

It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession - Goladus
http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/07/its_not_just_a_recession_its_a_mancession.php

======
philwelch
I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in
these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in
the long term.

I would not see health care as a safe industry right now, what with the
uncertainty of reform looming over our heads and what appears to be a bubble
in health care in any case. Yet with job growth in healthcare, government, and
education, the trend to notice isn't men and women, it's government and
market. Government jobs, and jobs in highly regulated industries, seem safer
at the moment than jobs in the market. Which is to be expected when government
spending rises in an economic downturn.

If we see recovery soon, this short term trend will reverse itself and all
this will be forgotten. But if we deepen into a depression, the other shoe
will eventually drop once the federal government reaches a debt crisis. Then
women (and, in fact, everyone in government/gov. regulated jobs) will be in
the same boat. Neither outcome will really sustain this trend.

~~~
nir
>I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in
these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in
the long term.

In the long term, can't a significant amount of engineering & programming be
automated and/or offshored? Obviously not all, but I'm not sure engineering
can be counted as a future-proof career path.

~~~
nostrademons
How many large-scale software projects have you worked on? ;-)

In the small scale, it always _looks_ like a program is just a bunch of lines
of code, and any monkey can type in lines of code. But in the large scale,
there're lots of judgments calls and architectural decisions that require that
you weigh competing factors, with incomplete information, and try to come up
with a "least bad" solution with possibly unforseen results in the future. You
can't automate this, and if you try to outsource it without open lines of
communication, you'll probably end up with a solution that satisfies nobody.

The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do
_after_ the rote parts have been automated.

~~~
nir
Isn't large scale software actually where most of the automation and
offshoring take place?

The "judgments calls and architectural decisions" can be made just as well by
software architects in India or China or Brazil.

>The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do
after the rote parts have been automated

Absolutely. For example: 6502 Assembly -> C -> Java -> Python. Each step is
exactly about that: Letting you focus on the interesting parts, and thus
produce more value with less human effort. This _is_ automation, we just call
it abstraction or whatever. We didn't see a drop in the job market as result,
since the demand for software had been rising even faster. The question is
whether this will remain the case.

------
swombat
That's one lousy graph. It makes it look like there's twice as many men
unemployed as women. The reality is there's only 20% more.

~~~
bwhite
No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5% a year and a
half ago, unemployment for women has gone up about 60% while unemployment for
men has gone up about 100% -- or not quite double the increase. It's a fair
representation.

And even in absolute numbers, there are far, far more than 20% more men than
women who are unemployed. It's the unemployment _rate_ for which the figure
for men is about 20-ish% more than the rate for women.

~~~
swombat
"No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5.5%"

You're assuming that most people who look upon the graph understand concepts
such as "baseline". I very much doubt that.

~~~
bwhite
I think the intention of the graph is to illustrate that the unemployment rate
for men has increased at about twice the rate as the unemployment rate for
women. And it's successful.

------
Goladus
Another possible factor is that women who lose their job may be less likely to
seek another. I've heard at least one anecdote already of a woman who lost her
job and decided to just stay home for the time being.

~~~
Dilpil
Indeed, almost no one understands the 'unemployment' statistic. As I
understand it, only people who are actively seeking employment and have no job
are included.

------
krakensden
While 'HealthEdGov' may have been the place to be over the past ten years,
it's worth pointing out that that sector is basically a remora- a useful
parasite to the shark, but still a parasite.

As a society, we need a stronger 'rest of the economy'.

~~~
jimbokun
To the extent that HealthEdGov is a proxy for just Gov (considering the amount
of government money spent on Health and Ed), I suppose that's true. But Health
and Ed definitely contribute a lot to productivity, I think. Sick, injured and
dead people do not produce as much value as healthy people, and well educated
people tend to produce more value than under educated people.

Disclaimer: this is being typed by someone whose paycheck comes directly from
the EdGov sector.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Intuitively, we believe that health and ed contribute to productivity, wealth,
etc. But the evidence that health and education (beyond the basics) contribute
much is actually pretty weak.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/human-
capital-p.html#m...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/human-
capital-p.html#more-17459)

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/medicine_as_sca.html>

By basics, I mean vaccines/trauma care/birthing in medicine, and
literacy/arithmetic in education.

Disclaimer: I also work in the Ed/NonGov sector, as well as in the Sci/Gov
sector.

------
indiejade
That's why in a recession, it's a good time to get "funemployed" . . .

[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
funemployment4-2009j...](http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
funemployment4-2009jun04,0,7581684.story)

------
asdlfj2sd33
It's a class-cession. People from the less educated lower classes have limited
employment opportunities mostly involving physical labor. Men tend to be
overrepresented in such jobs, like constructions. And we're in a housing bust.

~~~
bwhite
It's an age-cession, too. Overall teenage (16-19) employment is something like
24% now. For white teenagers it's now 21% (compare with an unemployment rate
in the low to mid teens over the past 10 years) and 39% (!) for black
teenagers (compare with unemployment rates in the high 20% and low 30% range
over the past 10 years).

One of the aggravating reasons those figures are so high is that US employers
were forced last month to raise wages for their least skilled/valuable
employees.

