CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORT TO AMERICA… POVERTY, CRIMINALS, ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS FOR WELFARE and HEROIN
Mexico prefers to export
its poor, not uplift them
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html
1) Mexico ended legal
immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th
lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands
territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and
genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance
Income.
‘Roseanne’ Tackles Illegal Immigration’s Disastrous Impact on Working, Middle-Class Americans
The latest episode of the hit rebooted ABC sitcom Roseanne admirably takes on the issue of illegal immigration and its negative impact on America’s working families and the middle-class.
The episode entitled, Meet the Neighbors finds Connor family patriarch Dan lose out on a job for which illegal immigrants had been hired to do for less money.
In a post, Roseanne Barr — an avid supporter of President Donald Trump on and off the show — hinted that the episode would deal with immigration.
“I got underbid on Al’s job. He’s using illegals,” Dan explains to a disappointed Roseanne, who’s worried about the family’s ability to make ends meat. “It ain’t Rosie. Those guys are so desperate they’ll work for nothing and we’re getting screwed in the process. All I know is we can’t pay our bills.”
Illegal immigration, where now more than 12 to 30 million illegal aliens live in the U.S., continues to impact America’s working and middle class more than any other communities.
As Breitbart News has reported, illegal immigration costs the American taxpayer approximately $8,075 each, totaling a burden of roughly $116 billion annually.
Every year, the federal government shells out approximately $45.8 billion in costs on illegal aliens and their children – including expenditures for public education, healthcare, justice enforcement initiatives and welfare programs.
Likewise, if illegal aliens were given amnesty to permanently remain in the U.S., it would cost American taxpayers about $2 trillion, Breitbart News noted.
Mass illegal and legal immigration to the U.S. has contributed to poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Amica’s Crisis of Work
Audio Transcript
CITY JOURNAL
AMERICA’S CRISIS OF WORK
AUDIO
Amica’s Crisis of Work
May 9, 2018
Economy,
finance, and budgets
Long-term, persistent joblessness is the great American
domestic crisis of our generation. In our 2017 special issue, “The Shape of Work to Come,” City Journal grappled with the
problem, and our writers continue to explore it.
City Journal recently convened
a panel of experts to talk about the future of work. Audio from their
discussion is featured in this episode of 10 Blocks.
The panel consisted of Ryan Avant, a
senior editor and economics columnist at The
Economist; Edward L. Glaeser, the
Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and contributing editor of City Journal; and Kay S. Hymowitz, a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. The
discussion was moderated by Steve LeVine, the Future Editor of Axios
and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome
back to the 10 Blocks podcast, this is your host, Brian Anderson, editor of
City Journal. First off -- we’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for
tuning-in. Since we launched the podcast a couple years ago, the feedback has
been tremendous, and we thank all of you for your interest or support. We made
a few changes we think you’ll appreciate: We have a snazzier musical intro, and
henceforth we’ll be posting episodes little more frequently.
Coming up on the latest podcast, we have an
exceptional show forlisteners: Last year, City Journal published a special
issue called, “The Shape of Work to Come”,
featuring articles on the great American domestic crisis of our time, long-term
joblessness. It’s a topic that our many of our writers are thinking about, and
we will continue to revisit it for the foreseeable future. Last week, City
Journal hosted a panel discussion in New York City with some of our own writers
and other experts thinking about the future of work. You’ll be able to listen
to that on this 10 Blocks. On the panel we have Edward Glaeser: Harvard
professor, Manhattan Institute fellow, and contributing editor here at City
Journal, and author of the great book on urbanism, Triumph of the City. Then
there’s Kay Hymowitz, also a long-time contributing editor to City Journal and
fellow at the Manhattan institute, and author most-recently of The New Brooklyn. They
we were joined by Ryan Avent, senior editor and the free exchange columnist at
The Economist. But the next voice you’ll here on the podcast is Steve LeVine,
“Future Editor” at Axios, who moderated the discussion.
We hope you enjoy!
Steve LeVine: Good
morning. Thanks very much for joining us here. That was an amazing
understatement. This panel is a fantastic panel and I’m really looking
forward to the discussion this morning to digging in. We are in the midst
of a debate about the future of work, the underlying forces that are creating a
crisis of stagnant wages and an uncertainty about jobs in the future.
Among the elements in the debate, a main question: Is this time
different? Is the technological cycle that we are in right now, the
revolution in AI and the new age of automation, is it different from prior
technological cycles over the last two centuries in which a normal economic
turn has produced enough jobs to employ everyone displaced by the new
technology? Why are wages stuck? How long will the disruption that
we are in last? Prior disruptions have lasted decades. What will
our society look like when the transition has been spent? And, finally,
pivoting off of a piece that was in The New York Times a couple of days ago: What we are
watching in the heartland that led to our current politics, did it start with
an economic malaise or a status malaise? So, to tee off this conversation
we are going to start with Ryan. And my question for you: What do past
technological revolutions, past cycles, tell us about the current one we are
in? Are they useful? Is it a useful roadmap?
Ryan Avent: Thank
you, Steve, and it is great to be here with what is a pretty fantastic
panel. It is an excellent question. I think that past technological
revolutions really are probably a good guide to what we are going
through. There is a possibility at some point that as AI becomes capable
of doing just about anything humans can do, that this will start to look a lot
different from what we have seen in the past. But I think that is decades
away, at least. So, for now we’ve got a disruption that’s sort of built
around a general purpose technology, information technology, and machine
learning that can be used in lots of different places across the economy and
that consequently is affecting lots of different industries, lots of different
job categories. What I think the past tells us, first of all, is as you
said, that this sort of thing can cause quite significant disruption over a
long period of time. I think that part of what we have seen in terms of
the malfunctioning of different institutions, different parts of the economy
over the past few decades is linked to technological change. That is
going to intensify for several decades to come. So, we are in the middle
of a very long process of social change. I think that there is often the
perspective looking back on how these things play out that everything ends up
okay. That, you know, jobs are destroyed but jobs are also created.
