Thanks Keith, The information used in Kevin Drum's article is about the US labour market, which has seen a long-term shift from manufacturing, essentially factory, jobs to service jobs. Service jobs do not, of course, only take place in tall office buildings, ever so many of them occur at ground level in places like coffee shops, eateries and stores selling the kinds of clothing and other goods that empowered women need if they are working in tall buildings. Women are much better at such jobs and more appealing in them than men.
The world is indeed now very different from that contemplated by Friedman and
Keynes and indeed anybody who has been around as long as you and I have. In
the 1950s, the women I went to university with were expected to take courses
like home economics and learn skills that would be useful to them in the home
and the non-working community. One woman on campus was taking engineering and
provided men, and probably some women too, with something to joke about. But
then along came the 1960s and '70s and whoosh the male dominated world was
turned on its head. Ever so many of the women who graduated then didn't even
give a thought to being a housewife. They had been trained for work and that's
where they went. Service organizations like daycares grew up around them.
They were staffed almost exclusively by women.
I have no idea of where we go from here. I'm retired and my kids have grown up
so it's nothing I worry about. But when I see men in their twenties or
thirties or even forties pushing baby-strollers down the street in the middle
of the day, I find myself yearning just a little for the good old days. Surely
they should be at work and their wives should be pushing those strollers,
shouldn't they?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Men without work
Ed,
I don't know whether you wrote the last paragraph below but I can quite see
male employment settling out lower than 80%. It's getting close to that now in
most advanced countries and there's still a lot of jobs that have yet to be
shaken out.
Besides women's jobs that Kevin Drum writes about below there's also at least
three other significant trends these days: (a) continuing automation; (b)
increasing decline of profit margins on mass produced goods; (c) increasing
skill gap in the newer technologies.
This is a very different world than any contemplated either by either Milton
Friedman or Keynes. I think they'd both be at a loss to suggest what should be
done now, and both would also be at a loss to see what sort of economics will
apply in the future.
Keith
At 08:49 12/02/2010 -0500, you wrote:
From the Mother Jones website.
Ed
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Men Without Work
- By Kevin Drum
| Wed Feb. 10, 2010 7:13 AM PST
Back in the early 90s Joel Garreau wrote a book called Edge City.
Basically, an edge city is a suburb, but it's a suburb that has the usual
sprawl of stucco houses plus at least five million square feet of leasable
office space. In other words, it's a self-contained community where people can
both live and work, and until the mid-70s such places really didn't exist.
Today they're ubiquitous. So what happened? Garreau explains:
When I started asking developers when, exactly, they first thought it
plausible to build quarter-of-a-million-square-foot office monoliths out in
some cow pasture, far from the old downtowns, I found it eerie how often the
year 1978 came up....The only thing I've discovered that begins to account for
that nationwide pattern is that 1978 was the peak year in all of American
history for women entering the work force. In the second half of the 1970s,
unprecedentedly, more than eight million hitherto non-wage-earning women went
out and found jobs. The spike year was 1978.
That same year, a multitude of developers independently decided to start
putting up big office buildings out beyond the traditional male-dominated
downtown....The new advantage was proximity to the emerging work force. These
Edge City work centers were convenient for women. It saved them time. This
discovery was potent. A decade later, developers viewed it as a truism that
office buildings had an indisputable advantage if they were located near the
best-educated, most conscientious, most stable workers - underemployed females
living in middle class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.
Italics mine. This passage has stuck with me ever since I first read it.
Three decades ago employers discovered that as long as their jobs didn't
require much in the way of physical strength - and fewer and fewer jobs did -
women were a better employment bet than men. Since then, this has become more
apparent with every passing year. Which brings us to the recession of 2008-09,
as described by Don Peck in the Atlantic:
The weight of this recession has fallen most heavily upon men, who've
suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses since the beginning
of 2008....In November, 19.4 percent of all men in their prime working years,
25 to 54, did not have jobs, the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor
Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948.
....According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National
Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job
losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and - when combined with
the depth and duration of the jobs crisis - poses "a profound challenge to
marriage," especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in
general, he says, "if men can't make a contribution financially, they don't
have much to offer."
Noted without comment, because I really don't quite know how this is all
going to shake out. But I wouldn't be surprised if we're entering not merely a
slow recovery in general, but an era in which the male employment ratio hovers
permanently around 80% even for those in their prime working years. For now,
though, just consider this some raw data.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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