generation limbo thread - limbo in the sand

one of the things that i think is maybe impt is that like, starting a small business selling expensive handmade hammers is fine but its not like its an unalloyed big picture good: lots of small business keep prices high and are fairly unproductive. and i think thats a vialbe argument that theres a kind of social/cultural/economic bias towards starting those kind of small businesses rather than the big idea/big future firms that really create jobs/wealth?? idk

I think you have to look at the artisan hammer thing as a third wave thing like

1) you buy hammers from local manufacturer / store ->
2) you buy cheaper hammers via mass production / chain retail / etc.
3) you (voluntarily) buy more expensive artisan brooklyn hammers. hammers as a luxury good.

as long as #3 is a supplement to #2 then we're not really gonna suffer in the same way from the inefficiencies of having lots of small firms. *but* at the same time this 'post-walmart economy' depends on having enough people w/ lots of disposable income and people willing to pay more than they could for things.

which might not mesh w/ other economic realities

i guess the point is that the economy as a whole doesnt really suffer if fewer ppl choose to start mfg and selling $300 scissors but it does need ppl to keep inventing facebook or w/e

ya I think that's it.

shifting the subject again, this was posted while ilx was down, but it's a good takedown of the 'college costs are due to lack of productivity gains' argument

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/21/why-tuition-costs-are-rising/

re talk of the "post-Wal-Mart economy" & "big idea/big future firms that really create jobs/wealth"---this seems to me such a gen limbo way of putting it! like as an early 20something in the mid90s ~the economy~ as a concept wasn't a thought: how am *i* gonna get paid, sure; but reifying the economy, or talking about what "really" creates wealth: that seems so new to me. & I wonder if some of it is a kind of passivity, that I am going to get paid by the system, by the economy, by what we woulda called "the man"---whereas our punk rock slacker whatever ideal was we're gonna do it ourselves.

I mean this is just the worst kind of armchair sociology but it's the sandbox, forgive me

that was also a point in human history where you could start a business called 'toothbrushes.com' and someone would cut you a check for 30 million dollars

there's that! but we didn't know that. & you did! & therein lies the difference?

it might be a mistake to generalize extensively from two ppl who took econ in undergrad

no doubt

though I am most interested in whether there's a greatest sense of conformity to corporate capitalism amongst, ultimately, my undergrads, & how this is gonna play out as I teach them; so I am generalizing on more than just what's said here.

idk i was thinking abt yr original post a lot and i can see an argument that less economic security you feel the more you value that?

i think one way thats manifested itself was this v idea that you had to get good marks in high school and then into a good college and then an elite grad/professional school. for people from my economic background i think there was much less a sense that they might be denied a place in the world if they werent on the treadmill from jump

I think 'conformity to corporate capitalism' is a complicated thing, I think people are highly suspicious of corporations for different reasons than they were in the 90s (taking advantage of poor people in asia vs. taking advantage of white collar employees)

also certain brands / mega-corporations are def embraced in a way they couldn't have been back then - apple, google, amazon

i think my generation had lower expectations, or at least a suspicion that those who eagerly assumed the treadmill position and succeeded were douchebags. I think that also went for those who did eagerly assume the treadmill position. The advertising messages I remember from the mid-late 90s were all about proving you weren't a douchebag after all, or embracing your douchitude.

"there was much less a sense that they might be denied a place in the world if they werent on the treadmill from jump"

right, this is exactly what I want to understand.

in particular, what counts as "a place in the world"?

that concept is also shifting fairly violently, I think.

I think a lot of people in my generation are willing to give up $ and security for 'self-agency' - having control over your future is having 'a place in the world' and has value that might trump a 6-figure job. and I think this started w/ gen x - but at the same time that decision is being made for people via the independent-contracterization of the economy.

are you euler??

it probably should have been 'their' world. i think its this idea of being 'the first generation to make less than their parents' and all that embodies abt expectations of material comfort/class/identity

in some ways this has been good for ppl of like upper middle class or upper class backgrounds, it probably speaks to the prejudice and narrowness of things that someone from the 'right' background didnt have to worry abt some azn or indian or irish kid taking his spot on the partner track at a white shoe law firm and cld bum around paris for a couple years after yale.

at the same time i think, across all economic backgrounds, theres a greater fear/awareness/belief that the jobs wont just 'be there' and that means putting yr hope in the treadmill or giving up on ideas of homeownership or selling cat scarves on etsy or &c &c &c

think he's dr3w d@niel

nah, I'm the big E

"control over your future": I spend most of my time with 60+ year olds (lol academia, esp when no one gets jobs) & their stories are amazing: antiwar & civil rights work in the late 60s, or time in Korea or Vietnam, or rough work, garbage collectors in Chicago in the late 60s: all while they sought to learn what they were gonna do. most of these people came from blue collar backgrounds: they're boomers & few grew up poor, but largely they grew up with little sense of what's possible, & except for the grace of a beautiful mind they'd have ended up like their peers, laborers in Harrisburg or Abiline or Salinas. now they've chaired professors at lovely places. I listen to them & compare my own boring stories of just being a good & diligent & ambitious student, & little more. they've left us such ornate structures, bureaucracies & financial empires, & maybe we added a few of our own. but more to the point, they gave us the gift of believing that we would inherit all of this. but did they think they had control over their futures? I never get that sense.

