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Yes bizarrely you keep arguing that the data disagrees with my position, which is that there every new job added wasn't a service sector bartender or waiter.
Hey look it is King Straw Man again arguing against something I've never said.
Let's repeat for what the fifth time?
I do not agree that all new jobs are low paying service sector jobs like bartenders and waiters. The chart I linked to proves this, since it has hundreds of thousands of well paying jobs that aren't bartenders and waiter type jobs.
King Straw Man is refuting this by showing there are more low wage jobs than better ones, which is an argument nobody has made. King Straw Man argues against a manufactured position.
Cool! So your argument is....Well some of the jobs are good paying, even if the majority arent.
Which is no argument at all. Its nit picking. Got it! My apologies, I thought you were having a real discussion, and you were trying to refute a poster who was pointing out that most new jobs are low paying ones. Turns out that no, your argument is just "Oh look! some of them pay well". Got it.
Cool! So your argument is....Well some of the jobs are good paying, even if the majority arent.
My argument is that the claim by that poster that all newly created jobs are service sector low paying job bartenders and waiters is false, and this is easily proven by data showing hundreds of thousands of jobs that are either well paying or not in the service sector.
Of course this simple and easily verifiable position has been hilariously attacked by King Straw Man, who in absence of any ability to discredit my position is attributing anything else he can think of to me and attacking that instead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by greywar
Which is no argument at all. Its nit picking.
An example of nitpicking would be saying 32% of new jobs are well paying instead of 29%. Pointing out someone claiming ALL new jobs are low paying in the service sector is not nit picking, it is highlighting something that is blatantly false.
Quote:
Originally Posted by greywar
My apologies, I thought you were having a real discussion
Apology accepted, please keep in mind in the future a real discussion doesn't entail you inventing positions for others so you can argue them.
An example of nitpicking would be saying 32% of new jobs are well paying instead of 29%. Pointing out someone claiming ALL new jobs are low paying in the service sector is not nit picking, it is highlighting something that is blatantly false.
Would you mind interpreting the data for me? What percentage of new jobs are well-paying? And in your opinion, how does this relate to the poverty rate trends over the last few years?
I'm not trying to instigate/troll you here, I'm genuinely interested in your viewpoint (not just how wrong someone else is).
I don't know, I haven't tried to calculate what percentage were well paying since my only argument was that it surely wasn't 0%. I think one thing we can dismiss is greywar's claim that service providing jobs have "sucky pay" or that the percentage of new jobs in the (very broad) service sector is a good barometer:
The service providing sector as a whole averages about $45k annually, which isn't wealthy by any means but isn't exactly what I think of sucky like a burger flipping min wage job. Retail trade and leisure are the closest to approaching the sucky category, their job gains for last year:
Retail trade +321k
Leisure +406k
Total non-farm job gains were 2,919,000 so those two categories were about 25% of the new jobs over the last year. Again, not saying this proves most jobs were or were not well-paying, just saying a certain number of them being in the service sector doesn't by itself prove anything. Maybe if we can first agree on the definition of "sucky" we can take a stab at discovering what percentage of new jobs qualify as such?
Poverty rate peaked in 2010 for all people and has been relatively stagnant every since, I'm not sure of it's correlation to salary of new jobs since poverty rate would also be a function of other factors including unemployment.
Poverty rate peaked in 2010 for all people and has been relatively stagnant every since, I'm not sure of it's correlation to salary of new jobs since poverty rate would also be a function of other factors including unemployment.
Thanks for the post. I think the core question is "why hasn't poverty decreased if we've been seeing more jobs?"
One explanation is the quality of jobs (sucky or not) haven't been significant enough to make a dent. Basically the whole "quality vs quantity" argument.
Whether that's true or not is up for debate -- but what are some other explanations if not that?
Yes bizarrely you keep arguing that the data disagrees with my position, which is that there every new job added wasn't a service sector bartender or waiter.
Hey look it is King Straw Man again arguing against something I've never said.
Let's repeat for what the fifth time?
I do not agree that all new jobs are low paying service sector jobs like bartenders and waiters. The chart I linked to proves this, since it has hundreds of thousands of well paying jobs that aren't bartenders and waiter type jobs.
King Straw Man is refuting this by showing there are more low wage jobs than better ones, which is an argument nobody has made. King Straw Man argues against a manufactured position.
Gotta hand it to you... you can nit-pick with the best of them. Good job, I guess?
It's important to break the cycle of permanent underclass but it can't be just this policy change in a vacuum. The rest of us got the memo. You get your education. You get your career established. Then you find your mate for a long-term relationship and think about reproducing.
If you're going to deny housing, you also at least need to give them trivial access to free birth control and abortions.
