David Brooks wrote an excellent column for the NY Times: The Lean Years. In his essay, he writes about how men have been disproportionately affected by the recession, and how people who come to working age during bad economic times usually sustain permanent damage to their earning capacity over a lifetime. Brooks’s column links to another excellent article, this time from the Atlantic: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.
I think both articles are correct. With 20% of men between 25 and 54 not working, our culture is sustaining permanent damage. It’s like MMA or boxing–once you get knocked out, you’re never the same, and the more you get knocked out, the worse you become. I hate to be a downer, but I think the working generation today will emerge similar to the way Americans emerged from the Great Depression: thrifty, fearful, and more timid.
I do have to make a comment to a comment. “Amy Smith” wrote:
Brooks; evrything you wrote about the Obama-recession is true and to the point. The very first step that should be taken is to re-patriate millions of illegal aliens back to their home countries. Those jobs should be available for American workers. And the hundreds of billions spent in social costs need to be saved for American citizens and ‘legal’ immigrants. We can get through this, but not with politicians selling us out for cheap labor.
What people aren’t seeing is that if you repatriated all the illegals, it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the job market because many Americans typically don’t want the physical jobs that illegals do: cooking, cleaning, etc. This gap between physical and “mental” will only grow in the future: many of these “green jobs” will be physical labor types of positions–installing solar panels, putting turbines together, assembling a new rail line. People keep saying we need more education, but do we really? I agree that we need more education, i.e. teaching people to become good citizens, but do we need more specialized education for office jobs? Right now, there are an excess of “educated” people who are underutilized. Sure, there are unemployed blue collar workers, as well as the cyclical construction workers that Brooks mentions, but a lot of those who have fallen out from real estate, banking, and print media are looking more towards “educated” types of positions that are not available. I wonder if these office jobs will come back, especially as the main problem with this recession seems to be a faulty economic and physical infrastructure.
I’ve got an idea that laissez-faire types will hate. Instead of subsidizing corn production (which is high enough as it is), maybe the government should subsidize physical labor so that it pays comparable wages with service type jobs. We’ve got a glut of college grads whom society cannot employ but who won’t get physical because of the poor pay and low status, but in the future the demand for physical labor could easily be greater than “mental” labor if we’re physically rebuilding infrastructure. So why not subsidize the labor of physical jobs in order to get more people working with their hands? With greater pay will come greater prestige for these positions, and it will urge more people to go into fields where they are needed. Perhaps down the road this will also lead to more creative engineering as more people begin to understand how to create things with their hands.
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But here is an...
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
Subsidizing physical labor with our tax dollars is a sound concept. It was something Hyman Minsky, an obscure economist, proposed. Instead of a “trickle-down” effect, the “bubble-up” effect of raising wages of the poor will translate into money that flows back into the economy instead of the being locked up in the coffers of large corporations.
70% of our economy is consumer spending. Average folks spend a larger percentage of their money. It’s money that circulates back into the economy.
To accomplish that, we would need policies that promote strong labor unions and a 90% tax rate on people making over ~ $2 million. Neither of which is currently on the table. Hopefully the Employee Free Choice Act will pass and make it easier to form a union. Also, Obama needs to quite pandering to the bankers and impose a 90% tax on their high incomes. We got a long way to go.
So you’re saying that… the government should pay tax dollars to people who do physical labor but not people who do other kinds of labor? I don’t get it.
I was thinking that the subsidies for physical labor would encourage more people to go into physical labor as a career. This could stimulate our manufacturing base, so that we can finally get more money coming into the country rather than going out.
The question, of course, is whether or not this is sustainable without susbsidies over the long-term when compared with countries like China whose wages are naturally lower since they don’t have strong employment laws, environmental laws, etc.
Ahh.. I see. But then, isn’t a lot of the true “physical labor” starting to go mechanized now anyway? Seems like robotic is going to play a larger and larger role in production, this century. A strong back or nimble fingers aren’t as big an asset as they once were.
Yes, to a large extent.
But you still need people to operate machines. If you have a truck-mounted jackhammer, for example, you still need a guy or gal to press the button before manually (or manually by use of another machine) clearing the garbage away. Or if your roof has problems, you still need a guy or gal to diagnose where the leak is.
