US College Grads See Slim-to-Nothing Wage Gains Since Recession (bloomberg.com) 245
The worth of a college degree is losing its luster in the US job market. From a report on Bloomberg: Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers. What you study matters for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates's paychecks have fallen. A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier. "It has been like this for the past five, six years now," said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. "It's a little depressing."
This is of no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Wage stagnation has taken the earnings of the middle class since the 70s. About the only thing keeping wages going up in that time has been union action and increases in the minimum wage. Since the min wage certainly has not been keeping up with inflation _and_ unions are at an all time low, none of this is a surprise.
For those of you who want the world to be better without a government acting as the means to corral all of us cats wandering around need to start showing us who think otherwise how that's going to work. Because the ideas you've espoused so far have failed. Profits as an end goal only promote avarice and greed as valued traits. This is where such thinking has lead us.
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But... but... but... Capitalism! Invisible Hand! Free Market! It will all right itself, you'll see. One day we'll all wake up in a paradise of high pay and a clean world. You just gotta believe!
Until then get back to work, slave.
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For those of you who want the world to be better without a government acting as the means to corral all of us cats wandering around need to
First thing to do when something doesn't work is to stop doing that. We're in this situation where the government controls the issuance and devaluation of money, the government regulates the markets, the government fakes the inflation data to make it look like we're not in a depression, and then people say, "obviously we need a government to be successful!"
start showin
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I also enjoyed "The Rise of the One Percent", although it's still under copyright.
Re:This is of no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you want to just say that or do you want to put in the time to read Man, Economy, and State, The Road to Serfdom, On Human Action, Economics in One Lesson, and I, Pencil
When your first link is to a 1500 page treatise on economic principles with no clear reference you remind me of the nutters who link to two hour long YouTube videos and anyone who doesn't watch it lose the argument.
Inflation is not really the problem, if you get paid good money convert it to gold, property or other item of real value. The problem is that many people don't get a fair value for their work. But what's the solution? You can let the free market handle it, but the buyers aren't interested in giving you a fair value, they want it as cheap as possible. Or you can try to let society decide through some form of socialism, but in practice that leads to some being more equal than others. Or we can go back to self-sufficiency, losing all advantages of scale and complex economic ecosystems. Or go UBI and decide that what you do isn't important, have some free money anyway.
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Or go UBI and decide that what you do isn't important, have some free money anyway.
UBI is paying people not to riot. Which, frankly, is a pretty good investment; if that's all it takes, then I don't see why they wouldn't be happy to pour on the cash. Especially since it's a really easy way to keep tabs on a lot of the population. If you implement it the same way we implement AFDC these days, you'll get a lot of data back when they use their benefits card. It's the next-best thing to killing cash without actually killing cash, because the poorest people will have the least access to paper
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We're in this situation where the government controls the issuance and devaluation of money, the government regulates the markets, the government fakes the inflation data to make it look like we're not in a depression, and then people say, "obviously we need a government to be successful!"
Have you read about eras such as the Gilded Age in the US? Unregulated markets, brought on mostly by quickly changing technology that simply didn't have rules on it, lead to the concentration of wealth into monopolies. Businessmen ruthlessly cut their competition out of the market, then performed hostile takeovers and shut them down to keep the prices/profits high once there was no competition. Once there was no competition, there was no incentive to do right for workers, so they shut down factories, laid o
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I'm sure those gaining as the inequality grows already think the world is better. And there are enough other people who are not gaining and never will gain but believe with an almost religious fervor that they are just one break from their hard work and inherent talent enabling them to leap the gap and they dream of that moment when they will be able to turn round and say "Fuck you, I'm alright now" to those left behind. And that's what will make the world a better place for them and they're happy with a wo
Re:This is of no surprise (Score:4, Informative)
Middle class folks are NOT minimum wage earners.
Pretty much by definition a middle class worker is waaaaaay above minimum wage.
