It's increasingly annoying to me to attempt to read papers that mix some absolute rates with relative rates and then rates of changes of those rates. That's data they have that they're not sharing. The publishing standard should be absolute data points; then also rates of change, then possibly also changes in the rates of change (2nd derivative! ) I think relative wages are important, but don't think this paper is very convincing about it.
"the decline in relative earnings for non-college prime-age men over the last four decades is estimated to have raised their labor force exit propensity by 0.49 percentage point, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in their labor force exit rate during this period."
What was the exit propensity before? (in 1980?) Is there a difference in the "exit rate" and "exit propensity"? So I open the whole 45 p pdf, to skim for graphs:
Figure 1: Changes in Relative Earnings
F 2: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by Education Attainment
F 3: 3: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by Occupation
F 4: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by State
(with states either above or below "median relative earnings decline rate")
Then tables with notes on men-women (no trans columns), and a little bit on different races (3: W B H) & tentative conclusion, with a note on disability:
"Nearly 30 percent of the prime-age men who left the labor force reported a work-limiting disability condition at the time of the exit event.14"
Since a lot of the paper is using median instead of average, to avoid the top side push of averages up, it seems that "disability" from 30% (below median) is more significant than any of the data presented.
The more relevant question becomes:
Why are so many non-college educated men becoming disabled?
Relative economic status doesn't just affect social status: it can also affect access to positional material goods. In a lot of the most lucrative job markets, housing is becoming a positional good; the tale of the upper-middle-class professional family changing jobs and moving out of the SF Bay Area because highly compensated techies have outbid them for all the houses in the good neighborhoods has become a cliche. Thus looking at mobility rates along with exit rates might provide more context on why higher peer wages drive exit.
"So if Richard Reeves thinks that men can be encouraged to work in low-status jobs in the health sector, he needs to think again."
It might well be that there will never be many men working in low-status health care jobs. That is an unknown. It is also unknown whether people are quitting because of status loss related to someone else getting a pay raise. Again, maybe. What is known is that some men quitting because of lower status does not mean there aren't many other men willing to take such jobs.
<i>"I’ve had a similar thought recently, which I express as the worst thing that happened to crypto was the run-up in Bitcoin price. That is because it focused people’s attention on speculation, which in turn elevated 'pyramid scheme' into a leading use case for crypto.
My longstanding aphorism is that standard banking is adjacent to government and crypto is adjacent to crime."</i>
I would say that government is adjacent to crime, and in more than one direction -- government doesn't just fight crime, it uses many of the same methods criminals do but legalizes them.
Ultimately, every fiat currency, at least once it loses its gold (or similar) backing, gets its value by the same circular reasoning SBF tricked his banks into accepting. They're all pyramid schemes. The official ones are worse because they can treat you as a criminal for trying to get your money out.
You mention my name, but my comment was not about COVID.
Yes, there are externality issues inv involved in the COVID response, since anything a person does to keep from getting COVID means they will not transmit it, so the value of prevention has some value that is external to the person bearing the of of the prevention. You are correct that the same reasoning applies to any infectious disease, but other diseases are less transmissible and harm from transmitted infection is greater. [I believe that there were fewer cases of flu in 2020 and 2021, so there seems to have been some positive effect of prevention measures on those fronts.] |
By the way, recognizing that prevention has some benefits does not imply that any given preventive measure was cost effective.
Could you be a little more specific about what it is you disagree with me about? That perhaps some of the reduced flu infections are not a result of COVID NPI? [When people measure "crowing out" are they careful to exclude the effects of measure that prevent spread of virus in general?] Could be. Different estimates of that would effect the optimal employment of NPI's.
_My_ point is that CDC/FDA failed us in not giving either individuals or policy makers the information (in most cases becasue they did not generate it) and tools needed to make cost effective decisions about which NIPs to employ when, how; when to promote asymptomatic testing; and how to roll out vaccination most effectively. These failures bear a large share of the blame for COVID response policies having become partisan.
Let's leave aside, please, what i pretended rather than real. [And I am not a Libertarian.]
CDC/FDA did not give individuals and families the information they would need to take optimally self interested decisions (or decisions that included the benefits they might provide to others) about NPI.
But (addressing your question about state involvement) coordination and externality problems exist. It's probably better for all restaurants with roughly similar transmission characteristic to be closed for indoor dining than for each to decide base on their own estimates of what others would do. [Of course if we could have instantly conjured up pigou taxes on each dimension of spread characteristic that would in principle have been better.] If there is evidence that wearing a mask prevents outward transmission of the virus, then it OK for the state to require businesses to require mask wearing for service, again, rather than having each venue figure it out for itself. I do not have a problem in principle with state involvement, but that the actual state involvement that we got was suboptimal (or more suboptimal than necessary given the cost of generating and disseminating knowledge).
It's increasingly annoying to me to attempt to read papers that mix some absolute rates with relative rates and then rates of changes of those rates. That's data they have that they're not sharing. The publishing standard should be absolute data points; then also rates of change, then possibly also changes in the rates of change (2nd derivative! ) I think relative wages are important, but don't think this paper is very convincing about it.
