And it doesn't mention that even the most educated workers are not keeping pace with real GDP growth.

The analysis basically books down to "supply exceeds demand, uneducated hardest hit". I would have liked to see more analysis on the ultimate reason for the lack of demand for workers.

Finally, it bugs me when people blame technology for destroying jobs and not society, employees, and employers for thinking simple, repetitive jobs are viable long-term career paths. Distilled to absurdity, we could pay people to dig holes and refill them, but robots will always be orders of magnitude better at that. Why blame the robot and not everyone else for not realizing hole-digger is a job with an expiration date?

Few people think a repetitive, unskilled job is a viable career path. People take these jobs because they have no other choice. Not everyone can go to college.

You don't have to go to college to think strategically about your next job, not just the current one.

> People take these jobs because they have no other choice.

You take a job because you have no other choice. You stay at a job past the expiration date because:

* nobody told you that jobs have expiration dates

* you know but think you'll deal with that problem later

...I think it's important for us to create a culture that encourages people to think about their jobs and careers strategically. The broader conversation revolves around statements like "people are stuck" or "they need retraining and/or education". I don't think those statements and attitudes are helping people enough, especially when bootstrapping, self-education, and content creation are cheaper and easier than ever.

You have to be in a good position just for the option of bootstrapping, and educating yourself. If you're working two jobs just to keep the lights on, you don't have the time or money. And self education doesn't mean much if you can't list a degree on your resume. It's not hopeless, but it's hard!

I think that really depends on upbringing. In rural areas with little education past highschool, there are plenty of people who would willingly do mind numbing work, if they got a decent paycheck from it. It's not mind numbing to them because its not framed that way in their mind. They see "I give you labor, you give me money". They are okay with that. People with higher education see things differently, but its not necessarily a better interpretation.

Reasons for lack of demand:

-phase lag: It takes a while for the economy to find uses for increased labour.

-Until the above is fixed: Unbalanced levels of education: The economy requires x amount of elementary graduates per y amount of high school graduates per z amount of university graduates. Mostly unskilled immigrants don't come in these ratios and therefore introduces imbalance, meaning there's a surplus of unskilled workers

What are the jobs without an expiration date?

It's always funny how when these kinds of questions arise in HN a lot of people is worried about what are "we" going to do with "them" when "we" have not works for "them".

(not talking about the parent here, by the way)

All jobs have expiration dates unless you're independently wealthy. That's why, for decades, commencement addresses have repeated factoids about the inevitability of career change.

It doesn't make sense, then, to stand around and grumble about how the robots are messing everything up. Instead, we need to develop productive advice and attitudes about being creators that use all this automation to do even greater things.

>I would have liked to see more analysis on the ultimate reason for the lack of demand for workers.

The simple answer is: because state economic policy has been systematically configured to keep inflation low and asset values high. Any economist can tell you that low inflation and high asset values, as goals, conflict with full employment, and tend to suppress the price of labor. Somehow, it has become a Thing You Don't Say to actually admit this fact, because that would mean low wages are a social problem rather than an individual moral failure.

>And it doesn't mention that even the most educated workers are not keeping pace with real GDP growth.

Should they be? Isn't a lot of rGDP growth caused by a growing population. Or is it not keeping up with rGDP/per capita.

>And it doesn't mention that even the most educated workers are not keeping pace with real GDP growth.

Doesn't this go away when you take into account benefits on top of salary?

I'd need to check for references, but I think most of the growth of benefits goes to increased cost of health care.

It is bad enough to be told that your 10% salary raise will be payable in lottery tickets (most people remain healthy and get zero raise, a minority of sick people get huge payoff in the form of medical services); but when you find out that the jackpot is the same size but more tickets got printed (medical cost raise but quality of service flats out) you get really pissed off.

Sure, but then we aren't in a situation where growth of wages isn't keeping pace with GDP, we are in a situation where healthcare cost increases are outpacing GDP. They are two different problems.

Unless you can decline benefits and have an equivalent dollar amount tacked onto your paycheck, I don't see why they should be taken into account.

Why don't you take it one step further and question the viability of the model of work as one of the primary sources of "inspiration" and "core" aspects in life and that life should not be centered around this in light of the recent developments in the job market and technology?

Also, please debate why most humans have to work in the first place just to put food on the table while the 1% of Earth's population controlling ~40% of global wealth.

The NY Times wouldn't mention immigration because that would harm the Ehite House narrative about how 'good' it will be to open the borders and provide amnesty. The people that are most conditioned to vote democrat (the poor) are the ones who are ultimately harmed the most from increasing immigration and reducing deportations. However by increasing immigration, presumably the Democrats think that they will add enough votes to offset the potential loss of votes from the existing American lower classes who are most profoundly harmed by illegal immigration and the so-called 'path to citizenship.'

In terms of immigration policy, one might want to ask oneself why tech companies want to increase H1s; why people like Zuckerberg care about the immigration issue at all. It isn't because of some altruism. More immigrants mean declining labor costs. This article exposes the canary of the lower wage segments, however a similar pattern will eventually emerge in the higher wage fields as well.

But if one provides amnesty, then these individuals would likely have to pay payroll taxes and be paid a normal wage, instead of hiding from the system and getting paid under the table. Anyway, it's employers hiring illegally that's the problem. Immigrants wouldn't be coming here and 'stealing' jobs if employers were not complicit in the matter.

