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The Engine of US Jobs
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 18, 2006 02:10 AM
from the it-used-to-be-us dept.
from the it-used-to-be-us dept.
eberta writes, "BusinessWeek has an interesting take on the US job situation, What's Really Propping Up The Economy. I think many of us have felt the US tech job market was stagnant and this article has insights into why this economy is so hot, yet not from our perspective. The spoiler is the business of health care — which will come as no surprise to anybody who has looked through the help wanted section lately. BusinessWeek has some opinions on how IT should play a bigger role in the health care industry."
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Time For All Those Health Nazis To Shut Up! (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, ok, but could you knock off the popping out of your little holes, grabbing us and eating us bit? It's annoying.
KFG
But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Healthcare does not really build value. Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a $20,000 bypass instead of a $5 bottle of asprin.
In the way economists measure things, the Exxon-Valdez disaster was a huge economic success.
One thing that really drives up the GDP is esculating housing costs. When a $100k house's value increases to $300k this is seen as a $200k increase in the economy.... but this is just bullshit, no value has been created. Sure it can stimulate the economy because Aunt Tilly can now take a $20k loan against her house and get a bypass and this trickles into the economy. Or Joe Sixpack might buy a new Chevvy... However, you should really see this as what it is: hyper inflation in housing prices.
If the "value" of a loaf of bread increases from $1 to $5, then that is seen as inflation, not growth. When a house goes from $100k to $300k this should be seen as inflation too.
Parent
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Ignoring quality of life issues... (Score:4, Insightful)
If a bottle of asprin results in her passing away but the bypass gives her 20 years more life, then (adjusting for inflation, etc) she merely has to generate $1,000 more wealth each year than she consumes for the operation to be "worth it". And, consider this: she has some dollar value of training and experience, valuable both during her hours working and her other hours contributing to the community. It could be that buying her a bypass would be like fixing the alternator in your car; sure it doesn't result in anything "new" but it is a small repair on a valuable item. You wouldn't throw away your car with a bad alternator; don't throw away (valuable) Aunty Tilly because she's got a bad valve.
Obviously, at some point people get old enough that society will never regain its financial investment in that elderly person (or lifetime-disabled person). S'OK. We're human beings; we take care of each other because we sympathize and empathize. It's part of the human condition, and it's a good thing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you for your great disservice. You have turned an economic problem into an emotional issue. This is ultimately why healthcare is such a hard problem, people don't like to hear that they (or their loved ones) are not immortal; but it's true. No one lives forever. Burying your head in the sand is not going to fix the problem: health care is costing too much.
I have seen quotes that suggest 80-50 percent of health care costs are spent in the last thre
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I think Canada will be surprised to learn that they gave up their sovereignty when they joined NAFTA.
I think what you saying would be better said this way: economic dependence on politically or socially unstable countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia, or China) is a source of economic insecurity.
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Not to worry, the US will probably soon be annex'ing Mexico. I think I just figured out the immigration plan the govt. is working on.
When the illegal immigrant population here in the US from MX reachs a bit over 1/3, of MX's total population....we can just annex the whole country...resources and all.
We can claim, "Hey, we got the people here, we might as well get the real estate that goes with them".
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Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not true.
A strong economy can be had with trade if the two nations have comparative advantage in trade. [wikipedia.org]
In real life there's rare examples of it existing only between two countries (usually more are involved), but it is an essential concept given that 28% of the global GDP was from exports. [hofstra.edu]
Restricting trade between countries (so there are no imports/exports) would only affect pricing/availability of goods within a country. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a country without a rich oil supply, then all sorts of products that are created from that supply would either be extremely expensive or non-existant (plastics, fuel, etc).
And even if you were to restrice trade to "free trade partners" (as you reference), that doesn't guarantee that the trade won't negatively affect an economy either. Free trade only refers to allowing products to flow without tariffs; it doesn't stop one country from dumping products into another, thus artificially lowering the price of those goods to drive the foreign industry into the ground.
Parent
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people think the GDP or GNP is a bogus, crude measure of economic health. There are a number of other measures which address the G?P's shortcomings. (The UN's "Human Development Index" (HDI) is probably the best known.)
As Robert Kennedy said in 1968:
Our gross national product -- if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Parent
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We shouldn't. Anyone who does has purposeful blinders on. The GDP and GNP are not for that. Nice bed of straw, though.
Time For All the Baby-Boomers to Stand Up! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is really no mystery here. More old people means larger government spending on health care. More spending means more jobs in the health care industry.
