Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley · 14 May 2008 · 196pp · 53,627 words
, offsetting the negative effects that a greater labor supply might have,” he writes. “They fill vital niches at the ends of the skill spectrum, doing low-skilled jobs that native Americans rebuff (at prevailing wages) as well as sophisticated high-skill jobs.” Among high-skilled immigrant workers, these dots are perhaps easier to
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the benefit of those Americans who compete most directly with low-skilled foreign workers for entry-level jobs. Black Americans, who are disproportionately concentrated in low-skilled jobs, are considered especially vulnerable. The black unemployment rate is typically double that of whites and significantly higher among black males. Can this situation be laid
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the country illegally each year—a direct consequence of the fact that our current policy is to make available just five thousand visas annually for low-skilled workers. If we want to reduce the number of illegal entries, the most sensible course is to provide more legal ways for people to come. This
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Krikorian, Mark Kristof, Nicholas Labor, U.S. Department of labor market argument automation delay and black economic advancement and California experience France and job stealing myth low-skilled American laborers and low-skilled immigrant laborers and Reagan on skilled professionals and labor participation rates Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Lamm, Richard “Latino Fear and
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
as much as financial opportunism: Platforms like Facebook paid users for successful posts, fueling cottage industries in countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Low-skill workers could be taught to use Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Microsoft’s AI image creator to churn out cheaply made, often bizarre imagery designed to game
The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)
by Maximilian Kasy · 15 Jan 2025 · 209pp · 63,332 words
Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 91–100. Autor, D. H., and D. Dorn. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market.” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1553–97. Autor, D. H., L. F. Katz, and
Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson · 23 Jan 2012 · 72pp · 21,361 words
unemployment is real. To understand this threat, we'll define three overlapping sets of winners and losers that technical change creates: (1) high-skilled vs. low-skilled workers, (2) superstars vs. everyone else, and (3) capital vs. labor. Each set has well-documented facts and compelling links to digital technology. What’s more
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the data. For all three sets of winners and losers, the news is troubling. Let’s look at each in turn. 1. High-Skilled vs. Low-Skilled Workers We’ll start with skill-biased technical change, which is perhaps the most carefully studied of the three phenomena. This is technical change that increases
Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig · 15 Mar 2020
at the two extremities: skilled and well-paid jobs in sophisticated sectors, and unskilled and/or deskilled low paid jobs in unsophisticated services. Yet, because low skill, low wage jobs must be created to increase the employment rate, this increase inevitably leads to an increase in income inequality (Artus 2017). 68 P.-M. Menger
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’s tech industries don’t employ as many people directly as the smokestack industries of the twentieth century did, they support the incomes of many low-skilled service jobs, as high-income earners, whose skills are complemented by computers, demand many services, like those of janitors, gardeners, hairdressers, fitness trainers, and so on
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there are good reasons to think that the unskilled will continue to see their earnings potential diminish over the next decades. According to our estimates, low-skilled, low-income jobs are most exposed to recent advances in machine learning. Even if the next generation goes to college and successfully acquires new skills, that will
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‘skill-premium’ was rising; why, for large parts of the twentieth century, the wages of high-skilled workers were rising relative to the wages of low-skilled workers, even though the supply of the former was rising as well. (Typically, the premium was measured by comparing the wage of college graduates to those
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interesting fact was not so much that high- skilled workers were increasingly being paid more relative to low-skilled workers, but that those middling-skilled workers were enjoying neither the same wage nor job growth as the low-skilled or high-skilled at either end. In light of this shortcoming, support began to build for a
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jobs from across the labour market and broke them down into all the tasks that made them up, it transpired that many high-skilled and low-skilled jobs required ‘non-routine’ tasks—that was why they were hard to automate, and why they saw great employment growth. But, critically, those middling-skilled jobs
Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin · 21 Jun 2023 · 248pp · 73,689 words
in both industries, further adding to the gravitational pull of these places. With the growing number of skilled workers in superstar cities has come increased jobs for low-skilled workers too. To understand why, it is helpful to differentiate between the ‘tradeable’ and ‘non-tradeable’ sectors of the economy. The tradeable sector produces things
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less skilled workers. That leads many to stay put in left-behind places, which only compounds the problem, as too many people chase too few low-skill jobs. This is why making cities like London, New York and San Francisco more affordable is so important. And whether you live in a rich or
Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook · 28 Mar 2016 · 345pp · 92,849 words
allows foreigners to share in the American Dream, which is something we should value for its own sake, but may also fuel economic growth.16 Low-skilled workers tend to bid down wages for low-skilled work, which sounds bad until you remember that this lowers the cost of the products we all
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,000 a year, and an experienced plumber can earn upward of $70,000.38 Even the low-skilled service-sector jobs at places such as McDonald’s and Walmart have been unfairly maligned as “dead-end jobs.” A low-skilled, low-paying job is not a limit on opportunity—it’s a stepping-stone to greater
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started his rise working behind a McDonald’s counter.)16 The more common pattern, of course, is for unskilled workers to start at these low-skill, low-paying jobs, and use the skills and experience they acquire to find better jobs in other fields. But what if a person can’t get that first
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benefits. In other cases, higher labor costs may lead some companies not to expand, while other companies may never get started. Either way, fewer jobs for low-skilled workers.22 The point isn’t to criticize the Card and Krueger study in particular. It’s that it’s wrong to take a single empirical
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. In 1989, those percentages had already fallen to 48.9 and 16.2 percent, respectively.)58 Was this frightening decline due to a lack of low-skilled jobs? Surely that’s part of the story, and here the job-killing minimum wage deserves its share of the blame. (According to journalist Jason Riley
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costs (subsidized housing costs increase when incomes rise) and clothing costs (depending on the job). . . . Single mothers on welfare know that leaving welfare for a low-skilled job will make them worse off than they were on welfare.65 In a more recent study from the Cato Institute, Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes
Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century
by Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston · 18 Apr 2016 · 338pp · 92,465 words
in occupations that are stagnating—is not unique to middle-skill workers. Some states—most notably southern and traditional Rust Belt states—have substantially more low-skill workers than low-skill jobs, while others—particularly those in the Northeast—have more high-skill workers than high-skill jobs. And then there are those states, like California
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
the same time reduce average real wages. Furthermore, technology’s inequality implications can be much more amplified when automation encroaches on the tasks performed by low-skill workers, reducing their real wages while raising the returns to capital and the wages of higher-skilled labor (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2022). It is important to
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
by Gabriel Winant · 23 Mar 2021 · 563pp · 136,190 words
categories were found in hospitals—where they were needed for technologically intensive interventions—rather than in nursing homes, ambulatory clinics, or home health care, where “low-skill” workers remained closer to the old model of slow, life-sustaining care. This rapid growth thus marked a dramatic occupational stratification of the hospital workforce94 While
The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want
by Diane Mulcahy · 8 Nov 2016 · 229pp · 61,482 words
. These workers are surviving in their full-time jobs but struggling if they lose them. The fate of retail and service workers and others in low-skill jobs changes marginally in the Gig Economy, but they continue to be the worst off. These workers are already in mostly poorly paid, insecure, part-time
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan · 18 Apr 2010 · 386pp · 122,595 words
1932. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats; economic growth is a very good thing for poor people. Period. But even at high tide, low-skilled workers are clinging to driftwood while their better-skilled peers are having cocktails on their yachts. A robust economy does not transform valet parking attendants into
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favors workers who either have computer skills or are smart enough to learn them on the job. Technology makes smart workers more productive while making low-skilled workers redundant. ATMs replaced bank tellers; self-serve pumps replaced gas station attendants; automated assembly lines replaced workers doing mindless, repetitive tasks. Indeed, the assembly line
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the demand for workers with no specialized skills other than a willingness to do an honest day’s work. Meanwhile, international trade puts low-skilled workers in greater competition with other low-skilled workers around the globe. In the long run, international trade is a powerful force for good; in the short run, it has victims
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are far fewer domestic servants in the United States than in India, even though the United States is a richer country. India is awash with low-skilled workers who have few other employment options; America is not, making domestic labor relatively expensive (as anyone with a nanny can attest). Who can afford a
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moved to Vietnam. (Remember, I was the speechwriter for the governor of Maine; I have tried to explain that.) Trade, like technology, can destroy jobs, particularly low-skilled jobs. If a worker in Maine earns $14 an hour for something that can be done in Vietnam for $1 an hour, then he had
The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah · 26 Feb 2017 · 492pp · 118,882 words
the labor market had led to the creation of a “polarized” work environment in which expansion was seen in the demand of high-skill and low-skills jobs, but coupled with a fall in the demand for routine or “middle-skilled” ** jobs, and that job polarization was leading to a shrinking concentration of
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, consistent with the ICT-based polarization hypothesis, this increase had come mainly from the reduction in the relative demand for middle-skilled workers rather than low-skilled workers (Michaels et al, 2010). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *(As per the Occupational Information Network ( ONET ) database, non-routine or abstract tasks are those that involve critical thinking, judgment/ decision
The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott · 1 Jun 2016 · 344pp · 94,332 words
income of highly skilled workers. As the income of these skilled workers has increased, so they have increased their demand for the services produced by low-skilled workers. The net effect of these substitution, complementarity and demand effects has been the hollowing out of the labour market. That described the first half of
Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida · 28 Jun 2009 · 325pp · 73,035 words
—industries that are quickly growing—lack the broad employment base enjoyed by China’s manufacturing industry.21 Until India figures out how to provide jobs to its low-skill workers, globalization will only deepen the country’s internal economic, political, and social divisions. The backlash to the spiky world extends beyond emerging economies. In
The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese · 23 Apr 2018 · 294pp · 96,661 words
untold numbers of order-taking jobs. If technology is destroying vast numbers of low-skilled jobs but is creating only a few new high-skill jobs, we will be left with a shortage of low-skill jobs and a large number of permanently unemployed low-skilled workers. Hence, we are in a permanent Great Depression. There are jobs that
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requirements of many, many existing jobs. Once you accept the idea that automation will do more and more low-skill jobs, you cannot escape the fact that this will result in too many low-skilled workers and too few low-skill jobs. What do we say to this line of narrative? Let’s explore the five assumptions behind it
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Google Translate. That’s why by 2024, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 29 percent employment growth for interpreters and translators. ASSUMPTION 4: Low-skilled workers will be the first to go. ASSUMPTION 5: There won’t be enough jobs for these workers in the future. The assumptions that
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low-skilled workers will be the first to go and that there won’t be enough jobs for them undoubtedly have some truth to them, but they require
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machines. In this view, the hierarchy of economic value in the future goes from skilled humans on top, then robots, then low-skilled workers. In this scenario, there are a great many low-skill jobs that robots will soon be able to do. For each job replaced, the number of unemployed unskilled workers will increase and
Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama · 1 Jan 1995 · 585pp · 165,304 words
skilled workers were concerned with having jobs that were intrinsically interesting or fulfilling, while unskilled workers were more interested in income. Many new entrants and low-skill workers, moreover, believed that having a factory job in the first place conferred significant social status. William H. Form, “Auto Workers and Their Machines: A Study
Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell · 1 Jan 2000 · 850pp · 254,117 words
minority workers. A majority of professional economists surveyed in Britain, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States agreed that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among low-skilled workers. Economists in France and Austria did not. However, the majority among Canadian economists was 85 percent and among American economists was 90 percent.{352} Dozens
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approaches and methods used in these studies, this literature as a whole was one “largely solidifying the conventional view that minimum wages reduce employment among low-skilled workers.”{353} Those officially responsible for administering minimum wage laws, such as the U. S. Department of Labor and various local agencies, prefer to claim that
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, with so many resources idled instead of being allocated. South Africa is not unique. A National Bureau of Economic Research study, comparing the employment of low-skilled workers in Europe and the United States found that, since the 1970s, such workers have been disproportionately displaced by machinery in European countries where there are
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you often have to carry your bags on your own. These are not simply trivial traveler’s pointers, but indicate a deeper and widespread phenomenon: low skilled jobs have been substituted away for machines in Europe, or eliminated, much more than in the US, while technological progress at the “top” i.e. at
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind · 14 Jan 2020 · 419pp · 109,241 words
, rather than being skill-biased, was “unskill-biased” instead.11 A popular picture of the Industrial Revolution depicts a wave of machines displacing swaths of low-skilled workers from their roles—people who made their living spinning thread and wefting cloth with bare hands and basic tools finding themselves without work. But this
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. Ibid., pp. 82–5. 30. Ibid., p. 89. 31. Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “What If Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?,” New York Times, 11 January 2019. 32. Moretti, New Geography of Jobs. 33. Eurostat (2019) data, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing · 27 Feb 2011 · 209pp · 89,619 words
most buyers is, quite simply, a fraud. To give one example, 40 per cent of Spanish university students a year after graduating find themselves in low-skilled jobs that do not require their qualifications. This can only produce a pandemic of status frustration. At present, the average lifetime monetary gain from going to
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was building a precariat. Migrants’ wages are lower than those of French workers and they are more vulnerable to unemployment, partly because they are in low-skilled jobs, such as construction, and more affected by economic fluctuations, partly because of discrimination. Unemployed Maghrebians often do not have the contribution record needed to claim
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-Sponsored Short-Time Jobs’, Financial Times, 29 October, p. 6. Autor, D. and Houseman, S. (2010), ‘Do Temporary-Help Jobs Improve Labor Market Outcomes for Low-Skilled Workers: Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3(2): 96–128. Bamford, J. (2009), The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9
The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder and David Ashton · 3 Nov 2010 · 209pp · 80,086 words
adjustment as workers retrained for more skilled positions. The idea of a magnet economy recognized a global auction for jobs, but this was limited to low-skill jobs auctioned on price, resulting in manufacturing jobs migrating to low-wage economies in Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe. There was little understanding that price
Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling · 14 Sep 2020 · 667pp · 149,811 words
/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/NineYearGains_web.pdf. 60. Chris Tomlinson, “San Antonio Program Moves Low-Skilled Workers into Middle Class,” Houston Chronicle, April 17, 2019, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/San-Antonio-program-moves-low-skilled-workers-13772983.php. 61. That translates to about a $5,000 annual boost. Roder and Elliott
People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 22 Apr 2019 · 462pp · 129,022 words
risky derivatives and other financial products that played a central role in our own financial collapse. It’s true that American workers have been disadvantaged—low-skilled workers in particular have seen their wages reduced, in part because of globalization. But that is partly because American negotiators got what they asked for: the
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’ve taken over the globalization agenda. The Pain of Globalization Globalization has affected both jobs and wages. It’s simplest to see its effects on low-skilled workers. When an advanced country like the US imports low-skilled, labor-intensive goods, the demand for low-skilled labor in the US falls, simply because
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we produce less of those goods here. If there is to be full employment, wages for low-skilled workers—adjusted for inflation—have to fall.4 And if wages don’t fall enough, unemployment increases. It’s really that simple. Anybody who believes in
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the law of supply and demand should understand why globalization (in the absence of government programs to ameliorate its effects) hurts low-skilled workers. The same goes for labor more generally: the US imports labor-intensive goods, and thus trade liberalization (opening up US markets to foreign goods by
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employment for men who have a high school diploma or less. The worry is that these labor-replacing machines will drive down wages, especially of low-skilled workers, and increase unemployment. The natural answer has been to increase workers’ skills. But in many areas, this won’t suffice: with AI, robots can learn
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“polarization,” with a relative increase of jobs requiring very, very high levels of skills, with the rest of the growth in employment being in very low-skilled jobs with correspondingly low wages.5 As machines replace labor, unemployment increases, a situation captured well by an apocryphal but often told story of the heads
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, xxvi false premises about, 97–98 and global cooperation in 21st century, 92–97 and intellectual property, 88–89 and internet legal frameworks, 135 and low-skilled workers, 21, 82, 86, 267n39 and market power, 61 pain of, 82–87 and protectionism, 89–92 and 21st-century trade agreements, 87–89 and tax
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employment, 193–94 fiscal policy to ensure creation of, 194–96 with good working conditions, 192–97 guaranteed, 196–97 improving quality of, 197 low-skilled workers and, See low-skilled workers and new technologies, 118–23 reducing exploitation, 197 restoring work–life balance, 197 right to, 196–97 Jobs, Steve, 65, 117, 139 Johnson, Lyndon
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long-term savers, 106 long-term unemployment, insurance for, 189 loopholes, in 2017 tax bill, xvii–xix, 85, 194, 206, 237 low-income trap, 44 low-skilled workers automation and, 118, 119, 122 competitive labor markets and, 198 globalization and, 21, 82, 86 job polarization and, 119 social justice and, 198 trade agreements
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, 200 and 2017 tax bill, 16, 184 Trump’s attack on, 16–17 University of California, Berkeley, 16 University of Chicago, 68 unskilled workers, See low-skilled workers urbanization, 153, 187 USTR (US Trade Representative), 99–100 usury laws, 145 Valeant, 71 values American, 222 as cause of current problems, 239–40 conservatism
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton · 17 Mar 2020 · 421pp · 110,272 words
exports brought two to three million new jobs, similar to the number of jobs lost. But in parts of the country with higher concentrations of low-skilled workers, there was no positive offset to the loss of manufacturing jobs.12 The traditional escape route for displaced workers has been to move from cities
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, Johannes Schmieder, and James Spletzer write that “domestic outsourcing has thoroughly transformed the nature of the employment relationship for a vast number of jobs, ranging from relatively low skilled tasks like cleaning and security to high skilled tasks like human resources and accounting.”33 They estimate that about a quarter of workers in
MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini · 17 Oct 2022 · 328pp · 96,678 words
