't
knock it just cause it's not something you're into.

I think as more people get good remote jobs that many of them will realize
that living in nice small towns is really desirable.

~~~
0xffff2
Lucky you. I have a house just outside a small town of 700, about 30 miles
outside a town of 30,000. I can't even get DSL; I'm stuck with terrible
satellite internet when I'm out there. I really can't wait for Starlink. If it
works as promised, I'll finally be able to ditch my Silicon Valley apartment
and go full remote.

------
astazangasta
I hate read this the other day. It is such tripe. Typical of the economist on
capitalist ideology, they crow about low unemployment but don't show a single
contrary stat. For example this:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO)

If a few quarters of rising wages is supposed to make us happy after decades
of stagnation, things are pretty sad.

------
WhompingWindows
1\. Labor force participation rate is much less rosy than typical employment
measures. If skilled jobs are automated away and those workers completely drop
out of the pool or rely on disability/benefits, can we really celebrate having
lower unemployment from the remainder of non-automation-decimated jobs?

2\. Minimum wage hikes in some areas are a great start, but when big players
like Lyft, Uber, and restaurant industry get away with relying on tips and
chance to meet minimum wage, we still are left with many low-quality, low-
skill jobs that seem rife for further automation.

3\. Where is the long-term focus on what to do about automation? Is any large
population in the rich world going to try UBI or another mechanism?

~~~
briandear
> Where is the long-term focus on what to do about automation?

[https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-
wart...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-wartzman-
book-excerpt-automation-donald-trump-215207)

> A study by University of Chicago economist Yale Brozen would find that while
> 13 million jobs had been destroyed during the 1950s, the adoption of new
> technology was among the ingredients that led to the creation of more than
> 20 million other positions. “Instead of being alarmed about growing
> automation, we ought to be cheering it on,” he wrote. “The catastrophe that
> doom criers constantly threaten us with has retreated into such a dim future
> that we simply cannot take their pronouncements seriously.”

> Economists started to explore the issue in the early 1800s, during the
> Industrial Revolution. Most classical theorists of the time—including J. B.
> Say, David Ricardo and John Ramsey McCulloch—held that introducing new
> machines would, save perhaps for a brief period of adjustment, produce more
> jobs than they’d destroy. By the end of the century, concern had faded
> nearly altogether. “Because the general upward trends in investment,
> production, employment and living standards were supported by evidence that
> could not be denied,” the economic historian Gregory Woirol has written,
> “technological change ceased to be seen as a relevant problem.”

We go through this "fear" pretty regularly and it's unfounded.

Also from the article:

> General Motors, for example, added more than 287,000 people to its payroll
> between 1940 and the mid-1950s. “There is widespread fear that technological
> progress … is a Grim Reaper of jobs,” GM vice president Louis Seaton told
> lawmakers. “Our experience and record completely refutes this view.”

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Are people getting more capable? Does it look like the machines will stop
getting more capable? If neither of those are true, we will probably keep
worrying about automation outperforming humans until it happens. A line
heading up is going to intersect a flat line eventually.

