What we really need is jobs taken from people trying to earn a living and given to people living with their parents who will do the same work for chump change!
Its brilliant!
Economists call it the "lump of labor fallacy." It's the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so any increase in the amount each worker can produce reduces the number of available jobs. (A famous example: those dire warnings in the 1950's that automation would lead to mass unemployment.) As the derisive name suggests, it's an idea economists view with contempt, yet the fallacy makes a comeback whenever the economy is sluggish.
Sure enough, the lump-of-labor fallacy has resurfaced in the United States — but with a twist. Traditionally, it is a fallacy of the economically naïve left — for example, four years ago France's Socialist government tried to create more jobs by reducing the length of the workweek. But in America today you're more likely to hear lump-of-labor arguments from the right, as an excuse for the Bush administration's policy failures.
The latest lump-of-labor revival came to my attention when I realized how eagerly certain commentators were picking up on a new study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In it, Erica Groshen and Simon Potter argue that the pattern of laying off workers during recessions and rehiring them during recoveries has changed: since 1990 employers have become much less likely to rehire former workers. It's an interesting study, and it might — repeat, might — shed some light on why businesses have added so few jobs during our so-called recovery.
But I was puzzled at first by the enthusiasm with which a relatively academic paper was seized upon by usually bullish, supposedly hardheaded business commentators. The puzzle vanished, however, when I read these remarks more carefully: they were mainly trying to make excuses for the administration's dismal job record. You see, they say, it's not that an economic policy consisting largely of tax cuts for the rich has failed to deliver. No, it's a structural problem with the economy, which just happens to have arisen now, and nobody could have done better.
Oh, well. But partisan politics aside, the growing lumpishness of American thinking about jobs is dangerous, in two ways.
First, it encourages fatalism — if politicians and the public believe that new jobs can't be created, they will stop pressuring our leaders to find more effective policies. And that would be a shame, since the Bush administration has resolutely refused to try the policies most likely to improve the employment picture.
To a good approximation - a minimum cost of employing teenage labor, set above the level at which employers value the marginal teenage worker, reduces teenage employment. That this is the case isn't ameliorated by complaining that we would prefer if employers valued teenage labor more.
There is a gap between the level at which employers value marginal teenage labor and the level we would prefer it be valued at - we can throw up our hands and say "no, we don't care about the marginal unemployed; those who can find employment are paid more and we are satisfied with that". Or we can say "we care about both, and we don't care about the marginal taxpayer, so we should fund the gap out of taxes, via a subsidy on employment". Or we can say "we care about the marginal taxpayer and the marginal unemployed, but not the marginal improvement to those already employed, so we should remove the minimum wage for teenagers". All of these are possible policy answers. But denying the existence of a tradeoff, by being outraged about the injustice of it all, strikes me as silly.
@Atomic Ross - observing high unemployment is what one would expect if there would, indeed, continue to be applications, even at a lower wage.
@Atomic Ross - observing high unemployment is what one would expect if there would, indeed, continue to be applications, even at a lower wage.
Indeed, but that's hardly going to help entitlement funding if annual incomes don't break into a taxable bracket, or worse, it keeps those employees in need of entitlements themselves. All it does is create a permanent and revolving service class that actually increases the unemployment levels of similarly-skilled workers outside the age qualifiers.
And teen unemployment is always going to be high. They have no skills, no experience, and most of them aren't actively even looking for work.
Since neither you nor I are Rick Santorum, I think we can safely recognize that the budgetary solvency of federal entitlement funding has essentially nothing to do with teenage minimum wages or the lack thereof, and everything to do with war, Social Security, Medicare, and Tax Cuts That Were Supposed To Be Temporary, etc. The effect is going to be small either way, at least from the perspective of a government of three hundred million people.
From the perspective of the marginal unemployed job-seeker, not so much, of course.
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
ronya on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
Atomika on
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Jesus Christ the conversation about abortion in this country is so cocked up.
I keep reading about the new state laws in SD and now AZ and my mind is just blown. Forcing women to go to clinics multiple times over a 72 hour period, when the nearest clinic is hours away. Claiming that an anti-abortion law is actually civil rights legislation. Now this Santorum nonsense. Wow. Just wow.
Why is it these people want to force every woman to have a baby (most of whom are terribly impoverished), but refuse to offer them any support after the baby?
So Baby Boomer's SS retirement is in trouble because too many of them had abortions and the ones that didn't never told their kids that their local abortion doctor is Satan in disguise.
Wouldn't any increase in taxes due to abortion be largely offset by the costs of treating individuals with profound birth defects?
