92 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Nov 2023
  3. Jun 2023
    1. Unemployment among those who have attained secondary education (vocational) isnearly 12% compared with the country average of about 6.25%. The government’spolicy push, and a budget allocation of almost 20% of GDP for education have notonly helped expand the network of educational institutions across 6000 inhabitedislands but have also improved the progression of cohorts. For example, thoseachieving lower secondary education went up from 31% in 1994 to 52% in 2013
  4. Dec 2022
    1. However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.

      initally creaded: 2022-10-10

    2. Musical Chairs

      The authors analogize educational levels and unemployment rates to playing musical chairs to underline the zero sum game being played in the labor market.

      This becomes a useful argument for why a universal basic income ought to be implemented, not to mention the bullshit job thesis which pairs with it.

    3. What greater education and skills allow an individual to do is to move fur-ther up in the overall queue of people looking to find a well-paying and re-warding job. However, because of the limited number of such jobs, only a setamount of people will be able to land such jobs. Consequently, one’s positionin the queue can change as a result of human capital, but the same amount ofpeople will still be stuck at the end of the line if the overall opportunities re-main the same.

      There is a direct analogy to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to be drawn here.

    4. One of the clear signs that the bottleneck to low-income adults working moreresults from their lack of opportunities is provided by looking at their hours of workover the business cycle. When the economy is strong and jobs are plentiful, low-incomeworkers are more likely to find work, find work with higher pay, and be able to securemore hours of work than when the economy is weak. In 2000, when the economy wasclose to genuine full employment, the unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent and thepoverty rate was 11.3 percent; but in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, theunemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and the poverty rate was almost 15.1 percent.What changed in those years was not poor families’ attitudes toward work but simplythe availability of jobs. Among the bottom one-fifth of nonelderly households, hoursworked per household were about 40 percent higher in the tight labor market of 2000than in recession- plagued 2010.Given the opportunity for work or additional work hours, low-income Americanswork more. A full-employment agenda that increases opportunities in the labor market,alongside stronger labor standards such as a higher minimum wage, reduces poverty.

      How can we frame the science of poverty with respect to the model of statistical mechanics?

      Unemployment numbers have very little to do with levels of poverty. They definitely don't seem to be correlated with poverty levels, in fact perhaps inversely so. Many would say that people are lazy and don't want to work when the general reality is that they do want to work (for a variety of reasons including identity and self-esteem), but the amount of work they can find and the pay they receive for it are the bigger problems.

  5. Sep 2022
    1. Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

      Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

      Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

      What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

    2. Research has also shown that poverty entrances and exits are most oftencaused by changes in employment status and/or financial resources.
  6. Apr 2022
    1. Youyang Gu. (2021, May 25). Is containing COVID-19 a requirement for preserving the economy? My analysis suggests: Probably not. In the US, there is no correlation between Covid deaths & changes in unemployment rates. However, blue states are much more likely to have higher increases in unemployment. 🧵 https://t.co/JrikBtawEb [Tweet]. @youyanggu. https://twitter.com/youyanggu/status/1397230156301930497

  7. Jan 2022
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  11. Feb 2021
  12. Dec 2020
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  15. Aug 2020
    1. Cajner, T., Crane, L. D., Decker, R. A., Grigsby, J., Hamins-Puertolas, A., Hurst, E., Kurz, C., & Yildirmaz, A. (2020). The U.S. Labor Market during the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession (Working Paper No. 27159; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27159

  16. Jul 2020
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  20. Jan 2017
    1. what's missing, some workforce experts say, is a large-scale system that connects young people, training programs, employers and transportation that gets everyone where they need to be.

      Who or what can be this connector? Is the an opportunity for a platform to bring these things together?

    1. interesting that this program hasn't been funded since 2012, but was aimed specifically at supporting employment for individuals in low-income communities.