Results for “those new service sector jobs”
170 found

The future of distance work arbitrage! (those new Rwandan service sector jobs)

In the central African country of Rwanda, single mothers employed at a Japanese eatery have found a new source of income after their jobs took a hit from the novel coronavirus pandemic: babysitting Japanese kids online.

Despite the seven-hour time difference, the cross-cultural service sees women play and sing with children 12,000 kilometers away in Japan via the videoconferencing app Zoom. The mothers will sometimes stream themselves shopping, chopping vegetables and cooking, to the delight of the kids’ parents as well.

The service is provided twice a day for an hour each in a mix of local languages, English, and Japanese.

“There’s a groove that you can’t experience in neighborhood eurythmic classes,” said Toyochika Kamekawa, 36, from Takahama in Fukui Prefecture. His 2-year-old son regularly takes part in the online sessions and sings songs he has been taught, accompanying himself on his toy drum.

The initiative was started up by Rwanda resident Mio Yamada, 38, who hires single mothers to work at her Japanese restaurant in the capital city of Kigali, and her acquaintance Yushi Nakashima, 30.

Yamada, who studied Swahili at university and now has three sons, moved to Rwanda with her husband in 2016 and opened her restaurant the following year.

And:

“I think my son will come to some realization (about the economic disparity between countries) when he’s older and compares his allowance with the sitters’ wages.”

And:

Some of the songs performed by the sitters touch on these darker themes. In one that foreshadows the conflict, the lyrics implore a child to stop crying with the words that when the war begins, they will be given milk from a cow that isn’t sad.

Here is the full story, via Air Genius Gary Leff.

Those new (old) service sector jobs: personal book curator

From the unusual products flogged on health and wellbeing site Goop to her one-of-a-kind beauty habits, Gwyneth Paltrow never fails to surprise us. Case in point: she once hired a ‘personal book curator’.

Back in 2001, the former actress decided to redesign her Los Angeles home and realised that to complete the gram-worthy look, she needed a good five to six hundred books to fill the empty shelves.

So what does a Hollywood star do when their personal novel collection doesn’t quite make the necessary requirements? They call in a celebrity-approved book curator of course.

The 46-year-old asked longtime friend, Thatcher Wine, a long-time book collector and the founder of Juniper Books, to complete the task. But with A-list clientele including the likes of Laura Dern and Shonda Rhimes, he was certainly no stranger to the job in hand.

And this is indeed an art:

Over in the dining room, Wine made sure to organise the books in a more minimal fashion in keeping with a “rigid colour palette of black, white, and grey since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read”.

Upon closer inspection, heavyweight coffee table books take price of place with shelves dedicated to artists including Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Here is the full story, here is the interview with Thatcher Wine.  Via Ted Gioia.

Those new (?) service sector jobs

Teen mail boat jumpers: “Rain or shine won’t keep these mail jumpers from their appointed rounds. Each year a bunch of high school seniors try out as mail jumpers on Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva and it may be the best summer job ever. The challenge is to dash to the mailbox and race back to the boat before it pulls away. The boat slows down but never stops so you have to…”

Via Jamie Jenkins.

Those new service sectors jobs — lots of ’em!

…we find that total employment rises substantially in industries with rising concentration.  this is true even when we look at total employment of the smaller firms in these industries.  This evidence is consistent with our view that increasing concentration is driven by new ICT-enabled technologies that ultimately raise aggregate industry TFP.  It is not consistent with the view that concentration is due to declining competition or entry barriers…as those forces will result in a decline in industry employment.

That is from a new paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg.  The paper presents a larger picture too:

…the secular changes the U.S. economy has experienced for the last four decades…amount to a new industrialization process.  One that allows firms to expand geographically and deliver its goods and services to customers locally.  We have argued that this evolution was the result of an underlying technological change that led to reductions in variable costs (and establishment-level fixed costs) in exchange for larger firm-level fixed costs.

Recommended.

Those new (old?) service sector jobs

Nobody ever warns the patients at Pennsylvania Hospital about Pete Schiavo, “The Groin Crusher.”