in Europe. Nevertheless, convincing voters in advanced economies to side with immigrants is a tough sell. The reasons are no mystery. Wages have stagnated for low-skilled workers—both blue-collar and service workers—and migration tends to reduce them further. New immigrants put pressure on public services from schools to housing to
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sectors (the “hamburger-flipping” jobs). Globalization can pose a threat, meantime, to anyone who feels their national, ethnic, cultural, or religious identity might suffer. Rural, low-skilled workers most fear this loss of status. Globalization and trade have hurt low-skilled blue-collar workers in advanced economies. A similar fate will increasingly hurt
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Adjustment Assistance Program, the first in a series of programs including the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Reauthorization Act of 2015. Aimed at unskilled and low-skilled workers who lose jobs because of trade, TAA programs don’t get much respect from skeptics. “Trade Burial Assistance” is what cynics call it. There is simply no
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to increase over time. If automation reverses the trend, how do we progress? MIT’s Autor foresees plenty of jobs for highly skilled and very low-skilled workers. Corporate strategists, neurosurgeons, and health care aides need not make way yet for computers. The vast middle, however, looks problematic. Those jobs “carry out well
Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words
/money/2021/03/09/975009239/results-from-the-city-that-just-gave-away-cash> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 86 Neil Lee and Stephen Clarke, ‘Do Low-Skilled Workers Gain from High-Tech Employment Growth? High-Technology Multipliers, Employment and Wages in Britain’, Research Policy, 48(9), November 2019, 103803 <https://doi.org/10
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Health-Care Algorithms’, Nature, 574(7780), 2019, pp. 608–609 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03228-6> Lee, Neil, and Stephen Clarke, ‘Do Low-Skilled Workers Gain from High-Tech Employment Growth? High-Technology Multipliers, Employment and Wages in Britain’, Research Policy, 48(9), November 2019, 103803 <https://doi.org/10
Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America
by Tamara Draut · 4 Apr 2016 · 255pp · 75,172 words
the pages of the New York Times to the screeching talking heads on Fox News, it’s common to refer to people in many jobs as “unskilled” or “low-skilled” workers. This language is used by conservatives and progressives alike, and I used it myself until I heard a speech given by Barbara Ehrenreich
Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake · 7 Nov 2017 · 346pp · 89,180 words
answering routine questions over the phone. As these computers have gotten cheaper and cheaper, it’s become more and more worthwhile for firms to replace low-skilled workers with computers. Demand for those workers has fallen and so, therefore, have their wages. More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) have warned that
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the working classes in the developed world have, it is argued, borne most of the costs. Immigration can play a similar role, increasing competition for low-skilled jobs (especially between new and recent immigrants). The third explanation for today’s inequality, focused on wealth inequality, is more basic: it is the idea that
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. Figure 6.3. Income shares of the top 1 percent in English-speaking countries. Source: Alvaredo et al. 2013. It’s easy to imagine how low-skilled workers in developed countries might lose out if they don’t have the skills to work with computers, or if their jobs are threatened by lower
That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum · 1 Sep 2011 · 441pp · 136,954 words
faster than any we had seen before. It took us Americans some time to appreciate that while many of our new competitors were low-wage, low-skilled workers, for the first time a growing number, particularly those in Asia, were low-wage, high-skilled workers. We knew all about cheap labor, but we
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category of workers we have not seen before on a large scale: the low-wage, high-skilled worker. We have gotten used to low-wage, low-skilled workers in large numbers. But the low-wage, high-skilled worker is a whole new species, to which we will have to adapt. The third story
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blew up, though, many workers found themselves literally up in the air. The bursting of the housing bubble wiped out a whole swath of low-skilled blue-collar jobs (many of the people who were building the houses) just when the intensification of globalization wiped out a whole swath of low- and mid
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in 1979 but only 46 percent in 2009,” and the trend is clearly downward. The third segment of the job market involves workers doing nonroutine low-skilled jobs that have to be done in person or manually—in an office, a hospital, a shopping center or restaurant, or at a specific construction site
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in a routine way—average lawyers, average accountants, average radiologists, average professors, and average scientists. The third are what we would call “creative servers,” nonroutine low-skilled workers who do their jobs in inspired ways—whether it is the baker who comes up with a special cake recipe and design or the nurse
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can still earn far more than a Chinese worker. Rather than mass-producing relatively low-value goods, which just creates a lot of low-paying, low-skilled jobs, American manufacturing is properly focused on high-paying, high-productivity factories that make such things as aircraft, medical and scientific equipment, control systems, and specialized
The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin · 17 Mar 2017 · 273pp · 87,159 words
call this the FTE sector to highlight the roles of finance, technology, and electronics in this part of the economy. The other group consists of low-skilled workers who are suffering some of the ills of globalization. I call this the low-wage sector to highlight the role of politics and technology in
Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 16 Sep 2006
period of unemployment as workers search for a new employer. Middle-aged workers often fail to find any job at all—they simply retire earlier. Low-skilled workers are particularly likely to suffer. That is why people in the advanced industrial countries worry about losing manufacturing jobs to China or service sector jobs
The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil · 17 Feb 2014 · 518pp · 147,036 words
between rising import shares and decreasing employment, but that overall effect was relatively small. Skill-biased technologic change, where new technologies lead to displacement of low-skilled jobs by those demanding higher skills, represented a far larger factor in explaining employment declines.29 Estimates of service offshoring similarly indicate that the effects have
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(Not) Getting by in America. New York: Holt. Erickcek, George, Susan Houseman, and Arne Kalleberg. 2003. “The Effects of Temporary Services and Contracting Out on Low-Skilled Workers: Evidence from Auto Suppliers, Hospitals, and Public Schools.” In Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, edited by Eileen Appelbaum, Annette
Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic · 10 Apr 2016 · 312pp · 91,835 words
higher taxation) Social pressure through politics (socialism, trade unions) Civil conflict (state breakdown) Widespread education Aging population (demand for social protection) Technological change that favors low-skilled workers When it comes to malign forces, however, there is more similarity between preindustrial and modern societies because war and civil conflict play a role in
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expect the skill premium to have been high (say, similar to what it was in Latin America). But nationalization of enterprises changed that: wages of low-skilled workers were relatively high and wages of high-skilled workers relatively low. Massive increase in schooling on the supply side, however, would have produced some reduction
Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders
by Reihan Salam · 24 Sep 2018 · 197pp · 49,240 words
because Sweden is one of the world’s most well-educated societies, its employers have learned to do without a large number of low-wage, low-skill workers.2 Rather, Swedish business models have been designed to make use of high-skilled, high-wage workers augmented by loads of laborsaving technology. They haven
The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells · 31 Aug 1996 · 843pp · 223,858 words
not the only characteristic of the new occupational structure. Simultaneous to this trend there is also the growth of low-end, unskilled, service occupations. These low-skilled jobs, despite their slower growth rate, may represent a substantial proportion of the post-industrial social structure in terms of their absolute numbers. In other words
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1982 dollars). Nor is the skill mix the source of increasing income inequality. In his study with Wolff, Howell shows that while the share of low-skilled workers in the US decreased across industries, the share of low-wage workers increased in these same industries. Several studies also suggest that higher skills are
More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan · 6 Feb 2020 · 524pp · 155,947 words
postgraduates.10 Some of this education is supplied privately. But governments have seen it as in the country’s interests to expand education, especially as low-skilled jobs are being automated or shifted to low-wage centres in Asia. Health As late as 1820, life expectancy at birth was only around 29 worldwide
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of new technology, which they dub skill-biased technological change (SBTC). Workers who can handle new technology are more valuable than those who cannot, while low-skilled workers may be replaced by robots or computer programmes. But a problem with this theory is that the widespread use of computers really occurred in the
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that the reason for around half the decline in labour’s share of GDP was the impact of technology, as employers were able to automate low-skilled jobs. Another quarter of the shift was down to globalisation; companies in the developed world were shifting jobs to low-wage countries in the rest of
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
by William Julius Wilson · 1 Jan 1996 · 399pp · 116,828 words
Societal Changes and Vulnerable Neighborhoods The disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is partly related to the nationwide decline in the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Although the growing wage inequality has hurt both low-skilled men and women, the problem of declining employment has been concentrated among low-skilled men
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men in the bottom fifth of this income distribution experienced more than a 30 percent drop in real wages between 1970 and 1989. Even the low-skilled workers who are consistently employed face problems of economic advancement. Job ladders—opportunities for promotion within firms—have eroded, and many less-skilled workers stagnate in
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among men. Unlike men with lower education, college-educated men are working more, not less. The shift in demand has been especially devastating for those low-skilled workers whose incorporation into the mainstream economy has been marginal or recent. Even before the economic restructuring of the nation’s economy, low-skilled African-Americans
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linked to immigration. However, although the increase in immigration contributed to the growing inequality, it is only one of several factors depressing the wages of low-skilled workers. As Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk point out in this connection, “Immigrants are heavily concentrated in a few states, such as California and Florida … inequality
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, but people were working. The disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is in part related to the nationwide decline in the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Fundamental structural changes in the new global economy, including changes in the distribution of jobs and in the level of education required to obtain employment
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, resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of increasing joblessness and declining real wages for low-skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system, the decreasing availability of lower-skilled blue-collar jobs, and the growing importance of training and education in
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a linkage between new structural realities, changing norms, and evolving cultural patterns. The new structural realities may be seen in the diminishing employment opportunities for low-skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system and the rise of new jobs in the highly technological global economy requiring training and education have severely
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States between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. Because of Europe’s relatively munificent social safety nets, many eschew the kind of low-paying jobs taken by low-skilled workers in the United States. They rely instead on relatively generous unemployment compensation. “In most of the European Union, an unemployed worker can receive close
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trapped in a public-assistance nightmare by the health care needs of their children. It would also make low-paying jobs more attractive for all low-skilled workers and therefore improve the rate of employment. However, at the time of this writing, not only has legislation for universal health care been shelved, but
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jobs, or getting to where the jobs are, or becoming job-ready. The central problem is that the demand for labor has shifted away from low-skilled workers because of structural changes in the economy. During certain periods, this problem can be offset to some extent by appropriate macroeconomic levers that can act
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spending and taxation and monetary policies that influence interest rates and control the money supply. But given the fundamental structural decline in the demand for low-skilled workers, such policies will have their greatest impact in the higher-wage sectors of the economy. Many low-wage workers, especially those in high-jobless inner
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the problem of negative employer attitudes, will not experience any improvement in their job prospects because of fiscal or monetary policies. Despite some claims that low-skilled workers fail to take advantage of labor-market opportunities, available evidence strongly suggests not only that the jobs for such workers carry lower real wages and
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fewer benefits than did comparable jobs in the early 1970s, but that it is harder for certain low-skilled workers, especially low-skilled males who are not being absorbed into the expanding service sector (see Chapter 2), to find employment today. As the economists Sheldon
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to low-skilled inner-city black workers. It is bad enough that they face the problem of shifts in labor market demand shared by all low-skilled workers; it is even worse that they confront negative employer perceptions about their work-related skills and attitudes. If jobs are plentiful even for less skilled
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to have been permanently reduced private sector demand for less-skilled workers.” Given the current need for public jobs to enhance the employment opportunities of low-skilled workers, what should be the nature of these jobs and how should they be implemented? Three thoughtful recent proposals for the creation of public jobs deserve
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selected expansion in congested urban areas would be 10 to 20 percent. Although the creation of infrastructure maintenance jobs will provide some employment opportunities for low-skilled workers, the condition of today’s labor market makes it unlikely that many of these jobs will actually go to high school dropouts or even to
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. None of the immediate solutions I am proposing involves retraining workers for higher-paying positions in the highly technological global economy. The need to retrain low-skilled workers is generally recognized by policymakers and informed observers in both Europe and the United States. However, the most serious discussions about training for the new
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created in the global economy, are designed to combat that problem. But my specific recommendations for immediate action would address the employment problems of many low-skilled workers, including those from the inner city. They would confront the current and serious problem of the disappearance of work in the inner-city ghetto. The
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short-term policy recommendation I am indebted to James S. Tobin. 46 The central problem is that the demand for labor has shifted away from low-skilled workers: See the discussion in Chapter 2. Also see Danziger and Gottschalk (1995). 47 this problem can be offset to some extent: Bloch (1994). 48 Despite
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some claims that low-skilled workers: See, for example, Mead (1992). 49 available evidence strongly suggests: Danziger and Gottschalk (1995), p. 155, Holzer (1995), and Carlson and Theodore (1995). 50 quotation
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn · 14 Jan 2020 · 307pp · 96,543 words
reality TV refrain: “You’re fired!” * * * — THE CAUSES OF ECONOMIC DISTRESS included automation and globalization, which affected workers in many countries, and real wages for low-skilled workers fell not only in the United States but also in Britain and Germany. So as part of our journey to understand what went so badly
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it harder for me to get a job,” he told us. It’s true that in places like Yamhill, immigrants may have taken some jobs from low-skilled workers. Several employers made the point to us that they would be crazy to hire a white high-school dropout who was often high on meth
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo · 12 Nov 2019 · 470pp · 148,730 words
effect of the downward slope. The newcomers spend money: they go to restaurants, they get haircuts, they go shopping. This creates jobs, and mostly jobs for other low-skilled people. As illustrated in figure 2.2, this tends to increase their wages and perhaps thus compensate for the shift in the labor supply
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effective use of the new workers, which can create new roles for the native low-skilled population. In the Danish case we discussed above, Danish low-skilled workers eventually benefited from the influx of migrants, in part because it enabled them to change their occupations.31 Where there were more migrants around, more
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native low-skilled workers upgraded from manual to nonmanual jobs and changed employers. While doing so, they also shifted to jobs with more complex tasks and that required more
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may start businesses that create jobs for the natives. If they are the least qualified, they might have to join the undifferentiated mass that native low-skilled workers will have to compete against. Who migrates typically depends on the barriers migrants have to overcome. When President Trump compared the migrants from “shithole countries
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relation disappeared; on average, rich states no longer attract more people. High-skilled workers continue to move from poor states to rich states, but now low-skilled workers, to the extent they still move, seem to be moving in the opposite direction. These two trends mean that since the 1990s, the US labor
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high school degree than for high-skilled workers.74 But this can only be a part of the reason. There is a wage premium for low-skilled workers too. According to websites that post salaries online, a Starbucks barista makes about $12 an hour in Boston and $9 in Boise.75 This is
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that, at least for the direct victims of cheaper imports, the gains are swamped by the costs. In our survey, 42 percent of respondents thought low-skilled workers are hurt when the United States trades with China (21 percent thought they are helped), and only 30 percent thought everyone is helped by the
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in the following years has almost always gone in the opposite direction of what the basic Stolper-Samuelson logic would suggest. The wages of the low-skilled workers, who are abundant in these countries (and should therefore have been helped), fell behind relative to those of their higher-skilled or better-educated counterparts
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tasks did not lead to the hiring of more engineers to supervise the robots. The explanation is probably similar to why competition with China hurt low-skilled workers; in the sticky economy, seamless reallocation is anything but guaranteed. Even if the total number of jobs does not fall, the current wave of automation
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suspect the current drive toward replacing human actions with robots cannot be prevented from taking a serious toll on the already dwindling stock of desirable jobs for low-skilled workers, first in the rich countries but very soon everywhere. This will add, to a greater or lesser extent, to what the China shock and
Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing · 4 Mar 2019 · 555pp · 80,635 words
domestic workers in these industries, and lowers their wages. Since low-skilled workers are more likely to be in import industries and high-skill workers are more likely to be in export industries, trade may systematically worsen the
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on technological innovation. Surely, if we all threw away our computers, or even banned computing, that would be a quick way to increase demand for low-skilled workers and return to the economy of yore. Suddenly, there would be an enormous demand for labor to do the myriad tasks that computers used to
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previous wave of immigrants, and there is also some evidence that high school dropouts are harmed. Still, other studies find positive wage effects, even for low-skilled workers.27 On the other hand, the positive effects of high-skilled immigrants on wage growth, even that of other high-skilled workers, is far less
Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart · 31 Dec 2018
predispositions.2 But debate continues about why immigration is perceived as a threat.3 Are anti-immigrant sentiments mainly driven by fear of competition from low-skilled workers?4 Or are concerns about the erosion of European cultural norms, the decline of Christianity, and threats to white predominance more important?5 Or are
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince · 22 Aug 2022 · 302pp · 92,206 words
higher average incomes and education attainment, and lower unemployment and poverty rates in 2000.8 Nevertheless, considerable fears remain, particularly around the influx of low-skilled workers, since these jobs are the ones available to the widest population of native-born people, particularly those who are poorest. The terms ‘low-skilled’ and ‘high-skilled
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level of formal education that a person’s profession requires, with the highest skilled jobs – a cardiac surgeon, for instance – requiring multiple university degrees, whereas low-skilled jobs are associated with manual labour. In reality, the terms don’t fully reflect a person’s skillset, and ignore many other qualities that are important
