generation limbo thread - limbo in the sand

haha this is just an rss feed at this point

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7410

dunno to what extent denmark can compare to america, but an interesting conclusion regardless:

Which college degrees are valuable in a global economy?
Our data report the occupations of Danish workers, and this allows us to measure the on-the-job requirements for four categories of knowledge and skills that are closely related to college degrees. When we examine the effects of offshoring on wages for different knowledge groups, we find that offshoring has the largest positive effect on occupations that require communication and language (premium of +4.4%), followed by social sciences (+3.7%), and maths (+2.7%). The premium for natural sciences and engineering is close to 0. This may seem curious given the policy emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) education in many advanced economies, but if science and maths are universal languages, jobs requiring them can be done anywhere with an educated workforce.
The primacy of communication in our results is broadly consistent with findings on immigration and economy-wide task specialisation by Peri and Sparber (2009) and Ottaviano et al. (2010) that highlight natives’ comparative advantage in language and communication tasks. We find that offshoring firms not only retain workers doing communication-intensive tasks, but that these workers actually become more valuable when offshoring rises. Why? One possible explanation is that offshoring increases interactions between domestic workers and foreign workers from different cultural backgrounds, and those differences raise the cost of communicating within the firm (Lazear 1999). Having domestic workers with finely tuned communication and language skills and social scientists with knowledge of other cultures and societies may be useful in overcoming offshoring-induced costs of cross-cultural dealing.

the obvious fly in the ointment is getting offshored employees to do good work, even (esp., even) in STEM work.

btw bonsoir from Paris, where we spent last night talking that sort of thing out over a lovely Sancerre.

cool, where are you in paris?

I'm jealous

Pigalle right now, looking out over the Place

this is hors sujet but I was reading about autolib today, have you seen them on the streets yet?

no, I don't think so, but I'm not sure: would they be all marked up?

I could watch out the window now as I'm looking out over Blvd de Clichy but I'd probably get distracted by the whores out there; it's Sat night & the bathhouses & porn shops are hopping.

more on topic, I spent tonight out with a colleague from a top American institution with whom we decided that Kant would have been worth a $400,000 salary, but that no present philosophe is...even though that's what "the market" has decided some of us are "worth".

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/12/structural-adjustment-for-the-middle-class.html

Here the concern is that maybe Bruce Springsteen was right -- "these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back to your hometown." Jobs with decent wages -- manufacturing jobs, union jobs, professional service jobs -- have declined precipitously in the past twenty years (not just since the recession). And that means that the opportunities for many workers to have "middle-class" incomes have become much more restricted. Here is a sober report from Chemical and Engineering News --

The severe national recession of the past several years is having a negative impact on the employment and the starting salaries of chemists and chemical engineers. The latest data from the American Chemical Society on graduates from 2009 found that median starting salaries fell about 5% for those receiving bachelor’s and doctoral degrees compared with the previous year. New graduates with master’s degrees appeared to have gotten a jump in pay.
Even the banking and financial sector has contracted (link):
The financial services industry, hammered by job cuts and record losses, is in for an even bigger contraction as the global recession deepens, said Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
“The financial sector will contract and it will contract much more than we’ve seen so far,” said Faber, who was in Tokyo to speak at an event hosted by CLSA Ltd. Financial professionals have “been in paradise for the past 25 years.”
More than 275,000 jobs in the financial industry have been lost in the last two years, according to Bloomberg data, while losses and writedowns at global companies exceeded $1 trillion in the past year. Faber said the contraction could rival declines seen in the 1970s following the collapse of Bernard Cornfeld’s Investors Overseas Services that shook confidence in the industry for a decade.

OWS needs to worry more about the 0.01%. Those are the lads who are doing the most damage.

It's true, Lessig made the same point--"You are the 99.999%"

well people who make $500k a year are generally not the movers and shakers of the world, but they still nerd to be paying substantially more in taxes

need

people who make $500k a year are to the truly rich what like whiney is to hipsters

in any case that's an article about structural changes in the economy and the 1 but not .01 might not be personally responsible for those changes but they are nevertheless people who benefit from them, even if they benefit less than the .01.

xp

also fwiw 'the one percent' is rarely used literally, when OWS goes on tours of the 'houses of the one percent' they visit the CEOs on the UES and not lower-upper-upper middle class professionals in park slope (/they don't take a walk in basically any residential neighborhood in manhattan)

ows doesn't spend that much time talking about people who own a few car dealerships or whatever, even the ones in 'the one percent'

Had a phone interview Thursday that went really well.
Was supposed to meet them Friday, which was postponed till Wed because the woman I was going to meet was sick.
Now get a phone call saying they are essentially going out of business and obv won't be hiring.

I want to get drunk.

what's the industry?

cold calling, obv, this is the generation limbo thread.

in a lot of ways this isn't a 'generation' thing even, but rather 'the future of labor, paid and unpaid'. I think people 20 years from now are even more fucked.

after a month of clicking the submit button and typing in my dad's credit card number I've applied to twelve PhD programs…limboing my way into the future.

godspeed

http://chronicle.com/article/Income-Gap-Widens/129980/

i always rmde when i read abt the 'rare skill set' thats required to run these institutions like any fourth grader cant read a powerpoint presentation someone else made

it requires skill to effectivize a university's brainput

also I'm willing to say okay yeah not *anybody* could run harvard or whatever, but $2m a year to run...mountain state university???

well i think its probably much rarer to have the 'skill set' it takes to become president of harvard or any big corp but i dont believe it takes an real skill or set of abilities to run one.

yeah I think it would be pretty hard to fuck it up

"hey guys lets change the school's name"

that's pretty much it?

also mountain state university dude making $1.8/m = university in beckley, west virginia where:

The median income for a household in the city was $28,122, and the median income for a family was $38,110. Males had a median income of $35,780 versus $23,239 for females. The per capita income for the city was $18,912. About 16.4% of families and 20.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33.9% of those under age 18 and 9.5% of those age 65 or over.

what does someone even do w/ that kinda money there

every time i get in a big argument w/ dad abt stuff like this im like 'putting together ikea furniture is harder than running exxon mobil' and he gets really mad but i firmly believe that to be true

drill more wells

I think it's ultimately a combination of

1. a child's take of 'how capitalism works'...'no u see we have a perfectly competitive market for literally everything in america, including college presidents and that's just the going rate to bag a good one, here's a supply/demand curve, nothing we can do'

2. everyone secretly hopes that people at the top of our important institutions are actually these hyper competent beasts instead of...mostly regular people socialized into certain roles.

does your dad run exxon mobil? can he put together ikea furniture? xps

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/12/credits-credentials-and-collective-consciousness.html

this is also interesting

i'm taking that course!

also signed up for the human-computer interaction course in january

what do you think of it so far?

some of it goes over my head, so i'm not exactly pulling a 4.0, but it's really enlightening overall. highly recommend future outings.

haha feeling kinda queasy thinking abt the 'opportunities for intimate engagement' @ stanford

theres probably a better thread for this but:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/the-politics-of-the-1-percent/#more-20281

haha well this thread has been pretty flexible and I think can be used to discuss anything relating to how we're systemically fucked in the long-term

I think the key part on that article is this:

The 1 percent cares more about deficits than the economy. When asked to name the most important problem facing the country, 32 percent of respondents said the deficit and 11 percent said the economy. By contrast, in an April 2011 CBS News/New York Times poll, 49 percent of Americans said the economy or jobs and only 5 percent said the deficit.

if wall st. (and friends) spent its political capital and PR money pushing for fiscal stimulus - which would actually help them most really - they'd be (slightly) harder to demonize. same dynamic exists w/ big business and universal health care - who would benefit most from not having to worry about health care spending? and yet.

this is ultimately why it's hard to take anything they do or say in good faith.

don't they care mostly about inflation, though?

well I said 'wall street' and not 'rich people' because although all superrich are rentiers on a certain level and have reasons not to want inflation, the financial sector ultimately depends on "productive capitalism"/economic growth (whether or not it creates it itself is up for debate) and has a lot more to lose from a double dip recession than from moderate inflation.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff87/English

Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations

*head explodes*

Has anyone here done a masters in ol' Britisherland? How did you pay for it? Student loans? How much did all factor up to cost? I r starting to look at courses to maybe take up next year. And starting to pay off debt in the hope to mebbe save some too.*

*Of course I might just change my mind a fuck off travelling for 6 months instead with savings.

look into cheaper EU degrees maybe? brits can do that, right?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/12/future-0

that's a good article! Is undervaluing the welfare of future generations related to declining interest in having children in the global North?

depends on your views on the 'welfare of existence' I guess