And then we all end up better off. And that does tend to be true over
long periods of time, but if sort of look in on shorter periods of time there
can be quite a lot of pain for established workers. There can be whole
generations where wages don’t go up. And so I think we need to be, you
know, we need to be hopeful but not necessarily too optimistic that the
problems are going to solve themselves. And then I think the other big
thing that these revolutions teach us is that there has to be quite a lot of
evolution in terms of institutions and norms and in governmental policies in
order to accommodate society to new technologies to make sure that the benefits
in the technologies are broadly shared, to make sure that society is kind of
okay with the way new technologies are being deployed. And we are already
sort of seeing, I think, a lot of backlash now and a lot of pressure to start
changing institutions, not just in terms of the economic effects but also
thinking about Facebook’s role in our political cycle, thinking about how
driverless cars are going to be used. There is going to be a lot of
pressure to overhaul our institutions and that is usually not a very neat
process, either. So, I think those are the sorts of things we can look
forward to, so to speak, in the decades to come.
Steve LeVine: Thank
you very much. That’s great. I want to dig in a little bit in our
modern age. Let’s say from the ‘70s forward, Ed. So, you define the
problem as a war on work. Can we dig a little bit in that thesis and also
can you talk a little bit about your work on the Eastern heartland?
Edward Glaeser: Sure.
So, when we take – and I couldn’t agree more with Ryan’s sentiments that you
know, long-term joblessness is the defining and dire social problem of our
age. When we try and understand how we got here, that 50-year evolution
that he described, there is a steady and running academic debate which concerns
is it from purely labor demand? Is it the changes in the technology, the
decline in deindustrialization of the US? Or is it in labor supply, which
can include two versions, one of which is it’s about the welfare state.
It’s about the dis-incentives for working created by things like disability or
the 30% tax on earnings created by food stamps and Section 8 housing
vouchers? Or is it about the cultural side, that I think Kay will get
into, that we are not training the next generation to actually want to
work. As an economist I am uniquely disadvantaged in talking about
cultural issues. So, I will leave that one completely on the plate for
right now. And say that no matter how important one believes the labor
demand side is going on, the labor supply issues, the welfare state issues,
don’t help. And they are particularly badly designed for the most
troubled parts of America. One way to see this, and I think we really do
have to rethink our you know, having place-based policies in this country, and
by place-based policies like me make it clear I am not talking about the Appalachian Regional Commission or building
people-mover monorails. I’m talking about policies that actually
recognize that labor markets are very different in different parts of the
country. So, a point that I have often made, often to my audiences in
fact, that having a national housing policy is kind of mad. That any
housing policy that is appropriate for New York is not going to be appropriate
for Detroit, and that is not going to be appropriate for Houston. These
are very different conditions. Similarly, an employment policy that is
targeted for Seattle or San Francisco Bay, right, you know, is going to be a
nightmare in Eastern Tennessee or West Virginia. So, let me be really
concrete about this, right, so the minimum wage in Seattle, not something that,
like many economists, I am not a big fan of minimum wages, but to make the
claim that it is somehow or other catastrophic is a mistake. That Seattle
is an incredibly robust economy filled with highly skilled people. If
anyone thinks that you know, imposing a $15 minimum wage on West Virginia would
be sensible, they are out of their mind, right? That would be an
absolutely catastrophic thing. Similarly, it’s only slightly more
complicated to take the view that this long diagonal line of despair in the
United States which starts in Louisiana and Mississippi and runs through
Appalachia and up through Northern Michigan, right, this area which is the
heartland of deindustrialization, of former parts of the Jim Crow South, is
particularly low in education and also particularly problematic in terms of its
political institutions as well. You know I often have sort of a
two-variable model of economic growth, that it’s about rules and schools and
unfortunately the Eastern heartland is weak on both fronts. This is an
area in which routinely you see a quarter of the prime-age males were
jobless. And this is an area in which having a welfare state that
discourages work is deeply problematic. Will it necessarily bring, you
know, will reforming that welfare state necessary bring you back to 5%
joblessness rates in these areas? No, it won’t, right? We may need
stronger medicine and we also have to count on some form of out
migration. But we sure as heck need to rethink our policies today.
And it is the most sensible thing that we can do, is to recognize that
discouraging work, right, or failing to encourage it, is a big mistake in
Eastern Tennessee, in Eastern Kentucky, in West Virginia, in Mississippi.
And just to be concrete about this, you can either think about what you need is
being a tilt, meaning that you are going to reduce the size of some payments
which go to the jobless and use that money to reduce the tax on work. So,
for example, you could reduce the level of disability payments but then enable
the disabled to keep more of their earnings at a higher level. Norway has
experimented with this, enabling the disabled to keep more of their earnings,
and it has worked. And people who were on disability have actually earned
more and have been more connected to the workforce. Or you can just say
what we need is a national earned income tax credit that is actually targeted
in a simpler way towards men who are out of the labor force. And then
there is at least an argument for saying, look if I have a limited number of
dollars to throw on that, let’s target it towards the areas where joblessness
is higher. Because in fact we do have evidence that suggests that things
that induce labor demand to go up in these areas do more to reduce
joblessness. So, we really do have to recognize that this evolution and
this change in terms of our working in America is not something that has
afflicted America uniformly. There are particular areas, and the Eastern
heartland is its core, where joblessness has risen most and accompanying
joblessness has been misery, opioid abuse, suicide, the breakdown of the
family. All of these things have gone together in a terrifying
cocktail. And even though we may not know how to use economic policies to
fix all of them, we know that dis-incentivizing work, having policies that stop
work from paying, certainly aren’t making things any better and we should start
by trying to reform those policies.