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their wages in the host country, they were taking all the money home with them – because they weren’t immigrants. Another reason that low-skilled migration actually increases jobs is that it slows down the adoption of mechanization and automation, both of which require huge investments of capital and training, and often alter
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; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
had the means to acquire costly human capital to become managers, accountants, clerks, mechanical engineers, and so on. Instead, they were left competing for low-skilled production jobs that were simple enough to be performed by children. But if workers are able to shift into less hazardous, more enjoyable, and better-paying jobs
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economic ladder. As noted, older workers with highly specialized skills living in isolated areas often struggled to adjust and could be forced to shift into low-skilled jobs at lower wages and reduce their standards of living, at least temporarily. But while mechanization made a few workers worse off individually in the short
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likely to find new employment in routine jobs.29 Fewer job options, especially for non-college-educated production workers, has led to cascading competition for low-skilled jobs. To be sure, as the jobs of machine operators dried up, new highly skilled jobs were created, as computer programmers were needed to design numerically
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to switch into a professional, managerial, or engineering job. The higher the cost of accumulating new human capital, the longer the transition will take. Even low-skilled service jobs in restaurant, hotels, and gasoline stations require some skills. Experience is valuable in just about every occupation. But unquestionably, the cost of acquiring new
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9 that the first wave of automation of routine work pushed many Americans out of decent middle-class jobs and into low-paying service jobs. Many of these low-skilled jobs are now threatened by automation, too. If anything, the next wave can be expected to put more downward pressure on the wages
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a college education, in contrast, were more likely to move up in the ranks. Unskilled work is not coming to an end, but as noted, low-skilled jobs are more exposed to future automation, while occupations that require a college degree remain relatively safe. And though it remains to be seen what the
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the answer for everyone. People who experience dislocation late in life and see their skills rendered redundant might find it easier to take on a low-skilled job, even if it pays less. As noted above, displaced worker studies consistently show that many end up in jobs that pay less well than the
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worker in Flint who finds a job in Boston cannot afford to live there. As discussed above, the next wave of automation will render many low-skilled jobs redundant, but there are still a variety of in-person service jobs that remain exceedingly hard to automate. Those jobs, it stands to reason, will
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these differences, as the authors argue. The general pattern across the industrial world, it seems, is that robots have not significantly reduced total employment, only low-skilled workers’ employment share. Automation, in other words, has caused employment opportunities for non-college-educated workers to dry up (G. Graetz and G. Michaels, forthcoming, “Robots
The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits · 14 Sep 2019 · 976pp · 235,576 words
the demand for services—housekeeping, for example, or personal care—that the least skilled provide.) See David H. Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (August 2013): 1559 (“If consumer preferences do not admit close
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in Competitive Labor Markets,” Journal of Public Economics 96 (2012): 739 (“With a binding minimum wage . . . an EITC expansion would increase after-tax incomes of low-skilled workers dollar for dollar.”). support middle-class jobs and wages: “Sens. Warner, Casey, and Stabenow Introduce Proposal to Encourage Employers to Provide Job Training That Moves
The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey · 3 Mar 2015 · 319pp · 90,965 words
as the supply of diploma bearers increased substantially. This occurred in part because of skill-biased technology change and the decline in real wages for low-skill workers. College credentials have also been locked in place as a required part of many large professions. Teachers, for example: There are 3.7 million elementary
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill · 4 Oct 2021 · 569pp · 165,510 words
these communities than in other parts of the country, their schools also struggle with a lower tax base, and most employment is in low-paid, low-skill jobs—this at a time when demand for low-skilled labor in cities has also diminished. Well-paid jobs in the knowledge economy and financial sector
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presidential election, they wanted something more than that. They wanted someone to take concrete action, immediately. President Trump did, in fairness, help to produce new low-skilled jobs through deregulation from 2017 to 2019. Unemployment was headed down during his tenure, and poverty rates were also trending toward all-time lows in 2019
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stark relief. But the disease and its economic fallout had the greatest impact in the poorest regions and zip codes. Young people, low-income and low-skilled workers, those without a college degree, and women (from all backgrounds) disproportionately bore the brunt of the economic effects in those communities and across America. Low
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become cluttered with hurdles in both the U.S. and the UK. Removing these hurdles is imperative for three key reasons. First, the decimation of low-skilled jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic underscored that finding a “good,” well-paying job in the twenty-first century will be almost impossible without some form
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its production to air conditioners and washing machines. Elliott, who left school at fifteen to become an electrical engineering apprentice, wanted to ensure that local low-skilled workers would have the same opportunity that he had had to access a good manufacturing job. In an interview with the local newspaper, the Northern Echo
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–36 internet connectivity and, 297, 299, 299–300 masks/physical distance and, 265, 268 other natural disasters and, 264, 265 pandemic warnings and, 264 poor/low-skilled workers and, 295–97 populist countries’ failure with, 265, 266 Russia, UK, U.S. failures with, 265 unemployment, 296–97, 301–2 U.S. health system
The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral · 14 Sep 2020 · 475pp · 134,707 words
of education and greater availability of professional jobs; meanwhile it fell 3 percent in less-educated, working-class, rural Republican districts with agricultural and low-skilled manufacturing jobs that are more vulnerable to overseas competition. Third, the partisan polarization of cable news media has likely reinforced political identities and increased affective polarization between
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’s sample was limited to 760 selective four-year universities, the graduates of which are likely drawn from the high end of the skills distribution. Low-skilled workers studied by Caldwell, Harmon, and Hargittai were mostly excluded from Armona’s analysis as a consequence of his sample. It has become appallingly obvious that
The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton · 15 Mar 2013 · 374pp · 114,660 words
keeping wages down? Globalization is a part of the story; the manufacture of many goods that used to be made in the United States by low-skilled workers has moved to poorer countries, and many companies have sent offshore jobs that used to be done domestically, including “back-office” work (like claims processing
Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin · 3 Aug 2015 · 271pp · 77,448 words
file clerks and receptionists with bachelor’s degrees, for example. The next step: “This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” That finding not only makes intuitive sense, it also
Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan · 20 Dec 2010 · 482pp · 117,962 words
practices of using nation-based quotas to encompass a range of migration “channels.” Economic channels bring in students and highly skilled migrants, as well as low-skilled workers to meet temporary labor demands. Families and particular ancestral groups are recognized through social migration channels. Those who have been compelled to move because of
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the early 1970s, the “guest-worker system” was being widely questioned. Migrant laborers had supplied replacement labor for German nationals moving out of low-status, low-skilled jobs, a need that had declined with the economic downturn. In addition, labor-intensive production processes were increasingly being moved to developing countries. Moreover, the scarcity
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countries have become more highly educated, the unmet demands of agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors have led states to open migration channels for foreign low-skilled workers. Recruiting low-skilled workers on short-term or seasonal contracts carries the risk of unintentionally generating a stream of permanent migrants (such as that which resulted from post-WWII
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, services (such as home and garden care), and seasonal agricultural labor. Migrant workers in such jobs may have higher education—being high-skilled workers in low-skill jobs—which is often referred to as “brain waste,” to which we will return in the following chapter. Low-skill migrants are diverse in origin, destination
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temporary migration programs—like Spain and Italy—have curtailed them and encouraged visa-holders to return home. In the long run, however, the demand for low-skilled workers in developed countries will increase. As we show in part III, we will see the proliferation of more highly managed programs involving employer-government collaboration
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migrants do not move to OECD countries. Thai workers in Taiwan and Hong Kong earn at least four times more than they would make as low-skilled workers in Thailand.157 In Tajikistan, the income of a seasonal out-migrant could easily cover the household expenses of a family for an entire year
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qualifications are not as relevant to labor market needs.168 In either case, university-educated migrants are more likely than natives to be employed in low-skilled jobs. Figure 6.3. Gaps in average professional salaries, selected country pairs, 2002-2006. Michael A. Clemens. 2009. “Skill Flow: A Fundamental Reconsideration of Skilled-Worker
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suicide, alcoholism, abuse, and drug smuggling, and the trafficking of women and children occurs with alarming frequency.219 The experiences of refugees, trafficked persons, and low-skilled workers highlight the need for adequate legal and political protection for migrants. Other categories of migrants are exposed to similar risks and vulnerabilities when they move
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services will require large influxes of migrants just to keep workforces at a stable size. Already, many developed countries rely on undocumented workers to fill low-skilled jobs. High-skilled labor will also be in greater demand in the future, as footloose companies continue to pressure governments to relieve mobility restrictions. Developed countries
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option for many developed countries as they face shrinking workforces and aging populations, both of which will contribute to a growing economic demand for more low-skilled workers. Large companies will also step up their current lobbying efforts to increase mobility for high-skilled workers, particularly in academic, business, and technology areas. Recent
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, for example—already draw disproportionately on migrant labor. Technological change creates new types of jobs for high-skilled workers, and there are limits to the low-skilled jobs it can replace. Machines and automation may reduce the labor inputs at a manufacturing plant, but they cannot staff a pharmacy, provide child care, or
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attainment. As we discussed earlier, the labor forces of developed countries are becoming smaller as a result of large-scale demographic changes. This leaves fewer low-skilled workers for industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality, where there are limits to the sub-stitutability of new technologies for labor. Without increased migration, these labor
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shrinking labor force will be compounded by the fact that as educational attainment rises in developed countries, fewer people will be interested in taking on low-skilled service jobs or in working in the trades and construction. The proportion of the workforce with tertiary education in developed countries is already at a historic
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need to be filled by 2020.95 In the European Union, the accession of Eastern European countries has created a pool of young and mobile low-skilled workers to meet demands in services and construction. It became common after 2004 to see Poles and Czechs serving tourists in the UK and feeding a
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trend of return migration that accompanied the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. In general, however, developed countries have tried to restrict the movement of low-skilled workers, primarily because of concerns that they and their children do not adapt as quickly as high-skilled workers.97 Employment rates are lower for
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low-skilled workers, often because the language barriers are higher. Nevertheless, they have continued to move through family migration programs or as asylum seekers. Many others try to
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enter without authorization. The hiring regulations around high-skilled jobs are more consistently enforced than those around low-skilled workers, so undocumented migrants may work undetected for years. Working outside of the law exposes them to exploitation and abuse. The regulation/enforcement gap in low
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United States and Western Europe. Such programs, however, led to the permanent settlement of many guest-workers and their families. Furthermore, if the demand for low-skilled workers is likely to persist for several decades, circulating workers in and out of the country to do the same jobs defies economic logic. Workers will
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the average worker nearly so much as letting him walk among the wealthy. Transported from Haiti or Nigeria to the United States or Canada, a low-skilled worker will watch the value of his labor jump more than 700 percent—instantly.35 When we consider that wealthy countries spend $70 billion in overseas
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama · 29 Sep 2014 · 828pp · 232,188 words
capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker. A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. One
The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet · 10 Nov 2015 · 437pp · 115,594 words
to much cheaper coal, and the large-scale production of chemicals and iron. The beginnings of modern manufacturing and industrialization helped create millions of jobs for poor, low-skilled workers. While the wages they earned seem paltry by today’s standards, they were better than the low and highly volatile farm income that most
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urban-based, labor-intensive manufacturing of shoes, textiles, garments, toys, jewelry, and many other goods for the export market. These enterprises created millions of jobs for low-skilled workers—many of them poor or near poor. All along, Indonesia complemented these strategies with efforts to invest in basic education, make primary health care available
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, and basic services. It is weakest where income is already highly unequal, or when growth is concentrated in natural resources or activities that use fewer low-skilled workers. But the cases in which the poor do not benefit from growth are the exception, not the rule. In most instances, as one well-known
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China, inequality has deteriorated steadily, to a large extent along geographical lines. The coastal cities are booming, not just for the rich but also for low-skilled workers who are able to get service or manufacturing jobs in one of the thousands of factories making shoes, shirts, electronics, and other products. But in
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to become more concentrated in the hands of a lucky (or politically well-connected) few. By contrast, where growth is based on agriculture and job opportunities for low-skilled workers (in manufacturing or services), the gains tend to be more broad based and equitable. In countries where ownership of land or other important economic
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. In these sectors, foreign firms pay workers two to three times more for basic production jobs and ten times more for supervisory and managerial jobs than for low-skilled work.12 Globalization has been, on the whole, a major force for progress in developing countries during the last two decades, and has provided
The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard · 1 Sep 2016 · 436pp · 98,538 words
classes. An influx of low-skilled immigrants only adds to the strain on constrained resources. If risk-takers and properly trained talent fail to create jobs for low-skilled immigrants that are as productive as the jobs of the lesser-skilled, native-born workers on average, lower-wage immigrants working in less productive
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properly trained talent and the economy’s willingness and capacity to take risk. Successful IT start-ups like Google and Facebook tend not to employ low-skilled workers directly. Instead, attractive investment opportunities raise the pay of properly trained talent and successful risk-takers, and their increased demand employs lesser-skilled workers in
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demand of properly trained talent and successful risk-takers, wages are driven down to waiters-waiting-on-waiters wages—that is, to the value of low-skilled workers serving each other without the added benefit of constrained resources. In a theoretical economy without constrained resources, lower-skilled workers are, in effect, already earning
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the minimum wage, workers that can’t reach the now-higher hurdle become unemployable. In addition to the harm raising the minimum wage causes to low-skilled workers, it can also do some good. Markets are not perfectly efficient—they don’t price everything perfectly—far from it. Prices are set on average
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nor employed),” and “substitution from low-skilled adults to possibly higher-skilled teenage students (in food-service occupations).”48 This harms, rather than helps, the low-skilled workers it seeks to help. A 2014 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research tracked—for the first time—the employment and earning histories
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individuals most affected by increases in the minimum wage and found that increases in the minimum wage over the last ten years reduced employment among low-skilled workers 6 to 9 percentage points.49 Similarly, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 500,000 workers will lose their jobs if the federal government increases
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to be so intractable. It’s more expensive to employ low-skilled, less reliable, and often troubled or reluctant workers than to employ the typical low-skilled worker, especially when supervision is scarce. The resulting low wages reduce the value of work to those workers. Compassion, especially for their children, demands welfare that
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example, a thriving city with a low share of Hispanic immigrants, isn’t intended to do the same thing—eliminate low-skilled jobs and motivate low-skilled workers to settle elsewhere. Perhaps a high national minimum wage would discourage low-skilled workers from immigrating to America by limiting their opportunities for employment, but it would be detrimental to the
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low-skilled workers who have already settled here. Meanwhile, advocates of the poor would insist on raising government benefits to meet the material needs of unemployed workers not
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poor. But compassion, especially for America’s poor children, drives a never-ending demand for others to provide welfare, despite welfare payments approaching what a low-skilled worker can earn in the market—nearly $30,000 per year with no end in the demand for further increases in sight. Benefit levels that high
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. While legal low-skilled immigration could be dialed back, high-skilled immigration is likely the only viable alternative for rebalancing the mix between high- and low-skilled workers. The latter solution is better for growth, too. And even if illegal immigrants were deported, America is still employing many lower-skilled Mexicans in Mexican
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immigrants to the number of low-skilled immigrants—the more of the latter, the more of the former—to hold the mix between high- and low-skilled workers in balance. Increasing the number of highly skilled workers, who contribute more to constrained resources than they consume and pay more taxes than government services
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all immigrants and eventually the vast majority of all workers truly covered their own costs. Without such a rebalancing of high-skilled workers relative to low-skilled workers, the future looks more worrisome than it otherwise could be. In the future, pension benefits and government spending will become major drags on growth. Despite
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-Employment Debate.” 49. Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither, “The Minimum Wage and the Great Recession: Evidence of Effects on the Employment and Income Trajectories of Low-Skilled Workers,” National Bureau of Economic Research, November 24, 2014, http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~mwither/pdfs/Effects%20of%20Min%20Wage%20on%20Wages%20Employment%20and%20Earnings.pdf. 50
The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart · 7 Jan 2017 · 382pp · 100,127 words
the country and its governing classes—priorities that no longer seem to include them. Meanwhile, in areas of high immigration existing citizens doing middling and low-skilled jobs are likely to feel even more like a replaceable cog in the economic machine as they are exposed to greater competition of various kinds with
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from almost zero in 2005. Britain is likely to remain quite a high immigration country for the foreseeable future, although after Brexit the number of low-skilled workers from the EU will eventually fall. The future direction of policy is likely to involve making a clearer distinction between permanent and short-term migrants
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passing fad, more than a decade later in 2006 in Gordon Brown’s penultimate budget speech he actually predicted there would be just 600,000 low-skill jobs by 2020. This was an extraordinary piece of wrong-headed conventional wisdom. The demand for low-skilled, and mainly low paid, jobs has in fact