There are 2 other factors that have increased health-care spending. First is the millions of illegal aliens who have no insurance. They usually go straight to the emergency room, where physicians do not refuse service (even to people without insurance). The services are not paid by the illegal aliens but are paid by the government.
Illegal aliens do become sick. They often work at grueling, backbreaking work. There is no incentive for American businesses (that employ illegal labor) to improve the working conditions because they can always find another desperate laborer if the current laborer becomes too sick to work. After all, the USA has an open-border policy with Mexico and the rest of South/Central America.
The other factor that has increased health-care spending is the excessive hours which Americans are forced to work. "60 Minutes", the renowned CBS program, recentedly reported that the average American now works more hours than even the average Japanese. These additional hours of work take a severe toll on workers' health. For example, 60+ hours of computer work per week leads to cardiovascular problems due to lack of exercise. The excessive hours also strain family relations, leading to the need for counseling or psychotherapy. In Silion Valley, the divorce rate is about 30% higher than the national rate [nytimes.com].
Parent
Re:Time For All the Baby-Boomers to Stand Up! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an important point (although a tangent to the article). The abusive policy of allowing illegal workers into the US without providing them the basic protections and education that citizens get is absolutely disgusting. The solution to a complicated and difficult immigration system is not to just let people through the boarders. Every time someone mentions immigration reform people for immigrant rights go crazy and demand the preservation of the status quo. I don't get it. I think immigrants should be placed in a much better position than they are today. Some argue the price of fruit and building costs would skyrocket, but I'm not convinced. Besides it's not like they could skyrocket worse than the housing market.
I think it would make sense to figure out what it usually costs for someone to illegally cross over (I've heard it's as expensive as $300). Just charge a bit less than that for a fast track work visa. take fingerprints and random DNA samples, photographs, etc. Give the work visa a 1 year expiration and hope that a vast majority of people go back to their country of origin once a year for christmas or easter or whatever. A valid non-expired work visa would enable a person to demand minimum wage and recieve basic services. To renew your visa you just go through the fast track again, it should be like going to the DMV. and the fast track ought to be a for-profit entity, the more effeciently you run it the greater your department profits. (give employees bonuses).
Obviously this will never happen because the government is incapable of doing anything constructive.
Parent
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What's Really ... (Score:4, Informative)
Invisible Job Benefits (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
*waves hand in front of you*
Look! Visisble!
*grumble*
Re:Invisible Job Benefits (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Lucky me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Who pays the bills? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as a non-american, it's already one of the great ironies of the 'great american economy' - increasing numbers of people will end up working in the healthcare industry, but won't be able to afford to use it for themselves or their families. Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
Re:Who pays the bills? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't worry about American healthcare workers not being able to afford health care, many of them are taking "Medical Holidays" to places in Asia where they can get cheap operations. Yes many years ago that might have been a bit risky, but these days in places like Taiwan, American patients can get first class treatment at 1/10th of the price and it's probably safer than being treated by overworked American medical staff.
Check out articles found by google http://www.google.com/search?num=50&complete=1&hl= en&lr=&safe=off&q=medical+tourism+taiwan/ [google.com]
BTW the article missed out Lawyers from the groups that will benefit.
Parent
Desperation, maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick your prefered cause of death.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A huge problem in healthcare is that the decision to pay is largely seperated from the decision to use services. This is true wether it's an insurance company you're dealing with, or a government payer.
When you go see a doctor for any old cold, bruise, cracked rib, or any number of certain things, the doc is gonna tell you the same thing your grandma would have: you just hav
Questionable basis (Score:4, Interesting)
From the start I'm inclined to believe the article is flawed from a statistical perspecitve. Where they quote the relevant unemployment rates of Germany and France in comparison to the US they do so without mention that the European countries use a measure which would see the US figure at over 12% (They count the underemployed as unemployed, so if you're a coder working a few hours flipping burgers you show up as unemployed).
That said with an aging population health care will continue to be a growing employer at all levels.
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This is often stated as the way the unemployment rate is determined, but it is completely wrong.
The method by which the U.S. goverment determines the unemployment rate is far more accurate than that. They do a survey every month of 60,000 households collecting various data including employment status. It's really quite detailed and the methodology [bls.gov] seems to be pretty good.