The birth rate for Downs Syndrome alone would increase by an order of magnitude, let alone more serious conditions. These are patients requiring a lifetime of care that would probably have to enter state institutions once their parents died.
November Fifth on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
But two, the "pro-life" stance is ridiculously inconsistent, even as to fetuses.
Funny, The Daily Show had a bit about this very issue. Can't easily find the clip in question at work, but here is what they touched on;
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour bragged at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference about his state's pro-life agenda, saying "Americans United for Life, I am proud to say, named Mississippi the safest state in America for an unborn child."
Note: this is not something you want to be #1 in. The rate is for the mortality rate of infants up to 1 year old per 1,000 live births, meaning over 1% of newborns in Mississippi don't make it to their first birthday, if I'm not mistaken.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
But two, the "pro-life" stance is ridiculously inconsistent, even as to fetuses.
Funny, The Daily Show had a bit about this very issue. Can't easily find the clip in question at work, but here is what they touched on;
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour bragged at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference about his state's pro-life agenda, saying "Americans United for Life, I am proud to say, named Mississippi the safest state in America for an unborn child."
Note: this is not something you want to be #1 in. The rate is for the mortality rate of infants up to 1 year old per 1,000 live births, meaning over 1% of newborns in Mississippi don't make it to their first birthday, if I'm not mistaken.
Those kids are safe right up to the second they're actually born.
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
If the Confederated Empire of Red States has their way, yes, yes we do.
Atomika on
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
But two, the "pro-life" stance is ridiculously inconsistent, even as to fetuses.
Funny, The Daily Show had a bit about this very issue. Can't easily find the clip in question at work, but here is what they touched on;
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour bragged at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference about his state's pro-life agenda, saying "Americans United for Life, I am proud to say, named Mississippi the safest state in America for an unborn child."
Note: this is not something you want to be #1 in. The rate is for the mortality rate of infants up to 1 year old per 1,000 live births, meaning over 1% of newborns in Mississippi don't make it to their first birthday, if I'm not mistaken.
See
When you suck out a amorphous mass of cells.
Thats murder.
But when a fully developed and born baby croaks due to your state being 200 years behind the rest of the world?
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
I lived all around Georgia for many different years of my life. You do not want to bring up Sherman in any way there especially for the more backwater towns. Shit will get real pretty quickly if you say anything less than vitriolic about the Shermenator.
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
If the Confederated Empire of Red States has their way, yes, yes we do.
We should just let them secede this time around, the south is all welfare states anyway. They'd be insolvent in 5 years and then we could have hilarious "confederate americans crossing our borders taking our jobs" debates
override367 on
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
I lived all around Georgia for many different years of my life. You do not want to bring up Sherman in any way there especially for the more backwater towns. Shit will get real pretty quickly if you say anything less than vitriolic about the Shermenator.
How can anyone look at that picture and see anything less than 100% badass.
We can only aspire to achieve such success at our respective careers that our very names are cursed and reviled across vast, still-ravaged-and-smoking swathes of the nation over a century after our deaths.
Eh, it's not that much of an accomplishment when the people still cursing and reviling you are the Southern US, where they never ever forget anything.
It's like Christian Bale's character in "The Fighter" - can't let go of the last time they had it good; doesn't matter that it was a really long time ago and at the expense of black people.
Going into this summer's prime hiring time, the national unemployment rate for teens was 25.4 percent last month after hitting 27.6 percent in October - the highest rate since 1948, when the federal government began tracking the number of teens actively seeking work. Both figures are stratospheric compared with the country's 9.9 percent rate.
...
The overall teen unemployment rate pales in comparison with the African-American teen jobless rate, which shot up to just shy of 50 percent in November, nearly eclipsing the worst record, the 52.1 percent set during another bruising recession, in August 1983. The rate dropped to 37.3 percent in April.
Those former fetuses had better find their bootstraps in a hurry, our entitlements are at stake!
They are just lazy. There is always opportunity if they try hard enough!
I think the trick will be lowering the minimum wage for people under a certain age, say if you're under 18. the minimum wage is actually $2/hr less than that of someone older.
Then have another bracket below that you can pay even less, say 16 and under get $3/hr less than the minimum wage.
Of course, to balance this out you'll have to let them work more hours during the week to make up the difference and save up some money, build a resume, etc. Current restrictions on hours worked by minors would have to be rescinded or at least loosened slightly, but it wouldn't be that big a deal I think.
But it wouldn't be fair if you could just hold them at those wages, so say after three months or six months you're required to increase that amount to the standard minimum wage.
This plan will get a lot more teens hired by local businesses every few months or so and really bring down unemployment while injecting a lot more fluidity into the economy.
