Results for “those new service sector jobs” 170 found
Assorted links
1. How to earn money trolling dating sites for hot, thin white women (those new service sector jobs).
2. What are the most edited Wikipedia articles? And a critique of the internet.
4. A chess grandmaster examines Piketty’s claim about rates of return. And Krugman on where the Piketty debate is at now.
5. Stephen Williamson is moving full-time to the St. Louis Fed…and will continue blogging.
Assorted links
1. Rent-a-man (those new service sector jobs). And let your drone take your dog for a walk.
4. What can economics learn from video games?
5. Turtles all the way down? Well, some of the way down.
6. Caplan responds to Bauman in a classical Caplan post. And Jeffrey Sachs responds to Bill Gates.
7. N.T. Wright (a former bishop), Ross Douthat, and Peter Thiel video on a bunch of things, including theology.
8. Getting a get.
Assorted links Monday
2. Those new service sector jobs (R. Kelly impersonator sought)
3. Sherpa pay is 2k-6k per season, compared to a median income of $540. Their lives are insured for up to 23k.
4. Join Slate Plus.
5. Is Piketty misreading Balzac? And Rajiv Sethi has many good points on Piketty, not just the usual stuff.
Assorted links
1. The McDonalds tasting menu.
2. Purva paksha.
3. Some more on those new service sector jobs. “”I bet there are many more people who are unfaithful than are Jewish,” Biderman remembers thinking.” Washington D.C. is a clear number one for membership.
4. “Your vacuum might rent an attachment from the neighbor’s vacuum without telling you.”
Why France is underrated
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Since the West European economic boom ended in the 1970s, the French civil service has been at best a mixed blessing. French administrators have gotten a lot done, reflecting their impeccable education and internal culture. But they have also helped to make the French economy overly static and too reliant on bureaucracy. A lazier, less activist civil service might have been better.
Fast forward to 2023. War and conflict are now more common on the global scene, a trend that shows no signs of abating. Populist governments are on the rise, and China and Russia are active and restless. None of those problems is easy to solve, and they all require greater involvement from the public sector. Nations with high-quality leadership and civil-service traditions will stand a better chance of navigating the turmoil.
So the bureaucracy that was once a hindrance to France may now turn out to be a comparative advantage. And at a time when governance seems to be deteriorating around the world, Macron continues to have a reputation as a relatively responsible leader.
This year has shown how this advantage plays out. Post-pandemic France has been a bit of a mix, with soaring energy prices, inflation, rising interest rates, continuation of the Ukraine war, labor strikes and protests, and a variety of European migration crises. Yet France avoided a credit downgrade and the French economy continued to create more jobs. Performance has hardly been perfect and the risk of recession remains, but France has done better than might have been expected 18 months ago.
I also consider the relatively successful French start-up scene, including in AI.
Saturday assorted links
1. Those new, super-duper specific service sector jobs, Federal Reserve edition.
2. The culture that is Korean email etiquette — “suffer a lot.”
3. The rise of the “extremely productive” researcher — a paper every five days? (Did they suffer a lot?)
4. Phil Magness appointed to a chair at the Independent Institute.
5. Preliminary results against lupus and other autoimmune diseases.
Sunday assorted links
1. Beauty induces higher stock market participation and thus higher returns.
2. “Afuera!”
3. Sri Lankan food is becoming more popular.
4. Those old service sector jobs. Circa 1933, with Einstein.
5. The new Katherine Rundell book (UK only) is receiving rave reviews (Times of London).
6. New Knausgaard novel is coming.
7. Markets in everything, security breach division, dept. of uh-oh.
Saturday assorted links
How much smaller will big business become?
At least on the tech side:
Consider the most prestigious service that generates images using AI, a company called Midjourney. It has a total of 11 full-time employees. Perhaps more are on the way, but that is remarkably few workers for a company that is becoming widely known in its field.
Part of the trick, of course, is that a lot of the work is done by computers and artificial intelligence. I don’t think this will lead to mass unemployment, because history shows that workers have typically managed to move from automating sectors into new and growing ones. But if some of the new job-creating sectors are personal services such as elder care, those jobs are typically in smaller and more local firms. That means fewer Americans working for big business.
Or consider ChatGPT, which has been described as the most rapidly growing consumer technology product in history. It is produced by OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco. By one recent estimate the company has about 375 employees. By contrast, Meta, even after some layoffs, currently has more than 60,000.
