Slashdot Mirror

...despite the picture you paint of a horrible dystopia, things were just fine.

It wasn't a "horrible dystopia". It was just an earlier time with more primitive technology which I have no desire to return to for a very slight improvement in the quality of voice calls. (which BTW I can still get if I use a POTS line) I rarely have any meaningful difficulty understanding the person on the other end of the line now and I can communicate a lot of other ways besides.

We managed to communicate with each other...

Far less efficiently than we do today. Sure we managed but it is easy to forget how limiting it was. Try it sometime. Turn off your cell phone and only communicate with a landline phone from your house. No internet, no text, no voicemail. If you don't come screaming back to the 21st century you are either on vacation or you are a luddite. :-)

And if you didn't make long-distance or out-of-country calls (because you didn't need to very often), you didn't have to pay those costs, so your monthly bill was quite small.

People didn't make those calls because it was too expensive to make them. It is a chicken and egg problem. You don't make the calls because it is too expensive and it doesn't get cheaper because you aren't making the calls. Furthermore all telecommunications were controlled by a single monopoly with very limited incentive to make things cheaper or better for customers. AT&T kept the long distance business after the breakup because that was where the money was at the time. The explosion in telecommunication services available mostly came after the breakup of AT&T. While it's hardly a utopia, I certainly get a lot more per dollar than I did 40 years ago.

I pay a monthly fee that's ten times that of the bad old days for services I need only occasionally, if at all, because I'm given no other choice.

"Ten times"? "No other choice"? Nonsense. First off I'm certain you are not accounting for inflation. $1 in 1975 is equivalent in purchasing power to $4.35 in 2014. Second, if you are going to compare, compare the cost of voice service only. You can get voice service on a cell phone for as little as $10/month in some places which is equivalent to $2.30 in 1975 once you account for inflation. If you tell me your phone bill was $2.30 in 1975 for nationwide calling I'm going to call you a liar.

The article keeps trying to compare GDP with employment. GDP has been increasing but yet unemployment is stuck at about 7%.

Unemployment peaked at 10% in October of 2009. It's now down to 6.6%, down 130bps in the last year. Still too high, but it has been declining steadily. This chart doesn't meet my definition of "stuck."

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Not exactly. The loan is an investment which has an expectation of being paid out over a long time period. Until that period has expired, it does not make sense for society to give up on collecting that debt.

Except that loan must be paid back (can't declare bankruptcy on a student loan), as stated by the GP.

Also, how can you be expected to pay back that loan when the society you owe it to, is also preventing you from getting a job to do so? Take a good look at the age ranges. Who just got out of college? Who has the best employment rate? Also look at the sex too. It's the same for both sexes at that age, with MEN actually doing worse than WOMEN. Also that is from the US Department of Labor.

Good luck paying back that debt to society, you'll need it.

Captcha: undergo.

Curunir_wolf wrote:
"Those numbers are based on unemployment rolls. Congress ended the EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) on December 31, so that took about 5 million people off the list."

Which numbers are based on unemployment insurance claims? Those are different (they do have an "insured unemployment rate" they publish weekly; "The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.6% during the week ending February 15, unchanged from the prior week.". They don't break them down by occupation and industry. That's totally separate from the unemployment rate (U3, U4, U5, U6), durations of unemployment, employment/population ratios, labor force participation rates, etc.). It doesn't matter whether or not you're collecting unemployment insurance benefits. If you're unemployed and actively seeking work you're part of these figures. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not provide information about unemployment insurance (UI)" See the FAQ and the methods book linked at the top of the FAQ page:
http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm

I've been using numbers from the monthly BLS Household Survey, a statistical survey of about 60K households, and from an un-published quarterly report by detailed occupations based on the same raw data, which they send to media and on individual request to others (just click the data request link at the bottom of most BLS pages)... with lots of caveats about small sample sizes for many detailed occupations making the figures subject to high error probabilities. That caveat is the reason why I give ranges, and I'm basing those ranges on looking at the last 8-12 quarters and the annual data within that time. (BTW, I haven't yet gotten the annual report for 2013, which should have more reliable figures than the quarterlies. Sometimes they don't send that until later, with the new year's 1st quarter report.)

There are CES figures from the monthly Establishment Survey for industry groupings, like the Information Industry (2.135M employed in January), and Software Publishers within that (i.e. for REAL jobs developing software products, of which only 234,300 were reported being employed in December; they're always a month behind). But they throw together all "production workers" which lumps in a lot of other non-management people who are not actually designing and developing software.

