What's a Résumé?

David Brooks complains that kids today, at least those coming out of elite colleges, are too perfect. A big part of his lecture to prospective employers is about their résumés and cover letters:

If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you’ve probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success....

When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity....

Reward cover letter rebels. Job seeking is the second greatest arena of social pretense in modern life — after dating. But some people choose not to spin and exaggerate. They choose not to make each occasion seem more impressive than it really was. You want people who are radically straight, even with superiors.

I don't want to overstate the case, as traditional résumés and cover letters still play a role in a lot of hiring, but the trend is toward having an initial review of job applications performed not by a person but by a computer, and also toward LinkedIn, a site where employers and recruiters can look for people who may be interested in a position, see their experience, review endorsements, and look for connections who they might trust to give a candid appraisal of how the person is likely to perform on the job. And that's on top of the long-standing issue, "It's not what you know, it's who you know", with roughly 80% of jobs being obtained through connections.

As others have argued, one of the reasons why the graduates of elite colleges have résumés that are similar in documenting certain forms of high achievement is that the colleges have defined those classes of achievement as the path to admission. If colleges and employers change the criteria, applicants will conform to the new criteria.

Would you prefer that applicants have lower GPAs? Ask it, and those students will show up at your door. Do you want them to not have any global travel experience? Ask, and the next batch will assiduously avoid or hide it. If you control something incredibly valuable and name a price, don’t be surprised when those willing to pay show up at your door. Make “experienced a major life setback” a requirement for admission to Yale, and you can be sure that parents will get their kids hooked on meth so that their kids can explain how they struggled with and eventually overcame the problem. Businesses will set up summer meth camps to make it easy. The next David Brooks column will complain about applicants being uniformly perfect avatars of success in this newly defined way. “The I learned I lot from my meth habit” will become the new “I learned a lot from helping those people in Mozambique.”

Brooks also misses the primary reason why arbitrary criteria are used to distinguish between job applicants. Employers cannot interview everybody, so when swamped with applications they will find ways to narrow the applicant pool to a reasonable number of candidates. It may be that the criteria are in many ways arbitrary and unfair, that a job doesn't actually require a college degree or a high GPA to assure good performance, but if you're looking for a quick way to reduce a stack of applications setting a minimum education requirement or a minimum GPA is one way to do it, and may be better than the alternatives. Sure, that may mean that somebody who has overcome significant life obstacles is ruled out, even if he might be a perfect fit for the job, but how can you (or your keyword-scanning filter) identify such a candidate as a promising applicant from hundreds of other candidates applying for one job? Odds are, even if you were to look for it, that information won't even be present in the candidate's résumé or cover letter.

As Brooks has previously pointed out, there's another side to the coin -- the "perfect" résumé may indicate that the applicant is a good cultural match for a job. Now it may be true that getting some new blood, some different ideas, into a stiff and moneyed workplace could actually improve the workplace, that's not necessarily what employers want:

Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.

They’ve been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.

Back then, Brooks was describing this as the result of meritocracy, with students striving to distinguish themselves through their accomplishments. Now Brooks is arguing that the very same students are not distinguishing themselves, but are conforming to an arbitrary and often meaningless set of standards that may not mean much in the workplace. He may be correct about the standards, but it simply cannot be the case that the students are simultaneously distinguishing themselves and rendering themselves indistinguishable. As Brooks then noted, the brand name of the institution can be more important than the relative qualification of the graduate -- an arbitrary standard that Brooks does not touch in his new essay.

There's a message for employers within Brooks essay that is valuable, and I think it can be boiled down to this: Don't focus on arbitrary criteria instead of figuring out if you're hiring the right person. Particularly with college graduates, odds are you're hiring somebody who is going to grow into the job, who will have to do a lot of learning during his or her early years of employment to become a significant long-term asset to your company. If you focus on other factors, even those that seem objectively reasonable, you can end up with a highly qualified person who simply isn't a good fit with the job, the company, or both.

Law school graduates may appreciate this argument:

You could argue that you don’t actually want rich, full personalities for your company. You just want achievement drones who can perform specific tasks. I doubt that’s in your company’s long-term interests. But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think of the effect you’re having on the deeper sensibilities of the next generation, the kind of souls you are incentivizing and thus fashioning, the legacy you will leave behind.

In many law firms, being able to document that you are an excellent drone is what gets you your first job, and large law firms require a constant inflow of new drones. You can worry about your soul if you make partner.

Too Many Desperate Law School Grads Spoil the Broth....

I learned something interesting from an executive from a large health care organization, the other day. She receives 200-300 job applications for any available position within her organization -- not much of a surprise given the economy and the fact that it's an attractive employer. But she indicated also that, for a lot of positions, they are flooded with applications from recent law school graduates -- to the point that hitting the entry for "law school" toward the top of somebody's résumé results in a near-automatic rejection of the application. (Odds are that the initial screening is done by computer....) It's not that a law school graduate with an appropriate job history or qualifications couldn't do some of the posted jobs, or couldn't learn the position over time. It's that so many desperate law grads are applying for the jobs that hitting a reference to law school or a "J.D." suggests that there's a very low possibility that the candidate is qualified for the position as posted.

No matter what you hear from people who claim that the law degree is a flexible degree that allows you do do more than practice law, unless you have confirmed both that it's true for the industry in which you hope to work and that the industry is hiring recent law grads, don't believe it -- and if you find such an industry, consider how small it is and how few graduates they hire before choosing law school as a path to employment. If you're interested in working in an industry that does not regularly hire people with law degrees, find out what degrees they prefer and get one of those degrees instead of a J.D.

I'm not optimistic about the future of the legal profession, or the potential for law school graduates who aren't able (or aren't willing) to pursue BigLaw careers to find remunerative work in smaller legal practices. Some will manage to do so, either starting their own firms or finding their way into legal jobs that allow them to create a foundation for later promotion or lateral moves. But from what I see, despite the reduced numbers of students attending law school, the future of the profession doesn't look particularly bright -- and if you're not going to end up working in law, in my opinion for most fields your three years of law school are either going to be a neutral or a detriment.

The "Three Million Available Jobs" Canard

I recently heard a guy, apparently the former star of a reality TV show about 'dirty job', purport that there are three million jobs with good wages waiting to be filled, and that they remain open due to a mismatch between job applicant skills and the needs of the employer. He suggested that the root of the problem was that people are turning up their noses at the skilled trades, and thus aren't even considering jobs that could pay them $40,000 - $120,000 per year. Needless to say, something about that claim carried the odor of an equine byproduct.

As it turns out, the "three million jobs" figure is tossed around with some regularity, and it represents a snapshot of the job market at any given time, and does not capture the even larger number of jobs that become available and that are filled each month. It's a bit like looking at a photo of kids playing musical chairs and observing how many open chairs there are - the snapshot tells us how many jobs are available, but many of those jobs are recent vacancies and most of them will be filled. So as it turns out, about 2.5 million of those jobs aren't at all difficult to fill, and the suggestion is that in manufacturing "there are as many as 500,000 jobs that aren't being filled because employers say they can't find qualified workers". Note, we're still a long way from "jobs that could pay $40,000 - $120,000 per year."

When Sixty Minutes explored this shortage of workers, it found that wages were stagnant and manufacturers were unwilling to train workers - that is, they wanted to hire people who were going to be fully productive from day one. They looked specifically at a company called "Click Bond", that has had difficulty getting workers with sufficient skill to run its machines. An executive helped form a partnership with local community colleges to train workers, and "As part of the training program, [participating] manufacturers are willing to pay students for two-day a week internships." The big money at the end of that training?

At the end of the 16 weeks of training, Click Bond offered Ryan Vre Non and Jamie Pacheco full time jobs at $12 an hour with benefits.

So if you complete the training and internship, and perform at the top of your class, you have the chance to earn $12/hour? Not only is that number far short of the great salary the "dirty jobs' guy was touting, it's difficult to believe that somebody who was capable of completing that program at the top of his class could not have found another program that would have resulted in a better-paying job. And really, if you're advertising a job at $12/hour for somebody who already possesses the skill set to be productive with minimal to no training, you're not offering enough to entice that person away from their current job.

Taking a close look at wage data in manufacturing, the Boston Consulting Group recently found that less than one percent of the manufacturing workforce, in a handful of labor market areas, is affected by a skills gap. In its survey of employers, Manpower finds that, among U.S. employers having difficulty filling jobs, 54% report that the reason positions are difficult to fill is that workers are looking for more pay than is offered and 44% report that applicants lack experience.