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Tell me about it. I haven't had a raise even close to the OFFICIAL Inflation Rate since the turn of the century: the only real bumps to pay came from changing jobs. And even then, bonuses are a thing of the past, last one I got was in December 2008. . .
And I'm a senior guy, by income, at about the "4%" level. When I was young, I would have thought myself rich. Now ? Upper middle-class at best, and only treading water. . .
chemical engineer graduates (Score:3)
Aging demographic and the growing wealth gap are deflationary it's going to hurt when it happens
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Marky Mark reference?
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All we need to do is democratically make policy to solve these problems. Aging demographic is harder, and is usually taken care of through immigration, but the wealth gap is easier. We have simple models to follow from the 1940s. Tax the crap out of the wealthiest, and hand out the money. FDR had to use a public works program, but the actual mechanism you use to distribute wealth is actually less important.
The missing part is a political movement that feels empowered to make these demands. After WWII it was
New American Dream (Score:2)
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Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
On the other hand, unicorns and massive valuations are great because they need employees to create new products which creates competition for employees and rising wages. If big established companies d
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Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to inves
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Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to invest any of if because I know that this giant stack of Jenga blocks we call a stock market is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later (when it does I'll shift funds to index stocks and ride the recovery). The marketing and advertising bubble will pop. The Twitter sale debacle is a harbinger of what's to come as people realize that marketing data and ad revenue aren't enough to keep a business afloat (hear the rumblings about Twitter adding paid subscriptions?) As incomes remain at best stagnant, disposable income drops as cost of living increases, meaning that marketing data gets less and less valuable. One of the pillars the stock market is built upon is confidence. As these large, popular companies go further and further in the red, people will start to panic. Wall Street might want to look into licensing those FoxConn suicide nets, or at least hand out free hardhats to pedestrians walking below.
The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
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The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Sure, you make all those gains, but, since like you say, timing the market is a fool's errand, unless you get lucky and pull out at the right time, you lose those gains along with everyone else.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
If you play long enough, the house always wins. When you play craps there's no problem riding a hot shooter, but if you are joining the game late in the streak, you might be better off just playing the pass line until he craps out. You won't win big, but you won't lose big either. Better to save your money for the
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Is she putting 15% of her income into a 401K or IRA too?
If so, then you're not doing too badly if starting out this young.
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Is she putting 15% of her income into a 401K or IRA too?
If so, then you're not doing too badly if starting out this young.
No. Her old job gave her a Roth, but she left that job for another one that paid a little less, but was closer to our house and actually offered a week of paid vacation. Every couple months she will put a couple hundred dollars into savings but that's it. I do all the 401k investment. Her paychecks are mostly earmarked for the mortgage.
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When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Roughly speaking, from the time unions started to spring up until Dodge v. Ford .
But otherwise, a solid belief in slavery (including sweatshops and company towns) and/or a choice of short-term greed and riches over long-term economic growth have dominated.
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The problem is that you don't make money by investing unless you can control your risk and make decisions from an understanding of how businesses work. This is a very specific skill set that is as complicated as programming. If you have someone else make the decisions for you, you are not getting a very big piece of the pie.
There are 2 easy ways to make big money investing. 1 is HFT. The market on that is kind of locked down, the little guy doesn't really stand a chance to get in on that unless you buy stock in HFT firms. The second is to just put enough in so that your small piece of the pie(to use your metaphor) is still a pretty big piece. That's kind of my point: unless you are smart enough (in the right way, there are plenty of smart/intelligent people that can't play the market) or are lucky enough (get in on an IPO,
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So basically if you are rich already you can invest and make money. I thought that went without saying.
Rich or, as I said, lucky. These days you don't get rich or make a lot of money just working. You can make enough to be comfortable (which I readily admit I am in this camp), but you have no real way to actually make money. I'm a reasonably intelligent person (and have been acknowledged as such both throughout school and by my coworkers), but my intelligence is geared more towards the acquisition and application of information. I'm not wired for inventive or entrepreneurial endeavors, which is just abou
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Everyone doesn't know that - in fact, schools seem to go out of their way to avoid teaching that. Ownership of the means of production is the way you turn 1 dollar into 2, in a capitalist society. Working for a living is for suckers, and public schools mostly train suckers.