Anyway, since the last 2 of the detailed occupation reports showed total aggregate unemployed as 9,263,000 for 2013Q4, and 10,049,000 for 2013Q3, you must be talking about other aggregates from either the Household or the Establishment surveys. So, from the Household survey:
Civilian, non-institutionalized population 16 and older (CivPop16+=CNIP16+*): LNU00000000: 246.915M.
Civilian labor force (CLF16+ =employed+UEASW): LNU01000000: 154.381M
Employed: LNU02000000: 143.526M
Not in the labor force (NILF): LNU05000000: 92.534M
Unemployed and actively seeking work (UEASW): LNU03000000: 10.855M
total not employed: 103.389M
employed/CNIP16+ men: LNU02300001: 63.5%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ women: LNU02300002: 53.2%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ total: LNU02300000: 58.1%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ black: LNU02300006: 52.7%
None of these are "seasonally adjusted", and that's the way I prefer them. (* In one spread-sheet I got started using one abbreviation, and years later when I created another for a different purpose I used another abbreviation; they designate the same things.)

U6 only counts some kinds of under-employment. Let's see... http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/sr... "Series Id: LNU03327709
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-6
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
2014 13.5"

It counts people who want to be employed full-time, but are employed part-time. It counts those "marginally attached" to the labor force. But it doesn't count mechanical engineers or software engineers or biophysicists... who want to be employed full-time, long-term as mechanical engineers or software engineers or biophysicists...
but who are employed full-time, temporarily, as ditch-diggers, as being under-employed. As far as BLS is concerned that's a fully-employed ditch-digger... for now.

"Series Id: LNU03327707
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-4
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and discouraged workers as a percent of the labor force and discouraged workers
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
2014 7.5
Series Id: LNU03327708
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-5
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and marginally attached workers as a percent of the labor force and marg attached
2014 8.6"

Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year. So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% compared to an overall rate of over 7%.

I apologize for interrupting this whine-fest with actual facts.

I think the problem with this is you're missing the bigger picture. Sure, unemployment is low, but the statistic which tells the story is job growth. If you look at the BLS website concerning electrical and electronics engineers, which should be a rapidly growing job prospect, given the times we live in, where every damn thing you own has a chip in it, wifi connectivity and a twitter feed, the number of jobs are growing at a much slower rate than normal.

Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year. So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% compared to an overall rate of over 7%.

I apologize for interrupting this whine-fest with actual facts.

I think the problem with this is you're missing the bigger picture. Sure, unemployment is low, but the statistic which tells the story is job growth. If you look at the BLS website concerning electrical and electronics engineers, which should be a rapidly growing job prospect, given the times we live in, where every damn thing you own has a chip in it, wifi connectivity and a twitter feed, the number of jobs are growing at a much slower rate than normal.

This is exactly what is going on.

Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year. So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% compared to an overall rate of over 7%.

I apologize for interrupting this whine-fest with actual facts.

You are looking at the wrong numbers. There are more than 70,000 engineering graduates each year, and yet unemployment is still 3%. Your facts shore up the argument that employers are looking for cheap labor.

This is exactly what is going on.

Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year. So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% compared to an overall rate of over 7%.

I apologize for interrupting this whine-fest with actual facts.

A $60 game (which is way too expensive to begin with)

Eh, not really. A game cartridge for the Atari 2600 was about $25 in 1981. Adjusting for inflation, that works out to $64.33 in 2014 dollars. Game prices have been remarkably consistent over the years. Don't make the mistake of comparing game prices you saw as a kid with modern prices. You always need to adjust for inflation.

Also the Atari games were usually made by a couple of programmers with a few months of work (stuff you can buy for $0.99 on your phone now). Your 2014 game has a production crew as big as a movie's and takes 1-2 years of development. You're getting a helluva lot more gaming value for your $60 than I got as a kid.

"The problem for Apple management is, how to justify sitting on a vast hoard of cash instead of returning it to shareholders. There is simply no defensible way to spend $160BN developing the next generation of iDevices."

What is wrong with returning it to shareholders? They own the company. Apple started up a decent dividend and the largest share buyback in history. This is the right move.

"wealth has become so concentrated that those who have it can't figure out any useful way to spend it, and those who would spend it don't have it, resulting in economic slowdown"

The Job Participation rate is in freefall, causing the economic slowdown. We need to find ways to encourage businesses to open new facilities (and hire workers) here in the US. Allowing a company like Apple to bring profits back to the US without being double-taxed would be a great start. Right now Apple has $200b in cash and needs to take new loans to give money back to shareholders. Why? Their money is stuck overseas.

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Per the BLS, the quit rate is continuing to rise.
http://www.bls.gov/news.releas...

I'm hoping that employee abuse will be forced to decline as a result.

My last job before I retired, they worked us 70+ hours per week (multiple heart attacks, divorces, etc) with the implied promise we'd pick up SAP skills and have nice jobs after the implementation. Then (as happens with MANY SAP implementations), at the end they laid 95% of us off and upgraded Infosys (who had been "helping") to support the entire project.

