43 Years of College as the Presumed Choice – Its Meaning, Changes, and Value – I

What do people do after graduating from high school? 

Once upon a time there were many common answers to this question, but in recent decades one has increasingly and remarkably steadily become the norm for above average students and many below.  It has hardly been that way throughout the nation’s history; according to the U.S. Department of Education, in the 1869-1870 school year only 1.3% of 18 to 24-year-old Americans were enrolled in college.  That share edged up to 2.3% in 1899-1900, reached 4.7% by 1919-20, and even in the Depression-time 1933-34 was at 6.7%.  By 1945-46, the beginning of the G.I. Bill, it reached 10.0%, achieving 17.7% only ten years later and 27.7% in fall 1963, on the eve of U.S. Vietnam War involvement.  With the end of conscription twelve years later, 40.3% of Americans attended, not exceeding that rate until 1981 but reaching 53.7% by the fall of 1991.  Sources conflict after those dates, but per the Bureau of Labor Statistics 70% of high school students went directly to college in 2005, though dropping to 65.9% by the fall of 2013.  Most other first-world countries have not reached these levels; in a 44-country list from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom had a higher share of 2014 25 to 34-year-olds with at least two-year degrees than America’s 46%. 

Since the Civil War, this massive and inexorable-seeming social trend has built with a remarkable lack of opposers.  One classic exception was author Caroline Bird, whose 1975 The Case Against College argued that fewer people should attend.  The book includes sections on how universities and even two-year schools benefit from a “mystique,” the cost of college to parents and students, its real, statistical, and erroneously purported advantages, a look at the true sources of success, and a 44-page chapter on alternative courses of action.  The work got attention, but as above did not stop the enrollment rise.

Now, 43 years later, we have picked up another dissident, this time professor Bryan Caplan, author of last month’s The Case Against Education.  In some ways, the roles and situation of college have transformed; in some ways they have not.  Here are nine changes, from Caplan and elsewhere, since Bird’s book.

First, the cost of college has massively increased even in relation to inflation.  The prices quoted by Bird, including $22,256 for all expenses for four years at Princeton, $2,400 per year including books and support for resident state-school students, and a medical school graduate expecting to owe “close to $15,000” now seem quaint.  According to former U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, college tuition rose 260% from 1980 to 2014, compared with 120% for the Consumer Price Index.  Anecdotally, and by adding a few years to each end, we can get much higher jumps.  Tuition at Lawrence University, which I attended for the 1975-76 school year, has more than decupled from $4,400 to 2016-2017’s $44,544.  That at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, for state residents, soared 14-fold from 1977’s $680 for two full-credit semesters to $9,534 per year.  As a student I covered that with 320 hours of minimum-wage work, at $2.30 per hour less payroll tax deductions – today, at Wisconsin’s $7.25, it would take 1,424.    

Second, vocationalism, which was starting to vie with pure learning for main college directions in 1975, largely won that battle in the early 1980s, with school-wide emphasis changes and accounting becoming the most popular undergraduate major.

Third, the percentage of graduates has also increased substantially.   In 1975, 17.6% of American males, and 10.6% of females had four-year degrees; by 2016 those numbers were up to 33.2% and 33.7%, or a combined share 137% higher.

Fourth, the average statistical advantage for graduates has also gone up, with the expected “earnings premium,” cited by Caplan as rising from 50% more over a lifetime than those only finishing high school in the late 1970s to 73% last year.

Fifth, there are more college dropouts than ever, and they are not counted in the statistical gain above.  They accrue sometimes considerable debt, impede themselves from earning more during their enrollment times, cost their parents money as well, and, per Caplan, may after failing “be too embittered to go back and learn a trade.” 

Sixth, employers’ main response to degrees becoming more common has been to raise their educational requirements.  In the 1950s, people wanting careers in business rarely went to college.  Later, I saw that personally in AT&T management – when arriving in 1988, my bachelor’s degree was a solid credential, with many peers and even my first on-the-job boss without one, but in only nine years so many such managers had retired, been downsized, or were otherwise replaced by those two steps more educated, that I felt naked without a master’s degree.  The tasks themselves did not change nearly that much, with intelligence and technical aptitude still most required.

