For Overlooked Countries: Eight Ways to Make Travel Easier

It’s not a common subject on this blog, but for a couple of decades I have been visiting places around the globe.  I have now set foot in 58 countries, in all of the continental groups except Antarctica – while my patterns are more frugal than most Americans, perhaps more akin to those of Europeans with more vacation time than money, they are common worldwide.  Travel is not a main source for writing on American employment, but it is related in that tourism has, during all of our lifetimes, been an ever-rising source of jobs; visitor appeal greatly controls how many are working in certain industries, and many more officials would prefer more outsiders coming in and spending money to fewer.  What relatively inexpensive things can destinations, especially but not exclusively the foreign ones which spurred my thinking here, do to get more of that?

First, consistently have and maintain street name signs.  When asked on an exit form what a small island country could do to make my experience better, I wrote “street signs” in capitals, underlined twice, and with three exclamation points.  Those of us who like to walk around can otherwise be blown off course remarkably easily.  And don’t they want them for the locals anyway?

Second, have some sort of competence test for cabdrivers.  It’s infuriating, as I did in this same place, after being pestered constantly by touts of “Taxi?” “Taxi?,” to finally get in one and find the driver, who seems to know English or the other language I’m speaking perfectly well, does not know locations of even the most popular tourist destinations.  If there is such an oversupply of cabs that drivers will often wait an hour or more for customers to finish their sightseeing so they can get another few dollars taking them elsewhere, then, say, a written exam on where things are would correct that as well.

Third, and this time I speak to the most developed places on the planet, have nothing for visitors requiring mobile phones.  I know, we can buy SIM cards, but using such technology also necessitates having such devices on hand, paying roaming charges, getting a clear signal, understanding dialing codes, and more.  With no country close to 100% cellphone saturation anyway, a modicum of pay phones, which have reached near or total nonexistence in some places, could also help travelers more.

Fourth, have more places of any kind to sit down.  To make the same points I made in academia last decade, populations are aging, people often need a few minutes to rest, and concrete benches can last for 50 years.  While loitering is a reasonable thing to discourage, the value to others will soon, if it hasn’t already, more than offset that.

Fifth, facilitate low-priced private room lodging.  Such offerings are nongovernmental-money decisions, but public policy, as shown in countries with few even rural options below maybe US$100 per night, can influence that.  And I’m not talking about Airbnb or other sharing options either, which can seem confusing and offer communication insufficient to many.

Sixth, accept cash everywhere.  Even in the United States, where customer needs have recently caused restaurants taking only electronic payments to change that, many erroneously assume that visitors will be as well-equipped as locals, who pay no credit card transaction fees and have any commonly used small-change-replacement systems (such as Hong Kong’s Octopus transit cards, extensively used in convenience stores).  I’m with a horde of people who use ATMs, themselves becoming less common at some destinations, and then spend as they go, not only getting lower fees but enjoying seeing the local money.  It would be sad to go to Australia and never see the kangaroos, platypus, echidna, and other designs on their everyday coins and notes.

Seventh, have free local maps available anywhere tourists might go.  Advertisements from their sponsors are fine, and are often actually helpful, but please keep them to scale, show what that scale is, and leave in streets or roads even if judged to be of no visitor interest.  Maps, especially in conjunction with good street signs, have no real substitute.

Eighth, and this is where our home country is the worst, have plenty of public toilets.  Walking around without frequent restaurant or museum stops brings this human need to the forefront.  These places need only be reasonably clean and open at all or almost all times.  If they want to, as many do, charge what is almost always a nominal amount, that is no problem (if they can make change!), though businesses, who see gains in sales when people can wander around longer, could pay for them.  One of the largest American portable toilet providers uses the name Comfort House for a reason.

Although some would need to come from changes in laws or company regulations, none of these improvements would be, in the long term, time-consuming or expensive.  All would boost tourism jobs and business income more efficiently than public relations campaigns.  Through online as well as in-person communication, word spreads more than ever before about the merits of Taiwan versus South Korea, or even, and especially, Fiji against Samoa.  Work and money are good things – when it’s relatively easy, let’s do what we can to get more of both.

Uber and Lyft: Heading Toward the End of the Road?

It’s not looking good for America’s premier gypsy cab companies.

In the December 5^th FoxNews.com, we saw “Uber, Lyft drivers get $17.22 hourly wage guarantee in New York after commission’s vote.”  This move was made by “taxi regulators” who claimed the move would “raise drivers’ annual earnings by $10,000 a year, making it the first U.S. city to set such minimum pay standards.”  That is believable, but since the move makes no mention of that amount being over their expenses, be they average or specific, it cannot be confused with the net $34,000-plus annual pay it would get an ordinary wage earner over a year of 40-hour weeks.  Uber, as expected, cried about that, saying it would cause “higher than necessary fare increases for riders,” which can indeed be the result of workers paid appropriate amounts, “while missing an opportunity to deal with congestion in Manhattan’s central business district” (even if cars trying for Uber fares, some paid by people who would otherwise take buses or subways, actually had that effect, it strains credulity to think that is this company, proven to be as mercenary as any Soldier of Fortune contributor, highly values that).

Six months later, on June 2^nd, we got the New York Times’s “Path to Ride-Share Profits Begins With Higher Prices.”  Author Austan Goolsbee started by contrasting Uber and Lyft market capitalization, then $80 billion, with their loss of “a great deal of money,” since then worsened by Uber dropping $5.2 billion in the second quarter and both companies’ capitalization falling to $68 billion.  Per Goolsbee, passengers are less sensitive to the fare increases these companies seem to need than drivers are to the pay raises they would provide.  However, with riders having many alternative ways of getting places, the effect would be significant, and we don’t know how much further the results of a study, that “for every 10 percent increase in price, demand fell by only about 5 percent,” could be extrapolated.  The author also said that drivers might otherwise be working for restaurants, meaning that their “average pay… is likely to end up around minimum wage, too.”  Taxi-commission edict or not, there is no reason for such workers to be getting anything approaching middle-class income – and the more they are paid, the fewer of them the market will need.

A third heavy shoe is about to drop.  As documented in “A fierce battle over defining employees in California nears decisive vote,” by John Myers, Liam Dillon, and Johana Bhuiyan in the September 7^th Los Angeles Times, this week the California legislature will vote on a measure, known as Assembly Bill 5 or AB5, which, per “Why Uber and Lyft Are Pushing To Keep Their Drivers as Independent Contractors” by David Jagielski in the same date’s Motley Fool, would require three criteria for workers to be denied classification as employees:  they would need to be “free from the company’s control”; their work “can’t (be) part of the company’s core operations”; and such laborers “would need to have an independent business in the industry.”  Either of the second two would conclusively deny Uber and Lyft ability to keep treating their drivers, who would “receive sick days, have minimum-wage protections, and be eligible for other benefits,” as independent contractors.  As a result, those two and restaurant delivery service DoorDash have spent $90 billion fighting AB5, which would not only raise their expenses but would end much of “their flexibility and being able to have almost anyone being able to drive for them.”  Here also, these companies are looking at some combination of higher customer charges and losing even more money. 

Will Uber and Lyft ever become profitable?  Maybe if and when autonomous vehicles, now delayed and uncertain, arrive.  But it seems more likely that they cannot last that long.  So keep patronizing them if they help you, but choose other investment opportunities.

Friday AM: Some Jobs Numbers Still Improving, Some Advances Reversed, and AJSN Down 200,000 To 16.2 Million

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was another mixed bag.  The headline number of net new nonfarm positions didn’t make its published 158,000 projection and turned in 130,000, close to what we need to cover population increase.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment remained, for the third straight month, at 3.7%.  The unadjusted version dropped 0.2%, mostly due to the typical difference between July and August, to 3.8%.  The adjusted number of jobless people fell 100,000 to 6.0 million, with those out for 27 weeks or longer holding at 1.2% and those working part-time for economic reasons, or working short-hours jobs while seeking thus far unsuccessfully full-time ones, gave up its June and July improvements and is now back at 4.4 million.  The two measures showing how common it is for Americans to be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, each gained 0.2%, with the former having its third straight improvement, to reach 63.2% and 60.9% respectively.  After a neutral month, average private nonfarm hourly wages came in at 13 cents more per hour than the previously announced result, and are now at $28.11.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the Royal Flush Press metric showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew that getting one would be routine and easy, went down 207,000, as follows:

The largest AJSN changes over July were those unemployed, cutting 317,000 from the total, followed by those discouraged and not wanting work at all, offsetting much of that with worsenings of 89,000 and 54,000.  The share of latent demand from those officially jobless fell to 34.5%, matching May’s outcome. 

Overall, how did we do?  The net effect was modest, with some measures, specifically the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, continuing to improve, and others, such as the count of those working part-time for economic reasons, losing what I had hoped were sturdier gains.  With better results so common, the lukewarm – and that’s what it is, not the likes of “poor” or “skimpy” – 130,000 jobs gain is no cause for concern.  As there is so much latent demand, the wage improvement is nothing to take for granted.  We’ll continue to track the trends, and see which are real and which, as most of them these days, are only fluctuations.  In the meantime, though, the turtle took a tiny but real step forward.  

Glaciers, Gondolas, and Slot Machines: Attracting Tourism Jobs Means Making Tough Choices

There may be no area of employment more modern, substantial, and promising than catering to people traveling for pleasure.  For all the beefing about air travel conditions, fares are lower in constant dollars than they have ever been.  Worldwide prosperity, on average, is way up.  A shift from valuing objects to valuing experiences means that more and more people travel.  And the rise of the 1% has opened up a new high tier.

With that said, here are three places where that has not worked out as planned.  The first was featured in Peter S. Goodman and Liz Alderman’s August 25^th New York Times “Iceland’s Purple Planes Are Grounded, and With Them, Its Economy.”  The piece, about a remarkably steep fall in that country’s number of visitors from discounter WOW going out of business, drew this immediate reaction from me:  Wait a minute!  Wasn’t it just yesterday that Icelanders were complaining about too much tourism?  Word was that visitors, often ill-mannered (of course), were overtaxing their delicate ecology, taking up too much Reykjavik space, preventing locals from getting hotel rooms when they themselves traveled, and so on.  And now “the sudden shortage of Americans – widely celebrated as a free-spending people – is bemoaned by merchants of Viking-themed tourist tchotkes (sic), by whale watching tour operators and by real estate agencies.”  Oh well.

The problem I have always sensed with Iceland’s tourist industry – and I have been there four times – is its ambivalence.  Some would like to make their country, the size of Kentucky with one-fourth the population of metropolitan Louisville, as close to an environmental preserve as sanely possible.  Others see its ample open spaces as opportunities to add industry and other businesses to help their standard of living.  It has often seemed gratuitously high-end to me, with a lack of bed and breakfasts and other low-priced non-hostel hotel rooms, little fast food, and sit-down restaurant meals seeming to start at about US$28 per person.  Except for the fine Bonus supermarket chain and a competitor or two, prices in stores will surprise you.  To sell more Eric the Red refrigerator magnets they can cut their $10 price in half with business-friendlier public policies… if they decide that’s what they want.

The opposite problem has plagued Venice.  Spearheaded by cruise ship passengers spending far less per capita than other visitors, they have just plain had too many – 36 million international ones alone, or 138 per permanent city resident, in 2017.  With demand for related goods and services distorting the business atmosphere the city runs the real risk of becoming a theme park, with a thousandth glass-animal shop pricing out the likes of a dry cleaner or an insurance agency.  Normally supply and demand would kick in, with hotel rooms and restaurants charging more, but with waterborne visitors not using much of either they have been able to clog the streets cheaply.  Two years ago the city banned large ships from docking, and next year they start a three-euro entrance fee for those not staying there, but those will only solve part of the problem – watch this classic destination for more developments.

The third tourism issue is here in the Catskills.  Locals clearly wanted the Resorts World casino, which, at my visit last year looked modern, busy, and full of people gambling, but it is losing so much money that the major stockholders are resorting to declaring bankruptcy, while staying open, to stiff its lenders and stay, at least for a while, in business.  Why has it done so poorly while seeming so good in principle and in real life?

One problem is that Resorts World, with what was a $129 per night hotel-room minimum, became yet another place failing to realize that one thing making Las Vegas great was its quantity of cheap accommodations, facilitating longer stays translating into more gambling.  Its publicity efforts have always seemed inadequate, without any massive push to bring in New York-area Jews with good childhood Catskills memories, and an apparently failed effort by the Malaysian owner to attract high-rolling Asians.  Prices such as the $16 nachos can also cut back repeat visits.  And, to keep bored patrons interested, like any other large casino it requires massive periodic infrastructure spending, meaning it needs way-high amounts of business just to break even. 

However, I suspect the largest problem is something else.  People came to 1950s and 1960s Las Vegas to gamble.  They would play, play, and play.  Long hours, as close to around the clock as they could stand.  Some thought they had systems assuring wins, but few people did that – it wasn’t called Lost Wages for nothing.  Gambling’s appeal is totally different now.  The GI and Silent generations forming not only the backbone but most of the body of Las Vegas punters have been replaced by Generation X and Millennials, who care for gambling vastly less.  Casinos are all over the country now, and the novelty is no more.  Instead of tacitly encouraging problem gambling, people who cannot handle it see a variety of announcements offering them help, including the option to bar themselves.  Roulette, blackjack, craps, and slot machines, after 70 years still the mainstays, are all old hat now.  It has become the norm for people to both know intellectually and feel emotionally that they cannot win over the long term.  Low-stakes entry points, such as $20 buy-in poker and nickel slots that don’t try to get people to play 20, 50, or 100 coins at a time, have gone away.  The clank of coins into metal trays is a thing of the past.  Despite, or maybe even because of, the proliferation of American and world casinos, gambling itself is in big trouble – the choice here is how casinos can change to accommodate that.

Obviously, tourism will continue to grow – but in what ways?  We will see.  Not all the jobs it generates will remain.  We wish it the best, but it may have many more hard times ahead.

Work Meritocracy: American Cradle-To-Retirement Competition

Yes, the United States has a culture.  For those of us living here it may seem transparent, but there are ways in which we part company with even our most comparable countries.  One of them is our love of competitions, which are not only central to our educational and vocational experiences but pop up in group recreational activities.  There is something about needing to know who is the best that gets our interest.

While we may bewilder Canadians, western Europeans, Australians, and northeast Asians by competing at choral singing, ranch chores (rodeo), and even ballroom dancing, we are taking that to a further extreme by inventing entire lives based around it – and those choosing that regimen are the worse off.  That is the thesis of Daniel Markovits’s “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition,” in the just-released September issue of Atlantic. 

Markovits, a Yale law professor whose article is planned to be released in book form, exaggerated – most Americans know little firsthand about the things of which he wrote.  But for those regretting not being in what has been called the 1%, he offered a look at the underside of how they got and stayed there.  And it’s not pleasant.

Have you wondered about the lives of those with the half-million-dollar-and up salaries in “finance, management, law, and medicine”?  Per Markovits, they now split off in preschool, when they prepare to “apply to 10 kindergartens, running a gantlet of essays, appraisals, and interviews,” which is repeated with “elite middle and high schools” that “commonly require three to five hours of homework a night,” all focusing not on “experiments and play” but instead on “the accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job.”  From there, these one-percenters “work with unprecedented intensity,” for example, if they are large-firm lawyers, producing 2,400 annual billable hours (calling for 70-hour weeks), or, if bankers, putting in 20-hour day-and-night combinations.  Those ultimately successful, per sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, survive a “final elimination” by being “still able to maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together.”  And eventually if they want they can retire, after which they will probably spend much time, money, hope, and effort helping their descendants do as they did.