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I'm not sure that a bridge counts as a household, probably not. In any one counts as unemployed only if one is actively looking for work.
everyone had a job in the stone age (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it is flawed to concentrate on jobs in the first place. By far the more meaningful data to compare countries by is standard of living. After all, everyone had a job in the stone age!
Of course standard of living is a subjective thing, practically only measurable through composition of a set of factors including such things as working hours per week, life expectancy, crime rate and even family size. Naturall
Re:everyone had a job in the stone age (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I do pay taxes in Germany and I have financed such vacations. I have good reason to. My reason is simple. Imagine a poor family in the US finds themselves facing a choice between a $100.000 hospital bill or death of their child.
Do you think they will let the kid die?
The economic model according to which helping the poor is a bad idea (called neoliberal although it is neither new nor liberal), assumes that they will.
Or will use desperate measures that harm the system that forces them to make the decision?
(Examples include defrauding the hospital, trying to raise money through crime - or even suicide, which destroys investments in education that you helped pay.)
US crime and suicide rates firmly prove this to be the case.
This is why the thinking that the poor do not need help is fundamentally flawed. People not served by the system will attack the system and defending/repairing the system is potentially much more expensive I do prefer financing vacations to massive crime rates and exploding prison populations, thank you very much.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
According to rational choice theory (which underlies almost all economic thinking in this day) they should not. The availability of unemployment benefits, medical care etc. means that logically, people shouldn't work. But they do. Germany is an economic force to be reckoned with - and survived disasters like two World War defeats and annexation of part of the country be the Soviet Bloc - even though this "abuse incentive" has
how the government spins the stats (Score:3, Insightful)
US Trade Deficit: When the Sausage comes home to Roost [bitsofnews.com] has some good discussion on the coming consequences of the trade deficit, and how we got here. Particularly pertinent is the section at the end about the 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and how the U.S. has definitively entered the "fall" stage of the power cycle.
But as you seem to indicate, few people seem to know that the federal reserve system is at the
"hot" economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Various U.S. Economic problems (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. economy probably is less healthy than it appears to be on the surface. We have a huge federal budget deficit as well as a huge trade deficit. A large percentage of our tax dollars goes towards paying the interest on what we have already borrowed. The majority of the federal budget deficit is being financed by money borrowed from Asian companies such as China. My knowledge about economics is somewhat limited, but my non-expert understanding is that in a strange sort of way the federal budget deficit helps make the trade deficit possible. Money needs to circulate between the two counties for trade to occur so China needs to send the dollars they they accumlate back here, somehow, to keep the price of the dollar from totally collapsing. So they buy T-bills from the U.S. Treasury to help us finance our deficit and the war in Iraq. That keeps the value of the dollar high enough for us to be able to buy goods from China at Wallmart and elsewhere. Correct me if my understanding of the economics is wrong, but doesn't the huge federal budget deficit help to make the huge trade deficit and loss of American jobs possible.
There are other problems as well such as a possible housing bubble in which many people have purchased homes with zero-interest loans or no down payments. If there is a bubble and it collapses then many of them could be in serious trouble. There is also high consumer debt levels and GM and Ford also seem to be in trouble.
So apparently, the overpriced health care that most of us can barely afford is now one of the main engines of the U.S. economy. There is that and housing (at least for the moment). The U.S. still dominates in making music and movies which Hollywood has been trying to protect with all the DRM and RIAA stuff they have been trying to push on all of us and the rest of the world. So the $500 per month that I pay for medical insurance is apparently going to support one of the few growing industries that the U.S. has heft.
Oh and lets not forget that all the baby boomers will soon be retiring and demanding Social Security and Medicare payments. Baby boomers have had smaller families which means that each retired baby boomer will eventually be supported by only two tax-payers. Younger people can plan on doing that while paying off the federal deficit at the same time while working in a job market in which in which many of the best jobs have gone overseas. Am I wrong in thinking that all this is not a sustainable plan for a long term healthy economy? Would someone please explain to me why politicians, the press and voters have not been more concerned about decades of large scale deficit spending. The combination of the war in Iraq and the tax cuts have made the deficit spending worse than ever. It is almost like we are trying to burn ourselves out econonomically. Would someone who has more knowledge about macro-economics please explain why I should not be worried about any of this! It everything really OK?
Parent
One Solution.... Robots. (Score:2)
Well the only way I can think of making health care less labor-intensive is to use robots. Lots of 'em. Or some kind of super robot that can do everything like cleaning bedpans, checking blood pressure, bathing patients, flirting with the X-ray machines etc. We could c
Broken window fallacy again (Score:5, Insightful)
Further:
Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years.