The first time most people meet Schiavo, they’ve just come out of a coronary procedure and he’s explaining that after the catheters are pulled out of their femoral artery, he’s going to apply pressure to their groin for 20 to 40 minutes to aid in clotting.

Awkward!

Or it would be, if it was anyone else but Schiavo, a gregarious, emotional, wisecracking guy who is all South Philly, even if he lives over the bridge in Jersey now.

Schiavo, 52, was so overwhelmed to learn that reader Sandy Kuritzky, whose husband’s groin he crushed earlier this year, nominated him for this series that he wept tears of joy several times during his interview.

“I know he doesn’t remember me or my husband because he has his hands on so many groins,” Kuritzky said. “But Pete’s attitude with his patients and their caregivers is so upbeat and friendly and caring and funny that it makes a stressful time less stressful and difficult.”

Patients and their families don’t forget the way Schiavo touches them — physically and emotionally. He’s won awards, had money donated in his name, and gets stopped all the time by former patients who want to buy him drinks or dinner.

“I’m holding someone’s groin for 20 minutes, they tend to remember me and nobody else,” Schiavo said. “I tell them: ‘I can promise you two things when I’m done: You’ll never forget my name or my face.’ And they never do.”

Here is the full story, via Dean C.

Those new service sector equine jobs

It is entrepreneurship that will create the jobs of the future:

We use a unique horse-­assisted leadership experience to help your group create a profound sense of trust, safety, honest communication, authentic connection, and purpose-driven action.

The Circle Up Experience brings together teams [of people] and horses because these majestic animals [presumably the latter] exemplify balanced and shared leadership. This style of leadership creates stability, trust, and the freedom to communicate while valuing the strengths of each individual member and their unique leadership roles within a dynamic and flexible herd[human]-like environment.

Via R., here is the full site.  Let’s get that equine labor force participation rate back up again…

More on Singapore and public sector talent development

From an anonymous correspondent, I will not indent:

“As a Singaporean, I appreciated your recent post on Singapore and the self-perpetuating nature of its establishment. I wanted to raise three points that may be of interest to you, which seem to also be under-discussed outside of Singapore.

The first is the Singaporean system of scholarships. You write in the post that “In Singapore, civil service jobs are extremely important. They are well paid and attract a very high quality of elite, and they are a major means of networking…” This is partly true, but the salary of civil servants at the entry level and most middle management positions is generally lower (by a small by noticeable amount) than that of comparative private sector employment, for the level of education etc. The real tool by which the government secures manpower for the civil service is a system of government scholarships. Singapore provides scholarships to high-school-equivalent students to fund their university education (either in Singapore or overseas), in exchange for which the student is bonded to work for the government for a period of 4 – 6 years after graduation. For talented low-income students, this is naturally an appealing option, and is win-win from the government’s point of view. What Singapore has successfully done, however, is create a set of social norms in which taking such a scholarship is seen as prestigious, and not something merely done out of need, such that many middle-class or even quite wealthy students take up the scholarship despite not needing it to fund their education. The incentive for them is the fast-tracking of scholars (relative to those employed through normal means) into higher positions within the civil service, a practice which is essentially an open secret. You could also think of this as a modern re-creation of the Chinese imperial exam system, without the bad parts, and I do think the cultural connection is not unimportant.

Singapore is often seen as a model for other developing countries for any number of the policies it adopts. But I think one truly underrated high impact policy is this scholarship system. It largely solves the problem governments in many countries face of keeping talent in the public sector, while redressing some degree of inequality (of course, the scale is limited). To a government, the cost of funding the higher education of a couple hundred students a year (Singapore’s birth cohort is small, after all) is relatively insignificant, even at the most expensive American colleges. I’ve always thought of this policy as one of the single lowest-cost, highest-impact things that other developing countries can borrow from Singapore: a marginal revolution, if you like.

