Unschoolable people in 1st world countries

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


I just read the year-end issue of NEWSWEEK, and it got me thinking about an issue conspicious with its absence.

In this issue, several country leaders went on and on about how just their country was adapting to the new times, and how many people were studying various stuff in their country. Big efforts were being done in every area, and if there were any mistakes, they were only of type not doing enough of the right thing. (Becomes very sugary to read, quickly. Pass the air********-bag. )

All leaders were saying that their country adapt well to all challenges, and shine through their well-educated workforce. No one touched upon what I saw as a glaring omission:

What to do with people who simply do not have in them to absorb anything more than basic schooling? 100 years ago, such people could still find a job as farmhands, miners, etc. However, jobs that only require two strong arms - and very little in the way of schooling and smarts - are fast disappearing in 1st world countries. We can put people into school, but the average person is not any intrinsically smarter now compared to 100 years ago. What to do with all people who simply do not have anything to bring to the table, jobmarket-wise? How high joblessness rate can we assume that there will be in the future?

I understand that politicians do not like to talk about difficult stuff like this, but it is still infuriating to read people who habitually sugarcoat everything, except their opponents, who are described as vileness inpersonated. One must have a bad mind to be able to stand that kind of world-view.

Back to the original issue - do you think that we in the distant future are heading towards a constantly high joblessness rate? What should be done about people who can not take in higher education than, say, Jr high?


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Inquartata]

Public works projects, perhaps?

Actually, I'm not sure that I agree with your basic premise that unskilled-laborer jobs are diminishing in industrialized economies. I think that there are still plenty of those to be had, but our cultures have raised the expectations of those who might fill them to the point where they aren't willing to do so any more. They think they ought to be making much more than such jobs are wont to pay, and they are above settling for less, because, well, they are them.

And so industrialized nations must contend with the problems accompanying widescale immigration, legal or otherwise, in order to import the unskilled laborers they need. The only other solution would be to pay citizens much more to do those jobs than is economically indicated.

Also, there has been a general decrease in physical fitness amongst the citizens of First World countries. So even if there were indeed fewer jobs for those who only had a strong back to offer, there are also fewer workers with strong backs to be found...

[epeeisky]

I have to agree with INQ here. There is not a severe decline in unskilled labor jobs over the last 50 years. Right now there are thousands of unskilled labor jobs in the Gulf Coast, but they are finding very few people to work them. Americans as a whole do not want to work at these jobs, so people from other countries, that are very economically depressed, jump at the oppurtunity to work at these "easy" jobs. There is no shortage of jobs, just a shortage of willing participants to work these jobs

[Feltan]

For those with no education and good looks, there is always the exciting career field of prostitution. And if you are in the unfortunate position of being uneducated and ugly, you can join the staff at the ACLU and enjoy being angry at the rest of the world.

Regards,
Feltan

[Inquartata]

There was a recent episode of Montel Williams ( yes, I hang my head in shame for watching it, prurient interest sucked me in ) on prostitution. One of the interviewed ladies had a PhD from Boston University. Another was due to inherit a multimillion-dollar trust fund shortly. Unconscionable, such people taking jobs away from the lumpenproletariat!

[PalmFrond]

Perhaps they were salving their middle/upper-class guilt? Depends on how exclusive they were, I suppose (and whether they did pro bono work).

[Zilverzmurfen]

Originally Posted by PalmFrond

Perhaps they were salving their middle/upper-class guilt?

...or trying to fund a drug habit..?
Either way it's really, really sad.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by epeeisky

I have to agree with INQ here. There is not a severe decline in unskilled labor jobs over the last 50 years.

Well, during the last hundred years or so:
1. Farming has gone from a majority job to something done by a small minority (2% of the working population in Sweden), so less need for farmhands
2. Mining is high mechanized - nobody hacks stone/coal with a pickaxe nowadays
3. Many heavy jobs in industry have been mechanized or automated.

A stats factoid: The Swedish state job placement website currently lists 9026 job opening advertisements. (some advertisements are for multiple openings, so the total # of openings is 12154.) Since all job openings (with very exceptions) by law must be reported to the job placement bureau, this is a fairly good snapshot of the jobmarket over here. Of those jobs, 345 - or 3.8% - are listed as jobs not requiring any special training. Throw in all farm and simple factory put-together-stuff jobs, and the percentage rises to 6.0%. Actually, since high-end job openings are more likely not to get reported compared to the low-level job openings, those estimations are probably conservative.

Those numbers should be compared to the total population of about 9 million, of which 357000 are listed as in working age but not presently having an employer-paid job. 29 people out of a real job for each job opening.

What does this show: The great majority of all job openings in a 1st world country require more than basic schooling, a lot of them quite a bit. I do not have the stats at hand, but I suspect that this was not the case 100 years ago.