But such reasons cast doubt on the idea of a skills mismatch, as it is not unreasonable to expect employers to pay the going rate for the skills they need, or to provide opportunities for workers to gain experience doing the jobs they need done. So the driver of current high rates of unemployment certainly does not seem to be the inadequate skills of the American workforce.

Seriously, if the message is "train yourself at your own expense" (or taxpayer expense), or even "train yourself at your own expense, but with the possibility of a part-time, paid internship", students are not going to clamor for those $12/hour opportunities.

In exchange for these math and computer programming skills, which for most people would most likely require some measure of secondary education, Click Bond is willing to pay newly hired employees $12 per hour. In Nevada, the average hourly wage covered by unemployment in 2011 was $20.13.

Pitts also talked with Klaus Kleinfeld, German-born CEO of Alcoa in Whitehall, Michigan. Alcoa employs 2,200 people working three shifts a day, seven days a week, producing parts to make jet engines 50 percent more fuel efficient.... The Alcoa plant currently has 27 job openings, but Kleinfeld says that Alcoa absolutely has no problem with a skills gap, but it sure would be a lot easier if people would “get an education.”...

While there may very well be 500,000 job openings in manufacturing facilities across the nation, these jobs require a specialized skill set that wasn’t required even a decade ago. Kleinfeld implied it, but Hutter made it perfectly clear – employers are not willing to pay to train employees anymore.

When you start looking for the more highly paid jobs where there is a "skills gap", the word "engineer" seems to come up a lot, but not so much "machine operator". If an experienced worker is worth $12/hour, we're not talking about a job with a meaningful career path.

Moving back to "dirty jobs", I personally have no problem with encouraging students to pursue jobs in the skilled trades. I respect that some people are concerned that when you start doing so in high school, you end up tracking students who are more likely to be poor or minority into trade-oriented 'tracks' rather than academic tracks, but the effort doesn't have to occur in high school. We, as a society, can simply accept that the skilled trades are important, can potentially pay as much or better than many white collar jobs, and that it's acceptable and in some cases optimal to pursue a career in the trades instead of seeking a college degree.

That said, some of the jobs we're talking about aren't just dirty, but are dangerous. A friend who owns a small factory described the toll on his body from his years of running industrial machines. He has severe degeneration of his back and knees - and he's the boss. Talk to some retired pipefitters about their aches and pains. Talk to some auto mechanics about the injuries they or their peers have suffered on the job.

We can't pretend either that everybody is capable of working those jobs, or even that some of the people who aren't applying for those jobs are declining the opportunity because they enjoy being unemployed. Somebody who has become unemployed after a couple of decades of working one job that wore out his body is not necessarily going to be capable of entering another job that carries a similar physical toll - even for $12/hour plus benefits. And for the theoretical job that starts at $40K and could pay $120K with an employer that purports itself to be willing to train, if they can't get enough applicants it's not because there's a shortage of skilled workers - it's because of what the prospective employer and his pitchmen aren't telling you - such as the level of physical danger, travel time and isolation.

The Million Dollar Law Degree

Given the triumphalism of those who tout a dubious study ostensibly showing that the present value of a law degree for an new graduate is $1 million, I think it's fair to remind them of how the rise in law school tuition, the huge rise in the number of law graduates, and the collapse of the legal job market call all of the authors' assumptions into question:

In June, the legal services sector lost more than 3,000 jobs, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since June 2012, the latest BLS data shows, the industry has seen a net gain of only 1,000 jobs. In the last two months alone, 6,000 positions disappeared....

The increase in the percentage of applicants being admitted to law schools is one reason that the lawyer bubble continues to grow. Another is the stagnant job market. In 2008, the BLS projected that the economy would add a net total of 98,500 new attorney positions for the entire decade ending in 2018. In 2010, the agency revised that estimate downward to project the addition of just 73,600 positions by the end of 2020.

Even allowing for attrition by retirement, death, and other reasons, the BLS now estimates that there will be 235,000 openings for lawyers, judges, and related workers through 2020—23,500 a year. Last year alone, law schools graduated 46,000 new attorneys.

If law schools as a group reduced enrollments by 20 percent from last year’s graduating class, they would still produce almost 37,000 new lawyers annually — 370,000 for a decade that will require only 235,000 — not to mention the current backlog that began accumulating even before the Great Recession began.

If you're a Harvard or Yale law student, odds are your law degree will return well over that $million over the course of your career. The further you get away from the elite schools, or the upper ranks of the law school you attend, the less likely it is that you'll end up earning a good (or even a decent) income, and the more likely it is that you'll end up working a job that neither requires a law degree nor helps you pay off your student loans. Law is also a profession where your first job will often significantly limit your options for the rest of your career, so graduating into a poor employment market can have a career-long impact on your earnings.

If you're thinking about attending law school, you need to keep in mind that when people are talking about the flexibility of a law degree the odds are (a) they don't know what they're talking about or (b) they work for a law school and you're hearing a sales pitch. If you're not committed to practicing law, consider taking some additional time to think about your options or considering how other graduate degrees (or employment options) might better fit your goals and personality. If you are committed to practicing law, and have done some homework to figure out what that actually means (no, TV dramas don't count as homework), you still need to consider in light of your grades, LSAT score, and the law schools willing to accept you whether that's a good investment. For most students at most law schools, in the present market (which, unfortunately, seems to be the likely market for legal employment stretching into the foreseeable future) it's not going to be worth it - most law graduates end up racking up a large amount of debt and then not finding work in the legal field or finding marginal work that sets them up for a career in which they're excluded from the more prestigious and higher-paying jobs. You can't get around the numbers.

The Perils of Being Overqualified

Paul Campos notes that employers are perhaps more diligent than ever in weeding out overqualified candidates:

I see this all the time in the legal world: people find that getting a JD actually hurts their job prospects, not just because they can’t get jobs as lawyers (48% of the national class of 2012 didn’t have real legal jobs nine months after graduation), but because, despite self-serving claims of legal academic administrators and faculty that a law degree is “versatile,” most non-legal employers consider a law degree either a negative or a flat disqualification for a job candidate. (Perhaps the most stark example of this is provided by paralegals who quit good jobs to go to law school, then discover that employers won’t hire people with JDs to do paralegal work).

The first time I heard about a candidate being rejected as overqualified was back in 1979, in the film Kramer vs. Kramer. I was young enough at the time to be puzzled by the idea, although I came to appreciate why employers would hesitate before hiring an employee they thought might jump ship as soon as something better came along.

But the J.D. problem isn't just one of overqualification - most employers outside of the field of law (or the music industry) don't see the J.D. as a qualification. So you're both overqualified, in that you have a graduate degree that in the view of many should result in your easily earning a six figure income, but underqualified, in that your degree is seen as having absolutely nothing to do with a position outside of the field of law. When you're trying to explain and argue how your degree relates to the job for which you're applying, the odds of getting the job will typically hover between "slim" and "none".

The Draft, National Service, and National Unity

A couple of days ago, Michael Gerson seemed to have one of those "the well is dry" moments when he had nothing much to say about contemporary events, and decided to join the ranks of those who believe that some form of "national service" would be a cure for some of our nation's (real or perceived) woes. Gerson draws inspiration from a book by the late William F. Buckley, Jr., in which Buckley waxes poetic about his WWII military service, which was served stateside.

The service movement has always had an element of nostalgia for the shared, unifying burdens of World War II, the United States’ epic of citizenship. In his slim, weighty volume, “Gratitude,” William F. Buckley recalled how his war experience has been a reminder of the “pulsation of consanguinity” that united the “Laramie cowboy” and the “Litterateur in Greenwich Village.” National service, he argued, can “ever so slightly elevate us from the trough of self-concern and self-devotion.”

I can't help but wonder if Buckley's perception might have been different had he, the "Litterateur in Greenwich Village", not graduated from Officer Candidate School, and had served as an enlisted man taking orders from his proverbial "Laramie cowboy", if he had been ordered to storm Omaha Beach, or if he had served in the Vietnam era. But at least he was speaking from the perspective of somebody who actually performed military service.

Gerson attempts some poeticism of his own,

The natural centrifugal forces of democracy have been augmented by geographical mobility and technologies that allow for the complete customization of little societies.

How then does a democracy cultivate civic responsibility and shared identity? Taxation allows us to fund common purposes, but it does not provide common experiences. A rite of passage in which young people — rich and poor, liberal and conservative, of every racial background — work side by side to address public problems would create, at least, a vivid, lifelong memory of shared national purpose.

Basically, Gerson sees changes in society as a bad thing, not surprising given that conservatism is inherently resistant to change and Gerson's conservatism seems primarily social in its nature, and fantasizes about a public service "melting pot" in which young people can forge bonds and embrace some sort of "national purpose". It seems fair to note that Gerson's resort to WWII, in which the military and parts of American society remained deeply segregated, and his avoidance of addressing the Vietnam experience, by which time the military and in large part American society were integrated, casts a shadow over his assumptions. Could it be that society as a whole coalesced around WWII and the common purpose of defeating Germany and Japan, while society's reaction to the Vietnam war created some significant social rifts? That in neither case was military / national service the driving force behind unity and disunity? Shouldn't we also acknowledge that different people draw different lessons from similar experiences? Or that some people forced into military service have very bad experiences that alienate them from their country or from certain groups of their fellow countrymen? Is that reality too dark to be allowed to interfere with such a happy dream?

Note also, Gerson's proposal cannot reasonably be described as involving shared experience:

Instead of giving 18-year-old males a meaningless (to them) Selective Service number, why not also give all 18-year-old men and women information on the five branches of the armed forces, along with the option of serving a year or more in a civilian service program? National service, while not legally mandatory, would be socially expected.

How many 18-year-olds are unaware of the armed forces, or of how they might enlist? How would "the option of serving a year or more in a civilian service program" represent some form of shared experience with members of the military? We're talking about roughly 4 million 18-year-olds per year, with the armed forces accepting roughly 180,000 enlisted personnel and 20,000 officers each year - while Gerson's plan might in theory result in a slightly larger pool of applicants, the military is exceeding its recruiting goals, so the net effect on society of providing "information on the five branches of the armed forces" is likely to be de minimis.

For the 3.8 million or so young people who Gerson wants to see pressured into performing civilian public service, what sort of work would his civilian programs perform? How would participants be housed, fed and otherwise supported during this program? How would we make the program more unifying than any other civilian job an 18-year-old might be able to get? How would we train and supervise participants? What sort of value could we reasonably expect to obtain from a year of service, with participants completing the program right around the time they might achieve some level of mastery of whatever it is they're assigned to do - or do we spend the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to implement this experiment without concerning ourselves about whether the work performed benefits society in any way other than the anticipated cultivation of civic responsibility?

It's also fair to ask, how does Gerson explain his own commitment to civic responsibility, given that he has never performed anything approaching public service. When he argues that public service is necessary for today's young people, even if completely unnecessary for him, does he include his own children among those who won't form an adequate commitment to American society unless they join the military or perform a year of "public service" as part of this new, mammoth government program, or is he worried about other people's children? For that matter, does he want his children to participate in a "public service" program through which they learn and adopt the culture and beliefs of others, or does he anticipate that they'll be the good influences who help impress civic responsibility upon society's riff raff?

I don't want to sound unsympathetic to Gerson's concerns about society and social cohesion, although I expect that we have considerably different views in relation to what level of conformity is desirable in a society and about the identity of the populations where we should focus our efforts on improving social cohesion and conduct. I have a different concern than Gerson about college-aged kids - that many feel pushed into college, or to pick a career path, when they would benefit from taking a year or two between high school and college to learn more about themselves, what careers they might want to pursue, and ultimately whether college is the right choice for them.

I am not one to embrace the notion that there's something wrong with "kids these days", or to ignore the fact that the "kids these days" who are going to ruin society invariably grow up to be the next generation of workers and parents who share similar sentiments about the next generation of kids. The factions that most concern me are the ones I first met when I entered legal practice - the defendants who, after a night in jail, are yukking it up as they wait for their criminal cases to be called. The parent who can't understand why anybody would object to the "good old fashioned whupping" they gave to a small child, who was left with a massive bruise extending from the small of his back to the bottom of his thighs. The grown men who argue that they should not be incarcerated for statutory rape because their twelve-year-old victim "looked at least fourteen". The mother who, given a choice between losing custody of her children and staying with an abusive boyfriend, picks the boyfriend.

It's easy for somebody like Gerson to go through life blissfully unaware that this type of population exists, read paragraphs like this one and imagining that he understands what I'm talking about, or sidestepping the question of what groups most need help and how to help them by adding his "kids these days"/"national service will cure (most or) all that ails society" argument to the enormous stack of essays and editorials that say more or less the same thing. Never mind that history offers plenty of examples of the military draft and national service programs in dysfunctional nations, it's a much easier argument to make than to take a serious look at the actual rifts within our society and what might work to reduce them.

Here's an interesting alternative: How about the government creates a program that will provide two years of work at a reasonable wage, coupled with relocation to the job location, vocational training and tutoring to help any participant who has not graduated from high school achieve a GED, and effectively guarantee a job to any 18-year-old who does not want to attend college, or who would just as soon defer college but has not found a better employment alternative? If you want, you can move kids around the country so that they experience something different from the community in which they were raised, while also helping kids who want to escape an impoverished area the tools they need to get out and stay out. Given the realities of the job market, you won't need social pressure to get young people to sign up. Call the program "national service" so that conservatives like David Brooks and Gerson can get behind it without complaining about its cost.... Perhaps even better, start up a private "public service" venture, get some of the nation's billionaires to fund it, and run the experiment on private money.

I'm not sure that such a program would be workable, but if you want to push in that direction it seems much more likely to return the benefits Gerson hopes to achieve than the poorly defined concept he shares in his column.

Résumés? What's a Résumé?

Touching on the job-seeking post from a couple of days ago...

We've learned more details about Apple's new 'GPU Design Center' in Orlando, Florida, following our reporting from earlier this week.

Sources told MacRumors that the engineers Apple hired recently were not laid off from AMD, but were instead actively recruited -- largely via their LinkedIn profiles. Apple is said to have learned that many of AMD's 3D graphics patents were issued from its Orlando offices and targeted this area specifically. AMD has job listings for its Orlando offices to fill several of these recently vacated positions.

They probably didn't even know they were looking for jobs before the recruiter called.

The End of Job Applications As We Know Them

First, a word in defense of Thomas Friedman (and his taxi drivers). Although he has the human tendency to seek points of view that reaffirm his own, at least he's sticking his head outside of the bubble and listening to somebody other than like-minded talking heads or agenda-driven "confidential sources". I also agree with Friedman's general conception that the job market is changing, as are the means by which people will find jobs and maintain their positions (or should I say, salaries) over their working lives. That said, in his column about a new website that tests the skills of job applicants... I think he's a bit too credulous toward the creators of the site he touts in his zeal to endorse a new era of employment.

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

The problem I see with that is that designing tests isn't a one-off. If you want tests that are measurably effective at assessing worker's skills, you have to do a lot more than create a test for a given job. You need to test the test. Further, let's say you create a test with "the right questions" - how do you grade the answers? If we were talking about tests of math skills, that could be automated. But we're not - at least as highlighted in the column, these are subjective tests:

HireArt asks candidates to do tasks that mimic the work they would do on the job. If it is for a Web analytics job, HireArt might ask: “You are hired as the marketing manager at an e-commerce company and asked to set up a Web site analytics system. What are the key performance indicators you would measure? How would you measure them?”...

Sample question: “Kanye West just released a new fashion collection. You can see it here. Imagine you had to write a tweet promoting this collection. What would your tweet be?” Someone applying for a sales job would have to record a sales pitch over video.

Really, more than a test, that's more like creating a standardized set of interview questions and giving applicants time to think through the answers. In essence, rather than just submitting résumés, the applicants would be interviewing in writing. But who would review the answers, and based upon what criteria? Enter the human element. Or perhaps even the computer element - if you get 500 people applying for each job, odds are that the initial "scoring" is going to be a computerized process, or performed by somebody associated with the website as opposed to a person who would actually be making a hiring decision. If you were hiring a salesperson, how valuable would the pre-recorded pitch be, as opposed to tasking a candidate to make a pitch during the interview and seeing how they respond to you in the role of customer? How much time would you save, reviewing perhaps hundreds of videos from applicants as opposed to interviewing leading prospects?

So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.”

From which I infer, she didn't get the job.

For some of us, the idea of somehow being tested before applying for a job is old hat. I can't recall the last job I applied for that did not want multiple writing samples, a sample document of some sort relating to the work I would be doing, or something else that would suggest qualification (or lack thereof) before I was selected for an interview. And I haven't applied for a job in a very long time. Perhaps outsourcing that sort of pre-screening will work for some employers.