The second point is on how the civil service is enmeshed with the elected government. The PAP often draws its candidates from the civil service, and because of its electoral dominance, it largely has the power to decide on the career pathways of its MPs and ministers. Unlike the UK, therefore, where ministerial promotions are largely dependent on political opportunity, the PAP does do quite a bit of planning about who its ministerial team a few years down the line is going to consist of, and often draws civil servants to fit into that system. If we look at the current Cabinet, for example:

  • Lawrence Wong (deputy PM and heir presumptive)
  • Heng Swee Keat (deputy PM)
  • Ong Ye Kung (Minister for Health)
  • Desmond Lee (Minister for National Development; probably closest to the US Department of the Interior in its scope)
  • Josephine Teo (Minister for Communications and Information)
  • S. Iswaran (previously Minster for Transport, though now under investigation for corruption)
  • Chee Hong Tat (acting Minister for Transport)
  • Gan Kim Yong (Minister for Trade and Industry)

[They] were all ex-civil servants before standing for election, and many more backbenchers and junior MPs could be added to that list. This contributes significantly to the links between the PAP and the establishment structure as a whole, because it means that MPs when coming into power have often been steeped in “the system” for many years before formally standing for election, and the process of selecting and promoting MPs is much more controlled than the relatively freer systems in liberal democracies.

The last point is about the army. It is not uncommon for ex-soldiers to serve in government in other countries, the US being a prime example, but while in the US this is largely a random process of ex-soldiers themselves choosing to run, in Singapore it’s a much more deliberate effort. First, the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) awards scholarships too, in a manner similar to the general civil service. In a classically Singaporean way, the scholarships are aggressively tiered, ranging from the most prestigious SAF Scholarship (only around 5 of which are awarded each year) to the SAF Academic Award which funds only local university studies. The degree of scholarship one receives in the army thus determines one’s career progression. The Chiefs of Defence Force (in charge of the SAF as a whole) have all been SAF scholarship recipients, as have almost all of the Chiefs of Army, Navy & Air Force. The relevance of this to your post is the fact that recipients of the more prestigious scholarships are often then cycled out of the army into either the civil service or politics. In Cabinet:

  • Chan Chun Sing (Minister for Education)
  • Teo Chee Hean (Coordinating Minister for National Security)
  • Lee Hsien Loong (PM)

[They] all started their careers in the SAF, and this list could likewise be extended by considering junior MPs. Likewise, many of the heads of the civil service in the various ministries are ex-SAF soldiers, as are the heads of many government agencies like the Public Utilities Board (managing water and electricity) and Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes the establishment newspapers.

Taken together, these three features are I think what contribute to the sense of the “establishment” being a kind of self-contained system that you allude to in your post. In general, young people are attracted to either the civil service or military after leaving high school, and are bonded to the government in exchange for university funding. Although some leave after the bond period, many stay on due to the promise of career progression in both organisations. Eventually, some then become cycled out into the elected government, and the process repeats. This process has, I think, become very attractive to the government because it allows them to exert much more control over the selecting and nurturing of talent, than the more freewheeling British or American systems.”

TC again: Bravo!

Further jobs with your voice

I’m a re-recording mixer and sound mixer so I can confirm that the people who provide such specialized voice talents are amazing. There are also many more varieties: one of the films I mixed featured a dog as a lead character. There are two people who are known for their abilities to mimic dogs and make between 5 and 10 thousand dollars a day.

There are also the amazing people who work in “loop groups”. They provide the background chatter that you hear in any scene with more than a few people. Whether it’s a scene with a few people in an office, or a large group in a restaurant, they have to provide talking without actually saying any identifiable words. It’s particularly important as many countries, especially Germany, will block any films that have identifiable English in the sound files. These background vocals are known as “walla”.

That is from Michael Farnan in the comments.

Those old service sector jobs

At Fountain Court Chambers in central London, the senior clerk is called Alex Taylor. A trim, bald 54-year-old who favors Italian suiting, Taylor isn’t actually named Alex. Traditionally in English law, should a newly hired clerk have the same Christian name as an existing member of the staff, he’s given a new one, allegedly to avoid confusion on the telephone. During his career, Taylor has been through no fewer than three names. His birth certificate reads “Mark.” When he first got to Fountain Court in 1979, the presence of another Mark saw him renamed John. Taylor remained a John through moves to two other chambers. Upon returning to Fountain Court, in 2008, he became Alex. At home his wife still calls him Mark.