& this is not to get too much into my own story but I think b/c my parents weren't college-educated & I'm first gen American I never really "got" what America could offer; things were so tenuous as a kid, paycheck to paycheck, parents lose jobs & you move a thousand miles because you go where the jobs are. I did well in school, I learned other people's ambitions, just because people told me you could avoid blue collar labor that way, & that sounded good to me.

& this goes on regarding tenure now, when people tell me how amazing it is & really I just want to work, same as I always have, nothing new despite that sublime security; but that's gonna get us away from what's important here, which is you all.

I think, in retrospect a college educated white male in 1960 (which most of these people were) had control over their future in a way that's just incomparable to anything since. did they *feel* that way at the time? prob not. were they thinking 'this is gonna be a pretty unique period in america history'? no. I think there are problems w/ taking the comparison too far, but in a lot of ways trends in academia correlate w/ the way the rest of the country has changed. even your sublime security, which you worked 10x harder for isn't comparable to what they had. in the same way that even someone on a decent white collar career path can't expect to work in the same industry their whole life, let alone the same company.

I think as far as the 'ornate structures, bureaucracies & financial empires' there's an argument that they weren't building as many of these as pillaging, leveraging, bankrupting the structures we already had.

couldnt you think of the artisanal hammer in relationship to the walmart hammer as being the makeshift establishment of some sort of labor aristocracy (where the market for one requires the other and so the profits of one necessitates the cheap labour required for the other) and therefore just kind of standing in for the erosion of those classes of workers (although in increasingly tenuous ways) as markets become more abstract and speculative. and in that sense it isn't really creating new spaces for profitability but just sort of trying to occupy an increasingly tenuous position as manufacturing in first world countries becomes less and less profitable and viable. idk that might be pretty short-sighted but it just seems like, if wealth is becoming as polarised as it apparently is, who are the young yuppies that are going to be able to afford those things anyway as well.

erosion in which classes of workers?

I think it's creating *some* new spaces for profitability but like we said, still depends on new facbooks etc. and this isn't really shit we're gonna be able to sell to japan and germany etc.

in some ways I feel like it makes sense to look this as new service sector activity that's pretending to be the manufacturing sector. when you're buying the artisan hammer you're buying the 'service of some brooklyn dude making a hammer' as much as you're buying a physical hammer. if you find value in that, there's value in that! I don't think that's any more absurd than a lot of the goods and services people pay for. but it's ultimately going to be niche.

well it is obviously fundamentally different but it still relies on perceived differences in the valuability of similar kinds of labour and so it does step modestly into the huge gaping employment holes left by the collapse of domestic manufacturing though obviously not on the same scale.

idk why i say obviously twice in that post esp since this is just an idea

im sorry judith but idrg your post

yeah some of that went past me

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/are-vocational-degrees-a-better-path-to-employment-in-the-short-run/2011/12/05/gIQAifaDWO_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/12/the-real-profiteers.html

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/

yeah I agree, I think RA's going for a single narrative when there are really a lot of things going on. he's an urbanist and so he's gonna be tempted by the most urbanist-friendly narrative. but yeah the macro level productivity-eating-up-job growth, automation, outsourcing, there are lots of things going on for sure. (I'm more concerned about the lack of urban housing stock when it comes to future resource depletion / need for transportation efficiences than w/r/t economic productivity but I think he's trying to attract the Economist audience?)

this is just econ not really limboish but I'm finding it interesting, not always convincing but a different pov, dude comes from the notre dame heterodox school:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-mirowski-the-seekers-or-how-mainstream-economists-have-defended-their-discipline-since-2008-%E2%80%93-part-i.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-mirowski-the-seekers-or-how-mainstream-economists-have-defended-their-discipline-since-2008-%E2%80%93%C2%A0part-ii.html

and relating to what hurting was talking about earlier:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/could-dismantling-the-submerged-state-surrounding-student-debt-pay-for-free-colleges/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/27/us-studentdebt-middleage-idUSTRE7BQ0T620111227