The problem, I think, is social. Nobody wants to be the guy operating the jackhammer because of low status. I think the government could break this social stigma by helping people make more through physical labor.
Hmm…you know, doctors have a physical job too. I guess it’s a matter of how one defines physical labor.
Haha, you’re argument is starting to shift slightly.
When you talk about someone operating the machinery that does the work, you’re beginning to slip into technology operation and maintenance rather than physical labor. Button pushing is not really any more physical than punching a computer keyboard. Diagnosis is also more of a mental exercise than a physical one, even in the field of roofing.
It’s hard to find much that truly depends on purely physical labor in a world of such rapidly increasing technology.
Yes, I don’t think there really is much truly physical labor left. But I guess what I’m saying is that there are jobs that are more physical than others. If you said, for example, that you were a designer, stockbroker, or television executive, the nature of your work would most likely not be physical at all, aside from typing on a keyboard or picking up a phone.
If, on the other hand, you were a landscaper, floor installer, or mechanic, you’d probably be considered physical, even though you’d still be using power tools or diagnostic computer tools. A landscaper or landscaping may sit on a lawn mower, but it’s still pretty physical.
I think these days, aside from doctors or other physical jobs that require higher degrees, there is a prestige gap between physical and “mental” that might be worth closing.
Yes, but in reality, it’s very difficult to assign “prestige” to a job. Money alone doesn’t do it. Union plumbers and carpenters have been making better than good money for many decades. In fact, they often are better compensated than mid-level business managers. Still, if one guy say’ “I’m a plumber,” and the other guy says “I’m the district payroll manager for Wells Fargo,” which one has more prestige at a cocktail party?
You raise an excellent point, King. I’m amazed by how much electricians make, and yet the prestige isn’t quite there. Hmm…maybe Obama could subsidize physical labor AND pay for a media campaign? Don’t know how effective that might be though. It might look desperate. Although maybe he could write it so that physical labor became patriotism?
Tell me about… that’s why whenever I have an electrical problem, I just run an extension cord to my neighbor’s patio outlet
But in all seriousness, I don’t think that a PSA for valuing dishwashers and cable guys will change people’s minds much. I rather think that if there is much less human labor available, then the push to innovate with mechanized labor solutions will increase accordingly. The pure labor jobs of today will become a combination of operating machinery and robotics to accomplish the same tasks with much less human labor. The ubiquitous automatic dishwasher is a good example of that. Imagine if instead, the restaurant industry had tried to somehow elevate the position of “dish boy” in they eyes of the public, with a marketing campaign and subsidized high salary.
At present, there are many industries that do not innovate or invest in developing labor-saving technology because it’s cheaper and easier to just exploit the illegal work force. Why bother when they can just use people almost as slave labor? In many cases, the human labor used today is just a means to temporarily put off the inevitable changes that must come.
Back in 1950 women spent far more hours at home because microwaves and dishwashers hadn’t been invented and cleaning and drying clothes took ages. Being a house-wife was a full-time job for EVERY family. Technology improved and meant women weren’t required in the home nearly as often, since all chores could be completed in short time. But it didn’t force women out the door and into poverty. Rather they started picking up NEW skills, and they now outnumber men by 50% in college bachelor degrees. This means higher incomes for families. Etc. You’re talking about subsidizing labor in order to reverse this trend…?
Increasing efficiency also means falling prices. Where once it took a man a week to plow a field (or 7 men to do it in one day), now one man can do it in a day. VCRs used to cost $1300. Do you think they went to $59.99 because of MORE laborers working on the assembly line? Cars cheaper because of LESS machinery?
Oi,
Okay, it looks like I’m losing this debate. I actually think you both are right. My argument was that people with more “hands on” experience would result in people knowing products better, and that therefore they’d be more equipped to create products. Although these days, I guess most products are created by scientists and entrepreneurs anyway.
I was also thinking that subsidizing manual labor would help narrow the prestige gap, although maybe that prestige gap would kill our national Horatio Alger story. It’s one thing to say “I became the CEO after working my way up from the mailroom” vs. “I became the head doctor after being just a doctor.”
In true debates, nobody really loses—positions simpy become more clarified.
Haha! Well, I’m winning by losing. I proposed something, then realized the flaws in my proposal. So now my position is stronger.
And we’re all better off for it.
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