Steve LeVine: Okay
great. Before we get into digging in further in the present, I didn’t
want to leave history completely behind and so I want to ask both of you if
there is a period, a past period that informs what you are thinking or the
audience can think about something that we can look at that helps to understand
where we are, where we are going, what is it? When is that time?
Ryan Avent: Well,
I think you can think about sort of the late 19th century. And it
was obviously very different in a lot of ways, but what we faced then was a
pretty dramatic technological and economic shift, a pretty dramatic shift in
the geography of the country in terms of where people lived and worked, and it
was one that kind of left people much better off, but it was also a pretty
tumultuous political period and it was the beginning of a period in which we
started to construct this welfare state. And we did it for good reasons,
I think, recognizing that in an industrial economy and an urban economy you
were often going to have downturns. You were going to have, you know,
people who through whatever, you know, no fault of their own could not find
good work. And we didn’t want those people to die in the streets.
And so there was the recognition that there was a need for institutional
change. In order to get that institutional change there were different
groups in society who had to mobilize, and so you had the rise of trade unions,
you had social reform movements, you had the rise of new political interest
groups. And I think that’s the sort of pattern we are going to be looking
at here. I mean I don’t think in terms of the interaction between work
and the welfare state and technology it looked the same then as it does now
because of how different the institutional environment is now. But I
think that pattern in which we see, as Ed did a very good job of pointing out,
that current institutions are not working in which people become very unhappy
and begin mobilizing for institutional change. That’s exactly the sort of
set of steps we are going to be working through over the next few
decades.
Steve LeVine: And
we are talking 1890 to the beginning of World War I.
Ryan Avent: I
think, well, and thereafter. I mean, I think you could include the inner
war period, the Depression, and the sort of intense pressure we faced there to
create Social Security, to begin building a lot of these basic welfare state
policies. That whole period is really the one we are thinking
about. It was quite a, you know – it’s not a short amount of time, but
that’s how long it takes, I think, to arrive at a consensus about what actually
should happen, you know, what sort of institutions do need to be in place, to
develop the political movements to get those things in place, and actually to
enact them and unveil them.
Steve LeVine: Ed.
Edward Glaeser: So,
I think if you are looking at a historical period to model ourselves on, I
would actually go to the major periods of reform in the social welfare state
that both Germany and Scandinavia went through in the last thirty years.
So, these are places that had extremely generous welfare states in the postwar
period. They realized that many of their rules, many of their policies,
were being deeply harmful in terms of the employment situation, and they quite
sensibly reformed in ways that promoted work and did less to discourage
employment. And in some sense, if you want to think about the divide in
Europe between its relatively prosperous North and its you know, deeply
troubled South, a lot of that divide owes much to the fact that the North was
able to look at its labor market policies and say these are screwed up and we
are going to fix them. Okay? And the South, many people have been
looking at their labor market policies and saying these are screwed up and, you
know, fixing them has proven too hard. And Macron is trying right now
very hard in France, but I think very much, you know, we have to ask ourselves
if the future of America is going to look more like Germany or Sweden or
whether it’s going to look more like Greece. And we have got that choice
ahead of us.
Steve LeVine: Great.
Kay, so, Charles Murray famously wrote Coming Apart. You have written quite a bit on the
subject of losing status, losing family, an amazing statistic that you cite
unmarried and divorced people make up 32% of the population and 71% of opioid
deaths.
Kay Hymowitz: I
believe that’s men.
Steve LeVine: That’s
men. Okay. Can you unpack when we are translating what Ryan and Ed
are talking about into how this has affected humans, people?
Kay Hymowitz: Okay.
So, some of you know I have been writing about family breakdown for a long
time, and I hope to convince you by the end of today’s discussion that that
actually has a lot of relevance to the discussion we are having today about
these technological changes. When I first started writing about the
family breakdown I was mostly talking about the difference between the way
upper income, educated people were doing. Steve says, this is what
Charles Murray was right about too, of course, how the people were doing at the
top and how people were doing at the very bottom. I was mostly talking
about the poor. And this was in the early ‘90s, mid-90s, it looked like
the white working class, or the working class more generally, was doing okay,
was hanging on there, at least in family terms. But since then there has
been a massive catastrophe to the family and community structures of these
places where we are seeing a lot of joblessness. What I think we have to
keep in mind is that the implications are for the future of these places and of
these people. Because what happens, we have begun to learn, is that boys
who are growing up in families where there are no fathers or erratic fathers,
father figures, really suffer, even more than girls. That evidence is
becoming more and more clear, especially with a recent study that just came out
from Raj Chetty about black children and mobility. And what he found was
that the boys were having a lot more trouble than girls. What we now know
is that the boys who are growing up in these homes are in very unstable fluid
homes, and these are not – we are not just talking about a marriage breaks up
and the child goes on to have a good relationship with both parents. Many
of us in this room have seen many examples of that. We are talking about
much more chaos. And J.D. Vance describes this, by the way, in his book Hillbilly Elegy.
A lot of chaos, a lot of coming and going of various adult figures. And
the reason that matters is because children, particularly boys, tend not to do
well in school, or emotionally, when they are going up under those
circumstances. So, we have increasing dysfunction among boys, younger
boys, and as they grow up, but they become exactly the jobless men that we are
talking about today. A lot of the boys, a lot of these young men actually
who were – of the jobless young men, when you talk to them they often came from
very chaotic homes themselves and were not able to learn and absorb any sense
of agency over their lives. They instead have this sense that things just
sort of happen and don’t have much self-control for themselves. So, they
are not doing well in school, they are far less likely to go to college than
girls. Well, okay, what happens when the time comes for having a
baby? You are not going to marry – women do not marry men who make a lot
less money than them and who can’t keep a job. That’s just a
reality. It remains that way, even fifty, sixty years after the feminist
movement.