Isn't this a good thing generally? These people are being displaced to do other, more important work. Information technology should, in general, not be a boom industry anymore. The tools are becoming good enough to displace human labor. Let more software and computers do work that people in IT used to do, and let them go work in the health care industry where mechanization has less benefit or opportunity.
What if... (Score:5, Interesting)
Factors contributing to rising demand for health care:
1) Aging population. Even in the US, which has one of the highest birth rates of any western country, the population as a whole is getting older. With the baby boomers about to retire, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
2) Obesity and other dietary/behavioral risk factors. There's been a bit of evidence that the negative consequences of obesity were overblown, but it's still bad news.
3) The most subtle and nefarious of all: advances in medicine. There's not really any demand for drugs that haven't been discovered yet, or surgeries that can't yet be performed successfully.
This last point is the scariest of all. Suppose we developed a way to give people an extra 10 years of life, but it cost a million dollar per person. We simply couldn't afford to provide it for everyone. What do we do? The American solution is to offer the procedure to anyone who can pay for it. The Canadian way would be to have a 90-year wait list so most people died before they could get the procedure. Other countries would perhaps find other ways of rationing health care, but the point is that the inevitable consequence would be rationed health care. Maybe the market would do the rationing, maybe the government would, maybe the Grim Reaper would, but rationing there would be.
So, what do people think? Obviously, we should try to make health care more efficient, but, if it's too expensive to give everyone full access, how do we sort things out?
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--
What US dcctors have pay for malpractice insurance alone is enough to pay for multiple doctors in other countries.
Not to mention that their hospitals don't have to pay for a legal department etc.
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Who the hell said that?
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These sort of what-if scenarios don't really advance the debate :
One phrase: Jobless Recovery (Score:2, Insightful)
the non-existence of the signs of a good economy - but all the signs of one being dismantled
Futures market on the future of IT jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
The above link is a futures exchange (where you bet only your reputation) on the future of ITJOBS in the US. You can compare articles like this to the consensus in that market. The market above includes a measure of whether or not the jobs we will still have in the future are well paying jobs or not. The current market consensus opinion is pretty rosy.
For a good ead... (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone interested in this point should read "The end of Medicine", reviewed on Slashdot recently.
I found it a sad read. In between the author explaining why he is a realli smart, cool guy, he takes you on a tour of the tech companies working in the US health care area. There is *big* money in detecting and dealing with the symptoms of bad life style. And a lot of the money is going on tech.
(The sad bit is how little is going on prevention - life style changes, proper food, exercise. Ah well)
What keeps US economy running (Score:5, Informative)
Agriculture is heavily subsidized. As in many/almost all "western" countries. In other words, a lossy business for the state. It's kept running to remain at least in a moderate way able to sustain itself, just in case the world starts treating them like, say, Cuba and shuts down international trade (or in case some country/ies decide it's fun to sink ships going for US harbors). It's a war insurance, if you want. And many other countries do exactly the same.
Productive industry is pretty much in the same boat. From cars to consumer products, everything is manufactured abroad. The only hardware still going strong is military hardware, and there the government is even the main (and often only) customer, not something where they would EARN money. They're spending.
So what remains as the generator of tax is service and content. Now, service is pretty hard to export. You can only export it by getting people from abroad to your country. While it is a generator of tax, it largely only creates domestic tax. Tourists from outside the US become fewer and fewer (and, honestly, I can't blame anyone who doesn't want to dare going to the US).
So what remains as the bringer of foreign money (besides the biggest bringer, the ability to "tax" internationally by having the foreign trade currency at your pressing fingertips, the USD) and balances the foreign trade at least to some degree is content, patents and copyright.
Health care is certainly a big tax bringer of the future, but this most certainly only creates domestic tax and does not generate a single cent of foreign money pouring into the country.
Re:What keeps US economy running (Score:4, Interesting)
In the USA, two factors most heavily affect the continued subsidization of agriculture: Lobbies and the electoral system. Powerful lobbying groups have huge sway over these problems, usually very large corporations who operate under the façade of being the small farmer. Through this, they yield the power of the college-electoral system through those American states with little else but primary industry, and unemployment is a huge electoral issue. Thus, this "farming the mailbox" is steadfast.