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As productivity raises (Score:3)
Re:As productivity raises (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, we have to look at the rest of the world as globalization trends continue. China has seen massive growth of the middle class since moving to a mixed economy, but naturally that's going to come at our expense. The U.S. owes a lot of its success in the 50's to escaping from WWII with its infrastructure unscathed while other western nations had to rebuild along with the isolationist Communist bloc not competing against the American economy.
Europe has been able to fully rebuild and reduce barriers to doing business to become a major economic powerhouse and the former Communist states have either ditched it or moved towards mixed economies that have allowed them to become far more prosperous. When we have to compete with the rest of the world, it's little wonder that we don't look as strong relative to decades past.
Re:As productivity raises (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then you are missing the way way back side. If productivity increases, and reduces the need for workers, fewer people have money to buy goods - even when they are cheaper (though that doesn't happen due to price stickiness and profit motive/greed). This causes a downward spiral that we've been living in for decades.
I'm so tired of market fundamentalism. It is a soulless religion.
China has seen an increase in their middle class because they use policy to build it. In the 40s through the 60s in the US rich people paid huge percentages of their income in taxes (and only the top 5% at first paid that), which was directly redistributed back to workers through public works and other programs. Wages and salaries were controlled with both floors and caps. This even lead directly to employer benefits such as health insurance - they couldn't pay more, so they needed to offer something else - and the economy was so good from these policies that there was a lot of demand for everything.
Europe and Japan acheived similar wonders with similar policy. We can look at those places today to see the countries where those redistributive policies are stronger, are weathering the shit-storm market fundamentalism brought us over the last decade, better than the free market states.
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You're missing the backside that as productivity increases, so does supply which reduces costs.
To a point. People love to assume this graph is a straight line.
Skillsets. (Score:3)
I feel like this boils down to what skillsets you have and how willing you are to move to use them.
1. If you ignored the EVERYONE HAS TO COLLEGE advice of the 2000s and learned a skilled trade instead you'd be doing rather well right now. We have such a shortage of CNC operators that local companies have teamed up with the VocTech highschool to offer an adult education class. You earn your GED and CNC/welding certifications in 8 weeks (going 2 days a week) and walk out earning $50k/year. CNC have billboards everywhere. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental and vision.
Even within engineering there are winners and losers. I just got poached on linked in for a 30% raise in another state. If you have the right words on your resume companies are looking. Just talking about my niche: Simulink, dSpace (Hardware-in-the loop), embedded, RTOS, etc are all doing very well across automotive and aerospace.
"Biology" is a great starter degree for pre-med or other advanced degree. A BS Bio on its own qualifies you to earn $31k a year.
2. Fewer Americans Moved Last Year Than At Any Time On Census Bureau Record [bisnow.com]. Since we followed food out of Africa humans have been migrating to earn a life. I see job postings around here that can't be filled because my college peers insist on living in location X. "I don't want to leave Seattle. It's so wonderful. I can't afford to go out. Live with 2 roommates but I'm 'living my dream'".
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Suckers! (Score:3)
Fight for 15 (Score:3)
Not just college grads (Score:3)
For the most part, wages have been stagnant across the board for pretty much everyone in the middle class and below for quite some time.
http://www.epi.org/publication... [epi.org]
It isn't just limited to those with a college degree.
In addition, the price increase of a degree has far, Far, FAR outpaced wages and will eventually reach a point that you'll have to consider if getting a degree ( and the enormous amount of debt that will come with it ) will be worth it or not in the future job markets.
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Word of advice... (Score:3)
Be willing to change, locations and careers as necessary. Be flexible.
There ARE places and jobs in the grand old USA where wages are going up. If you don't get that raise you want where you are, start looking for a location and career that is in demand and JUMP. Sooner rather than later.