Seventh, academic work and studying hours in college have dropped.  Per Caplan, average 1967 students took 40 hours per week for class and study time – in 2017, that was 27. 

Eighth, and strangely given the last difference, above-average universities have become significantly more selective.  Even correcting for high school grade inflation, many successful 1970s and 1980s professionals could not now get into the colleges they attended with the credentials they had.  To name only one example, the University of Wisconsin at Madison then accepted almost all applicants with gradepoint averages in the top half of their classes – now the average is 3.85, and over half of those seeking to attend are rejected.  

Ninth, the general incompetence of graduates, in conjunction with their learning only narrow pieces of subjects, has worsened.  For me, the most depressing parts of learning about Caplan’s work were his examples of what people who successfully completed college, the most recent of whom have overcome these high admission requirements, paid modern-day tuition, and avoided falling to the no-degree wayside, often or even generally cannot do.  Per Caplan, 20% had only “basic” or even “below basic” literacy, and many could not “make sense of a table explaining how an employee’s annual health-insurance costs varied with income and family size, or summarize the work-experience requirements in a job ad, or even use a newspaper schedule to find when a television program ended.”  He also discovered Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s finding that “students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”  Caplan glumly noted that while “those who believe that college is about learning how to learn should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use it to analyze the world,” it “scarcely occurs.”  While 1970s universities with their arena-sized classrooms and predominant “multiple-guess” exams had, though to a lesser extent, these problems as well, few good academic departments would have let people graduate without having more flexible capability within their fields. 

Next week, we look at what has stayed the same since Bird’s work, and what is now happening, overall, with American higher education. 

Bogus Employment Situations, How People Actually Find Work, and What Hiring Managers Really Want – Or Not

As long as there are people looking for employment, in other words as long as there is employment, there will be advice on how to get it.  Here we have three pieces from two authors, one maybe the best employment-obtaining columnist in the nation, and one with a standpoint of value without much previous stature in the field, anthropology.  What are they saying, and how much merit does it have?

First is another incisive warning from Liz Ryan of Forbes, her August 8th “Ten Signs You’re Interviewing For A Fake Job Opportunity.”  She recapped a letter received from a blogger cold-recruited for “Director of New Markets” and brought in for four interviews, during which “every conversation was stimulating,” then invited to a fifth, before which he overheard himself being described as a “tremendous resource… helping us figure out how to market our new products.”  He left the meeting early, then, when his main interviewer asked him to meet with a customer, requested that the man “get serious about this job offer,” after which he was never contacted again.

With online sources giving information about people’s knowledge and experience, which is often more than seekers of lower and middle management positions usually had in decades past, such abuse is a real problem.  Her ten tipoffs included a lack of apparent vetting and new interviewers every time who record your answers (“If they were going to hire you, why would they need to write down what you say?”), contrasted with vague and ever-changing information on their recruiting process, inability to articulate business “pain” with which the organization needs help, and a situation where “the job title, reporting relationship and responsibilities change every time you talk to them.”  As Ryan has written before, when all the company seems to care about is obtaining what you know, it’s time to talk instead about a consulting fee.

The second piece was Richard Eisenberg’s November 9^th Next Avenue “Why Job Hunters Don’t Find Work,” an interview with anthropology professor Ilana Gershon.  She reached five ostensibly preconception-free conclusions, that personal brands don’t help people get jobs, that “people you don’t know very well” aren’t worth much either, that “employers rarely know” how effective potential hires would be, that true workplace ties are the best, and that age discrimination is often implemented by employers dropping applicants without communication.  I think better of personal branding than Gershon, as it is a way of becoming known before jobs become open, and don’t think all people have enough direct work contacts to ignore the secondary ones, but otherwise I can’t disagree with any of these.     