I had to work thru it since I was so close to retirement (and they were paying us very well and providing free lunch and dinner while working us in 20 day long "weeks" of 12 hour days ) but my advice is- if Infosys is brought in to "help", start looking for a new job. Many of the people let go have not found work and it's been over a year.

I met a ex co-worker on the plane back from Winter Park last night and she said the conditions are better (40-50 hour weeks for six months now) but Infosys has been a challenge to work with. They are very literal and they never ever say no to anything. They just say they'll "do their best" and you have to understand that means "no, I can't do this." Upper management still plans on this as a "yes." so there have been repeated failures to meet targets.

Get your certs and find a new job if your employer is abusing you. You don't have to take it right now and sometime soon we are going to have another 6-18 month long downturn. The current cycle is 62 months long-- that's historic in length.

Back at the turn of the century (1901, not 2001), according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics the average work week was 53 hours and the "normal" work week was six 10 hour days. It really didn't change much until 1926 when Henry Ford reduced the work week at Ford Motor Co, to 40 hours, though the average work day had been slowly dropping from 10 to 8 hours before that time. But Ford was most likely the first major company to drop from a six to five day work week.

So, yes, people CAN work 60 hours a week and your grandparents (or great grandparents) probably did unless they were farmers. Farmers worked longer hours.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/earning...

I was going to retract everything I said this morning, but the rest of this comment is pasted from a link in tfa. I don't buy the projections. Particularly, the 1m jobs will be at the bottom of the pay scale, not the $80k average.

Summary of source data for Code.org infographic

1mm more jobs than students in computing, $500B over 10 years: From the 2010 - 2012 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/, across all industries we are adding 136,620 jobs per year in computing. Subtract 40,000 annual computer science graduates (see NSF data below) and you get roughly a gap of 100,000 jobs. 100,000 jobs adds up over 10 years to 1mm jobs, with an average salary of $80,000 (the average salary in computing), that results in: first year: 100,000 x $80,000 2nd year: 200,000 x $80,000 3rd year: 300,000 x $80,000 10th year: 1,000,000 x $80,000 TOTAL SALARIES = $440,000,000,000 ($440 billion)

This is slightly below $500b, but it doesn't account for inflation over the next 10 years. on top of that, there are many studies that show that each new software job results in many more jobs in the neighborhood. The latest such study suggested a 4.3x multiplier in terms of generating supporting/neighborhood jobs. With a 4.3x multiplier, weâ(TM)d be talking about 5.3mm jobs over 10 years, and much more than $440b, so to be conservative we just rounded up to $500b. Hereâ(TM)s a very rough back of envelope analysis that suggests that the total opportunity size in this space may actually be closer to $1T in 10 years.

Then one day I started to think about Google Car and I realized that the "killer app" for Google Car isn't as a car, it's as a truck. I agree it won't happen overnight, but it will happen. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost 800,000 big rig truck drivers at $40,000/yr in the US. (2012 data) Another 40,000 drive delivery trucks. Politics are the only thing that will save it. It's too large a cohort of workers. I look at the the NAFTA provisions for Mexican drivers to operate in the US that haven't been implemented as evidence that Congress will discourage their adoption. Also, what congressman wants to be on record of approving "Big Scary Robot Trucks" that accidentally drove over the Smith Family minivan killing both parents and Baby Smith too.

Stats: http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag...

The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. MANY people still work at or slightly above that. $7.25 * 2000 hours (full time) = $14,500 a year,

About 4.7% of hourly workers, or roughly 3% of all workers work at minimum wage. Many of those are people who receive tips or other compensation, so they actually make far more than minimum wage in reality.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage...

Even assuming they pay no taxes (they will pay at least a little) that means they need to come up with housing, utilities, transportation, medical expenses, food, clothing, etc on that. That's nearly impossible

From personal experience I can tell you that it is quite possible.

According to the BLS 95% of workplace deaths are men, even though men make up only slightly more than half of the workforce. So how come there is no push to get women in high risk jobs, like oil wells, private security companies, mining, etc?

It's got nothing to do with gender balance. It's about feminists finding things to rail against.

Go look at the CPI tables and figure it out..

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/

Strangely, many deep-red states are also struggling with poverty and high unemployment.

Except that is not true. There are five states with unemployment worse than California, and none are red (they all voted for Obama in 2012).

If "this kind of bureaucratic overreach" was a simple explanation for high unemployment rates ...

How to lie with statistics, those states may already have populations that are at a disadvantage, people who are not elitist techies or Republicans, and who voted for Obama, The class war is on. The Conservative motto is "I've got mine, screw you!" I hope you are happy creating dissention and exclusion. It may come back to haunt you, and sooner than you think.

Strangely, many deep-red states are also struggling with poverty and high unemployment.

Except that is not true. There are five states with unemployment worse than California, and none are red (they all voted for Obama in 2012).

If "this kind of bureaucratic overreach" was a simple explanation for high unemployment rates ...