I've lived in 4 different states in my long career and I am willing to pull up the tent stakes and move if it means more money. I've also had multiple kinds of jobs, from Electronic Engineering to Network engineering to Software Development.... And last year I got one of the biggest raises of my life by changing jobs...
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Who's kids?
There are many children who grow up moving a lot. My wife was a preacher's kid and she moved every couple of years as a child. I know military brats that moved every 9 months or so. Yea, it may be a hard thing, but it's not an impossible thing, and sometimes the adversity of one's life builds character.
IF your kids stability is more important to you than salary increases, that's fine, just be honest about it with yourself. It's not your job that's holding your back.
Like I said.. I've chang
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Still... IF you are locked in place because of the kids and that location doesn't see the salary increases available in other locations, it's not the job that's holding you back, but the location you desire to live that's holding you back. Just be honest with yourself about this and I'm fine...
Personally, I think that a lot of parents are inclined to coddle their offspring a bit too much anyway, which can also cause adjustment issues as they become adults. But hey, you got to do what you think is best for
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Oh sure, it's not simple, but there are websites that sort all this Cost of Living stuff out for you if you google a bit and the quality of life is something only you can determine for yourself.
I don't know where you are, but here in Texas there is a huge boom and they are starting to get desperate for software types and related fields. As one of my friends put it "It's a seller's market" for technical skills right now. The standards of living are not bad, though will admit that housing prices and comm
Lets look at the reasons (Score:3)
It's not just college grads, it's most people. (Score:2)
In general people earning at the median income (roughly 56k) have not seen their incomes recover past their pre-recession levels, and people at the first and second quintile (from the bottom, roughly 33k) have not recovered to their pre-recession incomes. Fresh out of school, the average college graduate makes about $50.5K.
So what recent college grads are experiencing is representative of what at about half of the people in the country are experiencing -- namely those with average to below average income.
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You seem to be mixing personal and household incomes here. The median personal income is closer to $25k. The median household income is around twice that, in the $50k-ish range, because the median household has about two-ish people. So your median income figure must be household income, or else it's off by an order of magnitude. But your college graduate income figure has to be personal income, because households don't go to college, individuals do.
Either that or you meant mean personal income, not median?
Peter Thiel was right ... (Score:3)
The housing bubble has moved to an education bubble.
He said 8 years before that the dotcom bubble had moved to a real-estate bubble. ...
To his credit, he's actually paying people to leave college and start companies.
Carts and Horses (in various orientations) (Score:2)
Could it be that instead of attacking fundamental problems in national economics, politicians instead decided to hand out even more money that wasn't there... ?
"We must be doing better, cause we all got papers now saying how smart we are"
No surprise: US still in recession (Score:3, Interesting)
Salaries suck, because the US is still in a recession. With real unemployment well over 20% [slashdot.org], comparable to economic powerhouses like Greece, Croatia and Botswana, it's no surprise that salaries are declining. Add in inflation, and they are declining even faster.
There is one overriding reason for the continuing recession: debt. Federal debt in the US [cbo.gov] is out of control - plus up to $200 trillion of unfunded obligations that everyone is carefully ignoring. If we also ignore those invisible (but inevitable) obligations, the US is still one of the top 20 most indebted nations. [wikipedia.org]
Keynesian economics have been thoroughly debunked. Actually, there was never any evidence that they might be correct. But politicians love them, because they provide an excuse to buy votes by spending other people's money. All of this debt has been built up with promises that never would be fulfilled. But the politicians making those promises are now mostly millionaires [nytimes.com], so that's ok.
What cannot go on forever will stop. Debt cannot be infinitely piled on, and countries like the US are reaching the limits of their ability to sell more debt. When this stops, the stopping is likely to be abrupt and unpleasant.
Entry level jobs are going away (Score:5, Interesting)
I think most of the stagnation is due to the fact that most college graduates are having to take lower-paying jobs. In the past, large companies were happy to take in new college graduates for entry-level jobs. Big companies paid relatively big salaries, and the recipient of that entry level job could either use it to rise in that company, or put it on their resume and move on to another.
