Assorted Jobs Topics: Five Shots, All Lined Up

Straight, no chaser:

The May 18^th New York Times included KJ Dell’Antonia’s “How High School Ruined Leisure.”  The author is a novelist, but this story was hardly fiction.  It showed us more about how we are implementing what in the 20^th century could have been called the Japanese model:  very difficult high school followed by much easier college, and subsequent professional opportunities often circumscribed by the university attended.  Dell’Antonia correctly described what were once called extracurricular activities, often in sports or music, as the students’ de facto careers, making these ventures no longer “leisure,” and could have cited Mark Twain describing work as “whatever a body is obliged to do.”  After the former great structuredness of their lives, young people often arrive in college with no idea of what they really like to do when taking a break from preparing for their futures, so will need to develop that life skill.

A question for 2019, “What even is a data-obsessed, project-juggling digital ninja?,” was the subtitle of a piece in the June Atlantic.  Here in “America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End,” author Amanda Mull chronicled “the obnoxious state of the modern job listing,” with perplexing and intense-seeming requirements of which the above are only a few examples.  I stopped off after a page or so to wonder if employers could really identify whether a prospective worker, or even someone on the job, was an “online warrior” or had “a passion for incredible customer service,” then saw the real problem with this sort of thing, that they are going to end up with a heavy share of the applicants they want the most, those young and male.  It is sad that, in an age where bogus accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on are almost ubiquitous, the true discrimination here, until this article, has gone unnoticed.  This is old wine in a new bottle, with ever more shameless emphasis on workaholism, and, if as Mull finished, top salaries and flexible labor practices are still lacking, ultimately “few people” will “seem to want to do the duties of a rock star if they’re not going to get paid like one.”

Eric Ravenscraft, in the June 5^th New York Times, broached an issue I have called a real problem with setting minimum legal pay rates, “What a ‘Living Wage’ Actually Means.”  He started with understatement, writing that “the definition” of that “can get muddy,” then told those somehow unaware that different geographical areas require different amounts of money.  The piece was biased toward a high base living standard, and did not touch the reality of people having varying wants or even needs, but I was glad to see this headline.

A June 6^th Niskanen Center piece, the basis for a related Salon article, considered “The Economics of a Job Guarantee: Wage and Employment Effects.”  Author Ed Dolan might have been channeling my AJSN when he named as the first point in favor of assured employment “a gap between the number of people now working and the number who would work if jobs were available at a living wage.”  Also the “pay gap,” any difference between what employers are offering and the most they could, and “a public service gap,” or the value of tasks that people working such jobs would do above what they would cost.  Although Dolan, through his selection of sources, made some rather fanciful statements such as companies having “business models that require that their workers live in abject poverty” and “the minimum wage has little or no discernible effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers,” he considered possible problems, such as a too-high guaranteed starting wage rate pulling away low-paid government workers, and acknowledged that, much or most of the time, the public service gap would be negative.  His muted conclusion that “there are many reasons to question how large a role guaranteed jobs should play” constituted an objection from the left, which does not bode well for this idea.

Did you know that, per The Motley Fool’s Daniel B. Kline, in USA Today on June 9^th, “many Americans have had a work spouse”?  Kline used that phrase to describe strong workplace friendships with people of “the gender you’re attracted to,” which he found that 44% of men and a hair over half of women have had.  While most have told their romantic partners about their work spouses, many have also lied, and it has been common for such pairings to “lead to full-blown emotional affairs” and, not rarely, even to physical ones.  It is adaptive for people to form personal or semi-personal relationships at a place where people spend much of their time, but the real problem is that the closer and therefore more effective they are, the greater the danger.  So, unless you are unattached or your relationship is open, watch your step here. 

That’s it – no bar bill either.

The Next 11 Years in United States Jobs: McKinsey Looks at Automation

This past week I was thoughtfully informed of a report that came out earlier this month.  McKinsey Global Institute, and especially authors Susan Lund, James Manyika, Liz Hilton Segel, André Dua, Bryan Hancock, Scott Rutherford, and Brent Macon, issued “The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow.”  Despite the more general title, the 28-page paper was limited to the projected effects of automation through 2030, but ended with a section framing courses of action. 

