Tag Archives: jobs

College, and What Degree Are You Looking For, Again?

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From Millennial Branding and their report The Multi-Generational Job Search (done in conjunction with Beyond.com), centered on a survey of “job seekers and HR professionals,” come these tidbits.

On the matter of whether going to college is, of necessity, for everyone:

[T]he majority of hiring managers (64% [2,978 respondents]) would still consider a candidate who hadn’t even attended college.

And

73% feel that college is only somewhat preparing students for the working world.

Then, this:

Liberal Arts majors (who are historically more focused on communications [and communications skills sought by 83% of respondents]) were shown to be the least likely to land a job, with only 2% of companies actively recruiting those graduates.

This against 27% looking for some sort of STEM degree and 18% looking for business majors (aside: these low numbers are an outcome of this administration’s poor economic policies, say I).

Hmm….

The Welfare Cliff from another Perspective

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I, among a number of other folks, wrote about this a short while back.

Following is the money graph from that post, from the perspective of the present post:WelfareCliff

Here’s another perspective on the matter, the point of “present post,” from AEIdeas‘ James Pethokoukis, who cited John Merline’s article for the Richmond Fed.

Writing about the “decline in labor force participation as a result of reported illness or disability,” Merline had this [emphasis added]:

Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found, is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s, because of the way initial benefits are calculated. That’s particularly true at the lower end of the income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of income replaced by the disability program climbed from 68% in 1984 to 86% in 2002 among lower-income men aged 50-61.

That’s an enormous marginal tax rate that must be paid in order to get a better job.

Demon Oil

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…and its evil carbon footprint. Here, courtesy of Mark Perry, writing for AEIdeas, are 10 examples of the destruction demon oil has wrought in North Dakota.

1. … [I]t took almost 58 years for the Bakken oil fields to produce the first 500 million barrels of oil from 1954 to July 2012; and then, thanks to the shale oil revolution, the Bakken oil fields produced the second 500 million barrels in less than two years—from July 2012 to March 2014!

2. In 2004, North Dakota ranked No. 9 for oil production by state, but then thanks to the shale oil boom in the Bakken, the state quickly rose to the No. 6 spot by 2008, the No. 4 spot in 2009, and then surpassed both California and Alaska in 2012 to become America’s second-largest oil producing state, behind only Texas.

3. … At one million barrels of oil every day, the North Dakota Bakken now produces more oil than entire countries like Colombia, Oman, and the UK.

4. In each of the last 69 months since January 2009, North Dakota has recorded the lowest state jobless rate in the country and led the country as the state with the highest rate of private sector job growth. …North Dakota’s jobless rate has been below the US jobless rate by an average of more than 5 percentage points over the last five years. Over the last 12 months through March, private payrolls in North Dakota have grown by…more than twice the national average of 2.25% in private sector job growth.

5. Over the last three years, the jobless rate in Williams County, North Dakota, in the heart of the Bakken oil fields, has averaged less than 1%, and has been as low as 0.7% in six different months.

6. According to the Conference Board, there were more than twice as many advertised online job openings in North Dakota in March (21,900) than there were unemployed workers seeking employment (10,610)…. At the national level…there are more than twice as many unemployed workers (10,486,000) as online advertised job vacancies (4,894,000).

7. The Census Bureau reported recently that three of the five fastest growing micro areas (cities with populations of 10,000 to 50,000) in the country between July 2012 and July 2013 were in North Dakota [including two of the top two].

8. The BEA reported recently that North Dakota led the country last year with the highest growth in state personal income at 7.6%, almost three times the national average of 2.6% growth….

9. North Dakota has boasted a state budget surplus in every year since 2008, when shale oil brought an unprecedented level of new jobs, wealth and prosperity to the state.

10. This might be the most impressive economic fact about North Dakota…: in 2006, North Dakota was America’s 11th poorest state by personal income per person. In just seven years, thanks the shale revolution, the Peace Garden State rose to become the nation’s 2nd most prosperous state in 2013, ranking behind only Connecticut last year for personal income per capita….

Read ’em and weep.