This Just In: British Woman Finds Employment

Joel commends us to Simon Kuper 's account in the Financial Times of how Kate Middleton, marrying Prince Andrew (!) William, will embark on her new life without a job--and how, in this respect, her name is legion.  In only mild exaggeration of Kuper's point,  none of us has a job any more.  The  old live off their pensions or their accumulated real estate value; the young live on the old or each other. "In this crisis," says Kuper,  "people have switched en masse from living off wages to living off capital."

Agreed that Kate is stepping up from the family's party-favors business, but if if she thinks she is moving into a life of uninterrupted ortolans and whipped cream, she'd better think again.  I'll bet she has already been instructed as to her duties and responsibilities--cutting ribbons, hugging school children, keeping her bra on while on her boyfriend's yacht.  If her mind wanders, she'll be brutally reminded by her phalanx of handlers.  In this light, it may be that Kate Middleton, after a long informal internship, is the one young person in Britain who is actually getting a job.    

Afterthought: My friend Dan suggests that if it doesn't work out, she might also find employment as a model for jellybeans.

College Grads: Not Doing So Badly

I suppose this is old news to anyone who pays attention but it is new news to me.  We stew about 9/15/25 (depending what you count) unemployment rates but unemployment for college grads is actually quite low--4.8 percent in December 2010 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 9.8 for high school grads and  15.3 percent for those without  high school diploma.  That's all college grads I'm talking about, not just the post-adolescent you are trying to get out of the guest room.  And it doesn't say a lot about job quality:  I wouldn't be surprised if there are a fair number of former mortgage brokers out there waiting tables or cutting hair and happy to have it thankyouverymuch.  I suppose it is one more thread for the mantra of how this is a skill-based society.  I suppose so but I still remember what a prospective non-employer told me back when I was a college dropout: it's not what you learn in college, it's just that completing college is proof of at least a certain minimum of staying power--also, perhaps, skill at outwitting a heartless bureaucracy.

I haven't seen any data on young college grads in particular.  I should think this would be particularly hard to measure, seeing as how a fair number of the kiddies just don't get their act in gear until months, maybe a year or two, after they walk across the stage (gotta be time for the World Tour or at least one more scarf-down of mom's cooking before you embark on the great adventure.  I suppose also  lot of he young get crap jobs and that's fine--really, that's what the young should be for.  Question is how long will they be stuck in those crap jobs?  Will "it's only until I find something real" turn into  25th anniversary lunch at Chili's with all your lucky-to-be-employed-at-all college graduate buddies?

Statisticitis

Been chatting with my buddy John about the scary stuff in this week's excellent Economist overview of the present and future of Europe. E.g.: "At 40%, youth unemployment in Spain is not just high; it is a moral indictment of an entire system."

Well, yes. But wait--these are Spanish statistics we are talking about. Does anyone take at face value any number generated in Club Med? Put another way: are these 40 percent really staying home sitting on their thumbs and slant-drilling into daddy's pension pool? Some, sure. But a good many, I suspect, have found a way to work off the books, reducing the nominal report to--

--to what, exactly? Of course I don't know for sure. To complicate things, I'm sure the degree of misreporting varies from place to place; I would expect better data from (say) Helsinki than I would from Athens (we all remember --yes--? that wonderful New York Times aerial photo a few weeks back showing all the off-the-books swimming pools in the mother of civilization).

But it's not just Club Med. The Economist says that in Belgium, the portion of potential workers between 55 and 64 actually labor force is just 35 percent--a fact which the E finds "disastrous," reporting that "in Sweden, the proportion is twice as high." I have no idea what to make of this, not least because Belgium is a country I could never figure out. No, rather two countries, yoked unwillingly together with a world capital at center. Repeating, must we believe that the non-working 65-percent cohort of Belgian junior/seniors is simply sitting it out (over an agreeable Belgian beer, perhaps?). Is Sweden really that different? Or is the Sweden number an index of Belgian laziness as of sloppy Belgian reporting?

Jobless Recovery: Just What The Doctor Ordered

The web is alive with stories about the green shoots in the economy and the Dow's momentary vault above 11,000. And, oh yes, the inevitable tsk-tsking about how unemployment remains give or take around 10 percent. But what if the recover is coming about not in spite but because of the 10-percent unemployment rate? What if the result of the late meltdown is precisely to cull the workforce, as you would cull a buffalo herd, getting rid of the weaklings so the rest of the herd can move faster?

Don't misunderstand, I'm not remotely pleased at the thought of such a result. But one way to tart up the bottom line is to cut the wage bill. People have been talking for a couple of years now about how some of those jobs are never coming back. And what if there is simply nothing to take their place?

[On buffalo herds and how beer drinking makes you smarter, go here.]

Unemployment Datapoint of the Day: Auto Rehab

Lunch today with a law student who, like so many, has no prospects. He said he used to fix cars. I asked him if he could find work there? Well, he said, I used to buy a junker every so often and rebuild it for resale. But these days everybody's doing it, so there's no easy money any more.

Lowenstein on Jobs

Roger Lowenstein offers an admirably succinct (but depressing) summary of wht you already kinda sorta already knew about the meltdown and the job market (link). Shorter short Lowenstein: employers aren't hoarding employees any more; they are laying off as many as they can. And it is not just layoffs: the meta-story is that employers haven't been hiring since the dotcom boom went bust.

Copy that. In the recent kerfuffle, I think folks may have forgotten how brief and transitory the boom was. I can remember a student/grad from the early 90s--quite a good one, really, high grades, good presentable manner-who told me felt like the velvet cord had been drawn up just in front of him. In retrospect--if so, it was because they were reconfiguring the theatre for the Next Big Extravaganza. Granted that nobody wants another real estate boom--which was all smoke and mirrors from the start--another dotcom boom, with all its innovation and intellectual electricity--why, that doesn't sound bad at all.

Lowenstein also says that one out of six construction workers is out of work. Sic? I would have thought maybe it was five out of six.

Afterthought: Lowenstein also tangentially hits upon one of the reasons why "economics" drives so many people so nots. He refers to "Okun's Law"- - "a mathematical relationship," as Lowenstein puts it, "between the decline in output (that is, goods and services produced) and the rise in unemployment." Lowenstein says:

It held up pretty well until recently. But this time around, although the decline in output would have predicted a rise in unemployment to 8 percent, the actual jobless rate has soared to 9.5 percent. So this recession is killing off jobs even faster than the things — like automobiles, houses, computers and newspapers — that jobholders produce

Alright, fine. So far so good. Fine fellow, Okun, useful research. BUT IT ISN'T A LAW. It's an insight, a generalization, a quaint observation, a description of some data. BUT IT ISN'T A LAW or we wouldn't be able to blow it off so easily. Got that? IT ISN'T A LAW. And, yes, I am writing in caps.