9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

Re:9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m... by tjic on Monday December 19, 2016 @11:18AM (#13212369)

> It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field

This is an example of what I'm talking about.

What's more of a waste of your training? To be work in a career field only 60% overlapping with your training, or to be unemployed (with 0% overlap) ?

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Re:9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m... by mcguire on Monday December 19, 2016 @11:31AM (#13212527)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

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Re:9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m... by tjic on Monday December 19, 2016 @11:56AM (#13212785)

JFC

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Re:9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m... by barry-cotter on Monday December 19, 2016 @12:22PM (#13213050)

Depends. If you never get a job in your field again because of downshifting into unskilled labour it's more of a waste than losing a year to unemployment and job search.

If you want to read more on this look up "search costs"

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1976....

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Re:9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m... by arcanus on Monday December 19, 2016 @11:27AM (#13212482)

Great point. Better to be employed than not, and of course no job is a perfect fit.

Would be interesting to count one as being only 60% employed, in the example you give. So if you had 100 million people all employed at 60% fit, that's an 'effective' employment of 60 million. Of course, I have no idea how one might measure that.

But I am not an economist, there may be similar (or superior) measures for underemployment.

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