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Birth and Nationality’, Office for National Statistics, 25 August 2016, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/populationoftheunitedkingdombycountryofbirthandnationality c.[EU citizens working in low skilled jobs in UK] ‘Number and proportion of people in employment: by country of birth, nationality, occupation and industry, ages 16 and over, April 2015 to March
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and Matthew J. Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. 2.‘UK economy shows shift to low-skilled jobs, research finds’, Financial Times, 19 January 2015, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6a8544ae-9d9e-11e4-8ea3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz4JBcFfD2o 3.The Institute for
The Gated City (Kindle Single)
by Ryan Avent · 30 Aug 2011 · 112pp · 30,160 words
a relocation of other jobs to places with lower labor costs. A huge mass of middle-skilled workers suddenly found itself competing with low-skilled workers, in America and abroad, for low-skill jobs. At the same time, technology increased the return to high-skill positions. The Internet now allows a skilled designer to serve customers
Britain Etc
by Mark Easton · 1 Mar 2012 · 411pp · 95,852 words
-EU immigration, about which a good deal had already been done – it had been the case for a number of years that no unskilled or low-skilled workers could legally come to Britain from beyond the EU, and there was little evidence that significant numbers of illegal migrants were still sneaking into the
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able to maintain a competitive advantage. Knowledge is providing the new jobs too. Go back to the early 1980s and almost half of UK jobs were unskilled or low-skilled jobs. Now it is about a quarter. People working in the knowledge industries accounted for a third of jobs in the early 1980s
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. Now it is closer to half. Knowledge services now account for more than two thirds of what Britain sells to the world. With low-skilled jobs disappearing and
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang · 26 Dec 2007 · 334pp · 98,950 words
. In fact, we often see individuals making short-term sacrifices for a long-term increase in their capacities, and heartily approve of them. Suppose a low-skilled worker quits his low-paying job and attends a training course to acquire new skills. If someone were to say the worker is making a big
The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane · 11 Apr 2004 · 187pp · 55,801 words
engineering occupations classified in BLS statistics). 44 CHAPTER 3 The shift that Jeremy Rifkin feared, a “deskilled” occupational structure, requires that the total number of low-skilled jobs ( janitors plus security guards plus food preparation and service workers, etc.) increases more than the total number of higher-skilled jobs (lawyers plus doctors plus
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During the industrial revolution, the short-run impact of growth was almost the opposite of what we see today. Technology favored not highskilled workers but low-skilled workers as machines combined with unskilled labor to make products ranging from textiles to bicycles to guns. It was higher-skilled workers—weavers, clock makers, and
Social Capital and Civil Society
by Francis Fukuyama · 1 Mar 2000
): 56-69. [FUKUYAMA] Social Capital 479 States. It is a problem that is bound to become more severe as the Third World develops and more low-skill workers enter the global labor market. It is, as the account of the Great Disruption above indicates, also one of the sources of family breakdown and
The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti · 21 May 2012 · 403pp · 87,035 words
misses the important point that the two groups are affected differently in different places. Technological change and globalization result in more employment opportunities for a low-skilled worker in a high-tech hub but fewer opportunities for a similar worker in a hollowed-out manufacturing town. What divides America today is not just
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. Differences in geographical mobility, coupled with increasing polarization among American cities, only exacerbate the problem. Thus, some of the earning inequality between highly skilled and low-skilled workers reflects mobility differences: if the less educated people were more able and willing to move to cities with better job opportunities, the gap between college
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, firms are apt to respond to an inflow of highly skilled immigrants by investing more, and this new investment may further raise the productivity of low-skilled workers. Third, skilled immigrants generate important spillovers at the local level, since an increase in the number of highly educated individuals in a city tends to
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immigrants is unlikely to have major negative effects for natives, but limiting the number of skilled immigrants could have significant negative effects, especially for our low-skilled workers. Recent research by Jennifer Hunt identifies which kind of highly skilled immigrant is most likely to bring benefits to American natives. Using a detailed sample
Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain · 14 Oct 2020 · 521pp · 110,286 words
they are essential for society’s wellbeing. Another misconception is that in our increasingly high-tech economies, low-skilled jobs are disappearing. In fact, many of the occupations with the most long-term job growth are relatively low-skilled and low-paid. In the US, thirteen of the twenty occupations with the most projected job growth
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also in the top twenty. Across the EU, there is also projected to be a big rise in employment between 2016 and 2030 for some low-skilled jobs, notably labourers in the mining, construction, manufacturing and transport industries, as well as cleaners.12 Immigrants in the US are much likelier than locals to
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others are trapped on temporary ones that offer less protection. In inflexible labour markets, there is a higher risk that migrants will end up unemployed. Low-skilled workers such as Mohammed and Souleymane deliver a sizeable drudgery dividend, providing vital services, doing jobs that locals don’t want to do and enabling locals
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their families. To ensure that temporary migrants leave again, they need to have the possibility to come back. New Zealand’s seasonal migration programme for low-skilled workers from Pacific island states has an overstay rate of less than 1 percent because, while migrants can stay only seven months in any season, they
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang · 1 Jan 2010 · 365pp · 88,125 words
let me explain. To begin with, with the continuous rise in manufacturing productivity, a greater proportion of the workforce in rich countries now works in low-skilled service jobs that do not require much education – stacking shelves in supermarkets, frying burgers in fast food restaurants and cleaning offices (see Things 3 and 9
No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika · 12 May 2015 · 389pp · 87,758 words
, a shortage of approximately 40 million high-skilled workers and 45 million medium-skill workers may emerge, by 2020, alongside a surplus of 95 million low-skilled workers. If the previous era was defined by millions of workers in China joining the global labor force, the next era will see skill gaps emerge
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efficient. Manufacturers that adopted computerized numerical control lathes for turning and milling eliminated the need for manual measurement and readjustment. Smart technology devices used by low-skill workers can equip them to perform higher-skill jobs. For example, as part of a financial inclusion program, introduction of technology allowed twenty thousand less-skilled
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that are now encroaching on knowledge work make it easier for machines to replace human work in a range of new fields. Young workers and low-skilled workers are bearing the brunt of the impact on job creation and skill demand in OECD countries.* At the same time, counterintuitive as it may seem
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imbalances will, we estimate, lead to a shortage of nearly eighty million high- and medium-skilled workers and a surplus of roughly ninety-five million low-skilled workers by 2020. To close the gap, advanced economies will need to accelerate the number of young people completing post–high school education to 2.5
The Economics of Inequality
by Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer · 7 Jan 2015 · 165pp · 45,129 words
the same proportion as direct redistribution but without increasing the cost of low-skilled labor to the firm and thus without decreasing the number of low-skilled jobs. Once again, the superiority of fiscal redistribution comes from the fact that, unlike direct redistribution, it severs the connection between the price paid by the
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2), and these findings are confirmed by historical work on major structural shifts in employment in various countries and periods. It is easier to replace low-skilled workers with machinery or skilled workers than to do without skilled workers. However, the superiority of fiscal transfers and allocation by price is no more readily
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be better to increase the manager’s tax by €760 a month and use the proceeds to make a fiscal transfer of €760 to the low-skilled worker. That way, the firm would not have to pay more to its workers and less to its managers, which would inevitably lead to hiring fewer
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fact remains that when the legal minimum wage falls as low as it did in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, low-skilled jobs can become so unattractive that an increase in the minimum wage can increase the labor supply and the level of employment. More generally, the potential
The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin · 14 Nov 2016 · 606pp · 87,358 words
to highly skilled workers. Following trends in the corporate world, the same hospital might well offshore its billing and record-keeping and thus harm some low-skill workers. At the same time, however, the hospital’s increased efficiency and the fact that it can export medical services over the Internet might very well
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possibilities are only limited by the imagination. The remote provision of labor services is likely to flow both ways. The general trend would be for low-skilled workers from developing nations to telecommute to rich nations, and high-skilled workers from rich nations to telecommute to developing nations. For example, experienced German technicians
Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang · 4 Jul 2007 · 347pp · 99,317 words
. In fact, we often see individuals making short-term sacrifices for a long-term increase in their capacities, and heartily approve of them. Suppose a low-skilled worker quits his low-paying job and attends a training course to acquire new skills. If someone were to say the worker is making a big
Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice · 5 Feb 2019 · 550pp · 124,073 words
and temptations arise naturally as part of Vernon’s (1966) product life-cycle as production becomes more routinized and can be performed by robots or low-skilled workers abroad. But we think it is far more remarkable that governments in ACDs routinely shun such temptations. At the height of deindustrialization in the 1980s
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meant that there was no desire among elites or the middle classes for a political system that could give the left, relying on support from low-skilled workers, opportunities for political influence. From this perspective it is clear that there was no pressure for PR in any of the protoliberal countries. Business had
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countries with a liberal state, early development of flexible labor markets, and no or weak guilds, unions developed around crafts and excluded effective representation of low-skilled workers. The labor movement was therefore fractured and uncoordinated, both industrially and politically, and the interests of skilled workers (the “aristocracy of the working class”) were
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increasingly segregated into a growing tier of low-productivity service sector occupations—especially in low-end personal and social services—the complementarities between high- and low-skilled workers unraveled. In both fragmented and industry-based industrial relations systems, this has meant a severe loss in the power of semiskilled workers’ unions and of
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will be opposed because they would face an increase in labor costs and will have to scale back their operations. Second, the relative supply of low-skilled workers will rise, which will cause a corresponding decline in their relative wages. Although this will be somewhat compensated for by a higher real exchange rate
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and cheaper imports, the compensation is less than one hundred percent, and much less in large countries. From this it follows that low-skilled workers will block lower funding for training if they are represented by a party in government. Insofar as PR electoral systems—which all export-oriented countries
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semiskilled workers would both be worse off under these policies, except if the government substantially boosted subsidies for training and thereby reduced the supply of low-skilled workers. But in majoritarian political systems, which are linked historically to liberal economic systems, the median voter is likely to be a skilled worker and would
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nevertheless transformative, techo-optimist scenario. Yet in assessing the consequences of such a shift we cannot extrapolate from what has happened to the minority of low-skilled workers in the past. Losers in the labor market are not automatically protected by democracy, but it makes a huge difference if they are in a
Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis · 19 May 2021 · 516pp · 116,875 words
estimated that without better planning, 6 million Brits risk being in jobs for which they are overqualified or being unemployed.12 Five million low-skilled workers will be chasing 2 million low-skilled jobs. Today, employers struggle to find high-skilled employees – at the time of writing there was an estimated shortfall of 3.4 million
The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das · 9 Feb 2016 · 327pp · 90,542 words
US by Apple, which earns around 30–50 percent of the final price. The process favors skilled labor, reducing the share of revenue accruing to low-skilled workers. Similar complex and fragmented production processes apply to the products that constitute around 85 percent of global GDP. This approach has created a rising wage
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premium for skilled labor and a growing number of poorly paid, insecure, low-skilled jobs. The process is exacerbated in developed economies by the shift from manufacturing to service industries, which are currently more difficult to relocate or automate. This
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, education, and childcare are essential to increased participation in and the quality of the workforce. In developed countries, higher skill levels are needed to escape low-skilled jobs and falling real wages. Occupations requiring a university education currently offer salaries two to three times higher than those requiring lesser qualifications. While manufactured products
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workforce are common. Workers, irrespective of profession and skill, now face what John Maynard Keynes termed technological unemployment. The process was championed as reducing low-skilled monotonous jobs and increasing employment mobility, as well as providing greater employment and lifestyle choices. Economists lauded the new knowledge/bioengineered/clean and green (delete as required
Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas · 14 Aug 2013 · 554pp · 158,687 words
distribution, at least in the US, have done relatively better than the middle deciles. It appears that remuneration has behaved better among highly skilled and low-skilled workers, than among workers with moderate skills.28 The factors contributing to these trends are very complex and there is no easy way to connect them
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray · 1 Jan 2012 · 397pp · 121,211 words
, such as electricians, plumbers, machinists, and tool and die makers, but also many people in midskill occupations—drywall installers or heavy-equipment operators, for example. Low-skill jobs are also heavily represented among the breadwinners in Fishtown—assembly-line workers, construction laborers, security guards, delivery truck drivers, or people who work on loading
Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy
by Diane Coyle · 14 Jan 2020 · 384pp · 108,414 words
. Both have contributed to increasing the wage premium earned by skilled workers while at the same time limiting increases in the earnings of medium- and low-skilled workers. The research literature by and large finds technological change to be the main driver of income inequality. It has increased demand for workers with the
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel · 17 Jan 2017 · 775pp · 208,604 words
share almost doubled from approximately 10 percent in 1870 to about 18 percent in 1913, and skill premiums increased. Urbanization, industrialization, and massive immigration by low-skilled workers were responsible for this trend. A whole series of indices for top wealth shares likewise shows a sustained rise from 1640 to 1890 or even
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globalization pressures), placing hope on the slow dissipation of rents over time and the emergence of future technologies that might increase the relative productivity of low-skilled workers. He is particularly pessimistic about the short-term prospects of economic equalization in the United States, where all indicators point to a continuing rise in
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
by Sebastian Mallaby · 10 Oct 2016 · 1,242pp · 317,903 words
.53 Nixon would then lay out Greenspan’s program of stimulating inner-city businesses with tax breaks—there would be credits to build housing, train low-skilled workers, and encourage businesses to locate in poor urban districts. This new program for black capitalism would replace the handout culture of government programs, fostering a
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planners overused manpower and distorted the national labor market. A large supply of cheap draftees dulled the Pentagon’s incentive to free up workers from low-skilled jobs that could be mechanized. The national economy was paying a price because manpower was being wasted. One day the army wheeled out General William Westmoreland
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space created by productivity-driven disinflation, Greenspan presided over a glorious period of growth, high-tech investment, and job creation that boosted living standards among low-skilled workers; in the era of globalization, the late 1990s stand out as one of the few periods in which inequality retreated. But by allowing this bonanza
The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin · 28 Dec 1994 · 372pp · 152 words
: growth in higher paying jobs and a shrinking in lower-paying jobs." Holtzman warned that unless new 144 THE DECLINE OF THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE low-skilled jobs can be found to fill the vacuum created by the new displacement technologies, the city will face "turmoil-more social dislocation, more crime, more poverty
The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin · 10 Jan 2019 · 301pp · 89,076 words
about what is going on here, it is easy to see that this is some sort of tax-and-redistribute scheme that is working though low-skill jobs in sheltered sectors. In essence, the high restaurant prices and wages are one way that Germans who are globally competitive are paying a “tax” which
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon · 12 Jan 2016 · 1,104pp · 302,176 words
the wages of domestic workers by a small amount and that the effect is greatest on domestic workers lacking a high school degree. Many low-skilled immigrants disproportionately take jobs and enter occupations already staffed by foreign-born workers—for example, restaurant workers and landscape services—and thus their main effect is to
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been called “manual” jobs. One result of the loss of middle-skilled routine jobs is that middle-skilled workers are forced to compete for low-skilled manual jobs, thus raising the supply relative to the demand for manual workers. The result has been a decline in wages for those with relatively low skills
Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing · 19 Mar 2020
of modern life in Britain and elsewhere. The technological revolution is accentuating the growing inequality. High-paying but automatable jobs may be more threatened than low-skilled, low-wage jobs such as care work or cleaning.63 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has joined those predicting that robots will raise production but lower wages
World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen · 19 Dec 2016
can play to ensure a strong supply of middle‐income jobs for those with mid‐tier skills. A two‐tier model of highly paid and low‐skilled jobs that resembles other world cities has begun to raise questions about the future spectrum of employment. The capacity of local businesses to grow by reducing
Left Behind
by Paul Collier · 6 Aug 2024 · 299pp · 92,766 words
.i With the collapse of its core industries and the loss of pro-social firms like Firth, the few firms attracted to South Yorkshire brought low-skill jobs. They came only because premises were cheap to rent and desperate people were willing to take tedious work at low wages. Call-centre and warehouse
Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle · 12 Mar 2019 · 349pp · 98,309 words
recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the majority of new job growth of the past decade has come from low-skill, nonroutine manual jobs, those that “require few skills and little problem solving.” Although some of the new errand jobs may feature high pay—Instacart can pay thirty
The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah · 23 Apr 2012 · 309pp · 91,581 words
Harvard economist Richard Murnane deem most vulnerable to automation. But impersonally delivered services include a lot more high-skill jobs (though they include lots of low-skill jobs, too). Securities analysis (high-skill) can be delivered remotely; so can keyboard entry (low-skill), radiology (high-skill), and customer complaint centers. Governments have become
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna · 18 Apr 2016 · 497pp · 144,283 words
unit of infrastructure spending unlocks more consumption than one unit of income. Ninety percent of the economic growth in the developing world comes from jobs in labor-intensive, low-skilled areas such as construction, textiles, agriculture, and tourism. The construction sector alone generates the most jobs of any sector. This should be the
The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg · 14 Jun 2023 · 295pp · 87,204 words
in the Nordic countries, while it requires thousands of dollars in the United States.) The fact that wages are not much higher for a low-skilled entry-level job today than forty years ago can, in this perspective, be seen as an opportunity for new groups of young people and immigrants to be
Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster · 3 May 2021 · 245pp · 75,397 words
Rabbi says, “the data is pretty clear to me. The US economy is now a few high-skill, high-wage jobs and a ton of low-skill, low-wage jobs.” Jerry replies, “All the new jobs are in leisure and hospitality.” “Which all pay for shit,” I add. The Rabbi continues. “You’re now
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen · 11 Sep 2013 · 291pp · 81,703 words