Steve LeVine: Thanks.
Let’s dig in just a little bit on that. So, two things go hand in
hand. One is unemployment, but also employment at a low wage…
Kay Hymowitz: Yes.
Steve LeVine: …or
uncertain, unstable employment. I am super interested in this dichotomy
of sort of the malaise that we are in now, and that other countries are too,
and this debate, is it this economic question, joblessness, low wage, or it is
loss of status?
Kay Hymowitz: Right.
So, it is impossible to really answer the question of whether – how much
economics plays a role in what is happening to the family and how much it is a
cultural thing, but I can tell you this, that we still know that married
couples have a better chance, not just of making more money, but of providing
more stability for their kids. And the kids are going to do better, tend
to do better. This is what many decades of research has shown. So,
if you look at, for instance, non-college-educated men, actually no, if you
look at high school dropouts who are married, they are doing better than men
with a little bit of college in some of these communities that we are
describing. So, there is, we don’t know why that is, is there something
about the personality, the social strengths of the person who is married?
But it isn’t just income. Clearly, there is something more involved.
Edward Glaeser: So,
can I just interject two facts which seem relevant?
Steve LeVine: Yes.
Edward Glaeser: First
of all, we have now reached a point where fully 50% of the long-term jobless
men, right, so that’s over 12 years, have never been married. Have never
been married. Second fact, about 85% of the long-term jobless men are not
living alone. That’s part of how the economics works. Of them, more
than 30% are actually, more than 30% of jobless men are living with their
parents. So, in fact, you have this sort of infant, it is you know, men
who are not growing up. And then you have another 55%, a small number
which are living with their lawful spouses, but a lot of them are living with
other people who are somehow or other making that household work.
Kay Hymowitz: Right.
Well I assume there is a great deal of moving around in and out of arrangements
and not much stability. A lot of these guys, by the way just so we have a
bigger picture about this, it’s not that they are thoughtless about their
kids. A lot of them are really devoted to their kids, or think they are
when the kids come, but what happens is that the relationship with the child’s
mother, and the mother tends to be the custody parent, becomes very
complex. Maybe there is a new man in the picture or a new woman in the
picture, a new child in the picture, and gradually the father kind of backs
off. And this has happened in the black community as well. So,
fatherlessness is – it is not just that a father is not living in the house,
although that is a key part of this picture, it’s that it is very difficult to
maintain any kind of contact and loving and stable relationship with a father
who is not married to mother. That’s just the reality.
Edward Glaeser: Parenting
is hard in the best of circumstances, right?
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah.
And mothers are the gatekeepers still, you know?
Steve LeVine: Ed
finds at least partial causation in public policy are economic incentives or
economic disincentives to work. What do you think about that? Do
you have a causation hypothesis?
Kay Hymowitz: I,
you know, again, I don’t think there is a way to think about this without
talking about the changes in social and cultural norms. When you think
about why men in the past have held jobs that were not particularly appealing,
you don’t hear well, they may not have been paid much, I mean we often talk
about the ‘50s and the period where, you know, the great industrial period of
our history as if that was always the norm. It was not. And many
times these jobs that men were working were really horrible. I had a
quotation I wanted to bring in from a writer named Connie Schultz who is a
columnist at TheCleveland Plain Dealer. Or she was, I don’t know
if she is still there. And she described growing up in the Cleveland
area. Her father worked at a factory in the boiler room. And she
said that when she would go, she went to visit this place and it was some kind
of hell. The temperatures were going up to 140, the filth was
unbelievable, the fatigue that her father experienced, but she said her father
would come home every day looking like he had just come back from Hades, which
he had, and would say you four kids, he had four kids, you kids are going to
college. In other words, the reason he was willing to put up with those
jobs was because he had people that were really relying on him and to whom he
was devoted. And so, when I think about the joblessness, it is hard for
you know, and the question of how much this is an economic or cultural problem,
these men don’t feel, for very complicated reasons, some of them true, that
they are needed. Nobody is relying on them. They can hang out on
the couch and play videogames. It doesn’t really matter. The kids
are going to be okay, sort of.
Steve LeVine: Yeah.
Ed, you have an interesting statistic in one of your writings. Only 41% of
high school dropouts, maybe this is also men, only 41% of high school dropouts
are working. That’s an amazing statistic.
Edward Glaeser: So,
that’s not prime age. So, that is going to include the whole population,
but that’s right.
Steve LeVine: Okay.
So, two questions. One is this suggests, and you do suggest, that we need
to, we need, in terms of a prescription, education, skilling up. So, I
want to ask you about, you know, to make that argument. But also, I want
to do, then, Ryan, if you will follow up right after that, you make the
argument you trot out you know, the history of the workforce gaining more skill
over time as the technological cycles evolved, unfolded. But then you say
we may have reached skilled saturation in the workforce. Can you talk
about that? So, Ed, you first.
Edward Glaeser: Okay,
although you’ve got me so interested in the question you asked Ryan, I don’t
want to – so, certainly I am a bit of a human capital determinist, right?