Originally Posted by epeeisky

Right now there are thousands of unskilled labor jobs in the Gulf Coast, but they are finding very few people to work them. Americans as a whole do not want to work at these jobs, so people from other countries, that are very economically depressed, jump at the oppurtunity to work at these "easy" jobs. There is no shortage of jobs, just a shortage of willing participants to work these jobs

If all those Gulf Coast clean-up job openings were to be filled overnight - would that make any noticeable dent in the unemployment rate? Furthermore, I find it highly unlikely that fixing up after special cases like Katrina kan form the basis of a consistently low unemployment.

Do you have any similar stats for USA and the Gulf Coast region, as the ones I listed above?


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

There was a recent episode of Montel Williams ( yes, I hang my head in shame for watching it, prurient interest sucked me in ) on prostitution.

Or you could say "I was watching it for research"

Originally Posted by Inquartata

One of the interviewed ladies had a PhD from Boston University. Another was due to inherit a multimillion-dollar trust fund shortly. Unconscionable, such people taking jobs away from the lumpenproletariat!

Perhaps the first lady had her degree in economics and decided there was a large revenue potential in the older line of business or (set cynic flag on) felt it was much the same (set cynic flag off). There's a old Lenny Bruce joke about a guy that goes to a hotel and asks the bellhop to send up a prostitute, but it's in an academia location and he's much surprised when a guy with a beard and a tweed jacket with elbow patches shows up at his door prepared to tell how he sold out his principles for lucre.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Feltan

For those with no education and good looks, there is always the exciting career field of prostitution. And if you are in the unfortunate position of being uneducated and ugly, you can join the staff at the ACLU and enjoy being angry at the rest of the world.

Regards,
Feltan

Come on, serious responses please. The watercooler exists for a purpose.

Prostitution can only take so many people - quite apart from the legal issues, most of those who can pay for it have wives. The market is is big enough to swallow (ahem) all the unemployed people.

The same goes for ACLU - their funds can not pay wages for enough people to make any noticeable dent in the unemployment figures.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

There was a recent episode of Montel Williams ( yes, I hang my head in shame for watching it, prurient interest sucked me in ) on prostitution. One of the interviewed ladies had a PhD from Boston University. Another was due to inherit a multimillion-dollar trust fund shortly. Unconscionable, such people taking jobs away from the lumpenproletariat!

Well, #1 was obvioulsy not unschoolable. #2 is such an unusual case so that it has no real impact on the total unemployment figures.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[YankeeRebel]

Originally Posted by epeeisky

Right now there are thousands of unskilled labor jobs in the Gulf Coast, but they are finding very few people to work them. Americans as a whole do not want to work at these jobs . . .

What it all comes down to is money. Americans will work any job for the right price. Henry Ford proved it a hundred years ago. The first auto assembly lines were back-breaking, mind-numbing, and physically exhausting work. The work was so bad that if he had offered the normal wage for an unskilled laborer, his company would have collapsed because of a lack of workers. Ford came up with a solution to this dilemma: pay a wage that made people want to work at that job. Pay them enough so that they will work themselves to exhaustion every day and want to come back for more. Ford offered unskilled laborers the astronomical wage of $5 per day, and it worked. Workers came by the thousands, begging for what was really a horrible job.

Flash forward to the present. You know where some of the best paying unskilled labor jobs in America are? Alaska. One of the deadliest jobs in America is working on a fishing boat off the Alaskan coast. This is a job that can literally kill a person every day, but there are Americans willing to fill that job every day because it pays extremely well.

If an employer offers a crappy job at a crappy wage, he is going to have major difficulties filling that position. That's just common sense.

The labor market is just that: a market. If an employer's demand for workers exceeds the supply of workers willing to do that job, the employer has to create demand for the job by sweetening it with more incentives.

[YankeeRebel]

Disturbingly, there are people in America who want to see wages go down. They want to see American laborers compete against illegal workers to determine who will work the cheapest. They seem to think that a poorer America is somehow a "stronger" America.

Those people are really pushing the myth that "Americans just don't want to work" so they can justify bringing in cheaper foreign labor to fill those positions and drive wages down.

The reality is, Americans will work at any job, no matter how bad, for the right price.

[Feltan]

Originally Posted by PeterGustafsson

Come on, serious responses please.

Ahhh fooey.....OK, a serious response.

The labor markets adjust. Just today, the US jobless claims hit a five year low: people are working, and people that want to find work are finding it.

Your premise is, I believe, flawed. You seem to suggest that the labor market is static......that once plenitful jobs cosisting of manual labor have reduced and hence the under educated workforce is is seeking a smaller and smaller pool of available positions. I do not believe this to be the case, nor do I beleive the market is that rigidly defined.

In essence, the bar gets raised over time. The manual laborer of today probably has more education than a skilled worker of yesteryear, and the skilled laborer of today is probably more educated than a professional employee of a few generations ago. In fact, the problem of an over-educated workforce in the States is accute -- we have to import unskilled labor. In the States, there are literally millions of undocumented illegal immigrants fully employed at low skill jobs.

The uneducated worker is, however, forced into a downward spiral of career opportunities. That may be a problem, or simply social Darwinism -- depending on your point-of-view.

Regards,
Feltan

P.S. And no one drew the conclusion that the only difference between being a prositute and working for the ACLU is how ugly a person is......I'm disappointed.