However, I think the future lies in a somewhat different direction. While large employers may well continue to reach out to new college grads through sites like the one Friedman describes, more and more jobs are going to be filled through personal connections and networking. A commonly recited statistic is that 80% of job openings are never advertised. I see a future in which that rises well over 90%, as people rely more and more on sites like LinkedIn to find and check references on people who may not even be aware that they're being considered for a job offer. The test will in no small part be your actual accomplishments, as documented on your profile and as verified by trusted people in your extended network.

Robert Saumuelson's ObamaCare Journamalism

If you read Samuelson's column, you know that he's not particularly interested in analyzing the issues of the day, so much as he is interested in advancing a specific, right-wing economic agenda. But he could at least make an effort, couldn't he?

To get some answers, I recently talked with the heads of four “professional employer organizations” (PEOs) — these are companies that act as “human resources” departments for small companies. They provide payroll services and advise on fringe benefits and government regulations. Their customers include construction companies, restaurants, small manufacturers and professional firms. Many of these firms are only now coming to grips with the ACA, because they’d assumed that the Supreme Court would invalidate it or that a Republican White House would repeal it.

That's the first place I would look for answers about the PPACA - a bunch of consultants who were apparently happy to reassure their clients, "Don't worry about ObamaCare because it will be repealed or overturned," or who knew better but were not sufficiently competent to convince their clients to prepare for the possibility that they might actually have to follow the law.

To encourage candor, we talked on a not-for-attribution basis.

As if they would own up to that level of incompetence and then speak with Samuelson on anything but a "not-for-attribution basis".

First, some companies now providing insurance are being hit with huge premium increases. Before Obamacare, said one PEO adviser, his clients typically received annual increases of 6 percent to 12 percent. “This year we’re seeing 30 percent rate hikes,” he said. The surge is blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the ACA’s requirement for more comprehensive coverage and on its formula for calculating premiums (aka “community rating”).

Seriously? Is it that the incompetence of the consultants who spoke with Samuelson reached beyond their failure to advise their clients to prepare to comply with the law, and extended into not even knowing the basic economics of health insurance and premium costs? Or is it that Samuelson didn't ask the obvious follow-up question, "Which is it - rightly or wrongly?" To be fair to Samuelson, I think he knows the answer, but if he said it out loud ("wrongly") his three-point list would as a consequence have only two points.

Second, most companies haven’t made final decisions. Those who have go both ways. Another adviser described a 250-worker car dealership with good wages but no health insurance; it will provide coverage and cut wages to help pay costs. Another example involved a 60-worker manufacturing firm with wages of $12 to $15 an hour. It offered bare-bones policies with steep deductibles. Confronting higher premiums for expanded coverage, the owner will drop insurance. He found the ACA “too complex,” said this adviser.

Should we assume at this point that we're talking about a cause of higher premiums other than those that employers rightly or wrongly attribute to ObamaCare? If so, it's pretty much a given that some employers will choose to drop insurance, pay the penalty, and let its workers seek coverage through the exchanges. They're probably better off than with the "bare-bones policies with steep deductibles" (i.e., "crap") policies Samuelson says their employer previously offered - I think it's safe to assume that Samuelson has a gold-plated Medicap plan on top of his own, government-paid, comprehensive Medicare benefits - the workers who need adequate insurance may be better served by their employer's choice. But seriously? The consultant who is paid to make the process as simple as possible for a client employer can't get his client past, "It's too complex"? And that would be the fault of... somebody other than the consultant?

Third, many firms are revising their business models to minimize insurance costs. One favorite idea: Hold workers below the 30-hour weekly threshold requiring insurance. Many part-time employees who work more (say, 35 hours a week) will lose hours.

I've heard about this little scheme, as well. The fixes are so obvious (e.g., setting the penalty based upon total employee hours) that the only reason that it's worth discussing is that people like Samuelson anticipate that Republicans will filibuster any effort to implement a fix. But you know what? It may not amount to much. When an employee is given a choice between working two jobs because his employer won't give him more than thirty hours, and working one job with decent health benefits, guess which job anybody worth hiring is going to choose?

If Samuelson had any experience working in an environment where employees earn at or near minimum wage, he would have some appreciation for how little it takes to convince an employee to change jobs. Samuelson wouldn't notice fifty cents an hour. Were he making $7.25 per hour, it would become a big deal. If you want to run the business with employees who don't mess up orders, don't waste food, are less likely to steal, are easier to train and supervise, etc., as a general rule you have to pay a bit more than the guy down the street. If my competitor in food service were intent on keeping his employees below thirty hours a week, I would be happily skimming the cream off of his workforce.

Another adviser mentioned a client, an engineering firm with 48 workers, that had deliberately restrained expansion.

This is where I make a coughing noise that sounds a lot like I'm actually saying "bull****". If this engineering firm truly is constraining its size to avoid giving its employees decent health insurance, it's not going to have much luck retaining engineers. They have even better options than the movie theater worker and hotel workers whose anticipated plight was, mere moments ago, giving Samuelson such... is the word, delight?

I would suggest that Samuelson stop "concern trolling" ObamaCare and propose some meaningful solutions, but... as I suggested up front, I see no evidence that he's interested in solving the problems ObamaCare is attempting to address.

If You Want to Reduce Suicide, Focus on the Economy

Ross Douthat is concerned that "loneliness" may be behind an increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men... a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. You would think this part would clue Douthat in:

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

But you can see he's already on the wrong track by the end of the paragraph. That is, the problem is not about a retreat from family, community and work. It's about the carpet being pulled out from under you.

You would think it was a state secret that the group at highest risk of suicide was middle class men (particularly white men), and that risk of suicide is strongly associated with three stressors: job loss, loss of family and poor health. Contrary to Douthat's assumption, there's not a higher suicide risk if you're single versus married - but divorce is a risk factor.

In our culture, our identity is wrapped up in the work we do. One of the first questions you're likely to be asked when you meet somebody is "Where do you work" or "What kind of work do you do". The factors also tend to go hand-in-hand. Poor health can lead to the loss of employment, financial stress resulting from loss of employment (or from poor health) can lead to divorce. When somebody's self image is built around job and family and he feels that he's irretrievably lost his economic future and his family, that's a huge psychological blow.

Douthat builds his argument in part on a fiction, that we're dealing with "structural unemployment". I've taken some issue with those who argue that there's nothing structural about our unemployment situation, but the type of thing they're talking about (the ability to return to full employment) and the type of thing I'm talking about (the ability of somebody who has lost employment to get back onto a similar income and career path) are two different things. If Douthat believes that there's something new about the problems men have if they're displaced from the workplace during or after their late forties, he hasn't been paying attention. Not even to the content of the newspaper for which he writes:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

More academically,

Suicide rates among both men and women aged 35–64 years increased substantially from 1999 and 2010. This finding is consistent with a previous study that showed a notable increase in the overall suicide rate among middle-aged adults relative to a small increase in suicide rates among younger persons and a small decline in older persons during a similar period. The increases were geographically widespread and occurred in states with high, as well as average and low suicide rates. By race/ethnicity, the increases were highest and statistically significant only among whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives, widening the racial/ethnic gap in suicide rates....

Possible contributing factors for the rise in suicide rates among middle-aged adults include the recent economic downturn (historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship); a cohort effect, based on evidence that the "baby boomer" generation had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years; and a rise in intentional overdoses associated with the increase in availability of prescription opioids.

In a loosey-goosey sort of sense, one court argue that Douthat has a point. That if people who were suicidal could break out of their mindset, reconnect with their communities, and find peace and joy in their lives, they would no longer be suicidal. But that would be to assume that depression and suicide are the results of a rational thought process rather than cognitive distortion, and that somebody who is suicidally depressed is well-positioned to make significant life changes. Sometimes in response to a suicide you hear, "I don't understand, he seemed so happy that day" - the result of a confusion of the immense relief that can come from the decision to commit suicide with an emergence from depression. When severely depressed individuals receive treatment, you have to be very careful during their early recovery because in some cases the only thing holding them back from suicide is lacking the cognitive energy to carry out their plan. This cartoon series, I think, does a pretty good job of illustrating depression - but that freedom depicted at the end can be (and in the author's case, was) dangerous.

