Friday, March 28, 2014

Five More Ways the Jobs Crisis Might be Nullified


I have previously identified three things with potential to end the permanent work shortage.  They are guaranteed income, shorter work hours, and payment for Internet information.  How about others?  Yes, there are extra ways the jobs crisis can be stopped, or at least made less important. 

First, there are the holocausts mentioned by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, in his classic 2000 Wired article “Why the future doesn’t need us.” One is from out-of-control robots, which, by replicating themselves, can give us problems bombs don’t cause.  Another could be from genetic modification, which could be used to create a fast-killing disease much worse than the medieval plague.  A third he called the “gray goo problem,” caused by nanotechnology, in which self-replicating man-made bacteria could “reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days.”  Any of these would make our need to work rather moot.

Second, funny things could happen to our consciousness.  Despite recent press on how we know we exist and how we can formally determine if other beings are alive, we don’t know much about what awareness really is.  There are four broad possibilities.  It could be algorithmic and caused by computational procedures, it could come from the brain and can be simulated by machines, it could be the same but cannot be replicated elsewhere, or it could have no physical source at all.  It’s quite a tall order to design an experiment to determine which of these is really the case, so we will continue to speculate.  If either of the first two is right, we have an interesting situation coming up – merging ourselves with computers.  If calculators, let alone animals, are self-aware, we will within the century be able to end our earthly needs, and our deaths, by changing platforms from flesh and blood to silicon.  And who would need to work then?

Third, more and more devices, along the lines of contact lenses but rather more profound, may be invented for our bodies.  One idea is nanobots, which would course through our bloodstreams and search for and destroy diseases and other malfunctions.  A lot of Superman-level technology is already in progress, such as telekinetics (making something move by thinking certain thoughts), a suit rather like an insect’s exoskeleton to provide extreme strength, and two things the Army uses already, telescopic and X-ray vision.  We may soon also see gene doping, or changing DNA to improve physical capabilities, beyond lab animals, where it has worked.  These would hardly be free, but there proliferation could warp our need for income in strange and unforeseen ways.   

Fourth, the aging process could become a thing of the past.  Possible breakthroughs could include deactivating destructive genes, treatment to change an individual’s genetic code, cell cloning for regeneration, and advanced metabolic medications, resulting in perpetual physical 35-year-olds.  The greatest advantages of these technologies would not be restricted to those born after their availability, as people could live endlessly if they only achieved what author Aubrey DeGrey called “longevity escape velocity,” when methods to stop aging add to remaining life expectancy quicker than it decreases naturally. 

Fifth, a relatively old standby in the immortality quest, cryonics, or preserving bodies at very low temperatures, could become the norm.  Science fiction author Larry Niven has written extensively on the outcome of what he called “corpsicles,” who (or which?) could be rejected or even destroyed by future generations even if the technology works, but many people, such as baseball great Ted Williams, are now in that state.  

If any of these things happen, jobs and careers could go away.  If energy and other resources become so cheap that nobody need pay for them, they won’t need to work either.

Will the jobs crisis end in one of these ways?  Technology marches on, but public policy stops and starts.  Yet our lawmakers and government leaders get there through our voting choices, so there is truth in the saying that people get the governments they deserve.  The future is, as always, ours to create. 

Friday, March 21, 2014

Here’s What to Give Up for Lent


Now let’s take a little break, from real-life Tom Clancy thrillers about disappearing airplanes, and from foreign despots doing remarkably accurate Adolf Hitler imitations (the election results were legitimate, that’s all the territory we want, we need to protect speakers of our language from harm which their country’s government couldn’t provide, and more).  It’s Lent, during which it was once a common custom for people to give things up.  So what would I like our conservatives and liberals to skip for at least its 30 remaining days?

Conservatives, give up complaining about Obamacare.  It’s the law, it’s moving forward (even if more than a little clumsily), and it’s crystal-clear that by decade’s end it will be as well established as Social Security and Medicare are now.  The stance against it is Wrong Side of History #1, and, if you can’t find something constructive to concentrate on, at least find something else to carp about.

Liberals, lay off harping about global warming, climate change, or whatever you’ll want us to call it next.  Your proselytizing reminds me of door-to-door religion sellers – if you’re confident about what you’re saying, then why do you need to convince others?  Some people who doubt that the whole package – not only that we know beyond any sane doubt that the planet is getting warmer, but that humans, especially Americans, are causing it, and that that is bad, and that the problem will go on indefinitely otherwise, AND that people can viably make the difference between salvation and disaster – is doubtlessly correct are not scientific Neanderthals.  Hush, and let the facts, if they truly support your position, speak for themselves.

