economy

Links of Note 10/21/16

/ The Old Crank

The Promise of Personalized Learning in Rural America [Bellwether Education Partners]
I haven’t read this but I would think that many of the issues facing rural K-12 schools would be similar to those faced by rural or otherwise isolated adult education programs.

Not Working Makes People Sick [Bloomberg View]
Does dropping out of workforce due to illness make you more sick? I think additional research would be needed to justify this conclusion, but it’s an interesting theory nonetheless.

Here’s What Economists Don’t Understand About Race [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
“The real driver of inequality… is not an individual’s level of education and productivity, but the resources that parents and grandparents are able to transmit.”

It’s Complicated

/ The Old Crank

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that while manufacturing has experienced some modest job growth lately, manufacturers are struggling to fill their open jobs. The story notes that the number of open manufacturing jobs has steadily risen since 2009, and that openings in manufacturing are at their highest level in 15 years.

I’m always a little suspicious, though, when anyone starts the ticker in 2009, which was when we were in the middle of one the worst recessions in history. Pretty much everything looks better if you start in 2009. It’s worth pulling the data from further back in time to get a better a better perspective on this recent growth:

Job Openings - Manufacturing, as of June 2016

Total U.S. Job Openings, Manufacturing, Dec. 2000 – Jun. 2016 (In thousands, seasonally adjusted). Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Here you can see that, yes, manufacturing job openings have rebounded since 2009, although they really had nowhere to go but up. In fact, they’ve climbed back to just about where they were in 2006. (We hit a high of 396,000 openings in April of that year, and there were 397,00 openings in April of this year.) So actually they are possibly at their highest levels in ten years, not fifteen.

But equally important is just how many more openings there were 15 years ago, if that’s what you count as your high-water mark (the BLS data only goes back as far as December of 2000). In January of 2001, there were an estimated 496,000 open jobs in manufacturing—100,000 more than there are today.

The second thing that I think is worth pointing out is that while job openings in manufacturing have been on the rise recently, employment in manufacturing has been on the decline for decades, and I don’t think anyone sees it coming back to where it was a few decades ago. Here’s another chart from the BLS showing the number of people employed in the manufacturing sectors since 1979:

Manufacturing Employment Trends

All Employees, Manufacturing, Dec. 2000 – Jun. 2016. (In thousands, seasonally adjusted). Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

In this instance, the BLS data goes back to the 1930s, but I started at 1979 because this is the high-water mark for manufacturing employment in this country. (And remember, there were fewer people in the labor force back then, and, well, fewer people, period, so the percentage of people working in the sector was much higher than today.) But you can see that manufacturing jobs started rapidly disappearing in the 2000s, and really cratered during the Great Recession. So the sector has come back a little bit, but it’s nowhere near where it once was.

Executives told the Journal that the reason that jobs are going unfilled is because they can’t find workers with the skills to run the advanced machinery these companies have invested in. (The machinery that in many cases allowed them to lay off all of their lower-skilled workers to begin with.) But let’s say that  we did give all those lower skilled factory workers who got laid off over the last 15 years the skills employers say they need—I think it’s unlikely, looking at the chart above, that the sector is would produce enough new jobs in the foreseeable future to hire them all back again.

(Let’s table, for the purposes of this discussion, the argument as to whether, in certain cases, employers have a moral responsibility to do more than just hang up a “Help Wanted” sign and hope for the best in those communities that were hit hard when all that advanced machinery enabled them to cut a bunch of jobs. Some might argue that these employers ought to stop complaining and invest in what is needed to skill up those folks for these new openings. I’ll let you make up your own minds about that.)

It’s also worth noting—again—that there are those who study this stuff who argue that the skills gap in manufacturing  is overblown. I’m reminded also, of this paper, published a few years ago by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which found that as a result of the Great Recession and the high unemployment rate that followed, employers simply got used to being able to hire workers with relatively high skills at a fairly low wage, a trend the study authors called “opportunistic upskilling.” Once the labor market tightened up again, hiring and retaining a workforce of higher-skilled people across the board was clearly going to be more challenging. They expected employers to adjust, by either lowering their skill requirements for some of these jobs or by raising wages. Those unwilling to do so would find that the average time to fill a position would grow longer. I have no idea if that is what’s going on at some of the companies highlighted in this article—but it could be!