The third article, published January 9^th and also from Liz Ryan in Forbes, gave me more to quarrel with than anything I can remember from her.  Perhaps that started with the overstated title, “Ten Things Every Hiring Manager Is Looking For.”  Clearly she was right about candidates’ needing to tell stories showing, instead of just stating, that they are “hard-working, smart and reliable,” even if such tales may not be believed, but those filling jobs don’t always particularly want “someone who can think on their feet,” “who’s dependable and keeps their commitments,” or “who has a sense of humor,” especially if they are not like that themselves, and it is surprisingly naïve to say that “they want to hire someone who has great ideas and is happy to share them,” or “is willing to learn, and to teach what they know.”  Having been told I wasn’t “a good fit” for a position that fit me like an Italian driving glove, after a day’s worth of interviews during which I emphasized my quality with actual work experiences, may have biased me, but I think most long-time corporate managers have seen the same. 

So what does work for getting a good job?  I will stay with my perceptions, originated by me during a half-year of unemployment and seconded by my career counselor, that hiring managers want two things:  someone with specific experience at the position in question, and someone they like personally.  You will know when you have the former, and the latter is far too individual to say, beyond ordinary manners and courtesy, what will win you over to “every” interviewer, or even to most of them.  As with tournament bridge, all you can do is play your game, and if you lose, you lose.  As with standup comedy, since you always risk it you should ensure that if you bomb it is with your own material.  As I learned in comedy improv, if you “suck” and “die” you should smile and bow.  Accordingly, prepare, be on time, and be yourself.  That is the right approach.      

It’s Open: Resorts World Catskills Is Already Transforming Sullivan County and Beyond

Yesterday, the long-anticipated Monticello, New York casino, approved by voters over four years ago, opened its doors.  With fewer than one third of its anticipated 332 hotel rooms available, many restaurants still in construction, and Resorts World Catskills’ centerpiece golf course not to be ready until next year, it’s a soft opening, but weeks ahead of schedule that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

The gaming facility will have two special emphases.  First it is trying to cater, more than other regional casinos, to high rollers, with private gambling areas and high-end accommodations.  Second, with Mandarin-speaking staff and large layouts for the dice game sic bo, similar to ones I saw crowded with players in Macau, it is seeking eastern Asian customers.  It has already been credited with creating anywhere from 1,400 to 2,200 jobs.  Additionally, in a departure from the casino model created by Bugsy Siegel over 70 years ago and still in use worldwide, it has large windows, perhaps emphasizing its integration with instead of separation from its surrounding area. 

How has employment worked out so far?  In June 2015, before significant construction had started, Sullivan had 32,441 people employed and 5.3% unemployment, higher than neighboring Orange and Ulster counties’ 4.8%.  A year later, Sullivan had shrunk the gap from 0.5% to 0.2%, and was up to 33,045 working and down to 4.2% unemployment.  By June 2017, possibly the building peak, Sullivan County, though now at 4.4% joblessness, was tied with Ulster and better than Orange, with 33,653 employed.  Given that these numbers reflect county residents instead of in-county employment, these statistics do not clearly show Sullivan’s work-opportunity changes, but a net gain of over 1,200 positions for a place of this size is noteworthy – and residents of nearby counties have also been helped. 

As for Resorts World Catskills’ future, we can only speculate.  Some comments coming out now look oversold, particularly the idea that the facility will, by itself, return the Catskills to its postwar tourism glory.  Its emphasis on large bettors may not work out.  If it starts with results as disappointing as those from other new state casinos, we hope the owners have the patience and can implement the business changes to achieve a turnaround.  The idea of catering to Asian players could be either visionary or quixotic, yet we should expect that chief Empire Resorts owner K.T. Lim, a billionaire Malaysian of Chinese descent, can bring them in and get them what they want.    

All the advantages, though, I cited in an August 2013 blog post still apply.  The increased tax revenues will help the state as well as the community, with many New Yorkers certain to choose it over competitors in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.  Tourism to the area will rise, with legal, fair, modern gambling, and other entertainment, becoming part of what the Catskills offer.  Those of us living in the area will have, along with the gaming opportunities, additional access to concerts, restaurants, nightclubs, golf, and waterparking.  The casino includes a poker room, giving the many people who play that game, in a category apart from others since it is not against the house, its only public Sullivan County venue.  Those unable to tolerate gambling have many casino-arranged resources, including the ability to bar themselves, available.  The resort is confined to its land and will not threaten widespread environmental destruction as did the previous large opportunity, fracking.   Accordingly, all we can do is cheer for it, because, at this point, if the casino wins we will as well.     