Douthat shares a non-suicidal author's account of how he reconnected with his small hometown due to his sister's terminal illness, and extrapolates,

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

It seems that Douthat is looking for a simple solution to the issue of suicide that ties into his conceit that a simple, small town lifestyle is somehow superior to... the way he lives his own life. As if anybody can find peace, contentment and community simply by moving to small town, rural America. As if small town, rural America would be unchanged if we all moved there. As if that's even possible. As if you can't find community in a city. As if suicide rates weren't higher in the less urbanized parts of the nation.

If you care about reducing suicide, you should be calling for government policies to help restore full employment. You should be advocating programs to help people deal with job loss and regain decent employment. You should be concerned about the quality and availability of mental health care. Pretending that all will be well if people return to the type of community seen in states with above-average suicide rates? Probably not helpful.

Actually, It's Not So Easy to Teach Yourself New Tricks....

An afterthought on Thomas Friedman's column,

But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.)

Well, quite clearly, college isn't cheaper than ever before. Quite the opposite. Even if, recognizing that your skills have become a bit rusty, you're inclined to go back.

I expect that Friedman is referencing the growing availability of online courses, free and paid, on a wide range of subjects. If you can put together an appropriate collection of such courses, you can approximate what you might learn in certain more expensive, formal educational programs. The first problem with that is curation - you generally won't know if a course is any good or how much you'll learn until you complete the course. The same is true to a degree with college courses, but the college has an incentive to curate the content and to try to ensure that courses are of reasonable quality. Similarly, colleges put together curricula to help students pick "majors" and "minors" and, ideally, take an appropriate set of courses to obtain an appropriate level of knowledge to justify being granted a degree. When you're putting together your own set of courses on the Internet, it can be difficult to know where that process begins and ends. If you are acting out of mere personal interest, sure, it's cheap and easy. If you're trying to teach yourself cutting edge job skills in your spare time, it's not easy and (assuming the material is available online) isn't necessarily cheap.

I have seen interesting programs that promise, somewhat convincingly, to take people from the beginner level to "competent and employable" in a block of time comparable to a college semester. For example, this program to teach Ruby on Rails. I think colleges should do a lot more to create and implement that type of program. But such a program is neither cheap nor easy. Sure, you can quit your job and with some decent guidance and luck in finding good resources, as well as a lot of motivation and sufficient aptitude, achieve reasonable mastery of Ruby on Rails in, say, twelve weeks. But... that's a luxury few people have.

Perhaps Friedman is thinking back to the days when he typed his columns and learned to use a word processor, but if we're serious about "inventing" jobs through a demonstration of skill sets and achievements not broadly shared by a larger pool of job applicants, for most workers I think things are getting harder. Not only are skills of that type increasingly complex, they become obsolete much more quickly than the important skills of the past. Picking the right skills to master, finding the time, finding the resources, and keeping current or moving on to the next thing? Easy? Come on.

Jobs Will Exist in the Future, But Résumés Might Not....

When I read Friedman's piece on "inventing jobs", I had hoped that he would be speaking to a future in which workers were more entrepreneurial - whether in terms of finding ways to work for themselves, or to position themselves to be more secure or more competitive when seeking or holding jobs. The forces that inspired Friedman's column, essentially the decline of the middle class crossed with the reduced possibility of completing your education before embarking on what we once might have called a career, are real.

But have you actually looked at the job market lately? Have you tried to get a job?

First, for a lot of employers the traditional résumé is something to be scanned and algorithmically processed. If you don't have the right keywords, it's possible that the only person who knows you've applied for the job will be the person who opens your job application and feeds it into the scanner. And if you're submitting your application electronically, you don't even have that.

Second, it's easier than ever for employers to investigate the applicants that they are considering interviewing. People put an alarming amount of personal information on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and most neglect to limit access to at least some of their more embarrassing information. And while that information may disqualify you from a job, we're reaching a point at which your qualification for a job may be even more tightly related to your online profile.

Frankly, employers don't trust résumés. It's easy for employees to exaggerate, even fabricate qualifications. Some people are very good about bluffing their way through interviews. The employer ends up with a suboptimal employee, and a choice between terminating the worker and engaging in another job search or hoping the employee grows into the position. The gamble often works for the dishonest employee - and if it doesn't, they suffer no real harm.

How is that changing? I suspect that over the next ten years, the traditional job posting is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Connections will be more important than ever. But the connections of growing importance aren't going to be the traditional "who you know". Instead, prospective employers will look for prospective employees on sites like LinkedIn, examining their credentials, and then reaching out to their own networks to verify the prospective employee's claims and professed skills. Historically, finding a common connection between yourself and a prospective employee was difficult, at best hit-or-miss. Now an employer can cultivate a select set of references, people who are trusted to give honest recommendations and referrals, and rely upon those people to suggest or verify the qualifications of prospective employees.

Ten, fifteen years from now, I think the typical opening for a "good job" will involve an employer identifying prospects, verifying their credentials, and narrowing their list down to a small number of prospects before the prospective employee even knows that the opportunity exists. Headhunting on steroids.

My advice to anybody in college: Build your professional network on Google Plus and LinkedIn, stop tweeting about your social life and latest snack, and start documenting your actual accomplishments. (If you don't have any yet, start accomplishing - what can you do, right now, that might impress a future employer in your field?) And keep it honest. The more technology-oriented your field, the more you need to get started... yesterday.

You Won't Save Middle Class Jobs with Talk About Teaching Motivation

A few days ago, Thomas Friedman took a kernel of truth and attempted to run much too far with it. At this point there is immense downward pressure on middle class incomes and job security, and in many fields - particularly those likely to offer the best wages - it is more important than ever to maintain an up-to-date skill set if you want to remain employed. I'm all for teaching students at all levels to be more entrepreneurial and about the expectations they are likely to face in a future job market. I question the conceit,

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.

Specifically, what middle class jobs are being pulled up? Also, frankly, the correlation between wages and "skill" is far less precise than Friedman assumes. If you have unusual skills that happen to be in demand, you are much more likely to get a job and a decent wage than you are if you have far more developed skills that happen to be in low demand or aren't materially different from the skill set held by the larger applicant pool. Part of the problem with telling workers, "You're responsible for your own career development" is that it's much easier to evolve skills that ultimately become commonplace or obsolete than it is to identify and master new skills on your own time and your own dime that your employer may not presently value but will ultimately prove to have significant value in the marketplace.

Friedman seems excited by the notion that knowledge is becoming unimportant,

I tracked ["education specialist Tony] Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Frankly, hearing a statement like that from a self-described "education specialist" would leave me looking for a new expert. Let's use a simple example from early elementary school - math facts. It is very difficult to progress in mathematical knowledge and skills without a mastery of basic math facts, because if you can't do simple math problems quickly in your head you will not develop the speed necessary to keep up with the rest of the class as lessons become more complex. Sorry, no, "You can use a calculator instead", is not an answer. First, if you need a calculator for basic math facts it's still going to slow you down. Second, it's a highly unusual person who succeeds in math-dependent fields who cannot do basic math problems in her head, and quickly solve problems that would confound most of the rest of us (we might not even know what information to punch into a calculator or how to order the operations) with pen and paper.

Friedman might object, "But math is different." But it's really not. You're not going to be a good lawyer unless you have a decent understanding of the legal principles you encounter. You're not going to be a good doctor unless you quickly recognize medical conditions and symptoms within your field of practice, and know how to perform a physical examination. Friedman's perspective is probably colored by his profession - few pundits have any meaningful subject matter expertise, so they spend much of their time aggregating information and whittling it down to column length. To some degree you might be able to get away with that as an "education expert" - you're not likely to be called upon for instant answers, and to the extent that your primary focus is on research and publication you're going to be drawing upon a broad variety of sources to produce your next paper. But even in that latter context, you need enough knowledge of your subject matter to know what has come before, as you're not going to successfully publish papers that betray a fundamental ignorance of the research that has been done in the past - and you can't trust Wikipedia to bring you up to speed.

But more than that, if you want to become good at grappling with a particular set of ideas or concepts, you need to actually wrestle with the facts. You can't learn or be taught how to be a good thinker without a framework. There's a reason that traditional education typically begins with a survey course - to provide students with the necessary foundation to understand more complex concepts and ideas. As much fun as it might be to pretend otherwise, "They can look it up on the Internet" isn't a substitute. If you don't learn the basics, you're going to end up in over your head.

There's something of a tension in Friedman's assertion,

My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job.