The point of all of this is—it’s complicated. I don’t have any doubt that many manufacturing jobs require more advanced skills than they did a decade or two ago, but a reluctance by employers to raise wages, or to look at lowering the skill requirement for some jobs (and/or investing in more training on the job) may also be factors.

Why do I care about this? Well, because from a workforce training/adult education perspective, I want know with as much precision as I can what the actual employment trends are in order to figure out what the actual need for training really is, and whether there are other things we need to look at in order to get people into (or back into) a job.

Links of Note 8/24/16

/ The Old Crank

The Hidden Costs of Low Literacy in Australia [SBS News]
Nicely organized explainer with compelling personal stories.

Rauner Signs Juvenile Justice Reform bills [Chicago Tribune]
Governor Rauner said the legislation was just one step in a larger effort that should address, among other things, the “lack of job skills” among the prison population in Illinois.

Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies [Wall Street Journal]
“The Flatiron School’s 12-week course costs $15,000, but earns students no degree and no certificate (my emphasis). What it does get them, at an overwhelming rate, is a well-paying job.”

Here’s Proof That the Economic Recovery Is Over [CNBC]
What I thought was interesting here is the notion that despite the generally good news regarding employment, there is evidence to suggest that many of these jobs are not “quality jobs.”

“If the employment condition is booming why are payroll taxes falling?

There are a couple of answers to that question and neither is favorable. The BLS numbers are either wrong or the quality of new jobs created must be very poor. The latter response seems the most credible; a combination of an increase in the proportion of part-time workers and full-time jobs that provide lower compensation.”

This Helpful Chart Reveals if a Robot Is Coming For Your Job [Business Insider]
A McKinsey report that purports to predict the likelihood of jobs becoming automated by analyzing work activities rather than occupations. Interesting that such human qualities as patience, empathy, and kindness aren’t on their list. Work that involves caring for others, such as caring for the elderly, sick, children etc. is an area of employment that is growing and where future needs will be great. I can’t imagine these jobs being done very well without empathetic, human interaction, even if technologies are used to assist.

I welcome your suggestions.

Links of Note 8/18/16

/ The Old Crank

Launching a new semi-regular feature today: occasional posts that simply compile links to announcements, new research and other news about adult education or tangentially related topics (probably more of the latter), with little to no commentary from me to get in your way. Just click and go. There are those who will describe these kinds of posts as “curated links.” I’m not one of them, but if you are, then you have the basic idea.

I welcome your suggestions.

In Many Courtrooms, Bad Interpreters Can Mean Justice Denied [Pew/Stateline]
“Because there are so many U.S. residents — roughly 25.6 million — who have limited proficiency in English, the credibility of the nation’s justice system relies on competent interpreters.” I witnessed this problem firsthand in Boston courts 25 20 years ago; it seemed to me that non-English speakers were often targeted for minor traffic violations. Many were frankly terrified and the lack of translation services certainly didn’t help.

DACA at Four: Participation in the Deferred Action Program and Impacts on Recipients [MPI]

  • “Examining DACA application rates against the MPI population estimates suggests that 63 percent of the immediately eligible population had applied as of March 2016; the rate fell to 48 percent when including the share that did not appear to meet the educational criteria but may have enrolled in a qualifying adult education population.”
  • “[T]he vast majority eligible to renew the two-year DACA grant have done so—93 percent MPI estimates.”

Lessons From a Year Teaching Digital Literacy [Pacific Standard]

Veteran Hillary Clinton Education Adviser Named to Candidate’s Transition Team [Politics K-12 – Education Week]

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Say They’ll Ease the Burden of Child-Care Costs [Real Time Economics – WSJ]
Summary of the two major party candidates’ proposals.

Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform [VERA]
“Women in jail are the fastest growing correctional population in the country—increasing 14-fold between 1970 and 2014. Yet there is surprisingly little research on why so many more women wind up in jail today. This report examines what research does exist on women in jail in order to begin to reframe the conversation to include them.”

Two Lingering Suspicions About Economic Statistics [Bloomberg View]
Helpful primer (for me, anyway) on data smoothing (such as the seasonal adjustments made by the BLS to unemployment data) and “Pollyanna creep,” defined here as the likelihood that changes in economic indicator measures/calculations that make the economy look better are more likely to be implemented than changes that do not, resulting in a cumulative effect that is increasingly removed from reality. “[C]hanges made in the calculation of inflation over the past quarter-century… have come under the most fire.”