Poor people are poor because they make lots of bad decisions. They have lousy role models. They attend crappy schools. Most have, at best, average intelligence. In the 21st century economy, if you don't have 21st century job skills, they're competing with millions of other people without those job skills. Other than trying to salvage a small percentage of them through improving/reforming education, I don't think there is a solution to this problem. If you have 21st century job skills, you have a good job. Your spouse probably also has 21st century job skills and has a good job. The whole jobs and poverty thing is tied to the new economic reality that automation and global competition have diminished the value of unskilled labor. Neither political party has a fix for this because there is no way to fix it. It creates a challenging social problem. What do you do with all those people who aren't capable of more than a McDonald's or Walmart job?
I generally agree with this.
One quibble--while I consider myself pro-choice, I think abortion should be an absolute last resort, and many in the pro-choice movement want to blur the line between abortion and contraception as if the two are one & the same...and I don't agree with that. It seems like other countries that have legal abortion still understand this distinction (i.e. keep it legal, but do everything possible to prevent the demand for abortion in the first place--Germany & the Netherlands are like this).
I also think it seems like the very time when Americans needed to get more disciplined about life, we got less disciplined....starting around the mid 1960s. It seems I'm not the only one to observe this. Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld said the essentially same thing in their book The Triple Package
There is some good news to this. The teen birth rate has dropped significantly over the last 15 years, and is at record lows. However, we're still behind the curve compared to other developed countries:
One quibble--while I consider myself pro-choice, I think abortion should be an absolute last resort, and many in the pro-choice movement want to blur the line between abortion and contraception as if the two are one & the same...and I don't agree with that. It seems like other countries that have legal abortion still understand this distinction (i.e. keep it legal, but do everything possible to prevent the demand for abortion in the first place--Germany & the Netherlands are like this).
I also think it seems like the very time when Americans needed to get more disciplined about life, we got less disciplined....starting around the mid 1960s. It seems I'm not the only one to observe this. Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld said the essentially same thing in their book The Triple Package
There is some good news to this. The teen birth rate has dropped significantly over the last 15 years, and is at record lows. However, we're still behind the curve compared to other developed countries:
This is not an abortion thread. It's a "what kind of jobs are being added" thread.
Personally, I don't know anybody with 21st century job skills who doesn't have a good job. If you're a hiring manager looking for technical people, it's damned tough to fill those positions. I imagine the same is true for pretty much any other high skill position. The top-20-ish percent with those job skills are doing great. Since we're near full employment, the top 50-ish percent are doing OK. We have a huge glut of unskilled and semi-skilled labor where the bottom 50% isn't worth paying much. No employer is going to spend more than they have to when hiring for McJobs. They're part time with no benefits to avoid all the expenses associated with full time employees. Employers don't have to pay very much because there are hundreds of other low skill people lined up to take that job if somebody quits. Unless you install a flux capacitor in the DeLorean, get up to 88 mph, and transport yourself back to 1955 when the United States was 50% of the world economy and had to pay middle class wages for unskilled jobs, this isn't going to change. If you jack up the minimum wage to $25.00/hour, corporations will use automation and offshoring to get rid of as much of that labor cost as possible.
[This is not an abortion thread. It's a "what kind of jobs are being added" thread.
You brought it up. I responded with a certain amount of disagreement. Obviously birth control and abortion are related to the topic or you wouldn't have brought them up, and I concur that they are indeed, relevant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD
Personally, I don't know anybody with 21st century job skills who doesn't have a good job. If you're a hiring manager looking for technical people, it's damned tough to fill those positions. I imagine the same is true for pretty much any other high skill position. The top-20-ish percent with those job skills are doing great. Since we're near full employment, the top 50-ish percent are doing OK. We have a huge glut of unskilled and semi-skilled labor where the bottom 50% isn't worth paying much. No employer is going to spend more than they have to when hiring for McJobs. They're part time with no benefits to avoid all the expenses associated with full time employees. Employers don't have to pay very much because there are hundreds of other low skill people lined up to take that job if somebody quits. Unless you install a flux capacitor in the DeLorean, get up to 88 mph, and transport yourself back to 1955 when the United States was 50% of the world economy and had to pay middle class wages for unskilled jobs, this isn't going to change. If you jack up the minimum wage to $25.00/hour, corporations will use automation and offshoring to get rid of as much of that labor cost as possible.
This is not an abortion thread. It's a "what kind of jobs are being added" thread.
The jobs that are being added are the jobs that are in demand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD
It's important to break the cycle of permanent underclass but it can't be just this policy change in a vacuum. The rest of us got the memo. You get your education. You get your career established. Then you find your mate for a long-term relationship and think about reproducing.
If you're going to deny housing, you also at least need to give them trivial access to free birth control and abortions.
By denying tax-payer funded housing, you force them to alter their Life-Style to something less glamorous like living with the parents or sharing housing with someone else similarly situated.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD
Poor people are poor because they make lots of bad decisions.
That's right and they need to learn from their mistakes, but that's not going to happen so long as you keep robbing me of money to throw at them.
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