Although this program, which despite Markovits’s use of the word, is not truly meritocratic – per my post earlier this year with oboes and Guatemala in the title, the type of merit is also critical – it causes problems.  It endangers three areas most would call key to a generally successful life:  happiness, sex, and longevity.  It may provide its practitioners with net worths unknown without entrepreneurism or large inheritances, but with, until the work ends, little opportunity to be enjoyed.  Per the author, it forces even very young people to stick to their preordained plans at the expense of exploration and self-discovery, in the process “exploiting” themselves and “impoverishing” their “inner lives.” 

Of such choices for themselves and their children, it is easy to see the appeal, especially for Americans, who, even those of lower family education and incomes, have long heard about “making something” of themselves, and, if particularly smart or capable, of getting to “the top.”  Winning such long, massive competitions can provide powerful self-esteem and eliminate any fear of having failed or underachieved.  Being without any real possibility of financial failure has its advantages.  However, I suspect the truly smart people, with vision of wider scope, know that excelling in this way is not the best they can do.  There is more to life than that, and those in the tracks described here are missing it, completely and permanently. 

Evaluating our success is open to great debate.  Even if we agree on who was better than whom and by how much, one simple truth still applies:  those winning rat races are still rats. 

What You Need to Know About Career-Related Instruction

The August Northeast Pennsylvania Business Journal had a 16-page section headlined its “2019 Adult Education Guide.”  It presented articles provided by a variety of learning-program providers explaining what courses they had and what they could do for those taking them.  They ranged from The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education (I didn’t know there even was such a thing), master’s degrees at East Stroudsburg University, “straight-to-career training certificates” from Northampton Community College, a cybersecurity program, and Johnson College’s diesel truck technology credential.  Here are 11 observations on this career-related area.

First, as above, there are a lot of programs and they vary widely.  The target area of this 33-year-old publication has fewer than a million people, and is probably roughly nationally representative as to economic strength, diversity of jobs, formal education levels, and so on.  A similar compendium for the New York area could be in the hundreds of pages.

Second, such programs are best when the school and the hirers are connected and the latter can strongly influence the former, by relating honestly what program graduates need to be chosen.  The gap between becoming qualified and actually getting a job can be huge, and responsibility for making it as small as possible ultimately falls on the schools.  Third, the in-field getting-hired rate is the most important statistic such organizations can offer.  Fourth, with those two things said there is nothing wrong with for-profit course providers as such. 

Fifth, those considering further instruction need to analyze the target field, including its current state, its prospects several years out, and its long-term viability.  Choosing a Lasting Career is now six years old, but anyone considering putting a large chunk of their lives and money need to look at the same factors as in that book, namely resistance to robotics, susceptibility to improvements in computing and connectivity, chance for a good living wage, family and outside activities compatibility, local-boundness, typical work conditions, and more. 

Sixth, while certificate programs should zero in on specific competencies, overly specific bachelor’s degree programs can fail when narrowly targeted objectives do not materialize.  Nobody expects coursework in air conditioning repair to provide guidance for a life’s worth of thinking, but conventional four-year experiences should do just that. 

Seventh, community colleges are good choices, as they provide well-focused training at bargain prices. 

Eighth, while employment-focused training is often excellent for individuals, as a matter of public policy it is ineffective for cutting joblessness, as it tends only to change who gets work, rather than the total number of people thus successful.

Ninth, students need to consider where the jobs are in their fields of interest, and know if they will need to relocate.

Tenth, nonspecific career credentials, such as M.B.A. programs, usually have very weak connections with employers, so those considering them should determine first if they will be sufficient, when combined with their existing assets, to get them working in the field they want. 