Nobody said it was a "simple explanation", but it is certainly part of the problem. In no other state is a business required by law to inform their customers that they may get cancer if they eat the toner powder from the laser printer in the back office.

If a school (or any other businesses) appear to be using fraudulent advertising, then the state attorney general should investigate. But they should not be throwing up hurdles to everyone that wants to start up a business and generate jobs.

According to the BLS report from 2012, there were 295k electrical & electronic engineers, and an additional 80k computer hardware engineers, who aren't counted in the total for whatever reason.

According to the BLS report from 2002, there were 272k EEs and an additional 67k computer hardware engineers.

So that's a total of 375k in 2012 and 339k in 2002. If my math is right, that's a growth rate of 1% per year. The US population growth rate averaged over the last ten years is around 0.9%.

So what am I missing? Where is TFA getting their startling decline from?

According to the BLS report from 2012, there were 295k electrical & electronic engineers, and an additional 80k computer hardware engineers, who aren't counted in the total for whatever reason.

According to the BLS report from 2002, there were 272k EEs and an additional 67k computer hardware engineers.

So that's a total of 375k in 2012 and 339k in 2002. If my math is right, that's a growth rate of 1% per year. The US population growth rate averaged over the last ten years is around 0.9%.

So what am I missing? Where is TFA getting their startling decline from?

Salaries in technology are rising at a rate of 7.5% or so per year [forbes.com].

No, they're projected to increase by that much in 2014, by folks who have a vested interested in making it look attractive. If you look at historical data, you'll see them rising by 23% over the last ten years. That's less than the inflation over that period.

According to the BLS [bls.gov], they're projecting a 22% increase in demand for developers.

Here's another one from the BLS that says 8% (same as average). The BLS breaks up software jobs into a bunch of categories that nobody has been able to figure out.

The supply has gone up, but not by that much.

It could. You're talking about 10 years. CS enrollment was booming in the 90's. Then came the crash in 2000/2001. CS enrollment dropped by over a third. High school students are not as dumb or historically ignorant as some people believe. They know what happened back then, and so are much less likely to fall for the current hype.

Unemployment among techies is about 4.4%

Which makes it 1.1% higher than the average for people with bachelor's degrees.

Salaries in technology are rising at a rate of 7.5% or so per year [forbes.com].

No, they're projected to increase by that much in 2014, by folks who have a vested interested in making it look attractive. If you look at historical data, you'll see them rising by 23% over the last ten years. That's less than the inflation over that period.

According to the BLS [bls.gov], they're projecting a 22% increase in demand for developers.

Here's another one from the BLS that says 8% (same as average). The BLS breaks up software jobs into a bunch of categories that nobody has been able to figure out.

The supply has gone up, but not by that much.

It could. You're talking about 10 years. CS enrollment was booming in the 90's. Then came the crash in 2000/2001. CS enrollment dropped by over a third. High school students are not as dumb or historically ignorant as some people believe. They know what happened back then, and so are much less likely to fall for the current hype.

Unemployment among techies is about 4.4%

Which makes it 1.1% higher than the average for people with bachelor's degrees.

1. Salaries in technology are rising at a rate of 7.5% or so per year. That's not really fast enough to stimulate the supply of people they need, but it's indicating that they can't get what they want for the price they were originally offering.
2. According to the BLS, they're projecting a 22% increase in demand for developers. The supply has gone up, but not by that much.
3. Unemployment among techies is about 4.4%, half the national average, and as low as 0.5% for DBAs. So very few who bill themselves as techies are out in the cold.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the average salary for an application software developer was $93,000, with only 90% of such developers making more than $139,000 in salary.

That should be 10%, from the BLS data he quotes.

In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year.

Umm, for the most part, that's by design. Since the Depression in the 1930s, the Fed's general policy has mostly been to encourage gradual inflation. Why? Well, a lot has to do with details of economic theory, but in simple terms, it encourages people to invest and spend money in the economy.

You can disagree with this idea (and there are people who do), but in the case of the dollar at least, it seems to have been effective. Between the Depression of the 1930s and 2008, we had nothing like the series of financial "panics" of the 1800s in the U.S.

When currency value rises (deflation), people hoard cash. They save. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn't encourage investment or innovation. Why should I bother taking a chance funding my brother's new small business (or even some crazy guy's cool new idea) if I can effectively increase my assets simply by hiding them under my mattress?

If deflation could occur at any moment, investors are also skittish. At a moment's notice, they could sense things decreasing in value and try to "cash out" of any investments, as happened in 2008. The main reason we don't experience such severe "runs on the market" (or actually runs from the market) every few years is because long-term investors believe that they'll still likely make a profit in the long run, at least due to the gradual rise in prices.

A targeted small rate of inflation makes it so the cash savers don't lose a lot of value, but the investors are encouraged. This is all by design.

