Eugene Wei’s excellent Status as a Service post rang a bell for me in terms of the puzzle of the jobless prime age men in the US. The difference from just unemployment is that the folks in the jobless cohort have opted out of even trying to get work. They’re most white and in mostly former manufacturing heavy areas. They score lower on optimism than their counterparts in most of the world, and interestingly even lower than US black and latino men in similar states (See Graham and Pinto’s recent work). They view their life as worse than their parents, and don’t expect it to get better.

Selling developer products into large companies is often vital to the success of those products. Bigger annual contract values can make or break a business.

I mentioned an increase in “rote” jobs in an earlier post, but I wasn’t too clear about exactly what I was referring to. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of the questions around wages and productivity, inspired partly by Scott Alexander’s recent article, which is detailed and appropriately confusing. Luckily, the question at hand doesn’t require definitively asserting the link, but instead thinking about how that productivity increase happens in general.

Bit of a grab bag on some recent work on the government policy side. Timothy Taylor had a post a couple of weeks ago on active labor market policies - those are policies which directly encourage work rather than subsidize unemployment. There’s a useful table in the post of various policy interventions and the assessed effectiveness:

In prior decades, hiring an external firm to do something that was an internal function would have looked mostly like outsourcing: hire a company to provide the same service more cheaply, often by through geographical labor price differences. Now, however, an increasing amount of that work is done by subscription to a software-as-a-service and similar products.

Slightly longer post, as this is working through a bigger picture I’ve been thinking about for the last week. There is a puzzle in the US: unemployment is low and wages are rising, but so is joblessness and alternative (and much less employee friendly) working structures. From looking at various explanations, several of the same factors seem to come up, resulting in pressure on long-term planning. I’ve tried to capture some of that in the note below:

There were some headlines recently along the lines of “Economists who predicted the gig economy say it never happened’. Timothy Taylor has a succinct summary of the work that prompted that on his blog, along with some other research from the Boston Fed. He concludes:

I just finished the excellent Capitalism without Capital, which covers the rise of investment in intangible assets such as knowledge and brand, rather than tangible assets like machines.  

Forbes have a good piece about how much of the technological change in the workplace is enhancing worker surveilance, specifically around monitoring completion and form of jobs, and breaks. They place this in the context of the famous shirtwaist fire:

Timothy Taylor has a great summary of Santiago Levy’s Under-Rewarded Efforts, a book about the lack of productivity growth in Mexico. One of the core points is that the social welfare system drew a big distinction between salaried and non-salaried workers, which failed to account for the incentives that would create: