Muddling For Solutions

[26 Inf]

I'm posting this because I just discovered this guy, John Mauldin. I'm probably the last person in the world who hasn't heard of John Mauldin, so thanks to Dorsai for setting me onto him.

After spending several hours reading Mauldin's works, I think he has a pretty good idea of what is going on, at least he puts my feelings about what is going on into words. What I've posted is, in essence and introduction to the article/essay. I've posted the link at the end:

Those who experienced the 1930s as adults are mostly gone now, but they left notes. We have a pretty good record of what that period was like. It wasn’t fun to begin with—then it got worse.

This year, I’ve written several times about the 1930s parallels that Ray Dalio and others see with our situation today. The similarities are indeed striking, but there are also important differences. Employment, for one.

Back then, a huge part of the working-age population couldn’t find jobs because there were none to find. Now, the unemployment rate is at record lows. Yet the level of unhappiness is not all that different. Why? How can people have jobs and still be so dissatisfied?

Employment is not a binary condition. Jobs vary qualitatively: wages, benefits, working conditions, security, and more. Further, current conditions include assumptions from the past.

Six+ decades of steadily improving worker conditions have been eroding since the Great Recession. Humans look for easy cause and effect explanations, because we want to blame something or someone when things aren’t the way we want—but it’s not that easy. And it’s particularly difficult when the actual cause is not something we can easily change.

To put it succinctly, if mass unemployment characterized the Great Depression, mass under-employment characterizes today’s economy. Millions don’t earn the wages they need to live comfortably, or they aren’t able to work in the field for which they feel qualified, or they fear losing their jobs, or they’re otherwise discontented.

Should just being “employed” make people/workers happy? On one level, any job is better than no job. But we also derive much of our identities and self-esteem from our work. If you aren’t happy with it, you’re probably not happy generally. Unhappy people can still vote and are often easy marks for shameless politicians to manipulate. Their spending patterns change, too. So it ends up affecting everyone, even those who are happy.

Today we’ll discuss this problem and the importance (and difficulty) of finding solutions. Just for the record, I write about this repeatedly, trying to look at it from different angles because it is going to be one of the most contentious and difficult problems our society (globally) faces in the 2020s. As both citizens and investors, not to mention parents and family, we need to think about this now.

https://www.mauldineconomics.com/fro...-for-solutions

[flenna]

Interesting, I have not read his work either. We have record unemployment, food and transportation availability unlike anytime in history. We have an obesity epidemic (especially among the poor) and everyone has a new car or two in the driveway. Yet people are leaving their chosen religion in epic numbers and humanism and secularism are on the rise. We have banned God from the public arena, replaced Him in schools with a multitude of humanistic and hedonistic studies and turned to government for our guidance. I think the problem is complex on the surface but below it is really the huge spiritual void in today's modern society.

[ABNAK]

I have long been of the line of thinking that you don't have to love your job, you just have to be able to tolerate it. This notion of "following your dreams" is all fine and well for La-La Land, but in reality most of us tolerate our jobs because they pay the bills and allow us a decent lifestyle.

For instance, my dream job would be owning a gun shop and doing gun-related stuff. But guess what? Sure, it's possible, but how likely is it to let me live the life I want like my medical field job does? I've been in said field for almost 30 years; however, I don't watch medical shows, read medical journals or articles (unless it's a health condition that affects me or my family), and when I leave work each day it's like turning off a light switch until I have to go back. I'm not "into" medical stuff. It can be a drag quite often, sometimes depressing and more often annoying. I'm not a "people person", but I deal with it and have for nearly three decades. It pays pretty well and allows me to live the life I want to. Club Med it ain't but I can't complain too much considering I chose it long ago, and in a little over 8 years I can say "Sayonara" and never look back.

Bottom line? For too long young people have been conditioned to think that they need to "follow your dreams" and must do for a living what they most cherish in life. WRONG!!! You need to find something that you can tolerate, something that might actually be in demand (gasp!), even if it isn't your lifelong ambition. Maybe that generic business or arts degree is why you're living in Mom's basement and bitching about how "The Man" has f****d you over.

[flenna]

I have long been of the line of thinking that you don't have to love your job, you just have to be able to tolerate it. This notion of "following your dreams" is all fine and well for La-La Land, but in reality most of us tolerate our jobs because they pay the bills and allow us a decent lifestyle.

For instance, my dream job would be owning a gun shop and doing gun-related stuff. But guess what? Sure, it's possible, but how likely is it to let me live the life I want like my medical field job does? I've been in said field for almost 30 years; however, I don't watch medical shows, read medical journals or articles (unless it's a health condition that affects me or my family), and when I leave work each day it's like turning off a light switch until I have to go back. I'm not "into" medical stuff. It can be a drag quite often, sometimes depressing and more often annoying. I'm not a "people person", but I deal with it and have for nearly three decades. It pays pretty well and allows me to live the life I want to. Club Med it ain't but I can't complain too much considering I chose it long ago, and in a little over 8 years I can say "Sayonara" and never look back.

Bottom line? For too long young people have been convinced that they need to "follow your dreams" and must do for a living what they most cherish in life. WRONG!!! You need to find something that you can tolerate, something that might be actually in demand (gasp!), even if it isn't your lifelong ambition. Maybe that generic business or arts degree is why you're living in Mom's basement and bitching about how "The Man" has f****d you over.

To paraphrase Drew Carey: "So you hate your job? Well, there is a support group for people like you. It is called Everybody, and they meet every Friday night at the bar".

[ABNAK]

To paraphrase Drew Carey: "So you hate your job? Well, there is a support group for people like you. It is called Everybody, and they meet every Friday night at the bar".

I like that one! Pretty much sums it up.

"Suck it up buttercup!"