Protection from war is an illusion, and known to be. Despite thoughts to the contrary, trade continues during war, especially agricultural trade - for every country lost to trade in foodstuffs, there are ten who want the barriers to exporting food to, e.g., the USA, dropped.
America's biggest currency stabilizer, where currency is economic purchasing power parity, is their own currency. The US dollar replaced gold as the ab initio staple currency after the Bretton Woods system failed, being the most liquid and stable currency available. Because other countries are subject to currency crises (i.e. Argentina, Thailand, etc.), they stock reserves in American dollars (foreign currency reserves).
The US dollar, then, is effectively backed by every other nation-state interested in preserving its currency against crises. Whenever the US dollar gets "cheaper", foreign countries soak it up. Thus, the biggest "export", in terns of preservation of purchasing power parity, is the US dollar's stability. There are arguments about the Euro, but it's still not a proven currency, though it has all the qualities necessary to substitute for the US dollar, and someday it may.
This isn't to say that patents and copyright are irrelevent. While they are a useful export, that contributes to continued economic growth in the USA, and particularly relevant as you say, as the USA has become essentially uncompetitive in most other areas. However, the laurels, as you could say, rest on the US dollar itself.
Parent
healthcare jobs already being outsourced (Score:4, Interesting)
The appeal is obvious: Heart surgeries and hip replacements in such countries as India, Thailand and Mexico can be had for less than one-third the cost in the USA.
At the same time, medical costs in the USA are rising rapidly, with no end in sight.
Seth
Business is good - just get healthcare clients (Score:4, Insightful)
Long term I worry though, as healthcare isn't fundamentally 'productive' in any sense. It's not making anything new, it's just chewing up a larger and larger percentage of our paychecks in the form of social security, medicare and insurance payments.
Exporting Dollars is the engine of US jobs. (Score:3, Informative)
The reason US inflation hasn't skyrocketed in the past in response is oil. The producers are paid in US dollars which means the rest of the world has to buy these new dollars to pay for their oil, essentially what's happening is that inflation is being exported from the US to the rest of the oil consuming world, or rather, the US economy is heavily subsidised by the oil consuming world. With the falling dollar though and corresponding reduction in the value of their dollar holdings, some are switching those dollar holdings to alternative currencies so less of that inflation is being exported and the falling dollar accelerates. Prices appear to increase correspondingly.
You will have noticed inflation and interest rates increasing.
Where's the market force? Where's technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
My first reaction when I hear about an industry hiring so many people, is "how can I get those people fired so that the industry's product won't be so expensive?"
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone comparison shopping for healthcare here in USA. And now that I think of it, I don't know how I would. It's not like prices are published somewhere, or that I can go get a copy of Consumer Reports that shows who gives the most value.
Insurance is the reason. A lot of people think of insurance as healthcare, rather than "catastophic oops" hedging. If, when you consider going to a clinic or hospital, you're not thinking, "oh shit, how much will this cost?" then you're not going to exert a market force.
If the patient doesn't exert a market force, then the provider will not be subject to market forces.
And every once in a while, some politician runs on a platform of further removing market forces, to make healthcare even more expensive. At least insurance users have a little say over costs, by shopping around for insurance plans (though it's horribly indirect). Politicians get the bright idea of having involuntary taxes pay for healthcare, so that nobody will have any incentive at all to reduce cost. It's not like someone will say, "Well, I don't want to spend as much on healthcare, so I've decided to pay less, and the only way to do that is to pay less income tax, and the way to do that is to have less income. Therefore, I'm leaving IBM to accept McDonald's offer." ;-)
I think if we can remove the indirections and somehow increase the information flow, we could get people to start thinking about cost/value, and create incentive for advancing the tech. I won't be happy until all the doctors and their support staff are unemployed, because we all have medi-droids taking care of us. You don't want a medi-droid? Ok, fine, hire expensive humans. But I sure want one. And if I can't have a robot, then let me hire someone who makes $10k/year, tele-operates from New Delhi, and prescribes 20-year-old no-longer-patented drugs. I might not live as long as you, but while I'm alive, I'll have a lot more beer money. :-)
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The aritcle said 1.7 million new HEALTHCARE jobs..
Are you trying to say Healthare should should be creating jobs to meet all US population growth???
Healthcare alone added jobs to meet 12% of the population growth. Thats is quite a bit for a single sector of the job market.
Now a usefull stastic would be how much did Healthcare grow vs US Population..
Now according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there were 6,388,000 US Healthcare Jobs in 2002.
By adding 1.7 million jo