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667 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Feb \ on: The Homelessness Crisis mostly_harmless
This is such a giant topic, but one more ingredient for the stew:
I'm curious about how the shift in the constituents of the economy intersects all of this. On the one hand, it seems (from my privileged perspective) that there's a mountain of high-paying jobs waiting to be had. Granted, you need special skills; but it's also true that as long as you have access to a computer and an internet connection, you can acquire those special skills for free! You can get a better education than was possible for 99% of the world, for free, anywhere with an internet connection, right now.
I mention that to raise the following point: once upon a time, if there was work to be had, it probably didn't take that much to be qualified for it. Most of my family were laborers of various sorts. You showed up and after a little training you sacrificed the integrity of your body for a paycheck. Not super self-actualizing, but open to everyone.
Now, if you don't have certain intellectual skills, or the right temperament, those things are all closed to you. And I don't think being a laborer is viable for almost anyone.
I know this is a very mainstream topic, and I don't know anything about it other than the hot take given above, but it seems intuitively relevant that if you fall off the conveyer belt that prepares you for the modern economy, it's really hard to get back on. You probably don't transition from living under a bridge to a job in the information economy the way you could in the industrialized era.
I'm going to reply to you and @siggy47 here, because he made a related point.
Supposedly, there's been a sharp increase in the share of people who would have been working class in previous years, but are now unemployable for the reasons you laid out. This was something Jordan Peterson was very concerned about and he cited a figure that something like 16% of the working age population is not capable of productive work.
I'm not sure I buy into that story. There are so many other things going on that I'm not ready to conclude that this is just a fact of our modern economy, but it is clearly part of what is happening.
There's another phenomenon that seems relevant, which is the sharp rise in entry-level wages (or at least offers). I haven't seen this reflected in labor data, but for the past decade I've noticed advertisements for jobs (often unpleasant ones) that were offering two or three times what a job like it used to pay. Somehow, we have both a huge pool of unemployed low-skill people and a bunch of employers desperately seeking entry-level workers.
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There are so many other things going on that I'm not ready to conclude that this is just a fact of our modern economy, but it is clearly part of what is happening.
Same. It's worth more than zero, but less than everything. The nuance that seems most important to me is not "are some people too dumb to work in the jobs favored by the modern economy" which would be a more extreme rendition of JBP's point; but "after you've made enough bad decisions to be in danger of homelessness, have you got yourself into a corner s.t. you can't get on board in the modern economy." I think the two are related and not identical.
Somehow, we have both a huge pool of unemployed low-skill people and a bunch of employers desperately seeking entry-level workers.
I posted about this at some point -- am very very interested in the topic because I just can't fathom how it's possible. And yet it's right there, in front of us. So bizarre.
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Even practicing labor economists don't know what's going with entry-level employment trends. We're missing something important, though.
after you've made enough bad decisions to be in danger of homelessness, have you got yourself into a corner s.t. you can't get on board in the modern economy
Then again, you hear about people getting out of prison after decades and starting back up. My dad worked with inner-city kids for a long time and one of the things that stuck with me from that is how some people overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and others just can never get out of their own way.
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There's no question that some people can surmount any hellish depths you can imagine, just like some people can smoke for 50 years and die of natural causes. It gets less likely as you stack the deck against them, though.
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