labor earnings. The longer-term trend is fewer jobs in middle-skill, white-collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations. Demand is rising for low-pay, low-skill jobs, and it is rising for high-pay, high-skill jobs, including tech and managerial jobs, but pay is not rising for the jobs in between
Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl · 7 May 2018 · 491pp · 77,650 words
lost moments of time that can be turned into work’.17 Both the existence of a large pool of workers competing for routine and often low-skilled jobs and the resulting competition for work have a long historical pedigree. The transformation of a workforce into a taskforce, in other words, was one of
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delivery cyclist weaving between cars and dodging jaywalking pedestrians on a rainy London evening, or the crowdworker sorting through hundreds of online images. These jobs might count as low-skilled labour—but their ever-changing, unpredictable nature makes them near impossible to translate into a simple algorithm. McAfee and Brynjofsson disagree: because ‘humanity
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · 20 Jan 2014 · 339pp · 88,732 words
worker, even though their ranks were thinning. The lack of demand for unskilled workers meant ever-lower wages for those who continued to compete for low-skill jobs. And because most of the people with the least education already had the lowest wages, this change increased overall income inequality. Organizational Coinvention While a
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan · 8 Aug 2020 · 438pp · 84,256 words
economies. Diagram 7.4 Changes in occupational employment shares among working age adults, 1980–2016 Minimum Wages Concerns about the transition from semi-skilled to low-skilled jobs, the resulting loss of bargaining power in the gig economy, and rising income inequality, may well have been factors in recent hikes to minimum wage
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen · 14 Sep 2020 · 486pp · 150,849 words
America. It was clear-eyed and prescient. “The numbers of the rich will grow more rapidly in the coming years,” Murray wrote. Real wages for low-skilled jobs will increase more slowly, if at all….I fear the potential for producing something like a caste society, with the implication of utter social separation
The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle · 21 Feb 2011 · 523pp · 111,615 words
when cheap clothing imports put domestic manufacturers out of business because they can’t compete, or when immigrant workers seem to bid down wages for low-skill jobs in the neighborhood, it seems pretty obvious that globalization is the culprit for the fact that low-income families have been faring poorly in recent
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart · 7 Sep 2020 · 463pp · 115,103 words
and often part-time women workers in the lowest-paid corners of the economy. Men in low-skill jobs such as garbage collection and postal delivery tend to be better paid than women in low-skill jobs, partly because the jobs have historically been unionized. Employment status is usually more connected to well-being in men than
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr · 14 Jun 2020 · 407pp · 113,198 words
despite the banality of our training, despite the hours of Whole Foods hype, I flush with the magic and possibility of these low-wage, low-skill grocery jobs—jobs laboring to create a myth of abundance for all the high-wage people with high opinions who populate WFs on the Bowery by day—and
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff · 15 Jan 2019 · 918pp · 257,605 words
now, these include many occupations far from the factory floor.13 This results in what economists call “job polarization,” which features some high-skill jobs and other low-skill jobs, with automation displacing most of the jobs that were once “in the middle.”14 And although some business leaders, economists, and technologists describe
Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy
by Howard Karger · 9 Sep 2005 · 299pp · 83,854 words
labor market increasingly marked by little employment security; a rising number of jobs that pay hourly wages without benefits; and the rapid creation of low-skilled and temporary jobs. The fringe economy is also tied to the increasing disparity of wealth in the United States. In 2004 the top 29,000 Americans had
Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration
by Unknown
road connected the men to the capital, just as the city was growing like mad with the people streaming in from Mexico’s agonized countryside. Low-skilled construction jobs were plentiful. A crew of Xocotla’s men traveled to Mexico City for the first time in to work as construction helpers. For three
The Lights in the Tunnel
by Martin Ford · 28 May 2011 · 261pp · 10,785 words
are highly educated and skilled have a significant advantage in the labor force. While this has been true so far, it is largely because relatively low skill jobs have been the first to be automated and also the first to be subjected to the full force of globalization. As we saw in Chapter
The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan · 16 Jan 2018 · 636pp · 140,406 words
out marriage and hates school has a Degree Return of 4%. There are only two main groups who should skip high school in favor of low-skilled jobs. The first group: Poor Students who don’t plan to work full time after graduation. The second group: students who are worse than Poor. If
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slow to learn that a worker is highly skilled if the worker’s best early job opportunity given the information available to employers is a low-skill-level job that reveals little about the worker’s talent.” 36. Hayes 1995 tantalizingly claims to teach “strategies for competent people without college degrees,” but his
The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee · 17 Jul 2013 · 440pp · 108,137 words
modern and changing industrial economy. The educational requirements of jobs in industrial society constantly increase as a result of technological change. The proportion of jobs that require low skill declines while the proportion that requires high skill increases. What is more, the same jobs are continually upgraded in their skill requirements. The result
Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson · 1 Jan 2008
you were here? Best wishes Seanie trends that will transform work 5 Globalization and connectivity Globalization cuts both ways. On the one hand, millions of low-skill jobs will be lost to low-cost areas such as China, India and Africa, while at the same time geography will become irrelevant as highly skilled
A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing · 3 May 2017 · 307pp · 82,680 words
character of what has been dubbed the ‘fourth technological revolution’ also appears to be more generalized than in preceding seismic changes, which predominantly hit low-skill manual jobs.19 All levels of job and occupation are being affected. The resultant economic uncertainty is creating widespread insecurity; this supports calls for a basic income
The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang · 2 Apr 2018 · 300pp · 76,638 words
sex operators, English tutors to Chinese kids, or image classifiers to help train AI. That’s not exactly an appealing future though—and long-distance low-skilled jobs are the ones most subject to automation and a race to the lowest-cost provider. Most retail workers at least had the gratification of leaving
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth · 22 Mar 2017 · 403pp · 111,119 words
by software. Meanwhile, the jobs that have returned post-recession are typically menial, creating an hourglass economy that offers a few high-skill and many low-skill jobs with little in between. Analysts predict that five million jobs across 15 major economies could well be lost to automation by 2020.73 And it
Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross · 7 May 2012 · 391pp · 97,018 words
gas extraction industry was more than $90,000. The boom has created demand for truckers, accountants, cooks, and HR managers, in addition to roughnecks. Even low-skilled jobs can command high wages. In tiny Williston, population 14,716, gas stations, convenience stores, and McDonald’s are offering $12.50 to $15 an hour
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari · 29 Aug 2018 · 389pp · 119,487 words
human jobs might prove easier than retraining humans to actually fill these jobs. During previous waves of automation, people could usually switch from one routine low-skill job to another. In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanisation of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo · 25 Apr 2011 · 370pp · 112,602 words
from the famed Green Revolution. Furthermore, the poor gained disproportionately from industrial growth, because higher-paid employment became available even to those with low skills. Once such a job does materialize, it can make a tremendous difference in the lives of the people who get it. The middle class spends much more on
Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik · 8 Oct 2017 · 322pp · 87,181 words
. But there have been no offsetting employment gains in other industries, which is a surprise. Trade advocates have long maintained that deindustrialization and loss of low-skill jobs in advanced economies have little to do with trade and are the product of new technologies rather than growing international trade. In the debate on
Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer · 17 Aug 2018 · 572pp · 94,002 words
/36. [37] management consulting firm McKinsey: “Skill shift: Automation and the future of the workforce | McKinsey...” toreset.me/37. [38] automation and robotics: “50% of low-skilled jobs will be replaced by AI and automation, report...” 21 Jul. 2017, toreset.me/38. [39] “in terms of both quality and speed”: “Deep Work: Rules
Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley · 20 Apr 2016 · 230pp · 79,229 words
scared of! I’m as ordinary as you are. Honestly.’ We are no longer an industrial society in which most people are working-class, doing low-skilled jobs. We are increasingly a knowledge-based society in which pay and social esteem are gained chiefly from doing technical and professional jobs for which you
Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes
by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne · 5 Sep 2007 · 458pp · 134,028 words
isolation numbers may not come down so fast. First, because the jobs that draw immigrants to America today, unlike in past decades, are primarily the low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans pass up, today’s immigrants come to America with less foreign language training, and less education generally, than used to be
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had an ambivalent but growing role in the American household, and the glut of college dropouts suggests that we will see a lot of previously low-skilled jobs taken by a new class of worker. (Just ask your massage therapist, hairdresser, or flight attendant the name of her sorority, or what her major
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
by Thomas Geoghegan · 20 Sep 2011 · 364pp · 104,697 words
of living. Unlike the hunter/nomad model, which produced high-skilled “hunter” jobs but not enough of them, the agrarian model produced a lot of low-skilled jobs, jobs, jobs, or what some would now call “McJobs.” In a sense, while the higher-skilled hunter model led to a better way of life, the farmer
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth · 1 Mar 2018 · 256pp · 79,075 words
(58.8 per cent) of graduates were in jobs that did not require a degree.5 In recent decades the UK economy has been creating low-skilled jobs at a faster rate than high-skilled jobs. Between 1996 and 2008, for every ten middle-skilled jobs that disappeared in the UK, around 4
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, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry
Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling · 6 Oct 2014 · 317pp · 71,776 words
to dominate in low-paid, unlicensed jobs. In 1993 7 per cent of employed young women between sixteen and twenty-four worked in low-paid, low-skilled jobs in the UK, but by 2013 that had increased to 21 per cent. For young men in these ‘elementary occupations’, the figure increased from 14
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford · 4 May 2015 · 484pp · 104,873 words
, low wages, few benefits, and a high turnover rate have helped to make fast food jobs relatively easy to find, and fast food jobs, together with other low-skill positions in retail, have provided a kind of private sector safety net for workers with few other options: these jobs have traditionally offered an
Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 28 Jan 2020 · 408pp · 108,985 words
qualification, and the situation is particularly stark for those with low qualifications. Matters may well get worse. Recent estimates suggest that between 2015 and 2025, low-skilled jobs in Europe will decline by more than seven million.10 An insufficient demand for labor also affects those with higher qualifications, which can have ripple
Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler · 1 Feb 2011 · 272pp · 64,626 words
that bad. That’s the goal of every economy—to increase the standard of living of its participants. If that means over a generation replacing low-skill jobs with higher-skilled careers developing more productive tools, then you are creating wealth for the entire economy. We went from Stone Age to Iron Age
Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason · 30 Sep 2013 · 357pp · 99,684 words
in a motel, you meet the people who earn the minimum wage. They are nearly always women. And these jobs are not full-shift jobs. They are low-skill, part-time jobs for people who, in the era of globalization, cannot find anything better than microwaving burgers and cleaning greying bedsheets for $7
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton · 8 Jun 2020 · 338pp · 104,684 words
rate fell from a peak of 10 percent in October of 2009 to 5 percent by the end of 2015. More people were finding jobs, including many low-skilled and minority workers who often have the hardest time securing employment. In December of 2015, the Fed raised its interest rate target from 0
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper · 20 Nov 2018 · 417pp · 97,577 words
to increase with size of the firm. Professor Holger M. Mueller of New York University and his colleagues found that wage differences between high and low-skill jobs increase with firm size. They also demonstrated that there is a strong relation between the change in firm size and rising wage inequality for most
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones · 14 Jul 2011 · 317pp · 101,475 words
for workers who were 'marginal to the labour market', those 'most likely to drop out or become discouraged workers', those 'who work in part-time, low-skilled jobs (such as single mothers and young people)', and those who faced barriers to finding work, such as an inability to travel. Clearly, then, attitudes towards
Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath · 6 Jan 2020 · 295pp · 90,821 words
to Labor Markets: An Overview.” Journal for Labour Market Research 46 (3): 185–99. Autor, D. H., and D. Dorn. 2013. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market.” American Economic Review 103 (5): 1553–97. Autor, D. H., D. Dorn, and G. H. Hanson. 2013
The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley · 19 Jan 2012 · 223pp · 10,010 words
has been underway since the early 1980s. There has been a continuing growth in jobs that pay well and require high skill, and in lowwage, low-skill jobs, but thanks to de-industrialisation, off-shoring and the impact of technology, ‘middle-tier’ jobs have been on the wane. 120 Some former industrial heartlands
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin · 31 Aug 2012 · 320pp · 96,006 words
,000 since 1969—a reduction of 28 percent. The most obvious pattern in the economy over the last forty years is the polarization into low-skill and high-skill jobs, with the middle class getting squeezed out. But this polarization has affected men and women very differently, as MIT economist David Autor shows in
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos · 12 May 2014 · 499pp · 152,156 words
English.’ They don’t have big dreams here.” As the years passed, I sensed that other young strivers like Michael were growing frustrated as well. Low-skilled jobs weren’t the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren’t enough white-collar jobs to employ each year’s crop of more than
The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg · 13 May 2019 · 336pp · 95,773 words
a leg up if the only thing employers cared about was finding warm bodies to do low-skill jobs cheaply—since younger workers are generally less skilled but cheap. But what employers increasingly care about, even in “low-skilled” jobs, is finding workers who are able to perform nonroutine tasks well. Older workers, with more life
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growth were more fairly distributed between workers and companies. The transition to a high-skilled economy, which is actually a polarization toward both high- and low-skilled jobs, clearly was not pulling enough workers into the high-skilled category: one analysis found that a total decline in labor share of 4.4 percentage
Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain
by Lisa McKenzie · 14 Jan 2015 · 212pp · 80,393 words
talked about the hopelessness of ever getting a job that offered economic stability and respect among their friends and family; they knew that getting a low-skilled, low-paid job would not give them a valued identity they needed to live on this estate, or even the means to live as ‘a proper family
The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna · 5 Feb 2019 · 496pp · 131,938 words
closing weekly nationwide. Sixty percent of the US economy is consumption, but 60 percent of the population is struggling economically, with 80 percent of US jobs low-skilled and low-paying. Rising inequality has become a hot-button political issue, with the top 10 percent claiming an ever larger share of national wealth
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander · 24 Nov 2011 · 467pp · 116,902 words
had suddenly become disposable was rooted in real changes in the economy—changes that have been devastating to poor black communities as factories have closed, low-skill jobs have disappeared, and all those who had the means to flee the ghetto did. The sense among those left behind that society no longer has
Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley · 27 Dec 2008 · 204pp · 67,922 words
communication.” The jobs they tend to displace don’t involve much independent thought, but rather raw computational or processing ability. They get rid of these low-skilled jobs in two ways: (1) by doing them themselves (e.g., through voice recognition phone trees); and (2) by allowing others in lower-wage labor markets
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have been. Others that can’t have been outsourced to low-wage labor markets (the famous Indian call centers), thanks to telecommunications technologies. The only low-skilled jobs that really remain in the United States are those which involve personal contact that cannot be performed from afar. It’s no surprise that the
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of jobs in the first decade of the third millennium is projected to be in food preparation and service.38 Computers were supposed to eliminate low-skilled jobs and create high-skilled ones. So, what’s happening here? It’s an indirect effect: the inequality itself creates the low-wage serving jobs. After
Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism
by Rick Wartzman · 15 Nov 2022 · 215pp · 69,370 words
be a good business decision.” She added that this also diminishes “a sense of moral urgency, which might otherwise be a motivator.” This concept of “low-skill” jobs warranting lesser pay than “high-skill” jobs is part and parcel of the way that many of those with the most prestige—not just CEOs
Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek · 5 Mar 2019 · 232pp · 76,830 words
town was desperately in need of work. But there was a problem with the jobs obsession, and not just because so many of the jobs were low-paid, low-skilled, insecure ones. (Grimsby held first place in the country for ‘semi-routine’ occupations, ‘typified’, the statisticians said, ‘by a short term and the direct
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of investment at an agency called Invest Bristol & Bath – told me the UK was at the top of an evolutionary tree of skills, and as low-skilled factory jobs went to cheaper countries, new, high-wage, high-skill jobs were being generated, not necessarily when foreign investors came in, but sometimes, counter-intuitively
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Somerdale-Skarbimierz journey, the new jobs are worse than the old Somerdale ones. Even supposing all the redundant Somerdale workers, and their children, found similar low-skilled jobs, they would never be as well-paid as they were at Somerdale, and, crucially, wouldn’t have the same generous final salary pensions. Some of
The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan · 26 Feb 2019 · 596pp · 163,682 words
offset aging (rather than just to attract the best global talent) will draw immigrants from a broader set than just the most capable. Indeed, since low-skilled jobs like caring for the elderly are low-paid and physically taxing, they are likely to draw young poor immigrants. When immigrants fill jobs across the
The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle · 4 Sep 2019 · 374pp · 111,284 words
. There is a widespread presumption that, whereas the majority of the jobs lost to technology are relatively highly skilled and well paid, new jobs tend to be low-skilled and low-paid positions, predominantly in the service sector. We have a mental picture of the new jobs on offer as low-paid work
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil · 25 Jun 2024
operate, today companies like FitMyFoot use 3D printing to create custom footwear that fits each customer perfectly.[82] So instead of a large number of low-skill jobs, FitMyFoot’s production depends on a smaller number of people with skills in computer science and operating 3D printers. Trends like this tend to replace
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
by Nicola Twilley · 24 Jun 2024 · 428pp · 125,388 words
assembly line, an innovation that would, in turn, revolutionize manufacturing, after seeing “an overhead trolley that the Chicago packers used in dressing beef.” Meat-packing jobs became low skilled, low paid, repetitive, and exploitative; butchery, as a skilled profession, all but died out. Up and down the East Coast and throughout the UK
Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies · 26 Feb 2019 · 349pp · 98,868 words
overlooked by the unemployment data because they have simply given up looking for work, after prolonged unemployment. Britain avoided unemployment by creating a surge in low-skilled, low-productivity jobs, at the same time experiencing a flat-lining of productivity growth that had not been witnessed in over two hundred years. In the United
The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter · 4 Jan 2011 · 353pp · 98,267 words
Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); David Autor and David Dorn, “Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States,” NBER working paper, November 2008; Congressional Budget Office, “Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007,” October
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
by Charles Murray · 14 Jun 2021 · 147pp · 42,682 words
cognitive ability and job performance are always positively correlated. The size of the correlation goes up as the job becomes more cognitively complex. Even for low-skill occupations, job experience does not lead to convergence in performance among persons with different cognitive ability. For intellectually demanding jobs, there is no point at which
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland · 11 Oct 2012 · 481pp · 120,693 words
used by economists, to polarize the labor market: there are better and more highly paid jobs at the top, not much change for the low-skill, low-income jobs at the bottom, but a hollowing out of the jobs in the middle, which used to provide the paychecks for the American middle class. Maarten
Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard · 15 Apr 2019 · 321pp · 92,828 words
work and invest for the long term. Anger and defiance take over, so that a community may consider even showing up for work at a low-skill job to be a “sellout.” But even successful communities—including those in high-expectation, high-performance cities and suburbs—leave indelible imprints on us, not all