AJSN Up Almost 900,000 To 17.15 Million as Unemployment Seasonally Jumps on Otherwise Slightly Warm Fed Jobs Report

The news is in from two classic American places this morning.  The first was discouraging but expected.  Washington, though, did better than Gobbler’s Knob.

We were led to anticipate a poor jobs report, with indifferent employment gains at best, after how much, a year ago, January dropped off from December.  Once again, though, this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was more moderate than expected.  While unadjusted joblessness did worsen considerably, from 3.9% to 4.5%, the adjusted version held at 4.1%.  We added 200,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions, half again what we needed to cover population growth.  The count of long-term unemployed, or those officially jobless for 27 weeks or longer, shed 100,000 to reach a new prerecession low of 1.4 million.  Average private nonfarm wages added 9 cents to a 2-cent December adjustment and is now at $26.74, for the past year up 2.9% and more than inflation.  The two measures of how common it is for Americans to be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, held for the second straight month at 62.7% and 60.1% respectively.  

Bringing up the rear in January’s federal statistics were adjusted unemployment, which rose 100,000 to 6.7 million, and the count of Americans working part-time for economic reasons or holding on to part-time jobs while looking for full-time ones, up the same amount for the second straight month to 5.0 million. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure of latent demand which shows in one figure how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew they were available, gained 867,000, almost completely on unadjusted unemployment’s bump, as follows:

Comparing the AJSN with last January’s, though, gives a more encouraging story.  It is now almost 1.2 million lower, with more than one quarter of that difference coming from people marginally attached to the labor force, specifically those discouraged or not searching for work in the previous year.  There are also now about 1.1 million fewer Americans in the armed services, in institutions, or off the grid.  On the other hand, to what should be nobody’s surprise, the count of those claiming no interest whatever in working continued its steady climb with 1.9 million more, in large but hardly entire part from the increasingly aging population.

So how good a month was this January?  Quite respectable, if unspectacular.  We avoided as large a seasonal drop as we had last year, and the strong gain in jobs was not offset much by anything else.  Accordingly, I saw the turtle shake his legs and take a step forward.  

Double Issue: Around the Horn on the News, On and Off the Jobs Topic

What’s been happening lately? 

The smelliest story of last week, if not truly deserving of being the largest, was not quite how it was widely interpreted.  Our president’s descriptive term about Haiti and a group of central African countries was vile, highly offensive, gratuitously provocative, and a piece of putrid diplomacy.  It was not racist.  The tendency of many liberals and some others to see any situation involving significant numbers of blacks through a racial lens came through here.  It is true that the countries referred to have predominately non-Arab African populations, but so do many others, such as Barbados, The Bahamas, and Botswana, which would never, even in his mind, suggest that label.  The citizens of almost all the world’s poorest countries are predominately of that overly general racial type, so unless he had gone out of his way to name one of the exceptions, say, Afghanistan, his statement would draw that accusation.  In our generally reasonable efforts to assess what this president is doing and saying, even when it is as here spectacularly repulsive, we must still be fair.