I believe that skills are the bedrock on which individual, urban and national
success rests. The differences in jobless numbers between the educated
and the less educated are enormous, and I think, very clearly, America needs to
do a better job in terms of educating its children. Some of that probably
does continue to go through traditional educational institutions, some of it
should be more entrepreneurial and more tied to the actual needs of the labor
force. We should certainly do things that feel more like competitively
sourced vocational ed that supplements traditional schooling, hopefully
bypassing the teacher’s unions while doing so, maybe going to actually people
who know something about, you know, the skills that are needed in the modern
environment, you know, do it with constant use of randomized, controlled trials
around this stuff, be innovative around it and invest in skills. The
reason why I tend not to be emphasizing skills as much as I have in the past,
though, in this recent work is that our traditional recipe, both for inequality
and for any dislocations that came through trade, was skills, skills,
skills. And that’s not wrong, but it is not enough, right? Telling
a 50-year-old displaced worker in West Virginia that yeah, you have lost your
job and will have no other foreseeable job in the next thirty years, but boy
I’ve got a great Pre-K for your granddaughter, right? That’s not so
satisfying for that guy, right? And that’s why we need to have
more. We need to be able to say that we have a better solution, and what
we do know about skills for the 50-year-old worker is we also have fifty years
of work on job retraining programs for displaced workers, and almost uniformly
the track record is dismal. Okay, which leads me to the view that by far
the best thing we can do for that 50-year-old worker is get him back at work
somewhere. Find some employer with some degree of government help who is
going to actually give this guy a job producing something that somebody else
wants. Give him something that provides structure to his life, give him
something that gives him some degree of dignity, a sense that he is actually
producing something the world wants. We can’t do it all with Pre-K.
It’s not, it just isn’t there, and we have to do something that actually
encourages entrepreneurs to find some form of work for this person, because in
some sense every unemployed or underemployed American is a failure of
entrepreneurial imagination.
Kay Hymowitz: Can
we…
Steve LeVine: Yes.
Kay Hymowitz: …interject
a question here? Are there other countries that do a better job at job
training? Retraining?
Ed Glaeser: Retraining.
I think there is some sense in which the Scandinavian countries do a bit
better, but, you know, the educational systems in those areas are so much
stronger in lots of different dimensions, and also in terms of the vocational
ed, I mean, there is a lot to admire in terms of Germany’s system. I mean
I think most of us would have trouble with a tracking system that basically
looks at a person at the age of 13 and says, okay your job is you are going to
be a tree for the rest of your life, or a garage mechanic, or whatever it
is. So, doing things that allow the traditional American optimism about
finding something, but combine that with, you know, serious vocational training
on top of that would be a plus. You know, like I have got no problem with
asking our kids to spend more time doing schooling, especially in the fact of
what she is describing. In a world in which families work less, I think
we should, you know, have other programs that work more.
Steve LeVine: One
second. I just wanted to follow up. Ed, okay. Janesville, Amy
Goldstein’s book, so she – one of the most interesting parts is the reskilling
section and her survey of these workers who had been laid off from the GM
factory and after six years those who went through reskilling and those who did
not, and those who did not were on a much higher percentage employed and
comparing those employed with skilled and did not reskill, they were earning a
lot more. And her answer to that is that reskilling is not an answer
totally in itself, there also have to be jobs to go into. Do you have any
sort of observation there?
Edward Glaeser: It
lines with fifty years of research on failed reskilling programs. I mean,
it’s in line with what we have. And the point that you need to get these
guys back at work, I think, is the central point. I mean most of us –
it’s also true in terms of teaching. I mean, most successful teaching is
about learning by doing. Most of it is sort of inspiring kids by what you
tell them, to actually go and do work themselves, and that’s how you learn,
right? It’s even more so for a 50-year-old. And you know, it’s very
hard to get people with demographics like mine to learn new tricks and, you
know, it is helpful if you are in a structured job environment to induce them
to do so.
Ryan Avent: All
right. So much to talk about. So, I think to get to the skill
saturation point, I mean, it’s important to know that, you know, a huge part of
our response to the Industrial Revolution was to increase educational
attainment. You know, at the start of it most people could not read and
write. By the end of it, you know, the vast majority of the working-age
population had a secondary school degree of some sort, and 40% or so had a
tertiary degree. That’s just a huge increase in educational attainment and
so I think, you know, Ed gives us some very good reasons to think that
education is not going to be the entirety of the solution this time
around. And I think that is – the difficulty in trying to replicate that
feat is another reason why we shouldn’t say that we can educate our way out of
this problem. But I think it, you know, we also ought to look at the fact
that while it is true that you get a big bump to income going from a high
school degree to a college degree, it used to be the case that that premium was
constantly rising. And since 2000 or so it has not been rising. The
premium to getting an advanced degree does continue to rise and there is still
intense demand for people with advanced degrees. But then that sort of
raises that bar there. And if we are talking about someone who is coming
from a troubled background who, you know, who perhaps doesn’t have the best
primary education, how realistic is it to get them into a you know, an advanced
degree program in computer engineering or something of that sort? And I
think it’s, to sort of add to Kay’s point about people working to get their
kids into college, since around 2000 or so real wages for college graduates
have also been stagnant. And there has been to some extent growth in
underemployment among college graduates where a growing share of college
graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. And that sort
of then has a trickledown effect where you are displacing people with less
education into jobs even farther does the ladder. But I think the sense
that college is less of a guarantee of a significantly better life is perhaps
something that is playing into psychology here.
Kay Hymowitz: I
often think when I’m looking at the data on college, the college premium, that
there is such a wide range of college status that you know, we forget, I think,
a lot of people in this room probably think in terms of what college is, you
know, an elite college, but most Americans who go to college are, it’s not just
that they are at state universities, there are often at community satellite
parts of that university.
Steve LeVine: Ryan,
but your thesis, if you still hold – this is 2016 when you wrote this, when you
published that book – that the actual percentage of the population that is college-educated,
that we have reached – that’s your saturation point. And you actually use
the phrase that the other part of the population is not cognitively capable.
Ryan Avent: Well,
I think – no, I mean I think that – so, if you look at countries like Korea
which have managed to raise completion rates for you know, university-level
schooling significantly above the rest of kind of the OECD, what we do see is that there was a significant
reduction in kind of the quality of education those people were getting.
And it’s not – I don’t think it’s a sort of disparaging remark. I mean
college is hard, you know?