Conservatives, it’s overdue by at least 16 months, since the 2012 election results were final, to dam the steady stream of criticizing Barack Obama.   He’s scheduled to be our president until January 2017.  Do you want to impeach him, remove him from office, and replace him with a Republican?  Sorry, can’t.  Running him down on each issue that comes up (Charles Krauthammer’s column, for one, while putting the occasional ball in the center-field stands, could be titled “What Obama Did Wrong This Time”) will NOT help your 2014 or 2016 causes – most moderates have just plain had enough of that stuff.

Liberals, and your guru Noam Chomsky, take time off from accusing conservatives of hating the poor.  Just because they don’t support destroying half a million jobs by raising the minimum wage, or trying to raise everyone’s prosperity to middle-class status, doesn’t mean they’ll drop their often devout Christianity by letting them starve.  Focus more on the right parts of that.  If you hadn’t asked for the sun, the moon, and the stars, more food stamps and longer unemployment benefits would have been a slam-dunk by now. 

Conservatives, on same-sex marriage, it’s time to give up.  Quit.  Fold your hand.  Leave the playing field.  That is Wrong Side of History #2.  Government licenses and humane rights, such as visiting your life partner in the hospital, are not sacred anyway.  And, if the experiments in Colorado and Washington prove nondisastrous, get ready to do the same thing with marijuana legalization.        

Liberals, for at least the next several weeks stop attributing all human differences to race, sex, or sexual orientation.  People are different in vastly more ways, and more important ways, than those things, which don’t explain everything.  I doubt you’re ready to believe that all groups aren’t 100% biologically or even culturally equal in interests, priorities, drive, and therefore economic outcomes, but at least stop dumping everyone’s actions on their genital type, skin pigmentation, or who they want in bed with them.

Conservatives, at least briefly table the gun-control paranoia!  So you think Obama, like every other Democratic president since Andrew Jackson, wants to ban guns?  OK, document it.  And then don’t believe it.  Even if everyone in Congress lost what was left of their common sense, the avowed blue-steel Democrats there would see that anything like that would get laughed out of committee, even if it bizarrely got that far.  And no, restrictions on things like giant ammunition magazines in public are not sinister precursors to such a law, any more than driving a mile west to your Atlanta grocery store means you’re headed to Los Angeles.

Liberals, did you think you were escaping blame for resisting change?  Hardly.  Through the next month, please stop equating the unions in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution, when labor and management were true opponents and neither employers nor employees knew when workers should and should not be pushed or endangered, with public-sector organizations today.  As the Japanese knew decades ago, once unions are in place they should be fully cooperated with, but advocating expanding their scope, especially by evoking images such as the widows of workers dying in steel mills getting denied even that day’s pay, is Wrong Side of History #3.

Conservatives and liberals, consider, over the next four weeks and two days, that the jobs crisis might be not only permanent but a higher priority than any of these.

There you are.  If nothing else, let’s all heed the proverb about not speaking unless we can improve upon the silence.  If you don’t like that one, at least consider what Tom Lehrer said:  “I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Friday, March 14, 2014

Janet Yellen at the Fed – So Far, So Good


When Janet L. Yellen’s name first reached the general public, it was because she was a novelty.  It’s sad that 2014 someone’s sex is more important than his or her qualifications, but it’s hardly rare.  She was frequently described as a woman who was a major candidate to replace Ben S. Bernanke as Chair of Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or, as otherwise known, chair of the Fed. 

That is an extremely responsible position.  In my mind, it would contend only with the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice for not only the effect it has on others but in its need for prudence and sobriety.  The Fed’s monetary policies affect the prosperity of the majority of Americans, and the decisions are the most complex imaginable.  A fellow graduate student, in physics instead of sociology, told me he didn’t want to study the social sciences because they had “too many variables” – we can all agree that economics is in that category.  Many of its factors are worse than that – they are simply unknown, lost in the murk of human behavior.  So in many ways it is a wonder that none of the past few decades’ Fed leaders, from Paul Volcker through Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, have made a clearly catastrophic error. 

Yellen, a Harvard economics professor at age 25, had been president and CEO of San Francisco’s Federal Reserve Bank for six years when she became the Fed’s vice chair in 2010.  After President Obama went through a remarkable amount of time deciding that Yellen was the right choice for the top job, he officially nominated her in October and she started the job last month. 