Perhaps cloud computing will be run through a few mega-firms such as Microsoft and Amazon, but — due largely to AI — we can expect many firms to radically shrink in size?
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.
Saturday assorted links
1. “Looking for work, they stumbled upon an audition call at Dive Bar, and emerged into the world of professional mermaidhood.” Those new (old?) service sector jobs…
2. Timeline of the Sober Curious movement.
3. Various short essays on Adam Smith.
4. Andrew Batson best music of 2022.
5. The Economist on The Repugnant Conclusion.
6. Okie-Dokie.
7. “For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.” WSJ link.
Sunday assorted links
2. Those new Brazilian service sector jobs (in Portuguese).
3. “After Denmark’s Queen Margrethe stripped the royal titles from four of her grandkids, news has surfaced that Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise may suffer the same fate.” Link here.
4. Knausgaard talk on the novel, recommended to me I have not heard it yet. But for this installment of The Norwegian Century you need to ff to about 29:00.
5. AI writes a thread on productivity hacks.
6. The real Stable Diffusion art.
7. Regulating the homeless (Ezra Klein, NYT).
Friday assorted links
1. Report from EA Global DC, mostly about me and Matt Yglesias. Matt’s points made good sense to me.
2. Who is good at prediction and why?
3. British pound back to where it was before the tax cuts were announced.
2022 as the year of AI?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
But the benefits of AI do not accrue only to those in the technology sector. AI makes many goods and services cheaper, and that in turn benefits the poor and disadvantaged. If software routes packages and shipments more efficiently, then transportation costs will be lower. If software and AI programs help economize on the use of electricity, then it will be easier to mitigate climate change. As computational biology improves health care, the sick will benefit.
The people who least need AI are the super-rich. They already can hire armies of servants to manage their obligations, schedules, and so on. They do not need to economize on the use of human labor. The rest of us do, whether directly or indirectly through the businesses we patronize.
Another benefit for lower-income groups is that current manifestations of AI do not usually displace the jobs of the poor. Many poor individuals hold jobs in the service sector or perform manual labor. Those tasks are either hard to automate (a robot gardener?) or, because wages are low, less profitable to automate.
It may be true that the costs of AI in the labor force — displaced jobs — are more visible than the benefits of AI — new jobs and lower prices. So it’s not surprising if AI is not entirely popular.
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
2. The latest on severity, from South African data. And a more general Omicron update.
3. Those newer (older?) service sector jobs: “Finding healthcare ‘soul-destroying,’ some turn to online sex work.”
Real consumption must at some point fall
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The best way to adjudicate competing claims about today’s economy is to consider opportunities for consumption. Over much of the last two years, labor supply contracted significantly, in large part due to the pandemic. That means the economy produced less. If you produce less, sooner or later you have to consume less, too. And if you consume less, you will be dissatisfied with economic conditions, especially in America, where the consumer typically is considered to be king (or queen).
There isn’t any way around this basic logic, no matter what the data say. Even if measured consumption is currently high, at some point it will have to fall relative to expectations. And indeed there are a host of problems, with shortages, supply-chain delays and a sluggish service sector. In a normal year, more Americans would have seen “Dune” on the big screen and gone to concerts. Americans are not quite able to get what they want, and that is obscured in the aggregate statistics.
The biggest messenger for consumption losses is the rate of consumer price inflation, which measured at 6.2% on last reading. Not so many Americans expect to get an offsetting raise…in return, and above-average inflation is likely to continue for a year or two, some would say for longer. So real wages for many millions of Americans will be noticeably lower for the near future, too. That will translate into lower levels of consumption, with the timing of those losses depending on the spending and borrowing plans of individual households.
Add to all this growing and unprecedentedly high debt for the federal government, plus unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Social Security.
Even if they don’t understand the exact economic logic here, most Americans grasp the common-sense truth that inflation and deficits are bad — for them, for their real wages, and for their future opportunities. They are happy to have higher savings in the bank, but they see the treadmill turning ever faster.
Some parts of the labor shortage also qualify as a decline in consumption. One reason for the “great resignation” is that people cannot get the kinds of jobs they want. That too is a manner of enduring lower consumption, even though it does not show up in consumption statistics. It’s not just the unemployed, as many people took jobs they were only marginally happy with. A job might involve a higher risk of Covid exposure than a worker feels comfortable with, or an internship might take place in a largely empty office.