Edward Glaeser: Not
hard enough. Not hard enough.
Ryan Avent: And,
I mean, you know, calculus is hard, linear algebra, these things are not easy
and not everyone can do them. That does not mean that they are less
valuable or, you know, or less worthy of respect than anyone else, but it does
mean that we need to be realistic about how we are going to find employment for
everyone.
Steve LeVine: Okay.
So, let’s move. We are going to wind down in this part of the
conversation, but before we shift to questions, so, in terms of
solutions. So, we know now that skilling, reskilling is a hard
thing. And, Ed, 50 years of failed or partly failed experiments, let’s
talk first about the wages. Ed, you talk about incentivizing
joblessness. Are we incentivizing stuck wages?
Edward Glaeser: Oh,
maybe. I mean I think the most important thing is working on straight
employment subsidies. So, you know, I think something like a flat-wage
subsidy targeted towards the bottom end of the labor market is the right
answer. Make it clear, make it a per-hour subsidy so it is not complex like
the EITC. I am fine if you want to say that those dollars are going to be
larger in West Virginia then they are going to be in New York. I am also
fine if what you say is a $3.00 wage bump is just going to have much more of an
impact in West Virginia than it is in New York. And so, it’s going to
have a place-based impact regardless. There is a question as to whether
or not you want to give the subsidy directly to the workers, which has a
certain political appeal, or you want to give it directly to the firms which
will probably be cheaper to implement, and also more effective in places that
have a binding minimum wage. So, if your goal is to bump up wages, then
giving it in those areas to the worker will achieve that, given that I’m more
focused on joblessness rather than raising wages. I think giving it to
the firm has a certain amount of sense to it.
Steve LeVine: Okay.
Ryan, did you have something on that?
Ryan Avent: Well,
so I think I have a particular view of sort of how this is all playing out.
And I guess I share Ed’s diagnosis of what’s going on, but I think it’s
probably going to be quite a bit harder to generate the kind of outcomes we
want. My sense is that what has happened over the past decade or two, and
what’s going to happen to an increasing extent as technology improves, is that
the substitutability of domestic workers for either foreign workers or
technology is increasing. It is easier than ever to take a domestic
worker here working in a factory or a warehouse or whatever and have that job
that they are doing be done either by someone in a different country or by a
machine. And that substitutability is going to go up and up and up as
technology improves. To me what that means is that we are stuck in a
place where workers are essentially in kind of a wage competition, with a lot
of the – either with machines or with the foreign workers. And the way
that we maintain high employment is by allowing wages to stagnate or fall in
real terms. Now, we run into trouble because we have these social safety
net programs which mean that if wages get low enough people say it’s not worth
it to work and drop out, and we don’t want that to happen. The
alternative, or an alternative, would be to make those programs less generous
and then to subsidize wages. And I think that is what Ed is proposing,
and that should address the issue of joblessness but I’m not sure it really
solves our problem in a few ways. One, I think if we wind up in a world
where the government is essentially subsidizing the very rich to have massive
household staffs, it is not clear to me that from a kind of status perspective
or a cultural perspective that’s a desirable place to be or a politically
sustainable place to be. The other thing I worry about is that we have,
if we maintain this massive pool of very cheap labor, that dramatically reduces
the incentive to use a lot of new technologies that are going to – that ought
to raise productivity. I mean you are not going to automate the warehouse
if you have, you know, massive numbers of cheap subsidized labor to keep using
there. We want to automate the warehouse. Those are bad jobs.
Automating the warehouse raises productivity, raises output. And so, I
worry that we are stuck in a trap where we are not taking full advantage of the
technologies available to us, we are not getting the productivity growth that
we want because workers are so cheap. And solving that problem is very
difficult, indeed.
Edward Glaeser: So,
I don’t really disagree with that much of what Ryan just said. I do agree
that it’s certainly possible to be very pessimistic about the future now.
A lack of hope has never deterred me from taking on policy challenges, that’s
part of the job of the academic and policy exchanges. Remember I have
been, you know, at least for 15 years I have been arguing for a need to reform
land use regulations in this country. And you know, I’m at a point where
a 6-4 loss of the Wiener Bill looks like an incredible success over those 16
years. So, I don’t disagree. It’s just you know, I believe in
taking on lost causes. That being said, I actually don’t think this is
completely a lost cause. I do believe that regardless of what you think
about the possibility of the future that there are, in fact, what we as
economists wonkily call externalities associated with not working. Some
part of that are the physical externalities associated with the payment and
some part of it is social externalities which create broader problems as a
whole. Now, the way we know how to fight externalities is to, you know,
subsidize good behaviors and tax bad behaviors. And that’s basically what
I am in favor of, is doing more to subsidize people to work and do less to
subsidize them from not working, and some combination of the two. And I’m
not sure that it is going to solve everything. Yes, it probably will
deter a little bit of labor-saving technology, but I guess I’m just not that
worried that we are going to underinvest in those. I mean, the past
thirty years has seen a fair amount of that. And I think the other point
that is floating around here that we probably haven’t made, and let me just say
this, historically we have – historically in the U.S., when places became less
productive we moved, right? We are a mobile nation. When the farmers
of New England looked out you know, looked out my neighbor’s backyard and saw
the rocky soil of Massachusetts and heard there was some place in the Ohio
River Valley that was better, they moved. And they had neighbors who
helped them raise a barn and they had balloon-frame houses to make their
housing cheap. And when the farmers you know, in the late 19th century, thought that
their agricultural incomes were low and saw an opportunity in Chicago or New
York City, the tenement builders were there erecting homes by the thousands and
hundreds of thousands to make space for them. When the Okies were hit by
the Dust Bowl they packed up their car and moved to California, and again homes
were made for them. The difference now is that we have parts of America
that are wildly productive, including New York City, Silicon Valley, Seattle,
Boston, and we don’t allow any building, right? And that is part of the
problem. And the consequence is for forty years prior to 1992, American
mobility rates never dropped below 6% across counties. Over the past ten
years they have never risen above 4%. Income convergence across areas,
which was abetted by the mobility of both people and firms, has completely
stalled, right? From 1860 to 1980 this was the norm. Poor places
got richer, rich places had less income growth. Over the past thirty
years that has been completely flat. We have ceased to see it.
