jobless recovery???

[capthek]

This may bring back a similar question going around back after the dot com bomb.  Why is the recovery largely jobless?  Back in 2000 I wondered if the world had become similar to the US in that the geography of jobs is uneven.  By this, I mean that you can have less unions and tax breaks in the South and this leads to companies and jobs moving to

Comments

[vargtimmen]

As more and more jobs become automated I foresee welfare/TANF becoming a permanent institution, with a class of permanently unemployed people who are given enough money to survive and need a job only if they strive for more. If there are no unskilled jobs left, what else can you really do besides say "All right, you're free to go off and create art or music or anything you feel like." We're not quite there yet, so I think the percentage of unskilled labor is higher than it should be right now. For that we really need to focus on better childhood education rather than attempting to retrain adults who are, essentially, modern-day peasants.

[mcfnord]

I saw a critical documentary of Jamaica "deregulation"... they had dairy farms, but they couldn't compete with SUBSIDIZED American milk production (delivered as instant milk). How reasonable is deregulation against subsidized product

[laudre]

The theory says that a minimum wage increases unemployment a couple of different ways (quantity of labor supplied increases due to more workers entering the market, quantity of labor demanded decreases due to higher cost of labor), and I've seen a few papers that have found empirical examples of this.

That being said, it's predicated upon the price floor being binding, which I'm not sure is the case; current federal minimum wage is $7.25, and the lowest hourly mean wage rate listed by the BLS (broken down by industry and occupational group, report from May 2009, found here) is $9.84, as far as I can see

[foreverbeach]

Only idiots think there is a recovery. You're in the first stages of a depression. Aside from record numbers of people now getting food subsidies, unemployment being off the charts, and bankruptcies skyrocketing again, the fed is the one financing the deficit spending now.

[p2thej]

"dear god, what can this person do for a living