Eleventh, as I advised people as a business professor, anything called “adult education” requires participants to act that way.  College for 18 to 22-year-olds serves purposes other than learning and credential acquisition, but these programs really don’t.  Students should always or almost always attend classes, do assignments in good faith, and complete all work required.  Such things as all-night agonizing over three to five-page papers need to come to an end.  Adult learners will find that if they focus on their assignments and complete them, that will be good enough if not perfect, and they will then pass their courses and complete their objectives.  That is why they are spending their time, effort, and money to be there.  If people get the most from adult learning programs, they may benefit greatly – accordingly, If such training is at all suitable and clearly leads to jobs, I strongly recommend it. 

Autonomous Vehicles: What’s Causing the Delays, and How They Can Get Off the Dime

Per recent posts, the past year has been rather disheartening for those of us who think we need progress on self-driving cars.  What has been the problem, and how can they get moving again?

The best article describing the state of that field so far came out in the July 17^th New York Times.  Neal E. Boudette’s “Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars are ‘Way in the Future’,” started by saying that “a year ago, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road in 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars,” which hasn’t and won’t happen.  The piece’s sources blamed the lack of progress on being able to deal with “all kinds of crazy things on the road,” and Boudette also named small related news items, recapped the fatal accident, quoted evidence of Elon Musk’s delusional hubris, and then got the article to justify itself by naming the need for “micro maneuvers” such as understanding other drivers are looking for a parking space so should not be followed closely and saying that “the technology is available now to create a car that won’t hit anything,” even if it would “constantly slam on the brakes.” 

From what I have read and not read, I see five reasons why progress has almost ground to a halt.  First, not only overreaction to that single death, but expected overreaction, as the firms seemed to pull back soon thereafter without receiving much actual pushback.  Second, companies’ testing has, thus far, not emphasized creating algorithms mimicking the thoughts of actual drivers.  Third, as I have read recently about artificial intelligence, massive efforts such as this often go through slow stretches in research intensity, which author and professor Nick Bostrom called a “winter,” or “period of retrenchment” – we clearly have another one here.  Fourth, the legal and regulatory climate, despite the July 31^st Yahoo Finance report that “U.S. Congress seeks to jump start (a) stalled self-driving car bill” to allow them more, has been intimidating if not actively discouraging, perhaps to the point where companies have focused excessively on being stopped.  Fifth, there has been insufficient emphasis on implementation – I saw that when working with information technology technicians more comfortable keying on the clean and promising future than on dealing with the grit of making things actually work, and recognize, or at least strongly suspect, it again. 

What, then, are the solutions?  Here are six.  One, researchers need to catalog what Boudette called “corner cases,” where people disobey traffic laws, and concentrate on solving them.  Two, it is time for them to quantify how drivers actually think when faced with these problems.  In Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, those making automated barbers copied the exact movements of people doing that job – let’s do that here.  Three, they should implement Boudette’s “car that won’t hit anything” and see where it could be used – the technology could progress from there.  Four, we need more driverless shuttle buses in limited, well-defined settings, which is about the lowest-hanging fruit actually constructive.  Five, manufacturers and others should push for more freedom and more places to use these vehicles, which may, given the recent Congress event, be easier than they think. 

Sixth, and finally, those on the side of this technology need to do interviews, give presentations, write articles, issue news releases, do radio spots, appear on TV shows, and put in Internet advertising, all emphasizing the potential for slashing the 30,000 annual driver-caused American deaths along with other autonomous-vehicle advantages and showing how close we really would be if we can tolerate a few more accidents.  There were times when it was more acceptable for efforts thought of as American projects to cause tragedies along the way.  Eighteen people have died during space flights and 96 perished during Hoover Dam’s construction, not to mention such numbers as over 400,000 United States soldiers killed in World War II.  It is time for us to consider driverless vehicle implementation necessary for the country, and give it the same status.  Then, as we know about our countrymen and from our history, it will succeed.