These days, there's just not a lot of entry level work that pays well. Big companies are outsourcing and offshoring the stuff that new grads used to do, and the jobs that remain onshore are with service providers. Those providers squeeze every single penny out of every outsourcing deal they make, and one of the ways they do that is to pay workers less and give them crappy benefits. For those who aren't lucky enough to get one of these jobs, yes, Starbucks awaits. The early 90s had a similar problem -- large companies had just killed huge swaths of their employees because computers were starting to automate processes that would require tons of manual work. College grads who would have gotten some faceless cubicle job a generation prior and used it as a stepping stone to prosperity all of a sudden didn't have that option. I'm pretty sure that's where the word McJob came from -- educated people forced to take low-paying, low-skill work because there wasn't a demand for educated people.
I'm foolishly hoping that one day MBA schools will start teaching students that it's better overall to have everything done in-house with employees you control. Accounting rules and tax laws would have to change to incentivize hiring large staffs, but I definitely think everyone, including executives on down to the lowest level employee, were happier when everyone who made the investment in education had the chance to earn a good wage.
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CashFloatsUp (Score:2)
Adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 since the recession.
Yet everyone else fights for table scraps... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0... [nytimes.com]
.
Increasing Economic Stagnation - Much wider issue (Score:2, Interesting)
As I've watched American prosperity and society change over the last 30-40 years, I've come to believe the following are the cause of the economic stagnation/depression that just gets worse each decade:
- Americans went gung ho into promoting cultural and ethnic diversity wiping away the uniformity of the 50's/60's replacing it with gigantic mess where no one talks to each other any more because they have nothing in common. Many recent research studies suggest that culturally/ethnically diverse societies fi
Its basic economics (Score:3)
What pay employers will offer is a direct function of supply and demand.
All the big companies are complaining about a shortage of STEM workers, but the reality has to be that its just not the case, otherwise there would be more competition for thos workers which would directly translate into higher wages offered.
Clearly the complaints are a baseless dog-and-pony show, probably just to keep the H1Bs flowing, which is also presumably where most of the supply is coming from that is actually surpessing the demand (and therefore wages) for local talent.
Re: To funny... (Score:2)
In the meantime the rich get richer and the poor seem to want the rich to become richer too!?
To be educated middle class and realising they are fucked by those who don't want an education and those who have too much money to care.
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"Without the ZIRP rates, the mortgages they lure people into, and the housing bubbles this creates, the amount of money circulating in our economies would shrink so much and so fast the whole shebang would fall to bits.
"That’s right: the survival of our economies today depends [on] the existence of housing bubbles. No bubble means no money creation means no functioning economy".
https://www.theautomaticearth.... [theautomaticearth.com]
"The US owes the world 453,000 tonnes of gold which is almost 3 times all the gold ever prod
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Trump says that real estate companies are paragons of efficiency, just like all corporate America.
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Seriously, lets blame the baby boomers for this. It's ALWAYS their fault. Just look at the dumbass from their age group they elected.
But don't they get credit for the dumbass from their age group that they didn't elect?
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Yeah, if only I had run a voter registration drive in my kindergarten class. That would totally have swung the 1980 election the other way.
Boomers get the blame because they were the ones with the power to set us on this course, or set us on a different course. Due to the small size of GenX, they have stayed the ones in power until the Millennials came of age.
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In my case a Computer Sci degree morphed into an Information Science degree and it's done me well so far.
I never went to high school but I went to community college. My General Education A.A. degree got me into software testing. A decade later I went back to school and my Computer Programming A.S. degree got me into IT support.
Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks (Score:4, Funny)
It is good to see the Enlightenment hasn't left a mark on you.
Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty damn simple:
Most college degrees show that you are basically employable in a white-collar or pink-collar job entry-level job paying $40K/year or so: you have proven you can show up, follow simple instructions, get work done on time, understand written material, write a page of text that sort of makes sense, do basic arithmetic, etc.
