Re: For Trucker

"Negloid" <negloid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1123614724.541832.114960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> The Trucker wrote:
>> "Negloid" <negloid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:1123518459.252925.4690@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >
>> > The Trucker wrote:
>> >> Negloid" <negloid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> >> news:1123223040.937492.49130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >> >
>> >> > The Trucker wrote:
>> >> >> Negloid" <negloid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> >> >> news:1123182161.620609.87480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > jrw wrote:
>> >
>> >> > I never
>> >> > wrote anything about personal failures. Perhaps you need to figure out
>> >> > what I mean by "marginal worker".
>> >>
>> >> Even better it might be good for you to tell us what
>> >> you mean.
>> >
>> > The marginal worker is the last worker a company hires. A marginal
>> > worker is not necessarily dumber, lazier, sicker, uglier, or fatter
>> > than other workers. He is just the most recently hired. But there is
>> > some reason he was hired most recently and in economic models,
>> > typically he is the least productive employee. (The logic being, for
>> > example, that the company will hire the most productive first and least
>> > productive last.) The marginal worker, under low unemployment, often
>> > is less productive just because he has *less experience*. He is a kid,
>> > or he is not trained for that job, or he is usually a stay-at-home
>> > parent who only entered the workforce because the pay was so damned
>> > good.
>>
>> Using that definition (that is an economics thing and it
>> refers to the workers at the "margins") then I retract my
>> heated objection to the term. Obviously there will always
>> be marginal workers. When the current marginal workers
>> are removed from the board then they will be replace with
>> workers that would be right up against the margin. And this
>> "margin" thing works both ways. It not only includes the
>> dudes that are not real productive, but the dudes that are
>> not all that much in NEED of a job in the first place.
>
> ...following this, another way to characterize my point is to say that
> in 1999 and 2000, many of those marginal workers were of the later
> sort. Companies were recruiting extremely hard, offering stock options
> to everyone. People who would likely have not even entered the
> workforce were attracted by the promises of high pay or even better,
> groud-floor equity in the next Amazon.com. These days its not nearly
> as common for students to take time off school to get a job coding HTML
> or for housewives to try to start up their own .com businesses as it
> was a few years ago. They aren't in the workforce anymore but most of
> the time they wouldn't be anyway.

I suppose one of my big questions/reservations about
what happened is the why of it. I could see many more
office workers telecommuting instead of burning up all
that gasoline. I could see FedEx like delivery vans
bringing groceries and shirts made to exact specifications.
I could see far fewer shopping malls and a lot more
quality time at home or at the soccer field. But that
didn't happen. I have my own assessment of why:
Conservatives HATE progress. All that downtown real
estate would have taken a horrendous hit, and the boys
on the top floor would not have the minions to look
down upon and the oil people would have been taken
down a notch. We gotta stop this technology stuff quick
or the people will get out from under the thumb.

> That is just my suggestion for why we have had a loss of jobs that
> never produced quite the expected unemployment rate, as well as the
> slower growth of the labor pool. There are always people who don't
> work for economic reasons. Today I don't believe that level is high by
> historical standards. The take home point is that the unusual
> situation was in 2000, not 2005.

I might even agree with your point but for the knowledge
that the Bushies have tried to claim that making hamburgers
is a "manufacturing" job, and to claim that someone
who works 2 days a week is "self employed" though that
individual WANTS/NEEDS more income than he can currently
earn in his self employed role. These things are changes
in the qualification of "data" and they distort the time series
correlation to the past. The Pinocchio regime is not the first
to do this. Reagan did it even more, and Clinton somewhat
less.

There is also the sharp increase in illegals that are not
accounted in the current statistics. Those that get jobs
displace others who may be counted, but there are
a great number of illegals that WANT work and can't
find it and thus should be counted according to the
definition of "unemployment". And _ALL_ of this
depresses wages and creates more "I give up"
unemployment that is also not accounted. To use
your terminology, the marginal workers have been
exorcised and a new set of workers have been
marginalized. There are just one hellova
lot of people that need an income and who do not
have an income and a hellova lot of people who did
have a good income that now have a lower income.