After an introduction in which the authors, to their great credit, mentioned the need to have “more inclusive growth” around the country, they presented five section titles to be fleshed out.  The first, “local economies have been on diverging trajectories for years,” when documented with assignment of almost every American city or its county into 13 “archetypes,” surprised me with how small the differences actually were, with the largest gap, between the 11 “small powerhouses” (e.g. Bend, Oregon and Charleston, South Carolina) and the about 1,000 widespread counties of “distressed Americana,” between a 16% 2007-2017 jobs gain and a 5% loss.  A chart showed the progression or regression of jobs in five of these groups, along with the overall average – while each lost positions between 2007 and 2009, the “high-growth hubs” and “megacities” rebounded and then some, but the poorest 1,000 have only a barely upward-sloping line from 2009 to 2017, showing that they had not recovered from the Great Recession.  One problem with the authors’ classification system is that city and county inclusion came from after-the-fact jobs progress, not original definitions, which accentuated differences; we could not have anticipated, for example, which 192 counties would be named “rural outliers” which “have found some success with tourism or mining and energy.”  Per the article, Americans are not relocating in large numbers for better job opportunities from the least prosperous places; that is probably for two reasons beyond the community-ties one the authors mentioned, that they could not anticipate which cities and counties would do the best, and that they were not confident that opportunities there would be long-lasting. 

The second section, “automation will not be felt evenly across places or occupational categories,” was mainly an updated view of the focus of my 2013 Choosing a Lasting Career and various works since then.  The authors said, correctly in my assessment, that “what lies ahead is not a sudden robot takeover but a period of ongoing, and perhaps accelerated, change in how work is organized and the mix of jobs in the economy.”  They also mentioned that while “less than 5 percent of occupations can be automated in their entirety, but within 60 percent of jobs, at least 30 percent of activities could be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies,” important since the largest mechanization threat to employment is not entire positions going away, but employers cutting workers by reorganizing workloads, automating portions where that is possible and leaving humans with the tasks machines cannot do.  I also add that mechanizing is often not as cost-effective in less populous areas with fewer opportunities, and so will often be slower there.  The authors held that “the hollowing out of middle-wage jobs” could continue, and forecasted “strong job growth in healthcare (yes), STEM occupations (I still disagree), creative fields (not sure), and business services (until individual ones become automatable).”  For better or worse, a chart showing mechanization exposure by field projected no effect from driverless vehicles.

Section 3, “in the decade ahead, local economies could continue to diverge,” dealt with new positions being concentrated, in particular with 60% of 2030 employment growth going to “25 megacities and high-growth hubs (e.g. Austin, Charlotte, and Las Vegas), plus their peripheries,” and included a projection that rural counties in general could see no net employment increase.  The fourth section, “less educated workers are most likely to be displaced, while the youngest and oldest workers face unique challenges,” found that those with high school or lower schooling are still the most vulnerable to automation.  One fine insight was that many of the jobs people have often used to start careers, especially in retail and food service, “are the very roles that automation could phase out,” and that older workers, heading toward retirement, will often be pushed their earlier.

The final segment, “local business leaders, policy makers, and educators will need to work together to chart a new course,” while necessarily unspecific, provided an outline of how to deal best with automation.  Its four subsections were: “connecting workers with new opportunities,“ mentioning somehow-cheaper urban housing, relocation tax credits, and “new digital tools” as solutions; “retraining workers and providing lifelong learning,” suggesting enlarging and geographically expanding skill-teaching programs (most likely with special emphasis on online and community college curricula);  “creating tailored economic development strategies to boost job creation” including the critical need for high-speed Internet access everywhere, and for areas to take stock of what assets they have; and “supporting workers,” not detailed much except for the idea of portable benefits, which is a dead letter for most low-income employees as they have few of any kind.  In a final paragraph, Lund et al. noted that “the challenge is not fighting against technology but preparing US workers to succeed alongside it.”

Overall, how do I evaluate “The Future of Work in America”?  It was excellent in general.  It had sober conclusions and estimates.  My disagreements were generally minor and expected.  While closely related to Choosing a Lasting Career, its audience was not workers but those influencing public policy.  It would have profited from addressing the gap between having specific job skills and actually being hired.  It could easily be expanded to book length, and further efforts could go in many different directions.  In the meantime, though, its strength at communicating and provoking thoughts about its overall message, which I took as “it’s a lot of work to get enough jobs,” means it belongs in the hands, or on the computers, of every pertinent city and county official in the nation. 