The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun · 16 Oct 2017 · 239pp · 62,311 words
Yifu Lin, the former chief economist of the World Bank, “Having itself been a ‘follower goose,’ China is on the verge of graduating from low-skilled manufacturing jobs and becoming a ‘leading dragon.’ That will free up nearly 100 million labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, enough to more than double manufacturing employment in low
Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure · 18 May 2020 · 459pp · 138,689 words
, with the population falling so rapidly, and so few youngsters having been born, there were too few people to carry out the low-waged jobs typically described as “low-skilled”: cleaning workplaces, picking fruit in the fields, serving in cafés. Immigrants began to arrive from the poorer former colonies of the empire that
Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley · 9 Sep 2019 · 263pp · 80,594 words
); Harvey (2018). 2 This account draws on: Marx (1894); Mandel (1981) 3 See, e.g., Autor, D. and Dord, D. (2012) “The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarisation of the US Labour Market”, MIT Department of Economics. 4 This account draws on: Mazzucato, M. (2011) The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public
The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams · 15 Feb 2015 · 193pp · 47,808 words
countries in the EEA. Of course, it is true that many (around half) of those working in London but born outside the UK work in low-skilled jobs. But the other half work in skilled jobs and are often particularly highly qualified. Even among migrant workers in low-skill employment, a surprising large
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Circle, The (2013) ref1 Egypt Cairo ref1 share of GDP ref1 employment ref1 growth ref1 immigrant labour ref1 in FWE ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 job creation ref1 low-skilled jobs ref1 public sector 1112 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) ref1 growth of ref1 shortages ref1 end user demand ref1 Engels, Friedrich ref1
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason · 29 Jul 2015 · 378pp · 110,518 words
and a precariat, with both layers seeing work partially de-linked from wages. In addition, as the Oxford Martin School suggests, it is the low-skilled service jobs that stand the highest risk of total automation over the next two decades. The global working class is not destined to remain for ever divided
The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson · 27 Jun 2015 · 168pp · 50,647 words
harder to find jobs than they were a decade ago. Jobs in almost all industries are becoming increasingly commoditized. It makes sense to us that low-skilled jobs with lower barriers to entry are being affected by globalization and technology, but why is it affecting the more highly-credentialed ones? The Cynefin Framework
The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford · 1 Jan 2006 · 395pp · 115,753 words
communities. In southern California, the rift was perhaps not so pronounced, but there was tension owing in part to competition between blacks and Latinos for low-skilled jobs. Moreover, it seemed that the newcomers had an advantage in the contest for employment. By the early 1990s, Los Angeles janitorial firms had largely replaced
The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts · 1 Sep 2014 · 324pp · 92,805 words
systematically and efficiently stripped of any task that can be automated or offshored, many of the remaining workers will have extremely slim pickings—mainly low-skill service-sector jobs such as food service, security, janitorial, lawn and garden, beauty shop, and home health care. On the plus side, such jobs are probably safe
Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett · 17 Aug 2015 · 397pp · 109,631 words
so on. The newly constructed office team then went about their business for two hours. The clerks were assigned to work on a variety of low-skilled, repetitive jobs and had little autonomy. The managers, as in a real office, performed reasonably high-skill-level tasks and directed the clerks’ activities. At the
Brave New World of Work
by Ulrich Beck · 15 Jan 2000 · 236pp · 67,953 words
’ lifts a burden from the public and corporate coffers and makes the individual the ‘architect of his or her own fortune’. The working poor. The jobs of ‘low-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers are directly threatened by globalization. For they can be replaced either by automation or by the supply of labour from other
Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education
by Mike Rose · 17 Sep 2012 · 225pp · 55,458 words
to our social and economic structure: tens of millions of young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-paying, dead-end jobs and older low-skilled displaced workers, unable to find employment as industries transform and jobs disappear. This situation places a huge and, if left alone, intractable drag on
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams · 1 Oct 2015 · 357pp · 95,986 words
technology sector.115 More importantly, the potential of service jobs is constrained by the newest wave of automation, which is likely to eliminate the low-skilled, low-wage service jobs that have traditionally been outsourced – clerical work, call-centre work or data entry, for example.116 As this non-routine cognitive labour is increasingly
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of low-skilled service work, and will be exacerbated by premature deindustrialisation. 4.Urban marginality in the developed economies will grow in size as low-skilled, low-wage jobs are automated. 5.The transformation of higher education into job training will be hastened in a desperate attempt to increase the supply of high-skilled
The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg · 3 Feb 1997 · 582pp · 160,693 words
Press, 1994), pp.29, 74. 103. Tilly, "Collective Violence," p.77. 104. For a well-documented look at the impact of disappearing factory jobs on persons with low skills, see William Julius Wilson, When Work 327 Disappears.' The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knop{ 1996). 105. Tilly, "Collective
Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer · 6 Nov 2014 · 504pp · 143,303 words
. If all the skilled and interesting tasks are bundled into a subset of all the jobs, while middling-skilled tasks are bundled up into other jobs and low-skilled and unpleasant tasks are bundled into yet others, then there can’t be equality of opportunity because the opportunities are unequal. If the proportions
Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace · 28 Jul 2015 · 144pp · 43,356 words
Oxford Martin School estimated that 45% of American jobs would disappear in the next 20 years, in two waves. (21) The first would attack relatively low-skilled jobs in transportation and administration. Some of this would come from self-driving vehicles, which are likely to appear on our roads in significant numbers from
Invisible Women
by Caroline Criado Perez · 12 Mar 2019 · 480pp · 119,407 words
. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.’ But it was in fact around this time that employers were starting to realise that programming was not the low-skilled clerical job they had once thought. It wasn’t like typing or feeling. It required advanced problem-solving skills. And, brilliance bias being more powerful than
The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark · 31 Dec 2014
at its highest since records began in 1992 (GLA Economics, 2014). With a GVA now well in excess of £300 billion, and the share of low-skilled jobs set to fall over the next two decades (Keijonen, 2014), London is again placed in the highest esteem by global standards, and is widely recognised
A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare · 11 Nov 2008 · 468pp · 123,823 words
answer for why blacks in the South received less than those in the North may be because they retained their near monopoly on unskilled and low-skilled jobs, causing whites there to be in greater relative need and to have had fewer resources.52 Regardless, African Americans continued to depend upon their own
The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida · 9 May 2016 · 356pp · 91,157 words
.S. Labor Market (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2006), http://economics.mit.edu/files/584; David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1553–1597; David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and
The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida · 22 Apr 2010 · 265pp · 74,941 words
being destroyed, and new industries, occupations, and firms are being created. In this kind of situation, it’s much harder for workers, particularly low-skilled ones, to find jobs where they live. In today’s economy and the economy of the future, geographic mobility is required to match workers and their skills to
Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green · 17 Jul 2017 · 296pp · 78,112 words
that would provide a path to citizenship for the now 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States, while enlarging guest-worker programs for low-skilled jobs in industries such as agriculture. In what seemed a positive omen, the Gang of Eight bill had the added designation of being a vehicle for
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words
services now comprise 80 per cent of both economic output and jobs. There is only one problem with the presumption that services, high-or low-skilled, will provide jobs where industry and agriculture no longer will. It turns out that any repetitive endeavour – whatever the industry – can be automated within the context of
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as Moravec’s Paradox, after the technologist who defined it. From the perspective of technological unemployment it was a hugely important observation, showing how even ‘low-skilled’ jobs, from construction to fruit picking, could remain immune from automation. Even as machines beat chess grandmasters and former supercomputers found their processing power equalled by
The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards · 14 Jun 2017 · 323pp · 95,492 words
occupations, and a corresponding drop in manufacturing employment. This has contributed to a polarization of the workforce in many countries, with more high-skilled and low-skilled jobs, but fewer requiring mid-level skills. At the same time, young people are finding it increasingly hard to get a foothold in the labour market
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider · 14 Aug 2017 · 237pp · 67,154 words
experience of receiving training, and becoming knowledgeable in running a business, can assist workers in taking what otherwise could be seen as a “dead end” low-skilled job and transforming it into a much better opportunity for advancement. Many of the advantages for low-wage immigrant workers inherent in a worker-owned business
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2 Oct 2017 · 349pp · 114,914 words
of note. I subscribed, like most, to the theories of the sociologist William Julius Wilson: that the decline of the kind of industrial high-paying low-skill jobs that built America’s white middle class had left large numbers of young black men unemployed, and the government made no real effort to ameliorate
The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax · 8 Nov 2016 · 360pp · 101,038 words
1992 and 2010, the share of employment by middle-skill workers has fallen dramatically, even as high-skill and low-skill jobs have grown. “For a long time, from the end of WWII to the 1970s, we had a lot of high paying jobs that didn’t
Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios · 15 Nov 2013 · 238pp · 73,121 words
implausible that in the future most persons will be scientists or skilled technicians. Indeed, the biggest area of job growth in rich countries has been low-skilled service jobs, where it is cheaper to hire human labor than to automate [Autor and Dorn 2013]. In the current US economy, one of the biggest
The New Snobbery
by David Skelton · 28 Jun 2021 · 226pp · 58,341 words
-status and generally lucrative jobs. At the other end of the economy, the skilled manufacturing jobs that once dominated have been replaced with relatively low-skilled, insecure, low-paid jobs. Whereas esteem used to be spread evenly across the economy, it is now reserved for jobs towards the knowledge end of the economy. The
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October 2008. 26 ‘Pope Francis: Politics cannot be “slave” to economy, finance’, The Hill, 24 September 2015. 27 Quoted in David Goodhart, ‘How to make low-skilled jobs seem more attractive’, BBC News, 17 February 2013. 28 Jonathan Cribb, ‘How are younger generations faring compared to their parents and grandparents’, Institute for Fiscal
The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World
by Philip Coggan · 1 Jul 2025 · 96pp · 36,083 words
workers are on low wages and zero-hour contracts, in what is dubbed the ‘precariat’. But while there was some evidence for the growth of low-skilled jobs in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the China shock was greatest, a recent paper found this effect has disappeared. Between 2016
Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade · 9 Jan 2024 · 392pp · 106,044 words
a million manufacturing jobs evaporated between 1990 and 2019. Americans who had worked good-paying manufacturing jobs were forced to take new low-paying, low-skill service sector jobs. From 2001 to 2003, the average manufacturing worker’s income plummeted from $40,154 to $32,123 when that person was reemployed in the
Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell · 23 May 2023
Europe (2.4%), especially in services. Most other occupational categories, meanwhile, dwindled, especially highly skilled bluecollar and construction jobs. The only exception was blue-collar, low-skilled jobs in private-sector services (for example, retail and catering).17 Meanwhile, growth in full-time, permanent employment was almost completely concentrated in the first income
Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow · 5 Nov 2019 · 273pp · 83,802 words
of the reasons for these worker-led strikes was that with an unofficial colour bar in operation, people of colour were concentrated in low-skilled, insecure and dangerous jobs in sectors where there were labour shortages and unsociable working hours. By the mid-1970s black and Asian male workers remained disproportionately represented in
The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross · 13 Sep 2021 · 363pp · 109,077 words
a worker through her entire career. Instead of fighting to maintain the status quo, unions must position their members to embrace the change. As low-skill industrial jobs went overseas, unions missed the first wave of opportunities to retrain their members for the high-skill, technology-driven jobs that remain firmly planted in
Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw · 29 Aug 2018 · 736pp · 233,366 words
it employed were from outside Britain. The predominantly young and frequently well-educated migrants, drawn to work far from home, filled labour shortages, often in low-skilled jobs, and made relatively few demands on welfare support. However, complaints soon arose – and did not subside – about downward pressure on wages and difficulties in housing
Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg · 1 Jan 2001
, garment manufacturing, delivery repair, services, printing and moving companies. These jobs must stay in the City to support industries finance, multimedia, real estate, low-skill, and tourism. The jobs like at stake are stable, high-wage jobs essential to a thriving economy."^^ Several hun- dred jobs already lost can be traced directly to
Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
by Parag Khanna · 4 Mar 2008 · 537pp · 158,544 words
(QIZs). The reality, however, is that few Jordanian companies have the manufacturing wherewithal to exploit the QIZs, and the Jordanians who work for them hold low-skill jobs that provide for sustenance, not wealth. The real beneficiaries have been Israeli and Chinese companies, which register their textile firms in Jordan and buy up
The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal
by Ludwig B. Chincarini · 29 Jul 2012 · 701pp · 199,010 words
the Greek economy and boost the German economy, as it should. A similar effect can happen, as the world grows more integrated. Much competition for low-skilled jobs comes from developing countries, and that makes Greek goods relatively uncompetitive in the world’s markets. Figure 18.1 shows Greece’s real exchange rate
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher · 26 Jun 2013 · 296pp · 76,284 words
for this shift are many. During the growth years of the 1990s and 2000s, low-skill construction and service jobs boomed in the suburbs. Soon immigrants began bypassing cities and immigrating directly to the suburbs and exurbs. But these low-skill jobs were the first to vaporize in the housing bust and ensuing recession. At the
God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge · 31 Mar 2009 · 518pp · 143,914 words
badly. Millions of them live in inner cities and impoverished suburbs. Most of the original immigrants were poorly educated people who were imported to do low-skilled jobs that Europeans no longer wanted to do. And the combination of Europe’s overgenerous welfare state and its tradition of protecting insiders has hampered integration
Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri · 9 Mar 2000 · 1,015pp · 170,908 words
S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N lation implies a corresponding growth oflow-value and low-skill jobs ofroutine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word processing. Here begins to emerge a fundamental division of labor within the realm ofimmaterial production. We
Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System
by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner and Andrew Jackson · 14 Apr 2012
fund private equity vehicles that take over productive manufacturers, fire local staff and outsource production to foreign low-wage countries. This reduces the number of low-skilled jobs available in the UK and contributes to unemployment. Finally, when private sector economic confidence is low, as during recessions, investors will tend to be risk
The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories
by Ilan Pappé · 21 Jun 2017 · 356pp · 97,794 words
mentioned can be added the prevention of work inside Israel. In 1992 a third of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, mostly in low-skilled, manual labour jobs in construction, agriculture and government services. This contributed 25 per cent of the territories’ GNP. The denial of the right to work became part
Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr · 5 Sep 2016 · 391pp · 105,382 words
is dispensable and disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing failed parts with fresh ones. You hire a low-skilled worker, or build a robot, and when a component dies, the worker, or the robot, swaps it out with a good one. Such a system requires
Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman · 13 Sep 2014 · 235pp · 62,862 words
between 1990 and 2000, researchers at the World Bank found that emigration out of a country had a negative effect on wages in Europe.39 Low-skilled workers got the shortest end of the stick. Over these same years, immigrants were more productive and better educated than typically assumed, even serving to motivate
About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney · 16 Aug 2021 · 306pp · 84,649 words
the nineteenth century and, by the 1870s, cheap watches and clocks, mass-produced in factories using specialist machines powered by steam engines and operated by low-skilled workers, were rolling off the production lines that formed part of the system. The old ways of manufacture were disappearing, trumpeted a British watchmaking journal in
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee · 14 Sep 2018 · 307pp · 88,180 words
tasks that once required high-skilled workers (for example, handcrafting textiles) and broke the work down into far simpler tasks that could be done by low-skilled workers (operating a steam-driven power loom). In the process, these technologies greatly increased the amount of these goods produced and drove down prices. In terms
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industrial economy. Yes, they displaced a relatively small number of skilled craftspeople (some of whom would become Luddites), but they empowered much larger numbers of low-skilled workers to take on repetitive, machine-enabled jobs that increased their productivity. Both the economic pie and overall standards of living grew. But what about the
Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge · 29 Nov 2011 · 460pp · 131,579 words
training for less skilled workers, given that companies have little incentive to invest in people who have few opportunities to move elsewhere, and given that low-skilled workers are also bearing the brunt of economic change, as manual jobs are shifted offshore or mechanized out of existence. But it is also arguable that
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri · 6 May 2019 · 346pp · 97,330 words
a way to make sure workers with limited skills aren’t left behind as technological progress races past them. But universal basic income assumes that “low-skill” workers need an economic floor because they will have no options once machines beat them out for jobs. Here’s what’s wrong with that logic
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler · 12 Nov 2008 · 407pp · 136,138 words
not fantastic. She’s not working in Silicon Valley, but she’s doing well for where she was.” In the rough-and-tumble marketplace, then, low-skilled workers can often be rescued by a low-cost gamble, a few minutes of attention and teaching. “One young lady we were about to terminate ’cause
The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin · 11 May 2020 · 393pp · 91,257 words
. 5 Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bai, “What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?” New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/upshot/big-cities-low-skilled-workers-wages.html. 6 Gabriela Inchauste, Living and Leaving: Housing, Mobility, and Welfare in the European Union, World
The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz · 13 May 2020 · 506pp · 133,134 words
Recovery as Jobs Growth Slows’, Guardian, 6 April 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/apr/06/women-hit-hard-us-economic-recession; Brian Groom, ‘Low-skilled workers hit hardest by recession’, Financial Times, 20 July 2011, https://www.ft.com/content/9e874afa-b2b4-11e0-bc28-00144feabdc0. 40 Indeed when Princeton’s Noam
The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey · 12 Oct 2017 · 288pp · 64,771 words
of workers’ average years of schooling completed means that the relative supply of skilled workers lags behind relative demand. Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged. People increasingly marry within their social class, reducing the marital pathway to social mobility. The factors contributing to
The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell · 22 Oct 2018 · 402pp · 126,835 words
got richer, so did many other people. This was due in part to the rise of labor unions that fought hard to ensure that even low-skilled workers earned a living wage. But it was also due to the more subtle and perhaps counterintuitive factor we’ve already touched upon: the relative decline
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even the most basic skills willing to take their low-paid jobs. Osterman and Weaver do not discuss the reasons for this difficulty in attracting low-skilled workers, and it remains something of a mystery. But I believe I found at least part of the answer in Brodhead, Kentucky, a small town at
All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs · 8 Apr 2015 · 255pp · 92,719 words
worth it. I’d rather have something minimum wage and not deal with that.” But I came back and I’m still here.’ Unqualified or low-skilled workers used to be valued for the things they did – work that may have exacted a physical toll, but might leave them enough mental space for
Arrival City
by Doug Saunders · 22 Mar 2011 · 366pp · 117,875 words
fall into criminality or social conservatism. This happens when family-reunification migration is restricted or when countries rely on temporary guest-worker programs to attract low-skilled workers without their families, as Germany did in the 1970s and Canada and Australia are attempting today. When settlement of families is restricted, arrival cities and
The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon?