Prejudicial responses also came from last week’s top business news, Walmart’s boost of their lowest chain-wide pay from $9 to $11 per hour, with additional benefits and many $1,000 add-on bonuses, and their almost simultaneous announcement of their decision to close 63 Sam’s Club stores later this year.  Walmart is to liberals much as Jane Fonda is to old-time conservatives, and their reaction to these business decisions, the first of which will cost the chain $700 million, was no more positive and believing than what those on the right would say if the former actress posed with a cache of guns and expressed fealty to the Second Amendment.  The point of this sharp attack may have been John Foley’s January 11^th New York Times “Walmart’s Minor Act of Retribution,” which called the over-two-thirds-of-a-billion-dollars “just a sliver of what it could save in taxes,” though according to analysts it was actually about 30 percent, or rather more if you imagine that portion of a pie.  The company also announced it would be cutting 1,000 corporate positions, which also seemed to get no favorable press.  It was noteworthy that while the closing Sam’s Club locations are heavily located in urban, suburban, or other relatively high-wage areas, a much larger share of the workers benefitting from these 22% wage increases are not, meaning not only that the company will now be sending a greater part of its money to the poorest American areas, but that it will get even more applicants for jobs already in heavy demand.  Investors were not moved much, and it may prove to be a lose-lose proposition for the firm, costing itself money while failing to satisfy its inconsolable opponents. 

Another large news item was from the previous week, that of Oprah Winfrey giving a fine if very partisan speech at the Golden Globes award ceremony, and emerging almost instantly as not only a possible 2020 presidential candidate but as a potential juggernaut of one.  She seems the perfect Democratic response to our current president – she is widely beloved for reasons other than substance, she is a woman, her fame is mostly from entertainment, her previous political experience borders on nonexistence, her party orientation is secondary but clear-cut, and she is black but transcends racial limitations similarly to Colin Powell who decades ago could have run and won.  Given the bizarre turn presidential politics took two years ago, she is deserving of the oddsmakers’ present choice of her as the most likely Democrat to win.  If she wants it she should go for it – it is quite possible that she is actually the only person, aside from the president himself, who can limit our current, potentially disastrous situation to four years. 

Moving to the subject of an article appearing in a Monday-dated magazine but appearing online the week before that, we, along with Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker’s “Resolutions” (electronic-version title “Improving Ourselves to Death”), look at the state of self-help literature.  Schwartz showed us how the genre has responded to higher work standards and requirements, gained diversity, and of course built on its own history, giving us approaches based on self-acceptance, telling others off, setting measurable and quantifiable goals, multifaceted development including such as cleansing diets and 1,000-digit pi memorization, making radical situational changes, and even choosing to “content ourselves with being average.”  It’s a good check-in on the field, but does not quite touch on what I have long considered its largest problem, that no matter how much most people can improve, their success will be determined by others who usually will not care about, or even like, your progresses.  Unless you want to do it as a hobby, or you have the aptitude, opportunity and sustained intensity necessary for a serious business venture or other project (and, as the world is closing in, realistic settings for such things are getting rarer and rarer), raising yourself from the 90^th percentile to the 99^th in public speaking, self-awareness, physical health, organization skills, work habits, or self-esteem will generally not, in money or even happiness, justify itself.  The outcome for people in the great middle capability and ambition zone is more likely, per Schwartz writing freely and quoting various authors, to contribute to high suicide, body-dissatisfaction, and anxiety rates; succumb to perfectionism, “the idea that kills”; and, if conveyed to others, add to the current situation, where “parents continue to feed their children the loving, well-intentioned lie that there are “no limits” and they can “be anything,” which leaves the kids blaming themselves, rather than the market’s brutality, when they inevitably come up short.”  If you find yourself the likes of morbidly obese, emotionally unable to chair a meeting at work, or stopping yourself from social behavior you know would be fun as well as beneficial, get the help you need, but once you surpass problems of this severity it may not be healthy for you to consume figurative platefuls of vitamins.

Another issue that keeps coming up is the possibility of removing our president through the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which, if “the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president can indefinitely act for him.  Our current one may be as objectionable as anyone to ever hold that office, and be the best likewise at bringing out negative emotions, but is not in this territory.  He maintains an excellent chance of being impeached, especially if Democrats take over both houses of Congress this fall, but it’s a waste of hope and effort to get him out before 2021 otherwise.  On a similar note, it’s wrong to overstate how much he is damaging our country’s reputation, as a clear problem with our form of government is that, once a century or two and with luck no more often than that, we elect a stinker. 