U.S. Soccer Team Pay Differences – Sex Discrimination Yet Again?

One topic I have written on several times is different average earnings between men and women.  My first such post was from March 2015, in which I explained that while most women had the same career attitudes as most men, the share of those making choices reducing their earnings was significantly greater, and a variety of statistics, such as 94% dying on the job being male, bore that out.  The piece, which has had over 6,000 views, is at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2015/03/yes-pay-gender-gap-is-real-but-its-not.html.  This January, hoping to get people to understand how the pattern could cause an illusion of heavier sex discrimination than exists, I released a fable putting the same situation into otherworldly terms, at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-perception-problem-of-large-felines.html. 

Over the past several years, those writing on the income difference have, indeed, looked for other reasons.  Stephen J. Dubner’s “The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap,” (Freakonomics, January 7, 2016), was a compendium of possible alternative explanations, but including some constructive passages on less-known unfairness, such as behind-screen auditions increasing hiring of female symphony orchestra musicians.  My viewpoint came out in “Don’t Buy Into the Gender Pay Gap Myth” (Forbes, April 12^th, 2016), in which, to show the entrenchedness of the perception of discrimination, author Karen Agness Lips added a story of “a group of 70 undergraduate women at Harvard,” when asked if they thought they would earn 78% of men’s pay, most indicated yes.  In the May 13^th, 2017 New York Times, Claire Cain Miller opined that “The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood,” and named reasons among the 11 figures I had presented in the post above.  After a flurry of August-September 2017 writing about Google’s efforts to increase the share of women in technical positions (for example “Push for Gender Equality in Tech?  Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far,” in the September 23^rd New York Times), we had another piece similar to mine, in Mary Katharine Ham’s April 10, 2018 The Federalist “Equal Pay Day Hype Ignores The Facts and Women’s Feelings About The Workplace.”  Overall, some commentators are getting the message that even if two-thirds of women are getting 100% of men’s average earnings due to their willingness to put in as many hours, choose less comfortable and convenient jobs, work as late into life, and so on, the remaining one-third is more than enough to create the illusion that all women are routinely paid less.  

Yet, that is not all.  I have since seen many articles looking for pay-gap reasons beyond unfair treatment or differing choices, which is healthy.  On the other side, though, was a recent pack-journalism effort.  From the beginning of the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament, reporting of the United States Women’s National Team was intense and pervasive.  It surprised me, since the team was already familiar with success, having won the event three times, including its last running in 2015.  As the event progressed the stories became more and more political, focusing on how much the players earned instead of on their on-field skill, and after they again won it all the coverage became editorial, advocating paying them “equally” to the far-less-successful men’s team. 

There are problems with that.  In the July 8^th Washington Post, Meg Kelly dug into the situation with “Are U.S. women’s soccer players earning less than men?”  She found three things not covered by others.  First was that the women’s and men’s teams are, strangely enough, hard to compare financially, as the teams have made “different collective-bargaining agreements,” which included men getting only performance and number-of-games bonuses and women receiving salaries but smaller bonuses.  Second, fully half of the income of the paying organization, the U.S. Soccer Federation, comes from sponsorships, which include television rights and are often sold “as a bundle,” with men’s and women’s teams both included.  Third, the World Cup’s parent company, Fédération Internationale de Football Association or FIFA, pays prize money to national groups for success, but its total amounts are $400 million for men and $30 million for women.

With the media blitz, it is certain that the USSF women’s team has gained fans.  Will they now be as lucrative as the men’s?  I doubt it.  Of three other sports in which the sexes have long played professionally and separately at high levels, tennis, golf, and basketball, men’s event attendances and TV audiences have always been much higher.  College basketball is not even as close.  There are certainly exceptions within countries, but we’ll see how much, and how quickly, the money wants to follow.  In the meantime, we can’t forget that jobs of all kinds pay according to the cash value of their employees.  That is not discrimination.   

June’s Employment Report: With Big Hiring, Looks Like No Recession, but AJSN, Up to 16.4 Million, Says Latent Job Demand is Still a Problem

As May’s job growth lagged, this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was especially important.  A subpar gain in the number of Americans working, when results insufficient to cover population growth have long been rare, would mean two in a row.  But we didn’t get that.  We exceeded the published projections of 160,000 and 168,000 to add 224,000 net new nonfarm positions, putting us back on the beam.