>> I
>> want to see a situation in which the people must be
>> ENTICED into giving up their freedom in exchange for a
>> J_O_B. Unemployment = 0.
>>
>>
>> >> > I "left out" nothing. I *pointed out* that half of the drop in the
>> >> > labor force participation rate occured because 16- to 19-year-olds
>> >> > dropped out of the labor force in larger numbers. Do you dispute that
>> >> > fact, or claim that it is meaningless?
>> >>
>> >> But you suggest that we leave out all sorts of data so as
>> >> to make the numbers look good.
>> >
>> > I suggest only that we pay attention to some of the details. I do not
>> > suggest that we ignore the 16-19 year old data. In fact I think we
>> > should give it extra scrutiny. That's the point, "Look everyone, half
>> > of the people who left the workforce were under 20 years old."
>> >
>> > Look at it, don't ignore it.
>>
>> Agreed. But think about what it ALL means. I always
>> come back to the question: "In a totally capitalistic
>> economy, what do you do with the people displaced
>> by technology?".
>
> They do what they have always done: adapt. They adapt their skills to
> a new application or they learn new skills.

And all of that is well and good. But if less labor is now
required to produce the "goods" then why are we all
working even more hours with our new "skills" than
we were before the great leap in technology replaced
us? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

> Do you think that there
> are an unusually large number of such people today?

Absolutely. There a great number of technologically
competent people out of work. They are being told
by "the market" to go back to school and get a degree
in business admin or law (actually a degree in how
to milk the government for privileges).

> If there is going
> to be technological progress, we have to expect that certain jobs will
> become obsolete.

the objective is for _ALL_ jobs to become obsolete:)

This is one of the big problems in latter day capitalistic
economics. It assumes that human wants are insatiable
(that may not be far off the mark), but it also assumes
that everyone "wants" more _stuff_. The fact is that many
people "want" more freedom from drudgery and from
prancing aristocratic "leaders". Many people "want"
to stay home and tend the yard, the garden, the structure
itself, and to be creative and thoughtful. Many want to
LEARN, to study history and literature, and to be more
involved in the political system. Many want to learn a
new language instead of seeing how much lip gloss and
fancy cars they can manage to accumulate by organizing
and directing the labors of everyone else. The true
measure of economic performance is the amount of
_leisure_ the average man has at his disposal.

>> You want to claim that a bunch of
>> people stopped working because they _could_ stop.
>
> Oh they lost their jobs for economic reasons, not because they wanted
> to. But that isn't the same as saying that most of the time these
> people would be in the workforce and that today the jobs market is
> historically bad.

The jobs situation and the workforce situation do not
need to be "historically bad" in order to prove that
neoconomics is a failure. When we consider the
technological innovation and capital development
that has taken place over the last 50 years it is
difficult to find any good reason for a work week
that is not significantly shorter than what was the
norm in 1955.

Capital creation is suppose to dramatically reduce
the labor necessary to the provisioning of goods
and services, yet we see the opposite situation.
The only explanation for this seems to be that
we are all working our butts off so that Pinocchio
can prance around the world on a big white horse
and so that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can each
have more personal jets.

But even the drab (it ain't so bad) economic numbers
are based on borrowing and it is beginning to look
as though the Gates era is ending and we will, instead,
all be tending rice paddies for chaiman Mao's
grandkids.