That's about it for 99% of college graduates. Congrats, you get to sit in a chair at work, and we know you can do the simple job we need filled. Hell, do well, and we'll even promote you to where you can earn more and actually add more value.
You went to MIT or did STEM? Great, we figure you are smart, hard-working, and have an analytical mind. That's worth $80K. We really don't care what you majored in or what courses you took. It's still a fucking entry-level job.
20 year old autodidact? Sorry, just too much uncertainty. Come back when you have a track record or a Github repository that we like.
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It tends to be for those autodidacts and other weird cases (like young college dropouts or philosophy PhDs looking to write code.)
Then again, I am usually interviewing for $200K-$800K developers, so our experiences may differ.
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Well written, Anonymous. On this much we agree: A college diploma is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain useful skills. However, I think you overstate your case. College does not guarantee that you will become a problem solver, but if becoming a problem solver is your goal then college can be an effective method of achieving it.
Self-motivation and self-study are important, but not sufficient. In a functional college environment, you will be serendipitously exposed to ideas that you would not
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It is entirely possible to get a college degree, even an advanced degree, and not learn anything useful.
I had a roommate who took automotive design on the West Coast in the 1990's, had no interest in getting a job at the Big Three in Detroit, and racked up $25K in student loans because he was interested in cars. Fortunately, he worked in a grocery store warehouse for six years when he got married to a college guidance counselor. His wife got him into warehouse logistics for the higher paying jobs to pay off the student debt.
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Good. College graduates rarely have the skill sets someone who has actually been working in the field an equivalent amount of time has. Education that is up to date is always more readily available on the net than it is in a stale college course. An autodidact is almost always far more valuable than someone who followed a canned path. This is not only because they've done more but because they have developed, and broadly demonstrate, the critical quality of self-motivation.
You know what most college degrees really say? That you were willing to let people waste your time on irrelevancies when you could have been out deep-diving into something. Or even worse, that you aren't capable of deep-diving into something.
I'm talking about degrees in useful subjects when I allow that some college graduates do manage to become useful during, and because of, college. Degrees in soft subjects aren't that. They're completely worthless. Not that history, philosophy and so forth are absolutely worthless; just that degrees in them are. You want to learn history (and you should) or dig into philosophy, just start reading.
You're almost always better off learning how to think for yourself than you are thinking the way someone else tells you to. Serious problem solving is not compatible with camp-following.
Bullcrap.... College/University is first about learning how to gain new knowledge and then learning how to apply that knowledge to a wide range of situations. It's not about teaching you how to think, it's about teaching you how to learn. Even the humanities degrees require the students to learn, set deadlines, work in teams, and accomplish goals. In many ways it gets students ready for the business world. As for self-motivation, professors could care less if you pass or not, so you have to have at le
Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about teaching you how to think, it's about teaching you how to learn.
Most students fail to become life-long learners and stop learning after leaving school. That's the kiss of death in a technical career. I had friends who threw away being software engineers because they were unwilling to learn new technologies after the dot com bust and settled for being drug store clerks.
Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't know how to learn by the time you're 18-20 and in college (excluding a few low income / opportunity cases) you probably won't benefit much from college...
I went to community college twice. Once as a young person trying to figure out my place in the world, exiting with an A.A. degree in General Education and mediocre grades. A decade later as an adult working 80 hours per week and taking two classes per semester for five years, exiting with A.S. in Computer Programming and a 4.0GPA in my major. Going back to school as an adult was a lot easier than as a young person. Some people aren't ready for college when they're young.
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http://www.theonion.com/blogpo... [theonion.com]
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So we need to cover stupid shit that people should already know. "This is how you turn on your computer"
When I was on the Google IT help desk, I had to walk a Stanford CS graduate student through the process of turning on his workstation because the computer labs always had someone standing around to turn the workstations on.
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Man, imagine how hard Google would have failed if it had been founded by Stanford CS students.
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Man, imagine how hard Google would have failed if it had been founded by Stanford CS students.
