Category Archives: jobs

College for Everyone?

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Maybe not.  I’ve written about the question of college for everyone elsewhere.

A report on a different subject, The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, posted at Knot Yet, has this in its “Conclusions and Implications:”

2 – How do we improve the job prospects for young adults who will not get a college degree but are willing and able to receive vocational training?
Surely improving the economy overall will help young adults without college degrees, as a rising tide lifts many boats, but how can these young adults be better prepared to enter the labor market even when the economy isn’t booming?  Even during recessions, there are decent jobs that go unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants.  How can education and industry leaders work together more closely to target high-demand occupations that pay good salaries and formalize pathways into jobs in these sectors?  Countries like Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom are achieving good success with vocational training, apprenticeship programs and placements for their young adults in industries as varied as nursing, information technology, and advanced manufacturing.  There certainly seems to be untapped potential for the United States to follow in their footsteps….

The Urban Institute‘s report, “Expanding Apprenticeship: A Way to Enhance Skills and Careers,” identified in a footnote to the above quote, points out that apprenticing—a natural extension of VoTech training (and given the modern responsibilities of office occupations—these aren’t your grandmother’s secretarial jobs—to Office Occupations training, also)—offers significant economic benefits to non-college graduate graduates (using middle-skill jobs as the baseline):

Looking at earnings impacts during the first 2.5 years after exiting [an apprenticeship] program, [Kevin Hollenbeck] estimated that the net social benefits to apprenticeship were about $50,000 per apprentice, far more than minimal gains accruing to community college students and WIA trainees.  In other words, it takes little time for a significant payoff to apprenticeship training to accrue to the worker and society at large.  On a lifetime basis, Hollenbeck projects the present value of earnings gains less costs at $269,000 per apprentice, compared to $96,000-$123,000 per community college attendee, and about $40,000 per WIA trainee.

We need to bring the VoTech and OO programs—updated to today’s technologies and business needs—back into our high schools, including public, private, parochial, charter, and make all of these programs voucher-accessible to the extent the programs are not already.

The UI report is well worth reading in its entirety, as is the Knot Yet report for its separate, main subject.

It’s Time

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…I think, to end the monopoly that is the United States Post Office.  The Constitution does not support this monopoly, saying only that one of the powers of Congress is To establish Post Offices and Post Roads.  Congress can do this just fine by fostering competition and getting out of the way of the private sector handling all of our mail delivery.

The trigger for this is the USPS’ union mendacious claims concerning USPS’ new partnership with Staples to open mini-post offices in Staples stores

…staffed by Staples employees, not postal workers

The American Postal Workers Union objects; the move “replaces good-paying union jobs with low-wage, nonunion workers.”

Don’t worry about what’s good for the customer; worry only about what’s good for the union.  Meanwhile, the price of a first class stamp keeps rising steadily.

In the end, nearly the only thing left to de-monopolize is first class mail delivery; the private sector competes quite effectively in all other classes of mail.  Package delivery, for instance, in direct competition with the USPS is faster and cheaper.  The only place where the private sector declines to compete (as opposed to being barred from competing) is in bulk junk mail delivery.  I still get my Tuesday and Wednesday rations of that like clockwork.  And I won’t miss it in the slightest.  I suspect my city’s recycling center won’t miss the clutter, also.

We’re Gonna Keep the Stall Going

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…move along.

At a joint appearance with Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, [Secretary of State John] Kerry said he has not received a crucial environmental report on the $7 billion pipeline, which would carry oil from western Canada to refineries in Texas.

“My hope is that before long, that analysis will be available, and then my work begins[.]”

Never mind that the “analysis” has been going on for the better part of a decade.

Then Kerry added this bit of mendacity:

I can promise our friends in Canada that all the appropriate effort is being put into trying to get this done effectively and rapidly.

Who does he think he’s kidding?

Another Thought on Economic Mobility

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Gerald Auten and Geoffrey Gee wrote about “Income Mobility in the United States: New Evidence from Income Tax Data.”  It’s an extensive paper; I’m abstracting a couple of points in this post [emphasis added].

  • More than half of taxpayers…moved to a different income quintile over this period [1996-2005]. About half…of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005.
  • Median incomes of taxpayers in the sample increased by 24% after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two–thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period.  Furthermore, the median incomes of those initially in the lowest income groups increased more in per centage terms than the median incomes of those in the higher income groups.  In contrast, the real median incomes of taxpayers who were in the highest income groups in 1996 declined by 2005.
  • The composition of the very top income groups changed dramatically over time.  Less than half…of those in the top 1% in 1996 were still in the top 1% in 2005.  Less than one–fourth of the individuals in the top 1/100th% in 1996 remained in that group in 2005.

Those evil 1%-ers not only had trouble staying in the 1%, a significant fraction of them were erstwhile bottom%-ers.

Taking economic mobility—income changes—relative to all taxpayers, Auten and Gee found this:

  • About 56% of taxpayers…in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher quintile by 2005.  While 29% moved up to the second quintile, nearly as many (27.4%) moved up two or more quintiles and 4.5% moved all the way to the top quintile.
  • More than twice as many middle–income taxpayers moved up to a higher income quintile…as dropped to a lower one[.]

Thomas Sowell had this comment on the matter three years ago:

Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a “problem” for which a “solution” is necessary.  They have created a powerful vision of “classes” with “disparities” and “inequities” in income, caused by “barriers” created by “society.”  But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.

And now comes President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party colleagues decrying exactly that static income inequality folderol in the middle of their failed economic recovery and the outcomes of their failed social control policies.  Truly, they are desperate to change the subject in this election year.

A Short Lesson

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…in employment history, presented pictorially.

Notice that: the share of working-age Americans had started to fall the year before the Panic of 2008, and it started to fall sharply a few months prior to the Panic’s official start.  Those are economic lags working through the system.

The problem is, the share of potential workers actually working has remained static at its historic low of roughly 58.5% ever since.  That’s not economic lag, that’s failed economic policies over the last several years.