As evidenced by his continued statement,

Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.

First of all, there's no evidence that jobs are going away. No major employer is casting off its employees in favor of an all-independent contractor workforce. Nor is outsourcing key functions all it's cracked up to be - when Boeing attempted to minimize its in-house expertise and rely on contractors... disaster followed. One of Yahoo!'s recent steps to re-invigorate its corporate culture was to stop employees from working at home. If there's evidence that employers are moving away from the concept of "jobs" and "employees", it's well-hidden.

Second, Friedman's expansion upon his comment reveals what I previously suggested. The issue is much less, "There won't be jobs in the future," and much more, "If employers realize that your skills aren't special your earning capacity will flatten or decline, and if your employer decides that your skills are obsolete you'll probably be shown the door." More than that, while corporations might historically have helped employees update their skills or develop new skills, Friedman sees that cost and burden as being shifted to the employee. I think he's correct, but as with professionally managed pension funds vs. individual retirement accounts I think he's missing something important: the professionals have access to information and resources that allow them, on the whole, to better predict market trends and by scaling up their operations they can take advantage of efficiencies that should allow for better training at a lower cost. When you transform that into, "Every man for himself", no matter how well you try to prepare employees for their "self-managed" future you will see a great number of them flounder or drown.

Friedman continues by speaking of the importance of motivation, more specifically of "intrinsic motivation":

Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.

That observation is, for lack of a better word platitudinous. Of course people who are intrinsically motivated to learn and expand their skills will do so. They always have and they always will. The problem is that the forces Friedman describes are extrinsic - they come from outside the worker. Fear of job loss can be a powerful motivator, but it's extrinsic. The statement only has significance if we can teach intrinsic motivation, but unfortunately that seems to be much more a component of personality than a product of a particular pedagogy.

Which is probably why, when asked how to produce more intrinsically motivated students, Friedman's expert may as well be clicking on a "mission statement generator":

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

To me, that sounds a lot like doubling down on the status quo (although if student work is assessed through the year rather than through high-stakes standardized testing, that would be a positive step)... but with badges. (Pieces of flair?) What's missing? Anything concrete. If I were the type of boss Friedman predicts for our collective futures, and somebody handed that statement to me as a meaningful reform proposal, he would quickly find himself testing his ability to invent his own job.

Blue Collar Careers Aren't as Easy or Available as Some Assume

I recently had to replace our range, as the old one started to produce error messages and the "cheap" repair didn't resolve the problem. Due to the fact that the original owner of this house picked a downdraft, slide-in range, I went with the most recent model of the same range. My hope was that the new range could be installed in the same manner as the old - the ventilation unit itself that sits below the range hasn't been changed. Alas... the new range was wider than the old range (and we have granite countertops) and the amount of clearance beneath the range has been reduced. So... the vent has to be reconstructed to allow for a slightly different placement of the fan and to allow the power cord to clear the vent duct.

I initially called around to try to find a handyman to cut the granite about 1/2 inch so that the oven would slide into the opening. Of the ten or so contractors I called, less than half called back and only one was willing to do (or should I say, subcontract) the work. He didn't want to send the granite subcontractor along unless he came along and, although the granite contractor was willing to charge a $200 flat fee (I expect that was a marked up rate) he wanted to accompany the granite contractor and charge a fee for the trip out and an additional hourly fee. It became pretty clear during our conversation that it was a package deal - he was not going to send the granite guy out unless he got to tag along, and that his fees for supervising were apt to meet or exceed the fees of the guy doing the work.

I took care of the cut myself - I got a dry cut diamond blade for my circular saw, put on appropriate eye, ear and hand protection and a mask, and kicked up a lot of dust. If you're going to try this at home, don't. Or if you do, I suggest using a grinder with a 4" blade instead of a circular saw, for better control. Or maybe you'll be able to rent or borrow a wet saw. The biggest problem I faced was that the guide for the saw sat over the open space, so I had to keep the saw straight and even by holding it that way rather than simply resting the bottom of the saw on the countertop. A grinder would have allowed for greater visibility of the marked line, would have been easier to control (i.e. it's a lot lighter), and likely would have made for a cleaner cut. On the whole, I'll say "not bad for a first job", but not work I'm going to be showing off to my friends. Not that I would have pulled out the range to show off the cut had it turned out better, but you know what I mean. ;-)

I got the range installed and close to level without replacing the vent pipe, but the other day I decided to complete the job. So I pulled out the range, removed the fan, and then removed an aluminum plate the original installer had placed on the wall around the hole for the vent. What did I find? Basically, the original installer had taken a hammer and knocked away the drywall, initially opening the wall in front of a wall stud and drain pipe, and then opening up a large hole to the right of that opening where the vent was installed through the wall. He had pulled all of the insulation out of that space, and cut/hammered a somewhat irregular hole through the wood and brick to the outside. He then used a dryer vent on the outside of the house instead of a proper vent cover for the range. The only thing he did to "seal" his work was to install a caulk line around the dryer vent - which is a good thing, given that he only sank two screws out of the four that were supposed to hold the cover in place. Well, that explains the drafts we would sometimes feel coming out from under the range....

And then I came across this editorial, arguing that "we" dismiss blue collar professions, but that blue collar work can potentially provide better remuneration than a college degree. Let me state up front that I agree with the overall principle - that if you're a student who has significant aptitude and interest in learning a skilled trade, it's perfectly appropriate to consider a trade instead of college - or to not give college a second thought. But at the same time, the conceit of essays such as this tends to be that college is hard but that anybody can learn and perform a skilled trade. So first and foremost, it's important to note that a lot of people in the skilled trades have associates degrees and bachelor's degrees, or have completed training or certification programs. Many skilled trades are physically demanding, and some are quite dangerous. Also, particularly at the laborer level, there's a lot of competition for jobs, sometimes from people who are willing to work for less than minimum wage.

For all I know, the guy who "installed" the vent for my range was paid less than minimum wage, cash under the table. Or perhaps he was paid a hefty installation fee, and chose to shave a couple of hours off of the job by not finishing the job properly. Or perhaps he was paid a substantial hourly wage and took a long lunch. I have no way of knowing. But I will guarantee that the homeowner paid a premium price for the "work". Expanding the pool of available laborers is not a recipe for driving up both quality and wages. It seems more likely to drive wages down without actually creating new job opportunities. You know... like the situation the author is describing for college graduates.

And the math....

At a time when unemployment is at an all-time high and college tuition continues to climb, the old formula no longer upholds. Students emerge with their hard-earned degrees and the college loans to show for it, but for what returns? The majority do not land a six-figure banking job straight out of school. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages for recent college graduates have not grown over the last decade, and actually dropped from 2007-11. In 2011, that average was just $16.81 per hour, a figure that barely makes a dent into student debt. The average wage for high school graduates is $9.45 per hour, a figure not much lower than that of a newly-minted university graduate, especially after you factor in tuition costs as well as the four years of being out of the workforce.

First, there was never an era in which the majority of college graduates would "land a six-figure banking job straight out of school". Second, $16.81 per hour is roughly $33,620 per year, and $9.45 is roughly $18,900 per year - and the college graduate likely also gets benefits such as paid vacation and health insurance. $9.45 is roughly 59% of $16.81. The author may not see the difference between those two figures as significant, but... I do.

Blue-collar professionals like electricians are enjoying 23% job growth this decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They earn on average $52,910 a year, almost $10 more per hour than recent college grads, and the top 10% earn at least $82,680. Welding, light truck driving and plumbing are just some of the blue-collar fields with similar earning potential, and the vocational training required is a fraction of the cost of a college degree.

First, the fact that the average career electrician makes 10% more than a newly minted college graduate does not make for a strong case that the college graduate was foolish to pursue the degree. Also, you need to consider that union electricians earn considerably more than non-union electricians, roughly $14,000 per year more, and we know which way that trend is going. Further, work as an electrician is physically demanding work. And let's just say, the top 10% of wage earners among college graduates earn a lot more than $82,680. On the whole, plumbers earn a bit less than electricians - and let's not forget that the category includes pipefitters and steamfitters. (Talk to some of those guys about their work-related injuries.) Light truck driving pays roughly $13 per hour, without much of a career path. The "master welders make lots of money" argument isn't particularly new, never mind that a master welder has to work many years to reach that level and will have considerable knowledge of metallurgy, and never mind that you're dealing with high temperatures and molten metal, potentially toxic fumes, potentially explosive materials, and are sometimes performing that work in dangerous locations or cramped spaces. It's "blue collar" so "anybody can do it", right?