Partially because migration historically has moved from poor areas to rich
areas. Think about the great migration North of African Americans fleeing
the desperate poverty and degradation of the Jim Crow South to find a brighter
opportunity in Detroit or Chicago. Well, today, you know, we’d say you
know, we want you to leave Detroit or Chicago and move to Silicon Valley.
And they are going to ask you, where are they going to pay for that
three-million-dollar starter home that occurs there. So as we know it at
M.I., everything comes down to NYCHA, and at least part of the answer is
allowing more migration. And you know, that service economy that you
mentioned, I mean, that’s a particularly bleak version, is the vast household
staff of the gilded age. But, you know, there is a lot to like in the
service economy. And we think about, you know, a world where we are going
to have a brighter world for less-skilled people and I think a lot of the
answers do come in services and not all that’s wrong.
Steve LeVine: Okay.
We are going to do a lightning round. Do you want to say some…
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah.
I wanted to add two things. One, in terms of policies, I think we need to
look at the schools and how they are doing with dealing with boys because we
know they are having a lot of trouble. And we need to get to these kids
before they drop out, before they have the kind of failure that leads to
joblessness and/or low skills and becoming part of what they call the
precariat, very precarious jobs that take you in and out of, you know, that are
not reliable. Ed, one question about this mobility issue that I find so
interesting is if you look historically, people, when they move, it’s generally
due to social networks of some sort. That is, their neighbors moved, or
their uncle moved and said oh, there are real opportunities here. And it
is curious in a place like Brooklyn that I’ve studied, you have neighborhoods
all over of different kinds of social groups. So, they are generally
ethnic groups, but we can have a Bangladeshi neighborhood, or a Pakistani
neighborhood, or Chinese, obviously, but we never get an Eastern heartland neighborhood.
So, and I wonder what it is that makes people not see that as a possibility.
Steve LeVine: Okay.
We have got just a few more minutes here. And so, I wanted to do a
lightning round. What is the big – why are we having this
discussion? Why is it important? There is a sense that the society
is under threat. That how do you support an advanced democracy with the
growth of jobs, $10-an-hour jobs, and the uncertainty about jobs period?
So, my question for each of you, starting with you, Kay, is are we under – is
our society under threat? Do you believe it is? And if you could do
one thing, what would it be?
Kay Hymowitz: So, I
think that it is under threat. I think the education-based meritocracy is
failing a lot of people and also creating class divisions in so many
respects. So, we are divided not just in terms of income, not just in
terms of education, but in everything from the coffee we drink, the places we
live, the way we think about families and marriage and children. And I
think that that division, that polarization, has created just enormous anger at
the lower end and that we are going to have more and more pressure, and this is
an important point for conservatives, I think, to deal with, a lot of pressure
for redistribution or some kinds of programs that can say that this system can
work for people at the bottom. We talk a lot about the jobless men, but
it is also people who are living and who are really actually working pretty
hard and still not doing that well. And, with very few hopes for their
children.
Steve LeVine: Thanks.
Ed?
Edward Glaeser: Wage
subsidies.
Steve LeVine: Well,
wait. First answer the question.
Edward Glaeser: Oh,
is it a major – yeah. It is a big problem and wage subsidies.
Kay Hymowitz: I
like that.
Steve LeVine: Ryan.
Edward Glaeser: Fix
NYCHA first.
Ryan Avent: Well,
you know, I like listening to Ed because Ed is optimistic about things. I
am sort of all the way on the other end of the scale. The main thing I
look forward to is kind of we finally get to see which dystopia we are going to
end up in. I think, I am sort of very concerned. If you look back
at industrial history, it all worked out okay but there were a lot of points in
which it might not have. There were, you know, there were serious revolutions.
There was basically a century-long ideological conflict that nearly led to
nuclear war. And that ideological conflict had its roots in kind of the
inequities generated by industrialization. So, there is a lot of ways
things could go wrong and there is not really anyone in control kind of saying
here is what we are going to do so that the worst outcomes don’t occur.
So, I think it is, you know, we need to be aware of kind of the difficulties
that are ahead of us, and the more we kind of talk about and realize that we
are going to have some radical solutions probably the better prepared we will
be and the better able we will be to avoid the worst outcomes.
Steve LeVine: I
feel a lot better now.
Ryan Avent: Yeah.
Do We Really Have a “Labor Shortage” in the
U.S., or Are We Manufacturing One?
By IRA MEHLMAN May 1, 2018
WATCH: Whistleblower Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Taken Over Every
Trade’ in CA Construction, Driven Down U.S. Wages
A whistleblower in the southern California construction industry
says illegal alien workers have “taken over every trade” in the business while
driving down wages by an estimated 40 percent.
Do We Really Have a “Labor Shortage” in the
U.S., or Are We Manufacturing One?
TWEET
Stethoscope with clipboard and Laptop on desk Doctor working in
hospital writing a prescription Healthcare and medical concept test results in
background vintage color selective focus.
It seems like there are three
kinds of jobs in America: Those that Americans won’t do, those that Americans
can’t do, and those that there aren’t enough Americans to do.