Here is one more paragraph on three more issues.  One, sex, often called gender, is becoming more of a social construct, defined by which one people decide to present as, which may be a change for the better, but doesn’t make transsexuals biological members of their new one, and it is positively Orwellian to change sexes on birth certificates, which must reflect anatomical and genetic realities.  Two, sex differences in average pay need not reflect educated and career-focused women, but those who set up their lives to depend on men for most of their money – as long as Seven Sisters graduates and similarly credentialed women are statistically tethered to others, we will not know the extent of the discrimination they face.  Three, in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others, all should know that advocating social conservatism, in anything from drug legalization to religious views, is going against the flow of history – in fifty years, for example, it will stun our great-grandchildren to realize that using a certain wild-growing weed could once, in this country, get you prison time – and should not be done.  

Next week, I will be traveling and well away from both computers and my normal routine, so will not have a blog post.  Rejoin me on February 2^nd, for my comments on the January jobs report and the latest update of the American Job Shortage Number (AJSN).  Have a fine fortnight. 

Starting 2018 with Six Proposed Jobs-Related Trends of Merit

We’re now on the twelfth day of the new year.  We don’t know what will happen, but we can predict and project. 

I am in receipt of six interrelated views.  How good are they, and what might the authors not be seeing about our current and evolving situation?

We start with the October 24^th New York Times “A Peek at Future Jobs Shows Growing Economic Divides.”  Ben Casselman suggested that the expected 2026 state for our economy is “more dominated by the service sector amid the continued erosion of manufacturing jobs,” appropriate since after those two, which followed extraction, we know of nothing to take over from service positions, which have hardly multiplied in past decades, as the highest level of paid work.  He did well to say that jobs centering on not only machine-compatible tasks but on algorithmic ones are endangered, and that, according to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, “overall job growth will continue to be slow.”  I quarrel with a finding that “computer science and other fields heavy in math or science will grow quickly” – I think in the next decade many American positions in those fields will go away to both globalization and automation, factors mentioned in the article – and don’t think a “steep decline” for typists and telephone operators would now be meaningful, but, overall, Casselman and this study are on solid ground.

Finlay Renwick, writing in Esquire, cited a rather different source in his November 7^th “Stephen Hawking Is Reasonably Worried We’re All Going To Be Destroyed By Robots.”  This is not new territory, but hearing it from possibly the world’s most brilliant man gives it extra impact.  As Renwick reported, Hawking told a Web Summit conference crowd that artificial intelligence “could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation or the worst,” and maintained that “we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.”  Not only could the technology produce “powerful autonomous weapons,” as we should already know, but also “new ways for the few to oppress the many.” He correctly said that “we simply need to be aware of the dangers, identify them, employ the best possible practice and management, and prepare for its consequences well in advance.”  All worthy of emphasis, especially from such a lofty perch.

There isn’t any consensus on the nature of the first three, but now, per Jim Hoagland in the November 22^nd New York Times, “The fourth industrial revolution is upon us.”  After steam engines, electricity, and computers, Hoagland saw some combination of machine learning and autonomous vehicles as the next fundamental leap.  It’s a problem that even two-page articles based on ideas as good as this one are sometimes too long, and here it didn’t help us to hear, erroneously, that “6.1 million jobs currently sit vacant largely because applicants lack either the skills or mobility needed,” or that China is one of two superpowers because we are in “a new bipolar world based on technology.”  Still, full credit to Hoagland.

One large autumn piece of employment news was a McKinsey study concluding that “Automation could kill 73 million U.S. jobs by 2030” (Paul Davidson, USA Today, November 28^th), which drew the comment, odd since it was from one of the effort’s co-authors, that “the dire predictions that robots are going to take our jobs are overstated.”  Well, it depends on both the job and the timeframe, and the “huge overhaul of the economy and labor market” advocated in the report won’t, as far as we can see, happen with paid positions.  The vague conclusions Davidson cited, such as that technology will replace from “zero to a third of work activities” and that from “39 million to 73 million jobs could [not will] be destroyed,” fail to inform, but the conclusions that “jobs will be created from rising incomes and consumption” and from “an aging population that will demand more health care professionals and investment in infrastructure and renewable energy” are, if obvious, worth something.  Although, in the absence of something as wide-scoped as a national infrastructure project, training doesn’t seem like a national project, it was good to hear the same co-author putting blame where it belongs, by saying that “governments and businesses already have fallen short in the retraining of workers.”  Ultimately, these study results are down the middle, which should make them noncontroversial and relatively easy to accept.