by Robert X. Cringely · 1 Jun 2014 · 232pp · 71,024 words
horror of the PM, one client could see and access the data of another. PMHell / August 11, 2013 / 2:43 pm Indian engineer: Too many low-skilled workers here Regarding your comment on emerging markets, I am a high performer (1-rater as they call it in IBM) for the last 3 years
Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016
by Ian Dunt · 11 Apr 2017 · 158pp · 45,927 words
arrangement, however. They would prefer a sector-by-sector work permit system. High-income, high-skill workers would be allowed into the UK. Low-income, low-skill workers wouldn’t. Free movement for bankers, passport control for plumbers. This option would also allow the government to create exemptions for low-pay industries which
Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna · 23 May 2016 · 437pp · 113,173 words
birth.56 Globally, some 17 million people migrate to a new country each year, in a variety of visa categories. They include 3.5 million low-skilled workers who migrate each year from countries such as the Philippines and India to the Middle East and elsewhere, and some 300,000 who cross the
Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein · 29 Oct 2016 · 332pp · 89,668 words
job. In fact, automation has caused the hollowing out of the wage structure; the highest-paid people continue to be highly paid, while middle- and low-skilled workers conduct a race to the bottom for lower-skilled jobs. Without some degree of redistribution and the provision of more public goods “such as food
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray · 3 May 2017 · 420pp · 126,194 words
are unemployed. Many do not have the skills necessary for high-end employment. So why import people to do low-skilled work when so many low-skilled workers already exist in Europe? Sometimes mass immigration is advocated because of the advantage it gives in supporting pensioners, sometimes because of the advantage it allegedly
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reality a huge number of low-skilled people who did not speak the language had been imported into a country with very little need for low-skilled workers. And while the government reluctantly tightened up its border procedures, political and community leaders continued to insist that there should be no borders and that
Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan · 15 Oct 2018 · 585pp · 151,239 words
, in short order, by both a surge in imports from China and an unusually large fall in manufacturing employment. These job losses were concentrated among low-skilled workers who had little chance of getting equally well-paid jobs in the future: for example, the clothing industry lost about half a million jobs in
Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends
by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott and Nazneen S. Mayadas · 19 Jan 2010 · 492pp · 70,082 words
the first 12 months of any claim) suffer particularly acute levels of unemployment and inactivity (Bloch, 2004). There is also evidence of exploitation, particularly among low-skilled workers, brutally evidenced by two tragic events: the death of 58 people in the back of a truck en route to the UK in 2000 and
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’s positive wage and employment effects depend at least in part on the substitutability of migrant workers; new migrants likely have small adverse impacts on low-skilled workers who came in previous waves of immigration. Further, some estimates suggest that migrants are a drain on social benefits, despite the fact that noncitizens are
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the 1960s saw the beginnings of a rationalization phase in the Swedish economy. Now, the type of labur sought after shifted toward 287 unskilled or low-skilled workers. In contrast to their counterparts a decade earlier, these workers were used more as a substitute for the native workforce than as a complement. While
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, New Zealand and Singapore (Table 22-1). These highly developed Western and Asian countries utilize immigration policy as a tool to resolve the shortage of low-skilled workers and certain highly skilled workers, notably in information technology (IT), health, and education (Constant and Zimmermann 2005). Asian countries in general are not so open
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; in 2008 the net immigration rates for Japan and South Korea were zero, and for Taiwan 0.04% (Table 22-1). However, the shortage of low-skilled workers since the late 1980s has forced the governments of these Asian countries to liberalize their immigration policy, at least for temporary immigrants. Although Korea and
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Labor Employment Services Act of 1992. According to this law, the admission of foreign workers is strictly for the purpose of alleviating the shortage of low-skilled workers in Taiwan. This is because, as Taiwan has become more industrialized, it has raised both the educational attainments and per capita income of its citizens
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machinery industries, and other capital and technological intensive industries had grown rapidly within the same period (Table 22-4). Thus the foreign workers policy for low-skilled workers has changed three times since 1992. Prior to mid-1997 the policy was to provide labor supply to labor-intensive industries and to major construction
Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman · 22 Nov 2016 · 602pp · 177,874 words
. Our ability as a country to embrace diversity is one of our greatest competitive advantages. We need to control low-skilled immigration so our own low-skilled workers are not priced out of jobs, while removing all limits on H-1B visas for foreign high-skilled knowledge workers. We should also double the
The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent · 20 Sep 2016 · 323pp · 90,868 words
growth in a few different ways. Low wages can encourage people to use more of some kinds of manual or service labour. As pay for low-skill workers stagnates, for example, more households might find it attractive to hire a house-cleaning service or a landscaping firm, to get nails done at a
The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne · 15 Nov 2015 · 336pp · 83,903 words
are also realising that graduates are no longer free from the kinds of risks and uncertainties previously thought to be the preserve of low-paid, low-skilled workers (Brown et al., 2011). This climate of uncertainty puts a strong premium on the ability of students to take an active approach to their employability
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl · 14 May 2018 · 463pp · 105,197 words
come? Most likely a mix of unskilled workers like Bishal and skilled ones as in our Google example. The illegal economy is currently dominated by low-skilled workers—strawberry pickers, nannies, gardeners, slaughterhouse workers. VIP would put this work on a legal footing, while channeling some of the surplus away from the employers
The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu · 15 Jun 2020 · 322pp · 84,580 words
.20191110; Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “What If Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?,” New York Times, 11 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/upshot/big-cities-low-skilled-workers-wages.html. 4. Joan Rosés and Nikolaus Wolf, “The Return of Regional Inequality: Europe from 1900 to
Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic · 9 Oct 2023
parts (landlords, gov ernment officials, and clergy), we get a total of six social classes. 31 The working class is composed of agricultural laborers and low-skilled workers outside agriculture ( gagistes inférieurs ) who together account for 70 percent of the active population. Their incomes are around half to 60 percent of the overall
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should not forget that free public education under socialism meant that, even without an ideological preference to improve the relative position of low-skilled workers, the compensatory differential between high-skilled and low-skilled workers had to be less. 11 The lower skill premium observed under socialism, in other words, should not be fully ascribed to
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ideological preferences. 12 Table 7.2 Relative Wages in Yugoslavia under Capitalism and Early Socialism Year 1938 1951 Low-skilled workers 1 1 Skilled workers 3.30 1.35 State administration (all employees) 1.66 1.03 White-collar employees (outside state administration) 2.00 1
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above as necessary for good work on income distribution. They even had somewhat of a political foundation because of social differentiation between high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Their main problem was that they focused on just one source of income: labor. Certainly, labor is quantitatively the largest source, but focusing on it
Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic · 23 Sep 2019
the economy has moved toward capitalism, and the wages of more efficient or more-skilled workers have gone up much more than the wages of low-skilled workers (at least until recently; see Luo and Zhu 2008, 15–17; Zhuang and Li 2016, 7). In one of the very rare papers that uses
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between regions, or between cities and villages, or between urban and rural workers, or between the private and the state sector, or between high- and low-skilled workers, or between men and women, inequality has increased for every such partition. It would be, I think, impossible to find any partition where inequality had
The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words
the airport previously reported to the Department of Transportation. III. While we tend to focus on “high-skilled” immigration, Silicon Valley was likewise built by “low-skilled” workers who assembled many of the tech industry’s best-known products. In the 1980s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that perhaps a quarter of
The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind · 20 Feb 2020
at Its Limit? Not for Employers,” New York Times, August 22, 2019. 24. Matthew Yglesias, “DREAM On: America Needs Much Bigger, Bolder Immigration Reform—for Low-Skilled Workers, Not Just Supergeniuses—to Boost the Economy,” Slate, June 20, 2012. 25. “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 10 Jun 2012 · 580pp · 168,476 words
on resources, diverting their attention away from replacing workers. Rather than across-the-board low interest rates (as now), which encourage the replacement even of low-skilled workers by machines, we could use investment tax credits to encourage investment; but the credits would be given only for investments that save resources and preserve
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Affected the Labor Share in Advanced Countries?,” IMF Working Paper, 2007, argues that technological change was more important than globalization, especially on the wages of low skilled workers.) But more recently, Paul Krugman has argued that the impact of globalization may be larger than was previously thought. “Trade and Inequality, Revisited,” Vox, June
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin · 9 Jun 2005
shop.63 Sweeping developments unrelated to electronics also benefited Fairchild Semiconductor and Bob Noyce. The increasing mechanization of agriculture in California freed up thousands of low-skilled workers for work in electronics assembly plants. An aggressive state-sponsored infrastructure-building spree changed zoning regulations and installed a network of roads and sewer pipes
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith · 26 Jun 2019 · 370pp · 107,983 words
-skilled textile jobs by the eighteenth century meant massive job displacement, a devaluation of weaving skills and the degradation of working conditions for the remaining low-skilled workers who were retained to operate the machines. Similar effects were seen in other newly mechanized industries, leading to the destruction of the once powerful guilds
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these jobs, the erosion of workers’ rights has started to become a serious social concern, resulting in the unreliable availability of work, depressed wages as low-skilled workers are interchangeable, dangerous working conditions, and denial of basic human comforts in the workplace. In the case of food-delivery service Deliveroo, the Guardian reported
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam · 12 Oct 2020 · 678pp · 160,676 words
, more widespread education means more equality, as the increased supply of high-skilled workers puts downward pressure on higher incomes, while the decreased supply of low-skilled workers puts upward pressure on lower incomes. That dynamic is offset by technological progress, which increases the demand for (and hence the incomes of) high-skilled
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workers and lowers the incomes of low-skilled workers. Hence, the title of the groundbreaking book that aims to explain the ups and downs of income equality over our period is The Race Between
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham · 27 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words
and greatly helped to emancipate women. And the industries that electricity and transportation helped create opened many middle-class job opportunities, even for medium- and low-skilled workers. Factory machines this time were complementary to workers, relieving them from heavy physical duty while still requiring them in great numbers. And drivers, telephone operators
Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
by Dani Rodrik · 12 Oct 2015 · 226pp · 59,080 words
What caused this dramatic change? One factor behind the rise in inequality was an increase in the “skill premium,” the gap between what high- and low-skilled workers earn. When economists first homed in on this gap beginning in the late 1980s, there was a plausible explanation at hand: globalization. The US economy
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had to put up with greater competition. As UCLA economist Edward Leamer put it in the early 1990s, “Our low-skill workers face a sea of low-paid, low-skilled workers around the world.”17 As a consequence, the gap between the wages of the two types of workers would increase. In fact, the theory had
Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage
by Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders · 1 Jul 2001 · 267pp · 79,905 words
individuals who would normally be employed in the middle of the earnings distribution are taking the lower paid jobs. This has ominous implications for the low-skilled workers who would normally have access to these jobs. ‘When there are insufficient jobs in aggregate this serves to bump the least skilled off the earnings
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other issues around low-paid jobs, Australian data are difficult to come by. Labour mobility figures in Australia show very little upward occupational mobility for low-skilled workers (ABS 1998, pp. 16–17) and research by Burgess and Campbell (1998) shows that the large growth in casual jobs during the 1990s did not
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey · 3 Apr 2014 · 464pp · 116,945 words
populations among the less skilled.8 The gap between too few high-skill workers and a massive reserve of unemployed and increasingly unemployable medium- and low-skill workers appears to be widening, while the definition of skills is evolving rapidly. So would it be possible for capital accumulation to move beyond the exponentials
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein · 5 May 2009 · 565pp · 164,405 words
-thirds agreed.22 Stolper-Samuelson does fail in at least one area by predicting that freer trade should decrease inequalities in developing nations by helping low-skilled workers. In fact, the opposite occurs: the most highly skilled industrial workers earn better pay in call centers and multinational-owned plants, increasing the gap between
The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson · 10 Oct 2018 · 482pp · 149,351 words
a whopping 10–15 per cent of national income in rich countries. As a result, our economies may have grown overall but workers, and especially low-skilled workers, aren’t seeing the fruits of this growth. It has been estimated for the US that if wages hadn’t fallen by this much, then
Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together
by Andrew Selee · 4 Jun 2018 · 359pp · 97,415 words
controllers, pilots, astronauts, emergency workers, and ordinary consumers, was one of the first communications equipment companies to discover the city. While earlier maquiladoras had used low-skilled workers, Plantronics needed people who could assemble precision equipment. And it also built its own design team of more than a hundred engineers drawn from Tijuana
Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath · 23 Jun 2014 · 401pp · 112,784 words
means-tested benefit, arbitrarily targeted on hourly wages rather than overall income, and arbitrarily funded through a ring-fenced tax on the employers who keep low-skilled workers off the dole’. There is an economistic way of looking at the world that sees things in that light. This is a vantage point from
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/339_Flexibility%20or%20Insecurity%20-%20final.pdf 49. David H. Autor and Susan N. Houseman, ‘Do temporary-help jobs improve labor market outcomes for low-skilled workers? Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2:3 (2010), pp. 96–128. 50. On the basis of a survey of around 1
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/papers/2010/4/jobs%20autor/04_jobs_autor.pdf Autor, David H. and Susan N. Houseman. ‘Do temporary-help jobs improve labor market outcomes for low-skilled workers? Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2:3 (2010), pp. 96–128. Beckett, Francis. Clem Attlee, Politico's Publishing, London, 2000. Bell
The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs · 2 Jun 2020
income in many countries, notably including the United States. Yet the ultimate effect of this tendency depends on two additional factors. To the extent that low-skilled workers can gain higher skills through increased education and training, the proportion of the workforce suffering from stagnant or declining earnings can be reduced. And even
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failing in three other dimensions of sustainable development. Inequalities are soaring, in part because of the differential effects of digital technologies on high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Environmental degradation is rampant, a reflection of a global economy that has reached nearly $100 trillion in annual output without taking care to ensure that
Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower · 12 Apr 2021 · 566pp · 160,453 words
rate, which seems to be highly responsive to employment opportunities for low-skilled men.45 Wage rises significantly lower the crime rate. Higher wages for low-skilled workers reduce both property and violent crime, as well as crime among adolescents.46 The impact of wages on crime is substantial; one study estimates that
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most likely to experience wage impacts, followed by native-born high school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to those of the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States. The study concluded that the literature on employment impacts finds little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment
Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell · 31 Aug 2015 · 877pp · 182,093 words
weakness of survey research in general— namely, that you can only survey survivors. Reduced employment of low-skilled workers in the wake of a minimum wage increase can take many forms. If all the businesses employing low-skilled workers were identical, then unemployment resulting from a minimum wage increase might be expected to be found in
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workers. But if, instead of surveying surviving firms after a minimum wage increase, data are collected on unemployment rates among particular groups of inexperienced and low-skilled workers, such as black teenagers, a more accurate picture of the effects of minimum wages on unemployment can be obtained. d About ten percent of the
The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk · 15 Feb 2018 · 497pp · 123,778 words
, so this story goes, have displaced millions of jobs.10 The rise of competitors from China to Bangladesh has lowered wages and reduced employment for low-skilled workers.11 Perhaps the citizens of democracies in North America and Western Europe just have to face up to the fact that the era of their
Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm · 18 May 2022
such risks, has parallels in a number of historical cases. Japan is a case in point because of starkly divergent unemployment risks between high- and low-skilled workers – a bifurcation that has been reinforced by a system of employment protection and company-provided benefits that substitute for labor mobility (Aoki 1988). In Latin
Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King · 5 May 2016 · 385pp · 111,113 words
accuracy. Amazon offers us a glimpse of something that we’ll see often in the future: automation technology reduces the need for and number of low-skilled workers and highly paid sales and marketing employees while creating an entirely new division within the company of highly skilled roboticists and AI software workers. We
Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page · 27 Nov 2018 · 543pp · 153,550 words
attend college slowed the growth in the number of college graduates, and a subsequent inflow of immigrants with low education levels increased the supply of low-skilled workers. At the same time, technological changes—the rise of automated manufacturing and the transition to a more digital economy—increased the relative value of educated
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A, α, β, and γ capture the technology and the relative value of the three types of labor. The relative market wage for high- and low-skilled workers is:7 Cause of inequality: Technological changes that favor educated workers increase β and decrease γ. These changes, along with increases in the supply of
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low-skilled workers, increase inequality. The next model, the positive feedback model, can explain the increased variation within professions. It focuses on the tail of the distribution and,
Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake · 4 Apr 2022 · 338pp · 85,566 words