Again, you can disagree with this strategy (and there are good reasons to question some assumptions), but that's what the Fed DESIGNED the system to do. You can't come back and say this is an inherent property of fiat currencies, since it isn't.

(And, by the way, all currencies that exceed their natural inherent value are effectively "fiat" -- if it weren't for speculation and some irrational attraction to shiny rocks, gold's value would be a lot lower. Thus, a "gold standard" is not inherently more stable, even if endorsed by a government -- lots of severe financial panics and depressions occurred while many countries were still under the gold standard. Contrary to popular belief, what makes a currency behave differently from a "fiat" currency isn't merely scarcity -- lots of things are scarce, and most of them have little to no value. In the long run and in dire circumstances, neither shiny rocks nor green pieces of paper nor Bitcoins are guaranteed to be of use -- only actual useful commodities that can be traded are.)

In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year.

You state this like it's a problem. Why is that?

We have run plenty of experiments with government-run fiat currencies. Every single one, without exception, has become totally worthless, or worth a lot less than when it originally started. In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year. Many nations do worse. For example India has had an average inflation rate of 7.5% over the last 50 years, Argentina has varied from zero to 40% per year over the last 20 years. If bitcoin can improve on this record, it would be a good thing.

Except that BTC blantantly hasn't outperformed anything. The value of Bitcoin - measured against USD, EUR, CHF, loaves of bread, goats, airplanes or anything - has rocketed up and down on a weekly basis by far more than 3.2%. And the measure of a currency isn't whether you can dig a hole in the ground, bury some notes in a barrel Walter White-style, and dig them up in a hundred years. A better measure would be looking at what short-term interest-bearing US notes have yielded over that time frame, as they have minimal liquidity/fair-value risk, equivalent credit risk and are actually investments, rather than a currency. Critizing USD notes because they are not a good long-term 'investment' is like critizing them for not being attractive wall-paper - you're missing the point.

We have run plenty of experiments with government-run fiat currencies. Every single one, without exception, has become totally worthless, or worth a lot less than when it originally started. In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year. Many nations do worse. For example India has had an average inflation rate of 7.5% over the last 50 years, Argentina has varied from zero to 40% per year over the last 20 years. If bitcoin can improve on this record, it would be a good thing.

Here's US employment by sector.

This isn't a criticism of you, as you obviously linked for the purpose of the "real" (I'm sure the "real" data is also massaged, but less so than the forecasts) data in your link, but I love how full of shit those projections are. +3.1m jobs 2002-2012, +15.6m 2012-2022? Hahahaha. Goods-producing, excluding agriculture: -4.1m/+1.2m (somehow it will take more humans to produce goods than before!); Services-providing: +7.5m/+14.1m (of course services won't be made more efficient and automated; we will need far more humans than before!), Nonagriculture self-employed and unpaid family worker: -0.2/+0.5m (perhaps they have a non-fantasy/non-biased reason for this one, as it's nearly meaningless to the overall numbers). Only agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting admits that trends are likely to accelerate, giving -0.1m/-0.2m. I assume this is because nobody has those jobs anyway, so they couldn't pretend to forecast a large enough gain to really affect their overall numbers.

Basic truth: it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff any more.

In the US, 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 50 years ago, that number was around 40%. In the 19th century, around 90%. For most of history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Today, that's a solved problem. There are no significant shortages of anything in the developed world.

So what will people do? Here's US employment by sector. For a few decades, additional employment in service industries took up much of the workforce. It still does in the US. That's where computers and the Internet have made a big dent. Much of the middle class was doing some form of manual "information processing". Computers do much of that now, faster and more cheaply. Paper pushing is a dying industry. (The paper industry itself is in deep trouble. We passed "max paper" a few years ago.)

That's only getting started. There are many legacy sectors which still employ large numbers of people, and they're being gradually knocked off by less-labor intensive approaches. Retail is the next to go - Amazon is replacing brick-and-mortar retail. No new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. Computers even sell now - that's what all the "ad targeting" and "recommendations" do.

Employment growth is mostly in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. Eventually, health care will solve its paper-pushing problem, which will downsize that sector. Most of the rest of the new jobs in those sectors are low-paying ones.

This is a great achievement. Our society has no clue how to deal with it. Where a market-based system takes us is a world with a few winners and a huge number of losers who can't generate enough wealth through work to buy much. France, Germany, and the Scandanavian countries are trying to develop policies to deal with it. Maybe they'll find something that works.

Sorry, but many of the statistics in your post are wildly incorrect.

No employment has not gone up steadily throughout his term.

CPS Table A-1 Historical Data: Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 138.025 million. Since then it has risen steadily (with a few hiccups here and there). As of November's data, employment is at 144.386 million. If you want to talk about job growth rather than employment, CES Table B-1 shows we've had steady positive jobs growth since the "double dip" scare in 2010. Every single month since September 2010 has had net jobs created.

note how the U6 number has continued to climb up under his presidency

U6 peaked at 17.1% in April 2010, and has been on a downward trend ever since. It is currently at 13.2%. Source

while we're doing this, note that the labor participation rate continues to fall through the floor like a brick

This is accurate, and "continues" is the proper word to use. Labor participation peaked in 2000 and has been trending downward since. It flattened out during the bubble years ('05-'07), steepened again during the recession, and is now back down to where it would have been had it never deviated from the '01-'04 trendline. Source (table A-1 again from above). While not a good thing, the aging of the baby boom generation cannot be attributed to economic policies of any president or any Congress. Economic policies don't stop people from getting old and retiring.

Sorry, but many of the statistics in your post are wildly incorrect.

No employment has not gone up steadily throughout his term.

CPS Table A-1 Historical Data: Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 138.025 million. Since then it has risen steadily (with a few hiccups here and there). As of November's data, employment is at 144.386 million. If you want to talk about job growth rather than employment, CES Table B-1 shows we've had steady positive jobs growth since the "double dip" scare in 2010. Every single month since September 2010 has had net jobs created.

note how the U6 number has continued to climb up under his presidency

U6 peaked at 17.1% in April 2010, and has been on a downward trend ever since. It is currently at 13.2%. Source

while we're doing this, note that the labor participation rate continues to fall through the floor like a brick

This is accurate, and "continues" is the proper word to use. Labor participation peaked in 2000 and has been trending downward since. It flattened out during the bubble years ('05-'07), steepened again during the recession, and is now back down to where it would have been had it never deviated from the '01-'04 trendline. Source (table A-1 again from above). While not a good thing, the aging of the baby boom generation cannot be attributed to economic policies of any president or any Congress. Economic policies don't stop people from getting old and retiring.

Sorry, but many of the statistics in your post are wildly incorrect.

No employment has not gone up steadily throughout his term.

CPS Table A-1 Historical Data: Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 138.025 million. Since then it has risen steadily (with a few hiccups here and there). As of November's data, employment is at 144.386 million. If you want to talk about job growth rather than employment, CES Table B-1 shows we've had steady positive jobs growth since the "double dip" scare in 2010. Every single month since September 2010 has had net jobs created.

note how the U6 number has continued to climb up under his presidency

U6 peaked at 17.1% in April 2010, and has been on a downward trend ever since. It is currently at 13.2%. Source

while we're doing this, note that the labor participation rate continues to fall through the floor like a brick

This is accurate, and "continues" is the proper word to use. Labor participation peaked in 2000 and has been trending downward since. It flattened out during the bubble years ('05-'07), steepened again during the recession, and is now back down to where it would have been had it never deviated from the '01-'04 trendline. Source (table A-1 again from above). While not a good thing, the aging of the baby boom generation cannot be attributed to economic policies of any president or any Congress. Economic policies don't stop people from getting old and retiring.

Sorry, but many of the statistics in your post are wildly incorrect.

No employment has not gone up steadily throughout his term.

CPS Table A-1 Historical Data: Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 138.025 million. Since then it has risen steadily (with a few hiccups here and there). As of November's data, employment is at 144.386 million. If you want to talk about job growth rather than employment, CES Table B-1 shows we've had steady positive jobs growth since the "double dip" scare in 2010. Every single month since September 2010 has had net jobs created.

note how the U6 number has continued to climb up under his presidency

U6 peaked at 17.1% in April 2010, and has been on a downward trend ever since. It is currently at 13.2%. Source

while we're doing this, note that the labor participation rate continues to fall through the floor like a brick

This is accurate, and "continues" is the proper word to use. Labor participation peaked in 2000 and has been trending downward since. It flattened out during the bubble years ('05-'07), steepened again during the recession, and is now back down to where it would have been had it never deviated from the '01-'04 trendline. Source (table A-1 again from above). While not a good thing, the aging of the baby boom generation cannot be attributed to economic policies of any president or any Congress. Economic policies don't stop people from getting old and retiring.

a businessman with a very clear understanding of how to loot destabilizing businesses

FTFY.

And that businessman lost not because of "pity" for Obama, but because he went too far right to try to win a completely dysfunctional Republican primary, and then was stuck with either staying where he was and getting crushed or explaining how he wasn't stating his real opinions before, losing all credibility - and getting crushed. He lost the race before it even started.

And it's a lot easier to destroy an economy than fix it. But looking at the current economic indicators we're finally starting to undo the Bush disaster...