Other numbers were mixed.  The adjusted unemployment rate edged up 0.1% to 3.7%, with the unadjusted figure seasonally way up, gaining 0.4% to 3.8%.  There are now 6.0 million adjusted jobless, up 100,000, including 1.4 million out for 27 weeks or longer which grew the same amount.  The count of those working part-time for economic reasons, or holding on to less than full-time positions while unsuccessfully seeking longer-hours ones, fell 100,000 to 4.3 million, an especially strong result following last month’s 300,000 decline.  The two measures of how common it is for Americans to be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, gained 0.1% and broke even, and are now at 62.8% and 60.6% respectively.  The average private nonfarm payroll wage matched last month’s slightly-above-inflation 9 cents per hour increase, and is now at $27.83.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew that getting one was easy and routine, gained 800,000, as follows:

The AJSN’s increase, mostly due to the difference between May and June (it is not seasonally adjusted), came mostly from official unemployment, but was pushed along by more people reporting they wanted to work but did not look for it for a year or more.  The share of the AJSN from those technically jobless was 34.5%, up 2.8% from May’s record low and also a seasonal outcome.  Compared with June 2018, the AJSN is now half a million lower, almost completely from higher official unemployment. 

How did we do?  Clearly we’re about where we were a few months ago, with May’s poor net-new-jobs result now looking random or caused by temporary factors.  We’re still gaining positions, but more people are looking for them, with a 1.5 million drop in those claiming no work interest and more discouraged.  Once more, we can’t fail to notice that the categories of marginal attachment, the second through eighth rows on the chart above, have stopped improving.  Still, we have less to worry about than a month ago.  The turtle took a small step forward.    

Driverless Vehicles and Driving Jobs: 4th Annual Forecast

Autonomous vehicle technology implementation and commentary since our July 11, 2018 issue has been discouraging.  What effect has that had on its projected proliferation dates, and on future taxi and truck driving positions?

First, two recent articles on the state of the field.  Slate’s June 13^th “How Close Are We to Self-Driving Cars, Really?” stunned me with a subtitle citing Chris Urmson, “who helped pioneer the technology at Google,” claiming “it could be 50 years before we see them everywhere.”  2069!  In the first paragraph, we got Urmson, interviewed by April Glaser, giving it “5 to 10 years” for “robots cruising down the road in a handful of cities and towns across the country” (2024-2029), and no less than 30 (2049) for them to be “everywhere.”  That’s a far cry from most attitudes we saw as recently as last year.  Urmson gave sober views, mostly a compendium of those in print in 2017, and added that maps for autonomous vehicles will need, instead of “where the Safeway is,” exact locations of stoplights, lanes, and right-of-way rules, and that at least some driverless vehicles should be cone-shaped “so you can see all the way around (them) really nearby.”  He had unfounded assumptions about people using much more mass transit, but even those fit in with the general idea I got, that we should be wondering if Urmson had been sleeping for two solid years. 

The other was Lawrence Ulrich’s June 20^th New York Times “Driverless Cars May Be Coming, but Let’s Not Get Carried Away.”  Was he saying that’s what the same publication did 20 months ago when it published an entire magazine dedicated to the view that they were certain to happen soon?  After appropriately starting with Tesla’s Elon Musk’s ravings that autonomous taxis will be ubiquitous in 2020, Ulrich moved to sources saying that “none of us have any idea,” that “driver-free transport will begin with a trickle, not a flood” (even in cities and parts of same with great emphasis and full sanction?), named one prominent research director saying there is now a “trough of disillusionment,” and that “making a robocar so foolproof that consumers and automakers can trust it with their lives, including one-in-a-billion situations” (necessary even with those 30,000 American-driver-caused annual deaths?) is much harder than demonstrating the likes of ability to make emergency stops.  Ulrich then described Cadillac’s Super Cruise semiautonomous-software option, a solid Level 2 product now available on at least one model, which monitors driver alertness but allows pedal and steering-wheel-free driving “on major highways.” 

Otherwise, what has happened and, more importantly, what has not happened over the past year?  The two events are above – Super Cruise, and pessimistic commentators getting attention.  The following, though, did not occur, or if so were not publicized.  There was no more driverless implementation in ordinary, wide-open areas.  There was no substantial rollout of automated shuttles, even in tightly controlled settings.  There was no debate or pushback between those at the front of the field and national, state, or city regulators.  There was no widespread use of such vehicles even in the most accommodating and suitable areas, such as Phoenix.  There was no evidence of more aggressive implementation in already sanctioned parts of cities, such as San Francisco or Singapore, despite geofencing providing invisible but firm barriers.  There was no significant public relations effort to persuade or cut the fears of ordinary people on the technology.  I heard nothing about related activity in other countries.  And, despite all of these non-happenings, there was no sign of anything like a solid wall of individual resistance or any discussed consensus of regulatory disapproval.

Some things, though, stayed the same.  We still had Musk all by himself with hyperoptimism.  We had overemphasis on the one fatal accident.  We had consortia, alliances, and division of labor.  We had vaporware peddlers offering vague and unreasonable promises without product.  And we still had technical progress, amount strangely unpublicized.

Taking all this, accepting doubt milder than that from our interviewees above, and realizing that though Super Cruise means good things for Level 2 implementation in particular we are still in real trouble all over, we get:

As before, you can see the level definitions at https://www.techrepublic.com/article/autonomous-driving-levels-0-to-5-understanding-the-differences/, though the document here has been updated.  Expect more from Work’s New Age as this issue evolves. 

Robots and Artificial Intelligence: Four Viewpoints, Three Useful

Driverless cars are not the only area where less of substance is being communicated than a year or two ago.  This combined field, which is now hard to split into its two parts and within the decade may in most observers’ minds be fully merged, has over the past seven months only got four articles, beyond technical updates, on my desk.  What do they have to say?

The oldest, Salon’s November 23^rd “Robots are making us less human, too: “Certain things essential to the democratic fabric erode,”” didn’t follow its title, but provided ideas worthy of discussion.  It was an interview of television director Maxim Pozdorovkin, whose work “The Truth About Killer Robots” ran on HBO November 26^th.  The show considered “the ethical dimension of using robots in our everyday life,” with concerns based on the worst these automata have given us, from spectacular industrial accidents to one employer after their implementation going from 3,200 workers to 800, and on to workers’ general losses, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, of “self-satisfaction” and “a sense of becoming better.”  Pozdorovkin also claimed the shrinking likelihood of doing tasks such as banking and hotel check-ins with humans “undercuts the social fabric.”  These are real if sometimes here overstated problems – how can we best deal with them?

An intriguing characteristic of good artificial intelligence systems is that they throw away what we consider best practices and invent their own, which are often superior.  That was the underlying main point of “One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine” (Steven Strogatz, The New York Times, December 26^th.)  The piece discussed AlphaZero, described as “a deep-learning algorithm” as opposed to “the world’s strongest chess programs” which had a larger base of technical knowledge but lacked insight into unprogrammable “basic principles.”  AlphaZero, after it “played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes,” “crushed… the reigning computer world champion” in a hundred-game match in which it, though having 72 draws, won the remaining 28 and was thus undefeated.  That could only have been because it was developing its own ways of winning.  Of course, chess is only one opportunity for such self-directed thinking machines, of which AlphaZero constituted “humankind’s first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence”; Strogatz mentioned “the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome.”  Scary, and we may be there before we know it. 

On the diametrically opposite side, we had “’AI could send us back to the stone age’: In conversation with the End Of The World” (Olivia Tambini, TechRadar, January 31).  This piece is really a summary of previously published work, some in this blog, about the dangers of “general intelligence” capability, such as AlphaZero above freed to solve the world’s problems.  We again, though with different words, got the Terminator autonomous goal-seeking problem, along with the results of an interview with author and philosopher Nick Bostrom, concerns similar to those named in the landmark now-19-years-old Bill Joy Wired paper “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the black-box nature of high-level machine knowledge development, and the need to somehow program “benevolence.”  Nothing especially new here, but one of the world’s most suitable topics for repeating, re-repeating, re-re-repeating, and so on.

Last was Joanie Courtney’s April 5^th Fox Business “The robots are here: New, unheard-of job titles signal growing occupations in digital age.”  There are not enough of those I have always said, and nothing here, especially Courtney’s efforts to blame employers’ insufficiently paying practices on workers, changed my view.  It is true that we should “encourage among future workers… the ability to keep learning and adapting,” though that is not a skill but a meta-skill, and that there is a gap between ordinary people becoming computer-theory experts and them responding to eras ending with the folded arms of 1980s autoworkers, but the “simulation training” Courtney advocates needs to be much more than that. 