economists Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Richard Blundell, and Rachel Griffith has shown that soft skills, particularly teamwork, are very important for helping wage progression for low-skilled workers and are all the more important if such workers are in high-tech firms (Aghion et al. 2019). Chapter 7 1. Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial
Economists and the Powerful
by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas · 30 Sep 2012 · 261pp · 103,244 words
of which saw changes in the state minimum wage. They found no evidence for employment loss, but strong evidence of an improved income situation for low-skilled workers in these industries. Neumark and Wascher (2007) did a number of studies in which they found a negative impact for young workers in France in
Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller · 14 Jun 2012 · 377pp · 97,144 words
laborers. They would spend more in restaurants, hire additional domestic servants, and consequently raise the salaries of the unskilled. Cognition enhancers would also allow some low-skilled workers who hadn’t been smart enough to become highly skilled professionals to find better jobs, which would benefit both them and those who remained in
The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope
by John A. Allison · 20 Sep 2012 · 348pp · 99,383 words
learn. Unemployment insurance provides an incentive for workers not to take a lower-paying job. Also, the minimum wage law keeps small businesses from hiring low-skilled workers at a wage rate that would allow their businesses to be profitable, so entry-level workers cannot gain the skills to become more productive and
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs · 1 Jan 2008 · 421pp · 125,417 words
poorest countries. The developed countries, meanwhile, are deeply conflicted internally about absorbing large numbers of low-skilled workers. The economics of such in-migration are more favorable than the politics. In economic terms, such in-migration of low-skilled workers tends to be a win for the source country, the host country, and the migrant. A
Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith · 17 Aug 2015 · 353pp · 91,520 words
entirely of innovative, creative employees. These agile organizations draw on employees and outsourced partners spread around the globe. Some of these organizations hire a few low-skilled workers; many hire none. With the proliferation of these companies, career options for creative problem-solvers will become ever more abundant, while options for hoop-jumpers
The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
by Dani Rodrik · 23 Dec 2010 · 356pp · 103,944 words
—in agriculture, say, or with developing countries—were different because they pitted domestic groups starkly against each other. They threatened farming groups, garment producers, or low-skilled workers with sharp income losses. So these types of trade were heavily circumscribed. Under the GATT priorities rested solidly in the domestic policy agenda, and this
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a sophisticated financial sector. But the central challenge South Africa confronted was the same: where would the jobs needed to employ the large surplus of low-skilled workers come from? South Africa had undergone a remarkable political and economic transformation since its democratic transition in 1994. Following the end of white minority rule
Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by Alasdair Gilchrist · 27 Jun 2016
that were at risk. Although it might have been attractive for CEOs at the time to reduce the payload and the operational expense and offload low-skilled workers, while investing in skilled IT generalists who could perform a variety of task, the premise was flawed. 243 244 Chapter 15 | Getting From Here to
Men Without Work
by Nicholas Eberstadt · 4 Sep 2016 · 126pp · 37,081 words
-educated Americans have actually suffered a reduction in their wages relative to other groups. A number of studies have identified declining labor market opportunities for low-skilled workers and related stagnant real wage growth as the most likely explanation for the decline of prime-age male labor force participation, at least for the
End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman · 30 Apr 2012 · 267pp · 71,123 words
skills is somewhat similar: as time goes by, they may find themselves demoted, at least in the eyes of potential employers, to the status of low-skilled workers, which will mean that their education goes to waste. A second way in which the slump undermines our future is through low business investment. Businesses
Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek · 22 Dec 2016 · 116pp · 31,356 words
-paid workforce of warehouse workers who are subject to incredibly comprehensive systems of surveillance and control. These firms simply continue the secular trend of outsourcing low-skill workers while retaining a core of well-paid high-skill labourers. On a broader scale, all of the post-2008 net employment gains in America have
"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration
by Aviva Chomsky · 23 Apr 2018 · 219pp · 62,816 words
A Note on Terminology Introduction, 2018 Introduction, 2007 PART ONE · IMMIGRANTS AND THE ECONOMY Myth 1. Immigrants take American jobs Myth 2. Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages Myth 3. Unions oppose immigration because it harms the working class Myth 4. Immigrants don’t pay taxes Myth 5. Immigrants
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to carry out the deportations). Unemployment during the Depression, like unemployment today, simply had very little to do with immigration. MYTH 2 IMMIGRANTS COMPETE WITH LOW-SKILLED WORKERS AND DRIVE DOWN WAGES Wages in the United States have indeed been falling with respect to prices, and with respect to profits, since the 1960s
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’ need for cheap labor in the past, and continues to do so today. So let’s return to the original question: do immigrants compete with low-skilled workers for low-paying jobs? Yes. But the reason that this competition exists is because too many people are deprived of rights. The proposals for immigration
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, 1940 to Date,” ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.txt or www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1.pdf. MYTH 2: IMMIGRANTS COMPETE WITH LOW-SKILLED WORKERS AND DRIVE DOWN WAGES 1. Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity,” New York Times, August 28, 2006
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
by Robert D. Putnam · 10 Mar 2015 · 459pp · 123,220 words
that premise.5 The costs of underinvesting in poor kids are even greater in an era of globalization, because of a “skills mismatch” between what low-skilled workers can do and what employers need in an age of rapid technological change. This leads, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz put it
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt · 14 Jun 2018 · 531pp · 125,069 words
. There is a range of reasonable opinions on many factual questions. (For example: How much does raising the minimum wage cause employers to hire fewer low-skilled workers? How much of an influence do prenatal hormones have on the differing toy and play preferences of boys versus girls?) But students in politically homogeneous
Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
by Stephen D. King · 14 Jun 2010 · 561pp · 87,892 words
numbers of low-skilled Bulgarians and Romanians coming into the UK will have to be offset by a reduction in the numbers of non-EU low-skilled workers. In a sly announcement on 8 April 2009, the UK government declared, first, that ‘Strict working restrictions for Eastern Europeans will not be scrapped’ and
Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry
by Steven Rattner · 19 Sep 2010 · 394pp · 124,743 words
high levels of skill and intellectual content, like technology and financial services. We simply cannot win with prosaic, commoditylike products that require large numbers of low-skilled workers. As tough as recent decades have been for Detroit's Big Three, the car industry is better positioned to compete than many other U.S
Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System
by Colin Yeo; · 15 Feb 2020 · 393pp · 102,801 words
been degree-level students in the UK. Tier Three of the points-based system was already dead on arrival in 2008. It was intended for ‘low-skilled’ workers in specific industries, such as agriculture and food processing. Programmes like the venerable Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme, which allowed for the temporary and seasonal recruitment
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time. The politics of immigration fundamentally changed and the case for high-skilled migration had, if anything, been made too successfully. The vital contribution of ‘low-skilled’ workers was minimised and dismissed right across the political spectrum following EU expansion, and the new low-paid EU migrants were massively taken for granted. While
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job, labelling them disdainfully as low-skilled underplays how dirty, dangerous and demeaning yet also critical their roles are. The redesignation of these labourers from ‘low-skilled workers’ to ‘key workers’ during the coronavirus crisis was both welcome and overdue, but it would be optimistic to think this change of attitude is likely
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will be illegally resident and will also, obviously, lack proof of lawful status. It will not be well-educated professionals who are caught out, but low-skilled workers with poor language skills and other vulnerable groups. There will be no easy route back to legality, either, as the government says that ‘good reason
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Democrats 1 Lilley, Peter 1, 2, 3 Lindholme detention centre 1 local authorities 1, 2 London Metropolitan University 1 long residence 1 lorries 1, 2 ‘low-skilled’ workers 1, 2 Maastricht Treaty (1992) 1 Mckay, James, Lord 1 McKee, Prof Martin 1 McLeod, Shannoy (deported) 1, 2, 3 Major, John 1 ‘managed migration
The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer · 12 May 2010 · 247pp · 68,918 words
remains a typical Persian Gulf monarchy. Emirati nationals, who represent just 20 percent of a population of about 5 million people made up largely of low-skilled workers from developing countries in South and Southeast Asia, accept heavily subsidized goods and services in return for political loyalty. Dubai’s colorful ruler, Sheikh Mohammed
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden · 20 Sep 2021 · 375pp · 102,166 words
that there are multiple opportunities to intervene in the connection between genotype and a complex phenotype. Changing the health care system so that wages for “low-skilled” workers were not dragged down by the immense cost of employer-provided health insurance would not change anything about people’s DNA—but it might weaken
Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi · 14 May 2020 · 511pp · 132,682 words
workers could earn a decent living have been reduced to a state of rusting decay brought about by declines in labor’s share of profits, low-skilled workers’ wages, labor force participation, and the start-up rate of new firms (due to barriers erected by powerful incumbents).7 Yet, our elected officials continue
The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman · 1 Jan 2013 · 514pp · 152,903 words
one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. “With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in
Commodore: A Company on the Edge
by Brian Bagnall · 13 Sep 2005 · 781pp · 226,928 words
lacked Seiler’s university background, he was often very effective at repairing the boards. “He fixed more boards than I did,” says Seiler. Dozens of low-skilled workers assembled the game machines, turning out dozens every day. “It was all these crazy Cubans building these pinball machines,” says Seiler. “I think part of
Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato · 31 Jul 2016 · 370pp · 102,823 words
middle and bottom. Across advanced economies, higher-skilled workers claimed an additional 6.5 percentage points of the labour share between 1980 and 2001, whereas low-skilled workers saw their portion shrink by 4.8 percentage points.22 Meanwhile, those at the very top of the income distribution have done exceedingly well. In
The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt · 15 Mar 2010
(2006: 14) claim that ‘at least 7 out of every 10 econ omists broadly agree’ that: a minimum wage increases unemployment among young workers and low-skilled workers. Mankiw et al. (2002: 32) claim that this proposition was endorsed by 79 per cent of economists – a number they call ‘an overwhelming majority’. Let
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reported in the textbooks. What we have yet to explain is why moderate increases in the minimum wage might not reduce employment of low-wage, low-skilled workers. There are several possible explanations, all of which depend on ‘frictions’ – imperfect information or mobility costs. One category of explanation is the ‘efficiency wage’ thesis
The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen · 27 Feb 2017 · 287pp · 82,576 words
your way out—to Jersey City, or easy-commute towns like Maplewood, New Jersey—you see the cost of renting or buying skyrocketing. For a low-skilled worker, the higher wages in those cities do not always make up for the much higher rental costs. And the reason is that those cities are
Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately · 6 Nov 2014 · 352pp · 104,411 words
decade of its ‘great stagnation’ (1964–85). The Stakhanovites of freedom of movement appeared in the main in small cities. They were categorized as ‘young, low-skilled workers, occupying positions requiring low qualifications and yielding low wages’, and served as cannon fodder during the USSR’s last, futile attempt to win the Cold
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the car’, Tracy Nichols Busch, A Class on Wheels: Avtodor and the ‘automobilization’ of the Soviet Union, 1927–1935, Washington, Georgetown University, 2003. 159 ‘young, low-skilled workers, occupying positions requiring low qualifications’, quoted in ‘Suburbanisation, employment change and commuting in the Tallinn Metropolitan Area’ (2005), Institute of Geography, University of Tartu: http
Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane · 28 Feb 2017 · 346pp · 90,371 words
explained because people with skills in high demand in sectors such as IT and finance have seen their earnings rise, reflecting their superior productivity, while low skilled workers have fallen behind. Under marginal productivity theory the solution to inequality is to increase education and job training opportunities for workers in order to increase
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab · 7 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words
and greatly helped to emancipate women. And the industries that electricity and transportation helped create opened many middle-class job opportunities, even for medium- and low-skilled workers. Factory machines this time were complementary to workers, relieving them from heavy physical duty while still requiring them in great numbers. And drivers, telephone operators
The Classical School
by Callum Williams · 19 May 2020 · 288pp · 89,781 words
saw that they could serve some useful purpose in providing benefits and security to workers. After all, he clearly recognised the uneven bargaining power which low-skilled workers faced when looking for a job. Sounding almost like Marx, Marshall argued that “when any group of them [unskilled labourers] suspends work, there are large
Hard Landing
by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr. · 1 Jan 1995 · 726pp · 210,048 words
found retailing exquisitely boring. Inventory automation didn’t begin to approach the intellectual challenge of airline reservations. Nor did he particularly like managing low-wage, low-skill workers. And he perceived a caste system in retailing in which merchants were Brahmans and everybody in the back office was scum. Bob Crandall had to
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer · 4 Mar 2014 · 559pp · 169,094 words
a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties—America’s masses fed on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card, low-skill workers structurally unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren’t coming back, the banks in Gotham leeching the last
The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America
by Sarah Kendzior · 24 Apr 2015 · 172pp · 48,747 words
stores departed, those without Internet access and credit cards can struggle to procure goods. But the fall of the mall is a bigger problem for low-skill workers. Materialism may remain rampant, but now its spaces are secret. Retail work has been replaced with jobs in online shopping warehouses where “pickers” labor unseen
Stacy Mitchell
by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)
Dorgan, “Jobs in America,” speech delivered on the Senate floor on Nov. 4, 2003; Greg Barrett, “Forces of Global Economy Usher In Uneasy Change for Low-Skilled Workers,” Gannett News Service, Dec. 3, 2002. 38. “American Bargain Shopping Holds Down Wages of Foreign Workers,” NBC News Transcripts, Dateline NBC, June 17, 2005; “How
What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill · 31 Aug 2022 · 451pp · 125,201 words
towards nationalism and immigration have life-changing implications for the hundreds of millions of international migrants;51 one estimate found that, on average, for a low-skill worker, moving to the United States boosts their annual income by over $15,000 per year.52 And it’s not only people who are affected
Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly · 4 Oct 2017 · 356pp · 112,271 words
cheaper, that might have a worrying knock-on effect. For every biggish SME, there is a smaller plant nearby, employing perhaps 10 to 15 relatively low-skilled workers making parts for that bigger company. Cheaper British imports mean that smaller companies may be priced out, with no other potential clients for their products
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone · 14 Oct 2013 · 380pp · 118,675 words
, it hired tens of thousands of temporary employees each holiday season and usually kept on about 10 to 15 percent of them permanently. These generally low-skilled workers, toiling for ten to twelve dollars an hour in places where there were few other good jobs, could find Amazon to be a somewhat cruel
Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia
by Ray Taras · 15 Dec 2009 · 267pp · 106,340 words
from Bulgaria and Romania. One report summed up their situation. “When the two countries joined the European Union in January, Britain capped the number of low-skilled workers it would admit to 20,000, despite offering an open door to migrants from new EU states such as Poland three years ago.”7 If
Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States
by Bernadette Hanlon · 18 Dec 2009
ordinances. Baltimore City, one of the first U.S. cities to pass a living-wage law, successfully pushed for legislation that ensures higher wages for low-skilled workers involved in city contracts. State and local governments are stepping in when the federal government has not. Expanding the living wage to move beyond just
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. More federal and state funding is needed for fiscally stressed inner-ring suburbs. Other issues to consider are affordable housing and a living wage for low-skilled workers. Suburban poverty rose in U.S. metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2000. Some regional variation is apparent. Poverty, whether among inner-ring or outer suburbs
The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Matthew Williams · 23 Mar 2021 · 592pp · 125,186 words
and services. Migration to these areas, concentrated in the North and on the south coast of England, is largely comprised of younger, non-English-speaking, low-skilled workers. The combination of unemployed locals and an abundance of employed migrants, competing for scarce resources in a time of recession and cutbacks, creates a greater
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer · 19 Jan 2016 · 558pp · 168,179 words
minimum wage laws: In an interview with the author, Roy Cordato, a vice president at the John Locke Foundation, argued that “the minimum wage hurts low-skilled workers, by pricing them out of the market,” and that concern about worker exploitation was “the kind of thinking that comes from Karl Marx.” In Cordato
Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman · 21 Mar 2017 · 441pp · 113,244 words
: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work that crossing the border from Latin America into the United States “appears to make the productivity of a low-skilled worker ten to twenty times higher, based on the wage differential.” Education entrepreneur and seastead humanitarian Michael Strong asks us to “[i]magine if you could
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Two Countries Compare? Visualised,” Datablog (blog), Guardian (UK), April 8, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2013/apr/08/south-korea-v-north-korea-compared. “low-skilled worker ten to twenty times higher”: Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), 136
Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment
by Lucas Chancel · 15 Jan 2020 · 191pp · 51,242 words
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, and subsequently in the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, put low-skilled workers in developed countries in competition with those in emerging and developing countries. The increase in inequality in developed countries was predicted and explained more than
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. · 24 Sep 2019 · 242pp · 71,943 words
sad irony to much of the maintenance of modern development. Traditional building materials require a base level of ongoing maintenance, tasks perfectly suited for the low-skilled worker willing to learn a trade. Modern maintenance-free materials don’t have these ongoing costs, which seems like a good thing, until they fail. That
Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin · 27 Apr 2020 · 239pp · 62,005 words
, by the way, because if it was ever passed, the higher wages would crush small businesses—including Walmart’s competition.) Artificially enforcing higher wages for low-skilled workers always ends badly because it ushers in automation, which replaces people with computers. Just look at McDonald’s, where many cashiers have now been replaced
China's Future
by David Shambaugh · 11 Mar 2016 · 261pp · 57,595 words
process the comparative advantage of countries like China begins to erode—thus causing a fundamental shift in the structure of the labor market (especially for low-skilled workers)—and forces them into the Middle Income Trap. Thus the “trap” (precisely what China faces now) is that the economy needs to transition up the