Alex/John/Mark Taylor belongs to one of the last surviving professions of Dickensian London. Clerks have co-existed with chimney sweeps and gene splicers. It’s a trade that one can enter as a teenager, with no formal qualifications, and that’s astonishingly well-paid. A senior clerk can earn a half-million pounds per year, or more than $650,000, and some who are especially entrenched make far more.

Clerks—pronounced “clarks”—have no equivalent in the U.S. legal system, and have nothing in common with the Ivy League–trained Supreme Court aides of the same spelling.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout, via the excellent Samir Varma.

*Bull Shit Jobs: A Theory*

That is the new and entertaining book by David Graeber, probably you already have heard of it.  Here is a brief summary.

Coming from academia, I am sympathetic to the view that not everyone is productive, or has a productive job. And my ongoing series “Those new service sector jobs…” is in part reflecting the wonder of the market in providing so many obscure services, but also in part a genuine moral query as to how many of these activities actually are worthwhile.  You are supposed to have mixed feelings when reading those entries, just as with “Markets in Everything.”

Still, I think Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.”  I view those as two quite distinct categories.  Overall he presents the five types of bullshit jobs as flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters, but he spends too much time trying to lower the status of these jobs and not enough time investigating what happens when those jobs go away.

He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists.  I would be surprised if they can get by with so few.  Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start.  Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.

A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all.  Then let him report back to us.

At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job.

Those old (ZMP) service sector jobs

Austrian hermit edition:

An Austrian town is looking to employ someone to live in a hermitage that has no heating nor running water in what appears to be one of the worst jobs in the world.

Saalfelden in the state of Salzburg is looking for a candidate to move into a 350-year-old building, that is built into a cliff-face, to meet and greet Christian pilgrims who frequent the site’s chapel for prayer and self reflection.

Local resident Alois Moser and Saalfelden’s mayor Erich Rohrmoser, will select the new hermit and have told a radio station the traits they are looking for in their new employee.

Moser told state broadcaster ORF that they want ‘a self-sufficient person who is at peace with their self, and willing to talk to people, but not to impose’.

He also said the successful candidate should have a Christian outlook and be ready to greet visiting pilgrims and locals who make their way up the steep cliff face to the house.

The chosen candidate will be selected more on the basis of personality than training and professional experience but will need to be prepared to live without a computer and television, job specifications say.

The parish have stressed the position, which runs from April to November each year, is unpaid despite the sacrifices one would have to make when accepting the post.

Although it appears to be an unattractive proposition the role was has been widely coveted in the past.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Mark Thorson.

“In a data-chic world, a chief economist is the new marketing must-have.”

The rest of the WaPo story, by Lydia DePillis, is here.  Here is one excerpt:

The market for consumer-facing economists is certainly getting crowded. Big Internet companies have had chief economists for years now; Google’s Hal Varian is an oft-quoted exponent of his employer’s capabilities and worldview. Microsoft recently hired Yahoo’s former chief economist to push a more “data-driven culture” at the tech dinosaur.

But they’re not just looking for super-wonks. More importantly for Richardson, rival real estate sites Zillow, Trulia, and CoreLogic have offered their chief economists as media-friendly talking heads, always available to explain national trends: Stan Humphries, Jed Kolko, and Mark Fleming have essentially become their companies’ most visible employees, speaking at conferences and testifying on Capitol Hill. That’s why Apartmentlist.com’s recent listing for a chief economist includes the following in its job description: “Act as the face of the company with key journalists for both print and tv interviews with leading publications,” “work closely with our PR and branding teams,” and have “excellent stage presence.”

File under “Those New Service Sector Jobs.”

What does the new gdp report imply for structural explanations of our current troubles?