[lsllc]

While interesting, and there are valid points, I disagree.

We have two generations that demand instant gratification that lack the discipline to save and to resist marketing that they need to live a lavish lifestyle and buy everything they want...on credit.

Do we need 70,000 trucks with smart everything, backup cameras, mobile hotspots, etc?

Do we need smart homes, high speed access, five different streaming services, 72” 4K televisions, and a new smartphone every six months?

Those behaviors are why people are perpetually broke and in debt.

More reasonable living and not adopting every new technology will help people live within their means. Most Americans are are wealthier than 99% of the rest of the world.


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[ABNAK]

While interesting, and there are valid points, I disagree.

We have two generations that demand instant gratification that lack the discipline to save and to resist marketing that they need to live a lavish lifestyle and buy everything they want...on credit.

Do we need 70,000 trucks with smart everything, backup cameras, mobile hotspots, etc?

Do we need smart homes, high speed access, five different streaming services, 72” 4K televisions, and a new smartphone every six months?

Those behaviors are why people are perpetually broke and in debt.

More reasonable living and not adopting every new technology will help people live within their means. Most Americans are are wealthier than 99% of the rest of the world.

I don't have a problem with people having that stuff if they can afford it. If you're a broke-dick or unable to afford those things (maybe some of them?) then you live in the 1990's. If you make enough to buy that stuff and still pay all your bills then you get to live in 2020. Pretty simple.

Of course if someone desires all the bells and whistles and is okay with living in perpetual debt/on credit, that's their decision and it's a free country. However, that irresponsible financial behavior often leads to voting in a more Leftward (read: socialist) manner because the sense of entitlement convinces them that they're being screwed over and it's somebody else's fault, not their own.

[lsllc]

I don't have a problem with people having that stuff if they can afford it. If you're a broke-dick or unable to afford those things (maybe some of them?) then you live in the 1990's. If you make enough to buy that stuff and still pay all your bills then you get to live in 2020. Pretty simple.

Of course if someone desires all the bells and whistles and is okay with living in perpetual debt/on credit, that's their decision and it's a free country. However, that irresponsible financial behavior often leads to voting in a more Leftward (read: socialist) manner because the sense of entitlement convinces them that they're being screwed over and it's somebody else's fault, not their own.

I don’t disagree with you one bit. But this is why people don’t live “comfortably” as stated by the OP. That notion is BS. People’s choices are their problem, not the lack of good jobs.


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[ABNAK]

I don’t disagree with you one bit. But this is why people don’t live “comfortably” as stated by the OP. That notion is BS. People’s choices are their problem, not the lack of good jobs.

This is increasingly becoming a service-oriented job market, i.e. manufacturing jobs are nowhere near where they were in the 1960's for instance. Automation is seeing to that. The days of $35 an hour with full bennies to bolt a bumper on a car on an assembly line are gone for the most part. Most service-related jobs don't pay that kind of money. You need a skill, and that means perhaps taking a job in a field that you may not necessarily prefer to but is in demand (like the medical field for instance....people are always going to be sick). HVAC is another example; hot, dirty, requires good knees [LOL], and at times crawling around where you would rather not. However, it pays pretty well....I know, I have just shelled out everything but my first-born this past summer to fix and then replace mine!. So there are good paying jobs out there, just gotta be willing to do them.

I might also add that good paying jobs don't always require a bachelor's degree. Most technical schools aren't a BS or BA program. Good way to avoid racking up enormous debt right off the bat from student loans.

[26 Inf]

People’s choices are their problem, not the lack of good jobs.

I'm not going to argue that people's choice are not PART of the problem, just that it is not the total problem.

Let me bore you: I retired quite comfortably about three and a half years ago, by quite comfortably I mean I began taking more from my brokerage account than I had been taking home while working. After a couple years of waking up, going to the range and shooting, returning to town for coffee with buds, and riding my motorcycle I became kind of depressed because I had no purpose, per se. I had done volunteer work through my church while working, occasionally even taking vacation to go on bigger projects. When I tried volunteer more 'full time' after retirement, I quickly ran into a situation where it became apparent that they were having to find stuff for me to do, so we parted ways.

In short, I found myself at loose ends. I decided I needed to get a job. Not just any job, a part-time job that gave me week-ends off, and allowed me to shoot in the mornings if I wanted, plus go to coffee. I ended up slinging freight from 9:00P to 1:00A for $12.00 an hour, less than a third of the hourly rate I retired at. Strangely enough, or maybe not so strange, I like the work. And it gives me a 'purpose.'

When I set out to figure for myself what a minimum livable wage was, I came up with slightly less that $13.00 and hour for a two breadwinner household. So this ought to be a pretty livable job, except it isn't.

Why? Because, in order to maximize shareholder value, stores like ours, run a skeleton crew of full time employees and rely on 'disposable' part time help to run the store. Increasingly this is the model for service industry and retail jobs. So I work with folks who always get less than 30 hours a week and, in our case, a schedule that doesn't include set days off (my job is the only area of the store with set days off). The random days off hampers your ability to get a second job somewhat.

This is the reality for a good percentage of folks. The other day I was talking with my ex-wife, she's a nurse and one of the daughters is thinking about going to nursing school. My ex told me she didn't know about long-term, because the hospitals and doctors offices are following the same trend. She told me she is sometimes the only RN on her SNU pod at night, she usually has four to six CNA/CMA's working under her.

Yep, there are good jobs if you have the skill set, but what happens when everyone goes to a vo-tech and becomes a welder - welder pay goes to shit.

You really don't want to read this one, which I also agree with. If you read it understand that one of the problems I see is that too many members of the semi-protected class only care about themselves:

https://www.mauldineconomics.com/fro...fe-on-the-edge