Paul Krugman Blog: Jobs and Values

[n2doc]

February 8, 2012, 8:43 AM
Jobs and Values
Some more about the whole values and the working class thing. You can say this for Charles Murray’s Coming Apart; he did do a fair bit of data crunching, producing results like this:


And he’s not the only one to note that marriage rates have fallen sharply among less-educated Americans, whites as well as minorities:


But as David Frum says, it’s odd how Murray dismisses the notion that declining opportunities rather than moral turpitude coming from mysterious sources might be responsible. Real wages for less-educated workers have fallen substantially, even as average incomes have continued to rise; maybe you think this shouldn’t have had a demoralizing, family-values-undermining effect, but the reality is that it does.

And Larry Mishel points me to an even more striking example of how the payoff to working hard and playing by the rules has fallen off a cliff, the collapse of employment benefits:


So we’ve created a society in which many young people see no chance of ever achieving middle-class status; then we look at their failure to adhere to middle-class values, and declare that there must be some mysterious force corroding our morality.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/jobs-and-values/

[TwilightGardener]

1. Several of my son's friends come from families who are really struggling

to make ends meet--they are really nice, SMART kids. Seniors in high school, most have after-school jobs in fast food, etc. But...they don't bother showing up to school. One of them will need catch-up work to graduate. They do not apply themselves AT ALL in class. I don't know what the future holds for them, and it's sad to see that they expect so little out of life, and don't seem to think it's worth even trying to achieve academic success. I think they see little opportunity for themselves because of their families' experiences--it's a cycle, these people are just getting beaten down, and think "what's the use?"

[woo me with science]

2. K&R

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. The problem isn't education, it's jobs.

If there were enough jobs, employers would lower their qualifications to reasonable levels. Employers now ask for advanced degrees for jobs which moderately intelligent HS graduates could competently perform. They do this to prequalify applicants - they'd rather deal with 30 resumes than 300.

Of course the less educated are the first ones to suffer, but that doesn't suggest that more education for them is the solution; all that will do is encourage employers to raise the bar a bit further to ensure that 9 of every 10 capable (not to be confused with qualified) applicants fall through the mesh.

There's an incestuous feedback cycle between colleges and corporate HR departments. So long as labor is in surplus, businesses can keep demanding that applicants purchase more of colleges product, without it costing the business anything.

[TwilightGardener]

4. Yep--my husband is on a job search now, and some of the postings he has

replied to are asking for such ridiculously complex combinations of education, skills, certification, security clearances and experience that only a handful of people in this country could possibly have them all. And they probably have jobs, LOL. All this for $50-75,000 per year. I think they weed most people out by sheer intimidation--or they already have candidates in mind but are required by law to post the jobs for the public (civil service), so they make up some impossible shit that no one has. I hate HR people, and the colleges that profit off job anxiety by offering degrees and certificates in just about everything now that used to be on-the-job training (which becomes the standard).

[Tippy]

5. Congressional Repubilicans...Just tell us why you are keeping

us from getting jobs...That crap you keep talking about is total nonsense...Republican are responsible for many in our country going to bed hungry at night. At least those who still have a roof over their heads....

[Nikia]

6. I think that many people have a hopeless mentality

Because they don't believe that they can ever get ahead, no matter how hard they work. They believe this because things are really stacked against them.
I think that this is bad for individuals and society. This is something that social Darwinist Republicans don't seem to understand. Falling wages don't encourage people to work harder because they believe that working harder won't change anything anyway. Going to college might not seem helpful if they see recent graduates with big loans and no job or a low paying job.