If financial freedom is your ultimate endgame, then going into business for yourself can increase earnings exponentially, a message Rich Dad, Poor Dad has been peddling since the beginning of this millennium.

In other words, the author thinks its easy to start and market a business in the skilled trades, based upon the facile analysis of a guy who is really good at hawking books? Hey - the author of the editorial is a freelance writer. How's that exponential increase in earnings coming along?

But do these blue-collar jobs lead to fulfillment? It is certainly an argument I'm sympathetic to. We are told to do what we love; the money will assuredly follow.

I suspect that the author dropped a word or two, and intended to argue that she's concerned that blue collar jobs aren't fulfilling. Well, that's going to depend on the job and the individual performing the job. Also, there are plenty of white collar jobs that are nothing but a grind. If work could be presumed to be fulfilling, they would probably call it something else. Also, I'm not sure who is saying "Do what you love and the money will assuredly follow," but somebody needs to smack them upside the head with reality.

The author concludes,

In this tight job market, we cannot afford to ignore the reality that a college degree is becoming a luxury: one that no longer translates directly to success. It is time we shed our stigmas towards "menial" workers. The irony is that their salaries – and accompanying lifestyles – are anything but.

I'm not aware of any era in which a college degree has automatically translated into financial success, which appears to be the type of success the author is focused upon. Certainly there have been times in the past when college graduates had friendlier job markets and more predictable career paths. Yes, with the cost of college education and the changes of opportunity for college graduates, college (particularly at the tuition rates of private colleges) is increasingly a luxury. Those trends should neither be ignored or diminished, and somebody thinking about college truly should consider, "What else might I do with that time and money that could result in an acceptable career and income?" An approach that is far from novel? Get a job and work while completing your education, borrowing as little money as you possibly can on your path to a degree. If you click with your job, you may even find that you don't need the degree - and if you don't, you are preparing for a future in which you have better options - and work experience.

Technically speaking, we wouldn't shed our... let's say prejudices... against blue collar workers. Yes, some people do look down on blue collar work. I recall a conversation during law school when a classmate, who was moonlighting as a janitor, was instructed by another student that people shouldn't have to do "demeaning" work like being a janitor. (Janitors aren't all that important, you know, because floors and toilets can learn how to clean themselves.) Yes, let's respect that people who work hard for a living deserve respect for their effort, no matter what their job. To me, part of that is recognizing that some of the jobs that fall into the category of "blue collar" require a level of knowledge and sophistication that can meet or exceed that of a lot of jobs that require college degrees, while also requiring significant physical effort and presenting significant risk of injury. Yes, pretty much anybody could have pounded that hole in my kitchen wall, and hidden his lousy workmanship rather than completing the job properly, but that's not the ideal.

As for the conclusion that "[blue collar] salaries – and accompanying lifestyles – are anything but".... I suspect the author means to suggest that they're not insubstantial, as opposed to not menial. Yes, you can make a decent income in certain skilled trades, but those jobs are not immune to recessions, nor are they immune to anti-union efforts. I know a lot of college graduates, and a lot of people in the skilled trades. The former group has weathered the "great recession" without much visible impact. It's harder to find a job if you're unemployed, it's harder to find a new job if you want to change jobs, but on the whole they have kept their jobs and wages. The skilled tradespeople on the other hand... a builder who had to reinvent his business, bringing in significantly lower profits, when the new housing market collapsed in his area. A finish carpenter whose business collapsed, and who ended up losing his home to foreclosure (and he does really good work. A painting, tiling and drywalling team that can't earn a living wage, because they are consistently underbid for work by people who barely know how to hold a paintbrush. They would have done an immaculate job installing that vent, were they around at the time, but... it's not only private customers who want to pay the lowest bid. Try starting and maintaining a business in that environment.

Mitt Romney: "Government Does Not Create Jobs"

But wait a second, Governor Romney, you claimed that you were going to create 12 million jobs if elected President. Your so-called five-point plan. Now you say "Government does not create jobs"?

Well, your jobs plan - your statement that you will create 12 million jobs - was always pretty obviously a fraud, it's good of you to finally admit it.

The Divine Right of Boys in the Information Age

It occurs to me that in talking about a David Brooks column I had not originally intended to talk about, I failed to mention the passage that most caught my attention:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic.¹ The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That is to say, by being pretty much the same as they ever were, schools around the world are suddenly failing to sufficiently engage boys and, while girls (being sugar, spice and everything nice, and predisposed to resist the temptation of a marshmallow) are "verbally and socially sophisticated" in a manner that is allowing them to succeed in college and to reap the rewards of the information age.

My first response is, where were the concern trolls when women, frail, wilting flowers that they are, were excluded from higher education? Brooks' allusion to genetics evokes the notion of past eras that women were biologically unsuited to higher education or to a competitive workplace. And let's not pretend that those biology/genetics arguments have vanished. Also, if the problem is genetic, why does Brooks believe school teachers will be able to "fix" it?

At least when it comes to math, Brooks appears intent on proving himself correct and folks like Larry Summers wrong:

Even so, men make up just over 40 percent of college students. Two million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The performance gap in graduate school is even higher.

I'm not seeing good numbers on college graduation rates (lots on enrollment, not so much on graduation), and I don't want to spend more time at the moment looking. So I'll use a ballpark figure I saw tossed out, that 1.5 million students graduate from undergraduate programs each year. 15 million over ten years. Using the 60:40 Brooks shared, based on enrollment you should see 9 million women graduate and only 6 million men. Brooks is telling us that the number is 2 million and that this means colleges aren't engaging male students? He didn't share a source for his data, but I'm having a difficult time seeing that as a problem for men. I would like him to elaborate on his data and conclusions.

Also, no offense David, but guys like you are well-suited for college. Even if K-12 schools reinvent themselves so that the most rambunctious young men are engaged in ways that don't involve reading books, what do you believe is going to happen when they reach college and are handed a two-inch-thick text book or parked at a Bunsen burner in a chemistry lab?

Meanwhile, we have more than a few years of the information age to look at. Let's compare how women are faring to how men are faring. If I were to look at a list of the founders of the most successful companies of the information age, or a broader list of their executives, what ratio of men to women should I expect to find? That is, once we move past the world of K-12 education, where can I find Brooks' hand-wringing translated into a real-world environment in which women have the advantage?

I suspect that Brooks isn't actually talking about "boys" here - he's talking about boys being raised in low-SES households. Were his own son to struggle in school, I am skeptical that Brooks would be criticizing his son's teacher for requiring him to write book reports about "exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas" (perhaps The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman). Brooks seems like the sort who would read the book with his son, try to engage his son in the literature and instill a love of reading and, if all else failed, hire a tutor to make sure that his son didn't fall behind the rest of the class. (He might even consider private school, assuming that wasn't his child's starting point.)

If Brooks were really talking about Henry V, he would be taking note that the new Henry IV benefits from the modern equivalent of the "divine right of kings" - a system that is set up to favor, privilege, preserve and expand his family's wealth, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Brooks can't argue that it's a zero sum game given his acknowledgment of the associated loss of middle class jobs and diminished opportunity for the non-wealthy Henry IV's. A modern Henry V doesn't need no education - he can and will fall back on daddy's name, money and connections, and a well-rigged tax code.

So let's not pretend that boy-centered K-12 education, whatever that would involve, would be a panacea. Let's not pretend that the modern Henry V's would be stifled in a traditional school while he would flourish in a rigid military academy. And most of all, let's not act as if the fact that the opening of doors, historically closed to women, is a bad thing, even if some men find that women outperform them in the ways that matter to the modern job market.²
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1. There is a sense in which men are genetically "inferior" to women - women get a full set of DNA building blocks, whereas men have lost a chunk of chromosomal material - hence XY instead of XX. That does translate into a set of Y-linked genetic traits, vulnerabilities, abnormalities and eccentricities, some of which can be beneficial and others of which can be catastrophic, with most falling somewhere in the middle. By way of example, see David Brooks' hairline - "male pattern baldness".

2. Brooks likes to talk about "human capital", and the optimization of its value. Brooks may well be able to fashion a K-12 program for kids who aren't college-oriented, and whose parents lack the wealth and resources to prevent that from mattering, such that their "human capital" is maximized. But who says that should be, could be, or is best accomplished through pushing them through college, whether or not they have academic focus, interest or aptitude? If Brooks accepts that his impoverished Henry and Henrietta V's aren't college material, why the lament about men struggling in college?

