Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
David Foster Use of mechanical tools may improve language skills.
The logistics crisis as an introduction to concentration risk.
Thousands of Chinese photographs saved from recycling.
Green shoots for nuclear energy–in the EU?
Why the ‘woke’ won’t debate.
Teams solve problems faster when they are more cognitively diverse.
The psychological and social costs of the college admissions game and the college treadmill.
This post argues that the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster, introduced in 1949, is the best toaster ever built.
I’m not much of a toaster expert…when there is toasting to be done around here, we mostly use the broiler…but do the toaster aficionados, assuming we have any such here, agree with the assessment?
In any case, the post raises an interesting question: what other types of products are there in which one particular historical product model is so excellent that it has never since been improved, or even matched?
It’s well-known that there are currently a lot of jobs going begging, even as employers offer higher pay; see for example this article. Bernie Sanders offers his explanation: he suggests that the problem lies in the ratio of CEO pay growth to worker pay growth since 1978, and “Maybe the problem isn’t a so-called ‘worker shortage.’ Maybe — just maybe — the working class of this country has finally had enough.”
I don’t think Bernie Sanders has a whole lot of experience with this whole ‘working’ thing, so it seems unlikely that he really understands what is going on.
Not very common, I think, for someone to turn down a job because someone at a level stratospherically above him makes a whole lot more money than what he is being offered. Do people really decide against a job at Wal-Mart because Doug McMillon got paid $20.9 million in 2020? Or decide not to go workin’ on the CSX railroad because of James Foote’s compensation package of $15.3 million? While people are very concerned with comparative pay levels, they are usually most concerned about the pay of people doing comparable work or those one or two levels above them (or below them) organizationally.
So what are the factors that are actually keeping so many jobs from attracting workers?
One factor, I think, is simple inertia: people who have been out of the workforce for several months during Covid lockdowns may be delaying going back to work, even though they know they will need to eventually. Another factor is the difficulties with child care / education…even when school are physically open, it’s hard to know how long it will be until they are locked down again, so you can’t count on them for a predictable schedule…and also, there are probably a fair number of people not very enthused about sending their kids back to public school at all, given what they’ve learned about them over the past year.
There are also people who are doing work off-books, and may find that by avoiding FICA and taxes…and any reduction in means-tested benefits…they can do better than they’d do at a full-time job.
Certainly one factor in reluctance to go back to work lies in the unnecessarily unpleasant nature of too many jobs…I’m not talking about jobs that, say, involve working in foundries in high temperatures or working outdoors on commercial fishing boats in winter, but rather retail and customer service jobs that feature extreme micromanagement plus schedules that change from week to week. See Zeynep Ton’s book The Good Jobs Strategy for more on this point. (my review here) And the enforcement of political correctness, also, makes quite a few workplaces unpleasant places to be.
And there is a feeling on the part of many people that they can’t get ahead, because of the importance of credentialism and contacts. I’m sure there are a lot of people in low-level positions in banks who would make excellent branch managers, but are not considered for these jobs because they don’t have college degrees…also, branch managers who are not considered for region executive jobs because they don’t have MBAs, and people who do have MBAs who can’t break into investment banking because their MBA is not from a ‘top’ school. The importance of credentialism varies widely by industry and by specific company within an industry, of course, I suspect many people think it’s more all-encompassing than it actually is, and this is demoralizing to them and creates a ‘why bother?’ mentality.
Finally, there is the problem of skill mismatch: the jobs that are open will often require skills that the potential applicants don’t have, even when unnecessary credential requirements are eliminated. (Although one would think that the trend toward jobs that can be done remotely would mitigate this problem to a considerable extent, by broadening the geography from which people can be drawn)
What else?
We’ve discussed some of the findings and recommendations made by Ryan Petersen of Flexport with regard to the West Coast seaport snarl-ups. I see that the company, which defines itself as a digital freight forwarder, is going to be hiring quite a few people–list of openings at their website:
https://www.flexport.com
The company says that many of the jobs, especially those in sales and software development, do not require specific logistics experience.
Andy Kessler, writing in the WSJ, notes that the Intel 4004 microprocessor was introduced to the market on November 15, 1971.
Here’s a history of the project, and here’s an article which describes some of the related projects that were going on at other companies.
Busicom’s decision to give Intel the rights to sell the 4004 for non-calculator applications in exchange for a break on prices–rather than royalties or equity or warrants in Intel–has to rank as one of the most expensive business mistakes ever.