How should we revise structural interpretations of unemployment in light of the new gdp revisions?  (For summaries, here are a few economists’ reactions to the report.)  Just to review briefly, I find the most plausible structural interpretations of the recent downturn to be based in the “we thought we were wealthier than we were” mechanism, leading to excess enthusiasm, excess leverage, and an eventual series of painful contractions, both AS and AD-driven, to correct the previous mistakes.  I view this hypothesis as the intersection of Fischer Black, Hyman Minsky, and Michael Mandel.

A key result of the new numbers is that we had been overestimating productivity growth during a period when it actually was feeble.  That is not only consistent with this structural view but it plays right into it:  the high productivity growth of 2007-2009 now turns out to be an illusion and indeed the structural story all along was suggesting we all had illusions about the ongoing rate of productivity growth.  As of even a mere few days ago, some of those illusions were still up and running (are they all gone now?  I doubt it.)

On one specific, it is quite possible that the new numbers diminish the relevance of the zero marginal product (ZMP) worker story.  The ZMP worker story tries to match the old data, which showed a lot of layoffs and skyrocketing per hour labor productivity in the very same or immediately succeeding quarters.  Those numbers, taken literally, imply that the laid off workers were either producing very little to begin with or they were producing for the more distant future, a’la the Garett Jones hypothesis.  The new gdp numbers will imply less of a boom in per hour labor productivity in the period when people are fired in great numbers, though I would be surprised if the final adjustments made this initially stark effect go away.  BLS estimates from June 2011 still show quite a strong ZMP effect, although you can argue the final numbers for that series are not yet in.  (I don’t see the relevant quarterly adjustments for per hour labor productivity in the new report, which comes from Commerce, not the BLS.)  Furthermore there is plenty of evidence that the unemployed face “discrimination” when trying to find a new job.  Finally, the strange and indeed relatively new countercyclicality of labor productivity also occurred in the last two recessions and it survived various rounds of data revisions.  It would be premature — in the extreme — to conclude we’ve simply had normal labor market behavior in this last recession.  That’s unlikely to prove the result.

Most generally, the ZMP hypothesis tries to rationalize an otherwise embarrassing fact for the structural hypothesis, namely high measured per hour labor productivity in recent crunch periods.  If somehow that measure were diminished, that helps the structural story, though it would make ZMP less necessary as an auxiliary hypothesis, some would say fudge.

Other parts of the structural story find ready support in the revisions.  Real wealth has fallen and so consumers have much less interest in wealth-elastic goods and services.  This shows up most visibly in state and local government employment, which has fallen sharply since the beginning of the recession.  Rightly or wrongly, consumers/voters view paying for these jobs as a luxury and so their number has been shrinking.  Construction employment is another structural issue, and given the negative wealth effect, and the disruption of previously secure plans, there is no reason to expect excess labor demand in many sectors.

In the new report “profits before tax” are revised upward for each year.  That further supports the idea of a whammy falling disproportionately on labor and the elimination of some very low product laborers.

Measured real rates of return remain negative, which is very much consistent with a structural story.  Multi-factor productivity remains miserably low.  In my view, a slow recovery was in the cards all along.  Finally, you shouldn’t take any of this to deny the joint significance of AD problems; AS and AD problems have very much compounded each other.

*Winner-Take-All Politics*, the new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

That's the new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.  I have a different take on the main argument, but this is an important book for raising some of the key questions of our time.  I would recommend that people read it and give it serious thought.  The writing style is also clear and accessible.  Two of the key arguments are:

1. Skill-based technological change is overrated as a cause of growing income inequality among the top earners.

2. "The guilty party is American politics."

You'll find an article-length version of some of the Hacker-Pierson argument here, although the book covers much more.

I agree with #1, so let me explain why my take on #2 differs:

1. Median income starts stagnating in 1973 and income inequality starts exploding in 1984, according to the authors.  However, I consider this a "long" time gap for the question under consideration, namely whether there is a direct causal relation and whether people at the top are using politics to skim from people further below in the income distribution.  Furthermore income growth stagnates around 1973 for many countries, not just the United States, and most of those countries never experienced the subsequent "inequality boom" of the Anglosphere.  If they avoided the later inequality, why didn't they also avoid the stagnation?  The discussion of the causal issues here isn't convincing and the authors' hypothesis is not compared to alternatives or tested against possible disconfirming evidence.  