Next week, on to autonomous vehicles and my annual projections. 

The Economist’s “Great Jobs Boom” – How Accurate Is That?

Three weeks ago, this venerable publication had quite a cover.  It had a headline “the great jobs boom,” and a cartoon showing dozens of people at work, from a travel hawker and a bus driver to a plant seller and a pizza deliverer.  The two connected articles’ shared thesis was that, despite some noted flaws, these are tremendous times for employment opportunities, that, although “a recession will kill it off… it deserves a little appreciation,” and that, in a positive sense, “the rich world’s jobs market could have more surprises in store.”  The pieces made numerous points, the most important of which I sorted into four categories:  pro-boom, anti-boom, good and underrated, and bad and oversold. 

Supporting the boom interpretation were three main ideas.  By an undisclosed definition, the gig economy, per the articles, only covers about 1% of American jobs.  Many government-released numbers, such as seasonally adjusted and unadjusted unemployment rates, net job growth, and number of people working, are better than they have been since Nixon was president.  Over the past ten years, we have had massively accumulating prosperity progress, and most recent months it has continued. 

On the other side, two points were negative.  Much of the 2010s jobs gains have been from women’s still continuing to join the labor force, which must reach a peak sometime.  Even The Economist admitted here that “middle skilled jobs are becoming harder to find,” contradicting the idea of huge growth almost by itself.  And, outside the articles, the American Job Shortage Number or AJSN still shows latent demand for 15.6 million additional positions, which, though off a third from the Great Recession’s top, seems only a solid improvement.

As well as the positive points above, several other things the unbilled authors mentioned point toward employment gains being more sustainable than we would otherwise think.  The first, “in the ten years to 2016 the cost of filling a vacancy fell by 80% in real terms,” attributed lower hiring costs to the ability of employers as well as potential workers to cheaply use job websites.  Second, what many have perceived as lagging average pay rates have helped.  Third, general progress, which I had thought would level off in 2017 or 2018, has continued, and next year we may well see sub-3.0% unemployment rates with average 200,000 monthly jobs gains.  Fourth, we have thus far had little business deregulation, which will probably change and allow even more positions.  Fifth, numbers found by the authors suggest that, as well as gig engagements, the overall count of low-paying jobs is not as high as what might be called a consensus view, and almost anyone under 80 knows that bad ones, actually in decline with higher low-end wages, are nothing new.  And sixth, the result of the most stunning statistic in the piece, that “in 2018, the employment rate among people of working age was the highest ever in Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia, and 22 other OECD countries,” could someday also, at least potentially, include central North America.

Not all underrated and less-known factors, though, favor our employment situation.  Minimum wage increases, though phased in and generally well-focused, have done hidden damage by cutting the number of jobs created, and scheduled raises are just getting started.  The Phillips curve, which previously showed a relationship between pay and employment, will continue being inoperative, as easily duplicatable products such as software and still-high latent demand for jobs mean productivity and low joblessness are no longer determinants.  The lack of immediate widespread automation danger may be gulling observers into thinking the robots will never come – but, with the next recession, we will know otherwise.  The colorful example contrasting 30%-unemployment Malaga’s clean roads and “buzzing” restaurants with 2.6% San Francisco’s “rough sleepers and empty lots” underscores the gap between front-line rates and how many more people would actually work if given the chance. 

As you can see, we have a mixed bag.  To resolve the problem, let’s go to a definition of “boom,” as provided in this case by Merriam-Webster: “a rapid expansion or increase:  such as… c:  a rapid widespread expansion of economic activity… d:  an upsurge in activity, interest, or popularity.”  We’re close here, but I don’t think this one qualifies, for two reasons.  First, it hasn’t been rapid.  Second, it just isn’t strong enough.  With over 15 million people still on the sidelines and a well-acknowledged shortage of positions suiting most workers’ ability and credentials, 2000s North Dakota it isn’t.  We are in relatively excellent times which as far as we know haven’t peaked yet, but after ten years it isn’t even “widespread,” and it’s hardly difficult to find people, especially among the 1.3 million who have been officially unemployed for over half a year, who know from experience that we don’t have a true boom.  So we can appreciate the help these times have given millions of jobholders, but let’s not get carried away.  Our jobs crisis is not over, and, low unemployment rates notwithstanding, sadly shows no signs of ending.  Eye-catching or not, that is the truth.