>> But that does not "fit" the definition of unemployment,
>> nor does it "fit" the reality. The unemployment statistics
>> are supposed to show the number/percentage of people
>> that _want_ work and yet cannot find work, and
>> that _should_ include those forced to give up
>> and join the folks down at the flop house.
>
> Well the metric does what it does. It provides an indication of how
> many people are looking but unable to find work. There are other
> official statistics available, just not as often reported. Right now
> you and I are discussing the labor force participation rate, which is
> one of those statistics. In addition there are different unemployment
> numbers published by the BLS/census.
>
> http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab12.htm
>
> This gives you the option of looking at both the unemployed as well as
> the marginally attached (want work but not in the labor force because
> they stopped looking). You will note that about 1% of the labor force
> falls in as marginally attached, which is about the same, or perhaps
> 10-20 basis points higher than the rate in 2000. This translates to
> about 1.5 million marginally attached individuals last month, versus
> 1.1 million marginally attached individuals in July of 2000.

But why has it taken 5 years of Republican "leadership" to _start_.
perhaps, getting back to even? And why have we had to borrow
tremendous amounts of money to prop up the economy? The
statistics we are seeing are WORSE than the stats we had when
the Republicans were not in control, and these stats are being
produced on borrowed funds. While we give one another hair
cuts in the "services" economy and import all the real "goods",
the Chinese are buying our country out from under us.

>> The
>> statistics do not show this. And taking jobs away
>> from teens while raising the cost of education is about
>> as Republican as it gets. How would you "work your
>> way through college" if the costs are astronomical and
>> there are no jobs?
>>
>> >> >> I too have a religious perspective. But I don't
>> >> >> manipulate the "data" around whatever
>> >> >> conclusion I have already adopted.
>> >> >
>> >> > There was a major drop in labor force participation amongst teenagers
>> >> > over the past few years. That is a fact. Do you not see the
>> >> > difference between a 40-year-old dropping out of the labor force and a
>> >> > 16-year-old not entering the labor force?
>> >>
>> >> I see the difference between teenagers working at Mickey D.
>> >> and old people working at Mickey D. The oldsters have to
>> >> work if they want other than dog food for dinner.
>> >
>> > This is pretty much what I was getting at. If a 40-year-old drops out
>> > of the labor force, that tends to be more indicative of labor market
>> > problems than if a 16-year-old does. The kid doesn't need the job that
>> > bad. Heck you might be able to prove that lower participation amongst
>> > kids indicates that parents feel more secure in their own abilities to
>> > fund their kid's activities so they don't force their kids to go get
>> > jobs. Maybe, maybe not. But certainly if fewer kids are in the labor
>> > force this year than last year, I am much less concerned than if they
>> > were adults.
>>
>> All of that is fine and good, but what about education for
>> those not born with the silver foot in their mouth?
>
> Well this is a whole new discussion. I seriously doubt that fewer kids
> are going to college these days, though I have not looked up any
> studies on the matter. Perhaps they are more willing to borrow.

When you bring up the loss of teen jobs it is not a "new
discussion".

>> > Think of it the other way, Coburn. What if the labor force
>> > participation rate for kids had risen substantially? With your
>> > ever-cynical view of the labor market under Republican leadership,
>> > wouldn't you think it was significant that labor force participation
>> > for people aged 20+ was even lower than the one being promoted?
>> > Wouldn't you want to point that out in your effort to prove that even
>> > more bread-winners than we realize are dropping out of the labor pool?
>>
>> I would be raising hell about kids in the work force and
>> the parents using them as income generators. But I would
>> like to see the labor force participation numbers go WAY
>> down across the board while the wages/income of the
>> lower and middle class INCREASES. The unemployment
>> numbers (being a reflection of those who _*WANT*_ a
>> job and cannot find one) should also fall as the economy
>> IMPROVES.
>
> They have improved, by several different measures.

They have only "improved" when compared to how
bad they were as Pinocchio restarted the "supply side"
horse*** again. What happens across the board is
that people settle for less and go back to work for
whatever wages they can get in whatever job they can
get. The S&P 500 looks really good and the unemployment
stuff looks better than it did, but the middle class just
got kicked in the teeth.