2. There is a lot of talk of unions, but I could concede various points and that's still just a ten to fifteen percent one-time wage premium, when workers are unionized.  It won't much explain persistent changes in growth rates over time, whether for the top one percent or the slow income growth at the median.  Furthermore the main U.S. sectors are harder to usefully unionize than, say, Canada's mineral and resource wealth or Europe's manufacturing.

3. The authors underestimate the role of finance in driving the growth in income inequality.  Their p.46 shows a graph suggesting that non-financial professionals are 40.8% of the top 0.1 percent.  Maybe so, but the key question is what percentage of income those professionals account for.  The Kaplan and Rauh paper, not cited in this book, suggests a central role for finance.  In 2007 the top 5 hedge fund earners pulled in more income than all the CEOs of the S&P 500 put together.  On top of that, some "non-financial" incomes are driven by financial market trading, such as in energy or commodity companies.  And a lot of top-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, etc.

Turn to Table 7 of the paper cited by the authors, p.56 here.  The "non-financial" category still looks bigger but it's incomes in the finance category which grow most rapidly and Bakija and Heim suggest that stock options and asset price movements account for a big share of the growth in "non-financial" incomes.  My view is that the increasing liquidity of financial markets drove much of the trend, which was distributed across both the "non-financial" and the "financial" sector.  If liquid financial markets allow a privately-owned warehouse company to buy a trucking company on the cheap, and profit greatly (plus the managers pull in a lot), I am calling that a financial markets development, even though it's in the "non-financial" sector.

4. Let's say the story at the top is mostly one of finance.  You could describe that as: "some change in financial markets led to rapid income growth for the top earners and politics did nothing about that."  Fair enough.  But it's still a big leap from that claim to portraying politics as the active force behind the change.  Politics was only the allowing force and I don't think there was much of a conspiracy, even if various wealthy figures did push for deregulation or more importantly an absence of new regulation.  I also don't think anybody was expecting incomes at the top to rise at the rates they did; it was a kind of pleasant surprise for the top earners to be so lucratively rewarded.  So the major change is left unexplained, for the most part, and the whole story is then shifted onto the passive actor, namely the public sector, which is elevated to a major causal role which it does not deserve.

5. pp.47-51 the authors talk about tax rates.  If we had kept earlier high marginal rates, the top earners would not have received nearly so much and also they would not have worked so hard.  Maybe so, yet this won't much explain the stagnating pre-tax incomes at the median and it doesn't fit very well into the overall story, unless you wish to make a complicated "lower tax revenue, lower quality public services, MP of the median earner goes down" sort of story. 

6. If the top earners are screwing over their wage earners in the big companies, by pulling in excess wages, options, and perks, we should observe non-stagnant median pay for people who avoid working in firms with fat cat CEOs.  Or we should observe talented lower-tier workers fleeing the big corporations, to keep their wages up.  Yet no evidence for these predictions is given, nor are the predictions considered.  It is likely that the predictions are false.

7. To the extent the high incomes at the top come through capital markets, it is either value created or a transfer/redistribution.  You can argue over the percentages, but to the extent it is the former it is not at the expense of the median.  To the extent it is the latter, the losers will be other investors, not the median earner or household, who does not hold much in the way of stock (lower pension fund returns don't count in the measure of median stagnation).

8. What follows p.72 is an engaging, readable progressive history of recent American politics, but the economic foundations of the underlying story have not been pinned down.

9. In my view, most likely we have two largely separate phenomena: a) median wage growth slows in 1973 because technology stagnates in some regards, and b) liquid financial markets, in various detailed ways, allow people with resources to earn a lot more than before.  Politics may well play a role in each development, but with respect to b) its role has been largely passively, rather than architectural and driving.

Anyway, I found it a very useful book for organizing my thoughts on these topics.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.