You left out the punchline!
Wait this was a joke about child labor laws right? The parts about rescinding how many hours children can work and letting people pay them a pittance?
Posts
?
I love Perry Bible Fellowship.
To a good approximation - a minimum cost of employing teenage labor, set above the level at which employers value the marginal teenage worker, reduces teenage employment. That this is the case isn't ameliorated by complaining that we would prefer if employers valued teenage labor more.
There is a gap between the level at which employers value marginal teenage labor and the level we would prefer it be valued at - we can throw up our hands and say "no, we don't care about the marginal unemployed; those who can find employment are paid more and we are satisfied with that". Or we can say "we care about both, and we don't care about the marginal taxpayer, so we should fund the gap out of taxes, via a subsidy on employment". Or we can say "we care about the marginal taxpayer and the marginal unemployed, but not the marginal improvement to those already employed, so we should remove the minimum wage for teenagers". All of these are possible policy answers. But denying the existence of a tradeoff, by being outraged about the injustice of it all, strikes me as silly.
@Atomic Ross - observing high unemployment is what one would expect if there would, indeed, continue to be applications, even at a lower wage.
Actually on second reading I'm not entirely sure what you're saying Ronya.
Blaming it on a head ache.
Indeed, but that's hardly going to help entitlement funding if annual incomes don't break into a taxable bracket, or worse, it keeps those employees in need of entitlements themselves. All it does is create a permanent and revolving service class that actually increases the unemployment levels of similarly-skilled workers outside the age qualifiers.
And teen unemployment is always going to be high. They have no skills, no experience, and most of them aren't actively even looking for work.
From the perspective of the marginal unemployed job-seeker, not so much, of course.
To be unemployed, you do have to be looking for work. %employment is not the same as %labor-force-participation. Labor force participation among teenagers is going to be low unless demand for unskilled uneducated labor makes an unexpected comeback, yes.
You never know. The way we're burning through petroleum, we'll be back to an antebellum agrarian economy before you can say Pacific Union Rail.
I keep reading about the new state laws in SD and now AZ and my mind is just blown. Forcing women to go to clinics multiple times over a 72 hour period, when the nearest clinic is hours away. Claiming that an anti-abortion law is actually civil rights legislation. Now this Santorum nonsense. Wow. Just wow.
Why is it these people want to force every woman to have a baby (most of whom are terribly impoverished), but refuse to offer them any support after the baby?
I think it has more to do with control than any genuine interest in a human life. One, for the reasons I just said above.
But two, the "pro-life" stance is ridiculously inconsistent, even as to fetuses.
The birth rate for Downs Syndrome alone would increase by an order of magnitude, let alone more serious conditions. These are patients requiring a lifetime of care that would probably have to enter state institutions once their parents died.
fixt
Funny, The Daily Show had a bit about this very issue. Can't easily find the clip in question at work, but here is what they touched on;
What they responded with is essentially this:
http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank17.html
State
Rate--Rank
Mississippi-11.4----1
Note: this is not something you want to be #1 in. The rate is for the mortality rate of infants up to 1 year old per 1,000 live births, meaning over 1% of newborns in Mississippi don't make it to their first birthday, if I'm not mistaken.
I dazed out at that point too. My eyes may have crossed even. It would have been funny to witness I'm sure.
Those kids are safe right up to the second they're actually born.
If we're going back to an antebellum society, does that mean we get a do-over on the Civil War?
Sweet.
Deploy the Shermanator.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0002455/ ?????
If the Confederated Empire of Red States has their way, yes, yes we do.
See
When you suck out a amorphous mass of cells.
Thats murder.
But when a fully developed and born baby croaks due to your state being 200 years behind the rest of the world?
Thats [strike]fine and dandy[/strike] gods will!
I lived all around Georgia for many different years of my life. You do not want to bring up Sherman in any way there especially for the more backwater towns. Shit will get real pretty quickly if you say anything less than vitriolic about the Shermenator.
We should just let them secede this time around, the south is all welfare states anyway. They'd be insolvent in 5 years and then we could have hilarious "confederate americans crossing our borders taking our jobs" debates
How can anyone look at that picture and see anything less than 100% badass.
We can only aspire to achieve such success at our respective careers that our very names are cursed and reviled across vast, still-ravaged-and-smoking swathes of the nation over a century after our deaths.
It's like Christian Bale's character in "The Fighter" - can't let go of the last time they had it good; doesn't matter that it was a really long time ago and at the expense of black people.
You left out the punchline!
Wait this was a joke about child labor laws right? The parts about rescinding how many hours children can work and letting people pay them a pittance?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Has this been posted yet
Because this should be posted