Beyond the prime credentials, what is she like?  She is a Keynesian, believing in the ability of circulating money to boost economic activity.  She is known as being more concerned with jobs than with inflation.  That is now a very good thing.  Earlier this year, she went out of her way to point out that long-term joblessness had not improved as much as the unemployment rate, and touched on the damage it did to long-out-of-work people’s careers.  That is also good.  She maintained in 2012 that the economy needed more stimulation, and, back in 1995, called moderately high inflation “a wise and humane policy.”  Accordingly, she has received some criticism from the right, such as being called “entirely too easy money” by investor Julian Robertson. 

That is understandable, but not to the point.  American inflation is dormant, and has been for a long time – in fact, it has been over 23 years, since November 1990, that it has exceeded an annual 6% even for a month.  On the other hand, even if you don’t think the job shortage is permanent, you must admit that employment is recovering very slowly, well over an official 6% almost five years after the last recession’s end, with measures such as the share of adults working having not improved at all. 

Since taking office, Yellen has said that any end to the federal bond-buying program will be based on a variety of economic indicators.  That is favorable also, as is continuing another of Bernanke’s well-judged policies of keeping short-term interest rates close to zero.  She acknowledged that raising the minimum wage could cost as many as one million jobs, a fine response from the first Democrat to hold the office in thirty years.  She said that bad February weather had made a significant dent in the economy, and on that we will see, probably in three weeks with March’s jobs data. 

In all, early indications on how Yellen will be for American jobs are clearly positive.  Not only does she have the right emphases, but her words on the minimum wage show that she may not be bound by party doctrine.  We can continue to expect, and probably receive, more solid performance from the Fed chair’s office.  As for inflation, we should not worry – even if the fundamentals hinted at all that it might return, she will not get carried away.  After all, her predecessor and de facto mentor Bernanke, though once known as Helicopter Ben for his statements about increasing the money supply by throwing it out from the air, saw inflation go nowhere during his eight-year tenure.  From here, Janet Yellen looks like a winner.

Friday, March 7, 2014

AJSN: America Almost 20.3 Million Jobs Short on Neutral February Jobs Report


Dull.  Nondescript.  Undistinctive.  Unsurprising.  Inconclusive. 

Those words could be used to describe this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics federal employment issue.  The 175,000 net new jobs were almost exactly the 172,000 estimate offered in The New York Times’s Economix blog.  The headline seasonally adjusted unemployment rate went up, though only a tenth of a percent to 6.7%.

Although official joblessness rose, the American Job Shortage Number (AJSN) decreased over 300,000, mostly on smaller counts of discouraged workers and those not having looked in the previous year.  The total number of additional American positions that could be quickly filled is still almost 20.3 million, with its components as follows:


AJSN
FEBRUARY 2014
TotalLatent Demand %Latent Demand Total
Unemployed10,893,000909,803,700
Discouraged755,00090679,500
Family Responsibilities251,0003075,300
In School or Training275,00050137,500
Ill Health or Disability173,0001017,300
Other848,00030254,400
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year3,216,000802,572,800
Not Available to Work Now572,00030171,600
Do Not Want a Job85,968,00054,298,400
Non-Civilian, Institutionalized, and Unaccounted For, 15+10,110,009101,011,001
American Expatriates6,320,000201,264,000
TOTAL  20,285,501




Those in school or training dropped, a strange thing to happen between January and February, by 72,000, while those saying they just plain didn’t want to work also found an unusual decrease, of 58,000, as did the non-civilian, institutionalized, and unknown group, off 449,000. 
Two of last month’s favorable changes held their gains; the labor force participation rate and employment-to-population ratio, more important in assessing the availability of work than the unemployment rate, stayed at 63.0% and 58.8%.  The number of people working part-time when they would prefer full-time improved to 7.2 million, while the count of long-term unemployed, officially jobless for 27 weeks or longer, gained back nearly all of its January loss and now stands at 3.8 million.  Seasonally unadjusted unemployment stayed at 7.0%. 
Compared with a year ago, the AJSN is now almost 1.5 million lower.  Almost the entire reason is fewer people unemployed, down 1.6 million.  Although over 3 million more are non-civilian, in institutions, or off the grid, 362,000 fewer report they want to work but haven’t looked over the past year, and 130,000 fewer are officially discouraged.  The number saying they didn’t want a job at all increased, as it is almost certain to continue doing, to 2.7 million.   
So what can we take away from this data?  First, the employment situation seems to have stabilized, with the number of jobs rising remarkably consistently with the rise in the adult population, and enough Americans choosing other lifestyles and otherwise leaving the labor force to keep official unemployment steadyish.  Second, the number of work opportunities and the number of Americans are still parting company, though slowly for now.  Third, we are not in a recession, but in our modern-day steady state.  If we think that is good enough, we should be happy – if not, today’s data gave us no reason at all for optimism.