During the early years of Google, the two founders vetted all job candidates and reportedly refused to interview any Stanford University CS graduates. My incident took place in 2008 when Google was hiring 300+ people per week.
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My (professional) engineering role only uses information from ~20% of my ~200 credit-hour curriculum, and just 6 specific credits would make most people reasonably capable at an entry level position. As we (sadly) move more to process-based engineering rather than relying on intelligent candidates, this becomes even more true.
As for salary stagnation specifically, the cause is really the broader economy. Margins are shrinking in most industries as friction is reduced. Hard to imagine how it wi
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Become?
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Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.
It's really more "How do I keep my gravy train rolling so I can live the lifestyle I'm accustomed to" rather than "Screw the next guy". The early baby boomers pissed away the Social Security surplus through wasteful spending, while the rest of the generation have so much money tied up in stocks/401k/retirement that the only way to keep their money is to keep the stock market going up and up. In order to do this wages have to go down so that profits can go up (since other costs can only be reduced so much,
Re: Sounds like it's working as intended. (Score:3)
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That's just not true.
In the 80s, SS income and distributions were adjusted, and the surplus was invested for the day (now) when retirees would become more numerous. Except for minor adjustments needed because of retirees' expected lifes being a little longer than expected, Social Security, per se, is solvent. The real
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Social security insurance is just an insurance pool. The specific numbers written down are always meant to deal with the math of the time (and try to project forward), but they need to be updated once in a while. The system has been stable for over 80 years, and with only a small amount of effort can be stable for the next 80. It's not a complex system, though it would be nice if politicians (mostly Republicans) would stop messing with it for ideological reasons.
Stable insurance systems are all about scale,
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Social Security works by the government creating money and giving it to people. As long as the resources that people want to buy with that money are available the model will endure.
Greenspan kind of lays it out here [youtube.com].
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In capitalism, there are two important classes - employer/owner and employee/worker. In the US we have only 2 viable political parties (and really only one that can effectively set policy) - both represent different sets of owners/employers. It should be no surprise then that in a country with no working class political party, workers (and that includes workers with advanced degrees) get left behind or even worse, exploited.
Re:Sounds like it's working as intended. (Score:5, Interesting)
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While you are correct that Boomers probably didn't realize what they were doing at the time, it's their actions now that are the real problem. They demand good pensions, paid for by the workers they are screwing by sitting on property and keeping prices high. They have a massive sense of entitlement, entitlement at other's expense.
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Not just companies, the government in the UK has put a "triple lock" on their pensions that keep them increasing well above the rate that wages do.
Anyway, those companies have to deal with their promises, not the younger generations.
Re:Sounds like it's working as intended. (Score:5, Insightful)
But their companies promised them those pensions!
What's depressing to me that, of the 5 other people in my immediate workgroup, who do the exact same job that I do(all of them also 20-30 years older than me), 4 of them have company pensions and will get to draw Social Security plus whatever whatever they've saved for retirement. The other will get his retirement and social security. I will probably just get my 401k.
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The American dream worked quite well for baby boomers, and the post WWII generation. The only reason it doesn't work any more is because the systems we need in place to make it a real possibility for people have been systematically attacked and removed, because that system requires that we collectively pay for it. In a system geared toward the concentration of wealth (like all market driven economies), it starts to feel like a small group (people who are good at getting money into their pockets) are being p
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That is incorrect.
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Right, because Democrats are known to want to keep wages low, and Republicans fight day and night to raise the earnings of the little guy... The bubble you live in must be incredibly opaque.
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You're arguing that people have had consistently less since 1890?
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"Recession" has a clear technical definition. The recession that started in 2008 ended in 2009.
"The economy is shitty" is entirely based around perception. That ended (or didn't end) based on your personal situation.
"clear technical" (Score:2)
"Recession" has a clear technical definition.
Based on easily manipulable data [marketoracle.co.uk]
.
You statists are so cute when you're at your most utterly naive and gullible!