[jeff]

Peter, to your original topic: this has been a dystopic future widely portrayed in science fiction, where for decades the suggestion of "labor saving devices", or robots, would put most people out of work. (Parenthetically: I remember long ago seeing charts of how many telephone operators would be needed - back when human intervention was required for every call - the number of operators grew to the size of the population. But direct dial fixed that). Even knowledge workers are not exempted in these futures, though, I'm not so worried about AI putting knowledge workers out of business - that's been a busted promise for decades.

Today we have automation in manufacturing and in the office (you don't have armies of clerks hunched over ledgers, or secretarial pools). "Computer" was originally a job title: somebody whose job it was to manually compute figures, all day long. In some cases, automation freed resources from drudgery to be used in higher value-add jobs, in other cases, large swathes of population saw their livelihood evaporate. All this is preview, as I'm sure you know all this quite well.

Prediction is hard, especially for the future (reference: Professor Yogi Berra). Does the bar get raised so people are marginalised due to their inherent inability to attain necessary skills? I don't think so. I think that the bar falls far short of doing calculus. Literacy - to the extent of reading an instruction manual or job application, core math skills far short of calculus, a smattering of science background, and fundamental problem-solving capabilities will still do for most.

My take is that the number of people inherently incapable of being educated to a level suitable for today's world is dwarfed by the number of people that could be educated to that level, but aren't. Whether due to sociological reasons (ethnic segments without a tradition, experience or examples of education) or resource distribution (population segments not getting adequate educational resources and social services to foster education), I think that the number of people that potentially could have been educated but were not dwarfs the number of people simply incapable of it.

As far as the grunt jobs that go begging: if supply of workers for such jobs became scarce, then wouldn't economic theory (for those who believe in it! ) tell us that the price (pay levels) for those workers would rise to the point that workers would be attracted to it? So long as the wages for back breaking labor remain low, then we should expect potential laborers to avoid them.

Edit: 1. I dawdled over this long enough that I now see YankeeRebel said the last bit better!
2. Feltan, do we have to bite every time somebody trolls?

[YankeeRebel]

Originally Posted by Feltan

In fact, the problem of an over-educated workforce in the States is accute -- we have to import unskilled labor. In the States, there are literally millions of undocumented illegal immigrants fully employed at low skill jobs.

Here's an example of the type of choice that American unskilled laborers have:

a) a janitor job offered by an employer who is only willing to pay $5.15 per hour

or

b) a fast food job which pays $6 or $7 per hour

Given that choice, would you choose the lower paying job if a higher paying one was available? Americans, acting rationally, are choosing the higher paying jobs. If an employer had to compete for that worker, they would have to raise their wage offer to make it more attractive.

The problem with the current labor market is that there are millions of undocumented illegal immigrants who are willing to work for anything. Employers know this and are exploiting it by offering sub-poverty wages for lots of jobs. Then the employer turns around and cries "I have to hire these illegals because no American will do this job."

The American labor market is definitely out of whack.

[jBirch]

If you consider education as the main determinant of job status, you're absolutely right that the number of jobs with low educational requirements are evaporating quickly. I would also make the comment that there is a vast difference between motivated unskilled labour and unmotivated unskilled labour. In a welfare state, unmotivated unskilled labour lives on perpetual welfare and can only be turned into productive assets if they can be turned into motivated, unskilled labour.

That said...the state provided education system is partly to blame for this trend. People are now expected to read/write, understand literature, understand complicated mathematical concepts (algebra, geometry, statistics), understand complicated science (biology, chemistry, physics) and to eshew physical labour for mental labour. If a student can not master these concepts, they are deemed "unskilled", "worthless" and subject to intense socially negative pressure. This, in economic terms, puts a high cost on the student staying in school. If other lucrative options are available, the student will drop out and pursue those activities instead of further incurring the cost of going to school.

Even the military in a first world nation, long the bastion of unskilled labour, is requiring more and more education of its soldiers. There is a flipside to this military angle and that is that weaponry is becoming easier and easier to use. Prior to the industrial age, battle was a highly specialised skill and only those with the proper physical and mental aptitude could undertake it as a career. Now, anyone can pick up a gun or make a bomb and use it to coerce.

Where this leads, I think, is that motivated unskilled labour demands a high price and will seek it out wherever possible. Further, the only endeavours that can command that high price are very risky ones. Therefor, as prices continue to climb, motivated unskilled labour will seek out ever more risky activities in order to finance a decent and socially accepted life style. This leads to increased criminal, ethically shakey and downright suicidal activities as people are willing to risk jail/injury/death to earn the wage they feel is deserved.

James.

[Inquartata]

We have also not reckoned with the underground economy: hard to measure precisely and not entirely populated by the uneducated. But I doubt that even Sweden has no criminal class, no itinerant peddlers, no day laborers...

[Feltan]

Originally Posted by YankeeRebel

...The American labor market is definitely out of whack.

Depends what you consider "out of whack."

Adam Smith's invisible hand works well until the Government starts making artificial rules. The more rules, the more out of whack things get.

Regards,
Feltan