>> A really good economy is one in which
>> very few family members (maybe even just ONE family
>> member) need to be employed outside the home in order
>> to see to the needs of the family (includes education) and
>> to the needs of retirement. The numbers we are seeing
>> seem to be misinterpreted and/or misrepresented. The
>> neoconomist WANTS more labor participation and lower
>> wages. The neoconomist WANTS everyone working their
>> butts off just to get along because the unemployment numbers
>> would look better
>
> Now hold on a second. Women and children entering the work force does
> not necessarily make the unemployment rate go down. It may help
> economic growth or certain measures of productivity but I fail to see
> how having more potential workers translates in to a greater percentage
> of those potential workers having a job.

Ok. You win on the "unemployment" thang, but you
don't win the labor participation point, the GDP point,
or the "inflation is under control" point, or the "wages
are not sagging point". Oh but that S&P 500
profit sure does look good.

>> and the serfs have no time to think about
>> how they are getting the wrench. The problem with the current
>> numbers is at least two fold: The data are controlled to some
>> degree (spin) so as to put a better light on things
>
> Perhaps, (I would argue that many of the problems you might cite are
> unavoidable,) but the important thing to remember is that we still have
> a time series. We can compare today's flawed data to yesterday's
> flawed data and still get a pretty good idea of what is going on in
> America.

No. The data are more flawed under Republican control
than they are under Democratic control. Reagan was the
first to include military people as "employed" so as to
improve the unemployment numbers. And, of course, we
have Pinocchio's Iraq war sucking a lot of otherwise
unemployed people into the military.

>> but even
>> more significantly, the numbers are then presented in a manner
>> that does not really reflect desired reality. The labor participation
>> numbers are the prime and shining example. I see liberal
>> Democrats ranting about a fall in this number as an indication
>> that there are insufficient jobs, and Pugs, instead of being
>> informative and straight forward about it are cringing over it.
>> Ridiculous. If productive effort were rewarded MORE and there
>> was less flow to the rentier then the labor participation numbers
>> would fall. If rent redistribution allowed every family to spend
>> more time on home and family in a decent place to live, then the
>> number of people looking for jobs would fall very quickly and
>> so too the unemployment rate when properly assessed.
>> People left the farm and moved to the city so as to
>> reduce their drudgery per mouth full of food. The next
>> move is not so easy. It will require a loosening of the bonds
>> of pure "capitalism".
>>
>> >> There are
>> >> also those that were in technology that now work at Mickey
>> >> D.
>> >
>> > ...as well as those who were in technology that are now staying in
>> > school until they graduate.
>>
>> That may be true and that's a good thing. But coots like
>> me won't be going back to school. When you are 60 it don't
>> make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, I see far too many young
>> people out here driving trucks (and far to many coots for that
>> matter). Trucks are a pretty inefficient way to deliver stuff over
>> long distances.
>
> Probably the greatest advantage of trucks is being able to choose exact
> delivery dates and locations. Blame the American consumer. They would
> rather pay more for the item to always be in stock at a store down the
> street. Trucking is actually a compromise for most shippers. It is a
> relatively quick way to transfer stuff without being nearly as
> expensive as air freight. Shipping via boats or trains is just not
> acceptable for quite a lot of freight.
>
> What do you propose as an alternative?

I propose some _real_ capital development like a
very high speed multihubbed rail system. Local
trucks (no sleeper), bring loaded trailers from
points less than 300 miles to a hub where the
trailers are placed in the high speed system and
delivered 600 to 3000 miles away. The trailer
is then removed from the high speed system and
delivered by local drivers within a radius of
300 miles. With a high speed rail system you
are looking at two day transit times in most cases.
But we have a problem here: Such a system is
too large for corporate America or Global
corpotopia. Creation of the system would require
eminent domain and real government power.
And such a thing will not happen in Republican
America unless we can find a way to give
Bill Gates, Tom Delay, Kenny Lay, and
Halliburton a large piece of the budgeted
funds.

--
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers
of society but the people themselves; and
if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion by
education." - Thomas Jefferson
http://GreaterVoice.org


.