Unemployment 4 year low: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref3
GDP up over 4% in Q3: http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2013/12/20/us-gdp-grew-4-1-in-third-quarter-more-than-previously-estimated/
Stock market record high: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/investing/stocks-markets/

You Republican middle class sheeple are so amazing in your loyalties. Your upper class overlords who have been making hand over fist in the market for the last 4 years must be feeding you an extra scoop of gruel in your dinner along with their usual lies about "the awful state of the economy"...

bottoming out of energy prices due to the huge oversupply of natural gas from fracking.

According to this site the average price/kwh has been steadily increasing, doesn't look like it accounts for inflation though. http://data.bls.gov/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?series_id=APU000072610&data_tool=XGtable

Wrong. It has an impact on the CPI (consumer price index) in the U.S., and the percent change in the CPI is the inflation rate. See http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaccomp.htm

This has nothing whatsoever to do with PCs suddenly becoming more expensive due to 'inflation'. It's a technical measure of how the U.S. government statistical 'proves' a computer costs less because it's more powerful than last years model, even if, in real dollars, the actual selling price is identical in both years. You might also note that 'core CPI' doesn't include gasoline (or food) costs, so your car example also fails.

$4000 year 2000 dollars are now inflated to $5424

We'll have to continue on the "agree to disagree" line here, since I think you're making a mistake by reflexively lumping "unionization" in with the problems. Union membership and representation is at historical lows, and still declining; problems due to "unions" should thus be declining, not rising. Granted, the education sector is still fairly highly unionized compared to other industries, but that's still only 39.2% of employees covered by union representation (source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf [bls.gov]). There's no indication of the majority 60% of the education system without unions being more free from the problems of teach-to-the-test "one size fits all" management metrics based education.

Yes, unions allow some bad teachers to stick around; I've had a few of those. They also allow especially good teachers --- the ones who cause trouble for higher management by sticking up for the individual needs of students instead of succumbing to uniform mediocrity --- to have a voice. From my own experience, my best teachers (who were willing to go through the trouble of dealing with a problematically way-ahead-of-standardized-grade-level kid like me) were rarely management favorites, and often burned out (or were forced out) and left for the far better conditions of jobs outside public education. Unions stand up for smaller class sizes, well educated teachers, diverse curricula, individual attention to students --- not cramming everything into a testing-driven, mass-production assembly line. Yes, these things raise educational costs (and cut into profitable opportunities for the privatization goons), but they're also mainly the things that make the education provided worthwhile at all.

Nothing "reflexive" about my including unions. I did not claim they were the major cause. Actually, the far-too-powerful teacher's unions are a symptom of the government meddling outside it's Constitutional scope & powers as well.

Unions stand up for smaller class sizes, well educated teachers, diverse curricula, individual attention to students --- not cramming everything into a testing-driven, mass-production assembly line. Yes, these things raise educational costs (and cut into profitable opportunities for the privatization goons), but they're also mainly the things that make the education provided

You don't need unions, the Federal government, or a one-size-fits-all, history-rewriting, "Common Core"-type homogenized & "PC" curriculum, to provide those things. All that stuff is a continuation of the same old shit that has gotten us here to this point of having an embarrassment of a US public education system. I've watched it happen in slo-mo over the last half-century.

Insanity, in one definition, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome each time.

Strat

We'll have to continue on the "agree to disagree" line here, since I think you're making a mistake by reflexively lumping "unionization" in with the problems. Union membership and representation is at historical lows, and still declining; problems due to "unions" should thus be declining, not rising. Granted, the education sector is still fairly highly unionized compared to other industries, but that's still only 39.2% of employees covered by union representation (source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf). There's no indication of the majority 60% of the education system without unions being more free from the problems of teach-to-the-test "one size fits all" management metrics based education.

Yes, unions allow some bad teachers to stick around; I've had a few of those. They also allow especially good teachers --- the ones who cause trouble for higher management by sticking up for the individual needs of students instead of succumbing to uniform mediocrity --- to have a voice. From my own experience, my best teachers (who were willing to go through the trouble of dealing with a problematically way-ahead-of-standardized-grade-level kid like me) were rarely management favorites, and often burned out (or were forced out) and left for the far better conditions of jobs outside public education. Unions stand up for smaller class sizes, well educated teachers, diverse curricula, individual attention to students --- not cramming everything into a testing-driven, mass-production assembly line. Yes, these things raise educational costs (and cut into profitable opportunities for the privatization goons), but they're also mainly the things that make the education provided worthwhile at all.

About the same as the average of all people w/ a bachelor's or higher: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Definitely no indication of a "shortage", unless there is a shortage of people for all types of work that require a college education. If anyone actually believes that, then I've got a bridge to sell them. Silicon Valley BS debunked once again by the actual statistics.

You're probably just propagandizing, but in case you believe that:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

What that's showing you is that 3% if the population have used up their benefit. They are still unemployed, they just aren't getting benefits anymore. In 2008, 66% of the population was either working or eligible for umployment. 2013, 63% are - 3% have either used up their two years of unemployment benefits or simply given up.