"the decline in relative earnings for non-college prime-age men over the last four decades is estimated to have raised their labor force exit propensity by 0.49 percentage point, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in their labor force exit rate during this period."
What was the exit propensity before? (in 1980?) Is there a difference in the "exit rate" and "exit propensity"? So I open the whole 45 p pdf, to skim for graphs:
Figure 1: Changes in Relative Earnings
F 2: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by Education Attainment
F 3: 3: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by Occupation
F 4: Changes in Relative Earnings and Labor Force Exit Rate by State
(with states either above or below "median relative earnings decline rate")
Then tables with notes on men-women (no trans columns), and a little bit on different races (3: W B H) & tentative conclusion, with a note on disability:
"Nearly 30 percent of the prime-age men who left the labor force reported a work-limiting disability condition at the time of the exit event.14"
Since a lot of the paper is using median instead of average, to avoid the top side push of averages up, it seems that "disability" from 30% (below median) is more significant than any of the data presented.
The more relevant question becomes:
Why are so many non-college educated men becoming disabled?
Naturally, " More research is needed..."
Relative economic status doesn't just affect social status: it can also affect access to positional material goods. In a lot of the most lucrative job markets, housing is becoming a positional good; the tale of the upper-middle-class professional family changing jobs and moving out of the SF Bay Area because highly compensated techies have outbid them for all the houses in the good neighborhoods has become a cliche. Thus looking at mobility rates along with exit rates might provide more context on why higher peer wages drive exit.
"So if Richard Reeves thinks that men can be encouraged to work in low-status jobs in the health sector, he needs to think again."
It might well be that there will never be many men working in low-status health care jobs. That is an unknown. It is also unknown whether people are quitting because of status loss related to someone else getting a pay raise. Again, maybe. What is known is that some men quitting because of lower status does not mean there aren't many other men willing to take such jobs.
<i>"I’ve had a similar thought recently, which I express as the worst thing that happened to crypto was the run-up in Bitcoin price. That is because it focused people’s attention on speculation, which in turn elevated 'pyramid scheme' into a leading use case for crypto.
My longstanding aphorism is that standard banking is adjacent to government and crypto is adjacent to crime."</i>
I would say that government is adjacent to crime, and in more than one direction -- government doesn't just fight crime, it uses many of the same methods criminals do but legalizes them.
Ultimately, every fiat currency, at least once it loses its gold (or similar) backing, gets its value by the same circular reasoning SBF tricked his banks into accepting. They're all pyramid schemes. The official ones are worse because they can treat you as a criminal for trying to get your money out.
"So if Richard Reeves thinks that men can be encouraged to work in low-status jobs in the health sector, he needs to think again."
Think about how to make health sector jobs not "low status."
That's easy. Status ~= money, low skilled job workers need to make MORE Money, and then they'll have higher status.
It's a bit of a problem that so many people equate money, countable & objective, with status. But they do, I do, we all do.
You mention my name, but my comment was not about COVID.
Yes, there are externality issues inv involved in the COVID response, since anything a person does to keep from getting COVID means they will not transmit it, so the value of prevention has some value that is external to the person bearing the of of the prevention. You are correct that the same reasoning applies to any infectious disease, but other diseases are less transmissible and harm from transmitted infection is greater. [I believe that there were fewer cases of flu in 2020 and 2021, so there seems to have been some positive effect of prevention measures on those fronts.] |
By the way, recognizing that prevention has some benefits does not imply that any given preventive measure was cost effective.
Could you be a little more specific about what it is you disagree with me about? That perhaps some of the reduced flu infections are not a result of COVID NPI? [When people measure "crowing out" are they careful to exclude the effects of measure that prevent spread of virus in general?] Could be. Different estimates of that would effect the optimal employment of NPI's.
_My_ point is that CDC/FDA failed us in not giving either individuals or policy makers the information (in most cases becasue they did not generate it) and tools needed to make cost effective decisions about which NIPs to employ when, how; when to promote asymptomatic testing; and how to roll out vaccination most effectively. These failures bear a large share of the blame for COVID response policies having become partisan.
Let's leave aside, please, what i pretended rather than real. [And I am not a Libertarian.]
CDC/FDA did not give individuals and families the information they would need to take optimally self interested decisions (or decisions that included the benefits they might provide to others) about NPI.
But (addressing your question about state involvement) coordination and externality problems exist. It's probably better for all restaurants with roughly similar transmission characteristic to be closed for indoor dining than for each to decide base on their own estimates of what others would do. [Of course if we could have instantly conjured up pigou taxes on each dimension of spread characteristic that would in principle have been better.] If there is evidence that wearing a mask prevents outward transmission of the virus, then it OK for the state to require businesses to require mask wearing for service, again, rather than having each venue figure it out for itself. I do not have a problem in principle with state involvement, but that the actual state involvement that we got was suboptimal (or more suboptimal than necessary given the cost of generating and disseminating knowledge).