Does Romney Lack a Coherent Economic Policy

At least, that's what people say. And it's a reasonable reaction, given that he hasn't disclosed an actual policy for boosting the economy. I agree with those who reject his prior offerings as representing an actual plan, as opposed to stringing together a list of promises and right-wing talking points:

The Romney campaign, of course, claims that it has presented an economic plan—and strictly speaking it is right. Last September, Romney unveiled “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,” an economic manifesto that ran to more than a hundred and fifty pages. Even back then, though, Romney’s ragtag collection of proposals—fifty-nine of them, ranging from eliminating the inheritance tax, to capping federal spending at twenty per cent of G.D.P., to opening up America’s energy reserves for development—was widely dismissed as inadequate by his fellow Republicans.

In response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary, Romney subsequently unveiled a revised version of his plan, this one containing a twenty per cent cut in income-tax rates from top to bottom. More recently, in a series of ads, his campaign has said that in his first hundred days he will move to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, and balance the budget. “By day one hundred,” the ads say, “President Romney’s leadership brings new certainty to our economy, and the promise of new banking and high-tech jobs.”

By no stretch of the imagination could the hastily revised tax proposals or the promises contained in the new ads be described as a credible, fully-costed economic plan.

Romney has apparently reduced his "plan" to five talking points, which he presented to the NAACP:

I know what it will take to put people back to work, to bring more jobs and better wages. My jobs plan is based on 25 years of success in business. It has five key steps.

First, I will take full advantage of our energy resources, and I will approve the Keystone pipeline from Canada. Low cost, plentiful coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables will bring over a million manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Second, I will open up new markets for American products. We are the most productive major economy in the world, so trade means good jobs for Americans. But trade must be free and fair, so I’ll clamp down on cheaters like China and make sure that they finally play by the rules.

Third, I will reduce government spending. Our high level of debt slows GDP growth and that means fewer jobs. If our goal is jobs, we must, must stop spending over a trillion dollars more than we earn. To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.

Fourth, I will focus on nurturing and developing the skilled workers our economy so desperately needs and the future demands. This is the human capital with which tomorrow’s bright future will be built. Too many homes and too many schools are failing to provide our children with the skills and education that are essential for anything other than a minimum-wage job.

And finally and perhaps most importantly, I will restore economic freedom. This nation’s economy runs on freedom, on opportunity, on entrepreneurs, on dreamers who innovate and build businesses. These entrepreneurs are being crushed by high taxation, burdensome regulation, hostile regulators, excessive healthcare costs, and destructive labor policies. I will work to make America the best place in the world for innovators and entrepreneurs and businesses small and large.

Do these five things – open up energy, expand trade, cut the growth of government, focus on better educating tomorrow’s workers today, and restore economic freedom – and jobs will come back to America, and wages will rise again. The President will say he will do those things, but he will not, he cannot, and his record of the last four years proves it.

Let's call that "The Five Platitudes of Mitt":

1. "Take Full Advantage of Our Energy Resources", apparently a signal to the fossil fuel industry that he'll back away from policies to reduce carbon emissions, and perhaps go back to the heady days of G.W. Bush and his massive subsidies, but there's no connection between "I'll make the energy industry richer than ever" and "bring[ing] over a million manufacturing jobs back to the United States". Mitt needs to connect the policy with the supposed outcome. What jobs does he imagine will come back to the United States if we burn more fossil fuel, and on what basis? What will those jobs pay?

2. "Open Up New Markets": How exactly will Romney identify and "open up" the "new markets"? What American products does he believe will be received by the "new markets" he opens up, and in what quantity? Exactly what does he believe that China is doing that makes it a "cheater" - is he talking about financial gamesmanship resulting in a devalued Renminbi, akin to the games he, himself, plays to avoid taxes - and once he defines the problem exactly what will he do to rectify it?

3. "Reduce Government Spending" - Romney personifies the modern Republican demagogue when it comes to government spending. He identifies no targets for his cuts other than the first serious federal effort to limit the healthcare inflation that seriously threatens our nation's financial stability - a program so "wasteful" that while attempting to reduce that serious economic threat it reduces the deficit.
   
   Romney endorses the Ryan Plan - a nebulous proposal that cuts government spending by hammering the middle class, but then increases the deficit by slashing taxes for people like Romney. Worse, while Ryan is happy to be specific about the tax cuts he's giving to the wealthiest Americans, he refuses to specify the cuts he's proposing to partially offset the economic catastrophe he proposes.

4. "Nurturing and Developing the Skilled Workers our Economy Needs" - What workers? Through what policies? To what effect? It's a "Chicken in Every Pot"-type statement - twaddle.

5. "Restore Economic Freedom" - More twaddle. It's the type of line that might get him a cheer from the most ignorant participants at a Tea Party rally. (I'm curious, also - when he enacted "Romneycare", did he take the position that he was knowingly harming small businesses? No, of course not. He's simply coughing out a focus-group vetted applause line that has nothing to do with any policies he would care or dare to articulate in public.)

He's running for office, and the mainstream media on the whole appears satisfied that in a political campaign, something a candidate purports to be a policy but is in fact nothing more than populism, demagoguery, ridiculous promises and absurd overstatements is sufficient. "How can we press for more - we might hurt the candidate's chances in the election if we made him share genuine policy proposals." But when Romney says things like "I have no hidden agenda", is it not fair to ask him, "So that means you have no actual agenda"? (The question can be rephrased to be more delicate, if you wilt at the thought of being somewhat sarcastic when questioning a political candidate.)

So yes, as John Cassidy pointed out in the article linked above, Romney's promises fall far short of a "credible, fully-costed economic plan". Cassidy accepts the cynical explanation that if Romney were to be specific it would cost him votes. But Cassidy also points out that Romney is not being advised by stupid men:

The academic economists advising Romney—a group that includes Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard—are moderate conservatives: they don’t believe in right-wing fairy stories about tax cuts being self-financing and budget cuts stimulating the economy. If Romney enters office and slashes tax rates without pushing through offsetting spending cuts, the budget deficit will shoot up—just as it did following the Reagan and Bush tax cuts. If he cuts government spending without stimulating demand in other ways, the unemployment rate will rise even further. In addition, the entire situation is greatly complicated by the so-called “fiscal cliff”: the fact that on January 1, 2013, the Bush tax cuts are due to expire and the automatic spending cuts agreed upon by both sides during last year’s debt-ceiling debacle are due to be introduced.

Let's back up for a minute here - way back to the days when Romney was advancing a Mssachusetts-style health insurance mandate for the nation, and speaking positively of federal legislation that would have created such a mandate. What else was he doing at that time? He was endorsing stimulus spending - and stating that as a Republican governor he would happily have taken stimulus money.

Here's a radical idea for you: Perhaps the reason Romney refuses to be specific about his economic policies is that he agrees that President Obama is doing all a president can do - and perhaps more than a Republican president could do - to revive the economy. Perhaps his economic advisors agree with him (the 2009 model) that the stimulus bill was sound economic policy and that, were it not made politically impossible by Romney's own party, another stimulus bill would be a really good idea.

Mankiw wrote an editorial some years back that could be interpreted as a suggestion that we use inflation or tax penalties to boost consumer spending. Perhaps Mankiw is now explicitly among those who argue that low, sustained inflation would be a good approach to dealing with debt overhang issues and pulling the nation out of the recession.

When he has unguarded moments, Romney appears to understand that, assuming he could actually identify targets for cuts, even when times are good you cannot significantly cut government spending without causing serious harm to the economy:

... because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.

Various right-wingers call that a "gaffe", but to the extent that's a fair characterization it would be a Kinsey Gaffe (a politician accidentally telling the truth). It suggests that Romney is the inverse of the old "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV line" - "I actually understand economics, but I play an idiot on TV". And note, consistent with his endorsement of stimulus spending back in 2009, the same logic he expresses in opposing tax cuts can be applied in favor of stimulus spending.

If Romney knows his "day one" promises are largely a lie - that if implemented they will actively harm the economy - then it shouldn't actually be a surprise that he won't state an actual policy. Because odds are it would end up sounding like, "My solution would be to do what President Obama is doing, but maybe I would have more success with my own party in terms of getting more stimulus spending or convincing them to pass the proposals the President has been pushing for the past year to boost employment. Significant spending cuts on my first day in office? Do I look like an idiot?"