Except that it send the signal to others yet again don't come to the US legally come illegally and eventually they will make you legal.

It depress wages of those employers who only hire legal workers. Why bother raising above minimum wage if you don't have to

It means more people will come illegally, depressing wages being paid by those who hire those who are not authorized. to work here.

I agree some business are the problem. They need to be punished.

>The NY Times wouldn't mention immigration because that would harm the Ehite House narrative about how 'good' it will be to open the borders and provide amnesty.

I didn't realize the NY Times was an operative of the Obama administration...

An operative makes it sound like they are under the thumb of the administration. Which I doubt to be accurate, yet I would say they are co-conspirators who share the same left wing agenda.

OK... This left wing agenda thing must be new with the NY Times. It sure looked like they were "co-conspirators" with the Bush administration when they refused or didn't bother to investigate the administrations claims about weapons of mass destruction Saddam supposedly had... They were practically promoting another war with Iraq.

So then they are simply a co-opted mouth piece of the political incumbents. Yet I would tend to argue that most of their reporting tends toward the left, yet that could be a factor of being in NYC which is primarily left wing.

Mark Zuckberg is worth 34.8 billion $. How much money do you think he saves by hiring "cheaper" H1B workers?

The idea behind his argument isn't that H1Bs are cheaper, it is that they increase the labour supply, which drags down the cost of hiring everyone.

And it doesn't mention civil rights or feminism either. There may be various cultural phenomenons that play a part in increasing the labor supply, but enforcing barriers to entry disregards the dignity of people. The fact is, if you want to be materially successful in life you have to compete (at least in some way) with everyone you share the Earth with. You can't stop immigration any more than you can stop oppressed people from wanting to be free. The point of the article is though to remind us educated NYTimes readers that while we might be sitting pretty, there are certain classes of society who are getting left behind.

Curiously the media typically are against immigration of the professional classes, think doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, etc. but typically are in favor of uneducated immigration -now industry wants both because it makes the labor supply cheaper, activists typically only look after the uneducated immigrant pool and hardly care about fighting for immigrant professionals.

As an aside, Japan but not Britain does a "good" job at limiting immigration despite the great need for it within their economy. Their bet is that the pain to their economy is worth the stability of their society. I suppose we shall see who has the better answer an open economy like the UK or a closed labor economy like Japan.

Also, this not a phenomenon unique to rich western countries, south Africa, Nigeria, Kenya are also very keen on protecting their own labor markets from immigrant classes. There is a protectionist aspect but its not racial in nature. Look at the Mexican motto "Mexico for Mexicans" and how other Hispanics are unfavored in their economy. Imagine a European country having a similar motto...

They may be opposed to immigrants from the professional classes but they'll use them for a political agenda.

Every time there's a conversation about "is undocumented immigration good?" the response from the press is "without immigrants we wouldn't have Google!!"

The UK has quite a bit of immigration from other European nations. It is certainly not good at limiting them. Japan is stagnant economically and has a shrinking population. Not to mention the highest debt to gdp ratio in the world, and certainly no culture of innovation like Silicon valley, which is home to diverse and skilled immigrants.

My point was to contrast the diverging approaches of two successful island nations. One chooses to allow immigration, the other severely limits it. Curious about long term outcome and viability if the resulting economies.

The fact that lowering barriers to entry (by people unfortunate enough to be born black, female or foreign) is a normative good does not mean that an article should ignore them - they are still possible positive causes of low income workers "getting hammered".

If they are a primary cause, then the correct response is just to accept that good things may have tradeoffs.

I agree it's a glaring oversight, but I don't think it's a supply/demand effect so much as a demographic shift: I'd bet that the group of American working men ages 30-45 without a high school diploma now tilts much more heavily first-generation immigrant than it did in 1990. The percentage of native born Americans with high school diplomas has risen pretty consistently over that period, and immigrants as a % of the population has been spiking since 1970, rising from 8% to 13% from 1990-2013.[1]

As the Census Bureau pointed out in 2003:

The percentage of the foreign born with a high school diploma (67 percent) was dramatically lower than that of the native population (88 percent), but paradoxically, the percentage with a bachelor's degree was the same (27 percent).[2]

I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that first generation immigrants may have less remunerative employment opportunities than native born citizens, regardless of their education level, but particularly without a high school diploma.

[1] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immi...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

Is there a corresponding increase in immigration over time? As far as I know (in my lifetime) there have always been migrant laborers.

> Is there a corresponding increase in immigration over time?

Yes. The both the number and percentage of immigrants have doubled since 1990. I'm pro immigration, but it's odd that we aren't even talking about how immigration affects job prospects, especially given the dismal wages across the board.

That's a pretty gross statistic. I don't have the reference handy but as I recall if you graph wage growth vs immigration on an annual or more granular basis, there is no significant correlation.

Who is the "we" that isn't talking about it?

I was trying to be inclusive, but in particular, I'm talking about the NYT article that was posted.

I'd like to see some credible data showing that.

Interesting, there seems to be some truth to this. I've known that immigration was a major cause of US population growth. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/03/15-immigran...

The premise of the main article, though, is that the major impact of globalization has been the decline in higher-wage sectors such as manufacturing, wheres immigrants are competing more in lower-wage sectors.