7.2% are getting unemployment benefits, 3% are no longer eligible = 10.2% real unemployment.

Folks, the WSJ focused cherry-picked the two categories to profile - 15-1142 and 15-1150. Try looking here for a more comprehensive listing of available descriptions: http://www.bls.gov/soc/2010/soc_alph.htm

Just a few listings notably absent from the WSJ article:
15-1130 Software Developers and Programmers
15-1132 Software Applications Architects
15-1133 Software Developers, Systems Software
...etc.

Not saying the WSJ did a poor job, they stated their methodologies up front. I'm saying understand what your sample actually represents relative to the population as a whole before drawing conclusions.

For this profile, we mainly focused on two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist.

So they looked at the two lowest-paying job categories out of the 8 defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and drew conclusions about the education levels of other six. Hmmm, maybe that's not the best approach...

I don't think YOU can understand why it is wrong. There reason you can't is because it isn't wrong. Your really want it to require a masters degree to teach a kid to add. You want that to be the case really bad, but it just doesn't.

Do you really think that it takes a masters degree to teach a child to add? To multiply? To solve polynomial equations? Let me assure you, you do not.

As for the amount that teachers make, you are using "Teacher Math", which is not very good math at all. You clearly did not follow the link. You dismissed it without reading it. You also used "Teacher Reading Comprehension", which also is not very good. Without following the link, you could see the statement "Here is a good example". Now, without a masters degree, I could easily teach a child that the statement "Here is a good example" means that one instance was going to be shown. A child that was taught be me, would not think that the link was going to show the national average.

You post links of teacher's salaries and declare them to be lower than the average, but you never post what you are comparing them to. For example, your link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the national median pay for a high school teacher is 53K, you didn't link to the national median.

Here is the the link you wanted. It shows income for both teachers, AND the rest of the public: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000

Surprise, Surprise, your own source says teachers have above average earnings. Look all you want. Every source puts teachers as earning above average wages.

"Teachers, while not earning rock-star salaries, are in the top half of all earners in every state in the Union. More education for teachers wouldn't solve the problem. Having a teacher with a masters degree is like having a McDonald's employee with 8 years of culinary school training. The extra training doesn't bring anything to the table. A person only needs to be about two levels ahead in a subject to be able to effectively teach the subject."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why the US is so fucked up right now. Because of idiots like the one above.

"the starting pay for the teachers is $41k a year. I'm not going to complain about the teacher's pay, but starting a career at $41k isn't poverty."
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-school-teachers.htm - the median pay was 53k in 2010.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/high-school-teacher/salary - the median pay was 54k in 2011.
"in the top half of all earners in every state in the Union" my ass.

The infrastructure for plumbing was paid for by the gov't.

The local city governments paid for their infrastructure. But this is off-topic anyway — even ancient Romans built the viaducts to bring-in water, yet the water-closets made a leap from a rich-only item to mass-use within a generation. Thanks to the power of Capitalism...

So where the roads that made cars more than interesting toys.

Again, local governments (and private companies) built the roads — long before automobiles were even invented. And they were invented in Europe, but it required true Capitalism to make them affordable for the masses.

And telephone lines.

There were plenty of private telephone lines long before (federal) government decided to give AT&T the ill-devised monopoly (which they had to wrestle back through the courts some decades later). And, unlike with plumbing or roads, telephone wires were entirely privately-owned. For a while there were competing phone-companies (such as "Bell" and "Home") — a grocery store or a hotel would have multiple sets for the patrons to use (for a fee).

I think the problem we have with the $30,000 bill is that it's so high that the only way it'll ever be more than a toy and a curiosity is if the gov't steps in to fund it

Ford-T cost $850 in 2013 which is over $20k in today's dollars. Had there been more people like you back then, the government might've stepped in to fund it, and the price would've remained the same — or climbed up slowly. Fortunately, the US was healthier back then and it did not happen — by the 1920s, the price had fallen to $260 because of increasing efficiencies of assembly line technique and volume.

If research is focused on a few rich kids, it's being directed away from somewhere else.

Yes... If there are only 10 pairs of pants available to 20 people, then 10 people will be without pants, no matter, how you divide them — by race, creed, or by charging high prices. However, if you choose the latter model, charging the high prices will help paying the tailors to sew ten more pairs in short order. And it will encourage one or two tailors to come up with a more efficient method of making them too.

If, instead, you distribute the 10 pairs available by government decree (fixing the prices, of course, to prevent "profiteering"), the shortage of supply will remain for ever.

Then they trot out the old: "Economy's not Zero Sum" and call it a day.

Darling, whatever you say. Until you can explain, reasonably and without name-calling, the existing fact, that public school education costs four times more than it did in 1962 (inflation-adjusted), with no measurable improvements in quality, your method of paying for public education shall remain as discredited as its results.