Perpetually high on the list
of jobs for which there is a claimed shortage of workers is nursing. In one of
the countless news reports about the “acute shortage” of nurses in the United
States, a 2016 Atlantic article notes, “America’s 3 million nurses make
up the largest segment of the health-care workforce in the U.S., and nursing is
currently one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country. Despite that
growth, demand is outpacing supply. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 1.2 million vacancies will emerge for registered nurses between
2014 and 2022.”
To fill this so-called void,
American health care institutions have been turning to foreign nurses.
About 15 percent of nurses currently work in the U.S. are foreign born, and the health care
industry is constantly clamoring for more.
So, if we are expecting 1.2
million vacancies in the coming years, there must be a good reason. Is it
because:
1. There
aren’t enough Americans who are educationally qualified to enter nursing
programs?
2. There
aren’t enough qualified Americans who want to be nurses?
3. Eager,
qualified nursing school applicants are being turned away in droves?
Turns out the answer is
C. According to CNN,
U.S. nursing schools are cutting admissions and rejecting record numbers of
qualified applicants. In 2017, nursing schools in the United States rejected
56,000 applicants who met all the qualifications for admission. And, given that
the average salary for a nurse practitioner is $97,000 a year, there are likely
many, many more qualified Americans who would consider a career in nursing. But
rather than expanding the capacity to train nurses in the United States,
schools are reducing the number of slots in nursing programs.
The only logical conclusion
that can be drawn from these facts is that the health care industry would
rather spend money lobbying for more foreign nurses than invest in training Americans to fill these jobs. Until not
that long ago, many hospitals had their own nursing training programs but decided to eliminate them as cost-cutting
measures.
It would not be a stretch to
insinuate that nursing is not the only sector of the U.S. economy in which
there is a labor shortage because we have deliberately created one for the
purpose of bringing in foreign workers.
Ira joined the Federation for American Immigration Reform
(FAIR) in 1986 with experience as a journalist, professor of journalism,
special assistant to Gov. Richard Lamm (Colorado), and press secretary of the
House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. His columns have appeared in
National Review, LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and more. He is
an experienced TV and ra
WATCH: Whistleblower Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Taken Over Every
Trade’ in CA Construction, Driven Down U.S. Wages
SSam
Hodgsen/Getty Images
A whistleblower in the southern California construction industry
says illegal alien workers have “taken over every trade” in the business while
driving down wages by an estimated 40 percent.
In an interview
with the group Progressives for Immigration Reform, a whistleblower who was an
independent contractor throughout the 1980s and 1990s explains how the
California construction industry transformed into one in which American men
could make a middle-class living off blue-collar work to a business where wages
have plummeted and illegal aliens dominate the field.
Blaine Taylor,
the whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a
starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 —
nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he
now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an
hour.
TAYLOR: If I
hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing
contractor, a good carpenter. [Emphasis added]
For a helper, it
was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about
$45 an hour.
That was the
going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
…
TAYLOR: The
reality is that a person that was hired as a laborer in 1988, I paid $15 an
hour and within a month if I could leave him on the job alone, he got $20 an
hour. If I hired somebody that already knew how to do certain types of labor or
certain types of operations, they would get $20 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for
construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage.
And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an
hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per
piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying
them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no
taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Taylor says that
the flood of illegal alien workers contributed to wages in the California
construction industry plummetting between the 1980s to today.
Between 2008 and
2016, construction wages were actually lower than in 1998, representing a
roughly 40 percent drop in pay. At the same time, construction materials,
Taylor said, increased by about 50 percent.
INTERVIEWER: It’s
really strange because as a young man, of course, just entering your working
life, you’re making a living wage, and then as you got middle-aged, the wage
dropped, which is like… you know most people don’t expect in their careers that
they’re going to start out at the top and they’re actually going to fall below
where they are when they start.
TAYLOR: Well,
part of it was due to the market, but then there’s the other part that really pulled it down and
that was the influx of just a flood of undocumented workers. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, Taylor
says that illegal aliens are dominating the blue-collar trades in the
California construction industry, with an illegal alien population that
potentially exceeds more than three million.
TAYLOR: Unfortunately, what I have found, is that [the construction
in California is] overwhelmingly being built by illegal immigrants that have
basically taken over every trade. [Emphasis added]
Just to go back
for a second, in the 80’s and early 90’s when I was a contractor, it wasn’t
unusual to see undocumented workers doing landscaping, demolition, then it
became roofing, and concrete work. So the heavier, more difficult, and dirtier
sort of trades where you actually got in the ditches were the first trades to
be taken over [by illegal aliens], then the rest of them began to fall.
The drywall was
next, painting, framing was the last, and now electrical and plumbing has been
taken over. All the trades finally went to the illegal
immigrants. [Emphasis
added]
In a 2017 report by the Los Angeles Times, the left-leaning paper admitted
that at the time illegal aliens began flooding the California construction
industry, wages drastically dropped.
“You can’t live
on a wage of $11 an hour for a construction worker,” Taylor said. “There’s no
hope for people. Young people, as a young man growing up in Detroit, you looked
forward to hopefully working in the construction industry.”
“That was an
attractive career to go into as a young person,” Taylor said.
The big
business-preferred cheap labor economic model of importing more than one
million new legal immigrants every year to compete mostly for working and
middle-class jobs against Americans has resulted in decades of stagnant and
even decreased wages for U.S. workers:
Median earnings
of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
For instance, the massive importation of low-skilled
foreign nationals to the U.S. has translated to a cheap-labor economy that has
aided in keeping American men’s wages stagnant for at least 44 years,
as Breitbart News reported. Median
earnings for American men working full-time were actually lower in 2016 than
they were in 2007.
On the other hand, President Trump’s economic nationalist efforts
to tighten the labor market by increasing interior
enforcement of illegal immigration has helped secure history-making wage
growth for American workers in the construction industry,
the garment industry,
for workers employed at small businesses, and
for black Americans.
No comments:
Post a Comment