We have also long known about average Westerners getting older, but how is it that “We haven’t prepared for the aging monster” (Washington Post, December 6^th)?  Author Robert J. Samuelson correctly said that “the problem is simple,” but concluded that our only choices are higher retirement ages, cut benefits, or higher taxes.  He left out the effect of not only more jobs but more good jobs for those 60 and older, without which we will indeed make no progress and need no preparation.  The reason the jobs crisis continues despite much improved employment numbers is that so many Americans and others, such as the 96 million out of the labor force, are neither working nor officially jobless, and that people choosing in large numbers to drop interest in working does not mean they would not ultimately want to do that and generate federal tax revenue in the process.  More career positions for those now taking early or other retirement from lack of perceived opportunities is the best aging-trend preparation we could have.

Contrary to its title, Alex Williams’s December 11^th New York Times “Will Robots Take Our Children’s Jobs?” is a survey of what individuals should know and can do about our employment situation.  As I covered in Work’s New Age and Choosing a Lasting Career, Wilson identified the problem, documented the rising ability of software to replace human analysis, considered guaranteed basic income, touched on the Singularity, and looked at what career paths might stay or disappear.  Although he seemed to fall into a trap by citing a TED talk saying that bank employees have not reduced in number, but rather replaced “mind-numbing work like counting out 20-dollar bills” with “more cognitively demanding tasks” when the lack of job loss has been completely due to massively more transactions, he ended with a quotation that “the robot plumber is a long, long way away.”  As with other articles here, Williams’s piece is flawed but still well worthwhile.  We might end the decade with the likes of December’s 4.1% official unemployment, but only if we can avoid a recession – if we get one of those, we will see even more truth in the predictions above.       

December’s AJSN Up 113,000 to 16.3 Million Positions Behind in Classically Meh December Jobs Report

The word on the electronic street, coming in to this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, was that it was going to be a good month, with 190,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions added.  It didn’t work out that way, though as we will see it was hardly a thumbs-down report either. 

We added 148,000 jobs, not an embarrassment but only about 15,000 more than we need for our increasing population.  Average private nonfarm payroll wages were up 8 cents per hour, a few cents more than inflation, to reach $26.63.  The count of what the BLS calls “long-term unemployed,” or those jobless for the past 27 weeks or longer, fell 100,000 to 1.5 million, but the number of those working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping less than full-time positions while looking thus far unsuccessfully for something beyond that category, rose the same amount to 4.9 million.

The other significant statistics broke even.  There are still 6.6 million officially unemployed.  Seasonally adjusted and unadjusted joblessness are still at 4.1% and 3.9% respectively.  The two measures of how common it is for Americans to be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, held at 62.7% and 60.1%. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing in one figure how many more positions could be quickly filled if all knew that getting one were as easy as getting a pizza, didn’t change much either.  However, with a sharp increase in those claiming no interest in working, and gains or no change in all seven categories of marginal attachment, especially those wanting work but not looking for the past year, the difference was unfavorable, up just over 100,000 as follows:

Compared with a year before, however, the AJSN has shown real improvement, completely in the number of those officially unemployed, down since December 2016 from 7,170,000 to 6,278,000.  There was a drop of 255,000 in the count of people not having looked for work in the past year, but that was more than erased by rises in the numbers of those in the armed services or off the grid and the best estimate of American expatriates.

So where did we go this month?  Once again, nowhere.  As before, where we are camping out is not so bad, with low unemployment and participation rates significantly above their 2015-2016 lows, but that is very much what we are doing.  However, our employment situation has stopped improving.  Whether that is plenty good enough, woefully inadequate, or somewhere in between is for you to judge.  For the third straight month, though, the turtle did not move a leg muscle.