Tag Archives: jobs

The importance of statistics on college campuses

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Within a longer look at the fate of the humanities, one Harvard student suggests statistics dominates campus conversations:

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I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about things being “reified.”) Haimo told me that there was: the language of statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard now is introductory statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in 2005. “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample? How are you gathering your data?’ ” he said. “I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s part of any good critical analysis of things.”

It struck me that I knew at once what Haimo meant: on social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge. Today, a quantitative idea of rigor underlies even a lot of arguments about the humanities’ special value. Last school year, Spencer Glassman, a history major, argued in a column for the student paper that Harvard’s humanities “need to be more rigorous,” because they set no standards comparable to the “tangible things that any student who completes Stat 110 or Physics 16 must know.” He told me, “One could easily walk away with an A or A-minus and not have learned anything. All the STEM concentrators have this attitude that humanities are a joke.”…

Haimo and I turned back toward Harvard Square. “I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”

I suspect this level of authority is not just true on a college campus: numbers have a particular power in the world today. They convey proof. Patterns and trends. There can often be little space to ask where the numbers came from or what they mean.

Is this the only way to understand the world? No. We need to consider all sorts of data to understand and explain what is going on. Stories and narratives do not just exist to flesh out quantitative patterns; they can convey deep truths and raise important questions.

But what if we only care today about what is most efficient and most able to directly translate into money? If college students and others prioritize jobs over everything else, does this advantage numbers and their connections to STEM and certain occupations that are the only ways or perceived certain ways to wealth and a return on investment? From later in the article:

In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change.

If American society prizes money and a certain kind of success above all else, are these patterns that surprising?

Remembering the frenzy and promise regarding Amazon HQ2

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Amazon announced part of their HQ2 is coming along on schedule but the full project will soon go on pause:

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John Schoettler, Amazon’s real estate head, said in a statement the company is pushing out the groundbreaking of PenPlace, the second phase of the sprawling northern Virginia campus. The first phase of the campus, known as Metropolitan Park, is expected to open on time this June and will be occupied by 8,000 employees.

The move comes as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has taken steps to curtail expenses across the company in the face of slowing revenue and a gloomy economic outlook. That’s led to the company announcing the largest layoffs in its history, totaling more than 18,000 employees, while also reevaluating its real estate portfolio and sunsetting some projects…

PenPlace encompasses three 22-story office buildings, more than 100,000 square feet of retail space and a 350-foot-tall tower, called “The Helix.” The development is larger than Metropolitan Park, which sits south of PenPlace, and includes two additional, 22-story office towers, as well as a mixed-use site featuring retail, restaurants and green spaces.

Amazon selected Arlington as the site of HQ2, in addition to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York, as part of a closely watched, splashy search for a second headquarters that kicked off in 2017. The company announced in 2019 it would halt plans to build its new headquarters in New York after it faced pushback from local activists and city council leaders.

Numerous communities across the United States submitted proposals to host this second headquarters and the company sought tax breaks. The promise of the new headquarters involved at least these two big features: the status of Amazon in your community plus the thousands of jobs in a corporate headquarters.

With the changes in the world, will these promises pan out for Arlington, Virginia and the D.C. metro area? It sounds like at least 8,000 employees will be onsite. However, the headquarters may never be as big as once envisioned. Does Amazon have the same status in 2023 that it did in 2017? This include everything from its financial outlook to its recent layoffs to changes in the everyday Amazon experience for customers.

On the whole, I would guess local leaders will still pitch this as a big win. We got Amazon and all these jobs (and implying that others did not). The long-term effects might be less clear, particularly if tax breaks for Amazon and opportunity costs and the longer-term fortunes of the company are factored in.

“The strength of weak ties” applies to LinkedIn

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A recent study suggests that weak ties on Linkedin are better in helping people find jobs:

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If you have a LinkedIn account, your connections probably consist of a core group of people you know well, and a larger set of people you know less well. The latter are what experts call “weak ties.” Now a unique, large-scale experiment co-directed by an MIT scholar shows that on LinkedIn, those weak ties are more likely to land you new employment, compared to your ties with people you know better…

The notion that there is something especially useful about the more tenuous connections in your social network dates to a highly influential 1973 paper by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” from The American Journal of Sociology. In it, Granovetter identified weak ties as a key source of “diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization.”…

All told, the experiment involved around 20 million LinkedIn users, who over the five years ended up creating about 2 billion new connections on the site, recorded over 70 million job applications, and wound up accepting 600,000 new jobs identified through the site…

“Moderately weak ties are the best,” Aral says. “Not the weakest, but slightly stronger than the weakest.” The inflection point is around 10 mutual connections between people; if you share more than that with someone on LinkedIn, the usefulness of your connection to the other person, in job-hunting terms, diminishes.

The general idea is the people more removed to you but still in your network can access opportunities that close connections do not have access to. Reach out to the edges of your network and there are more options.

Now it would be interesting to see how LinkedIn and other similar platforms take advantage of this knowledge. Many social media platforms want to connect people. But, what if having more ties and increased interaction with other users is actually a negative feature for jobs?

Or, I imagine there are strategies for social media users to create an excellent set of weak ties rather than connect with people they know better. Why connect with people close to you when you could amass weak ties that could come through big later?

Trying to keep up with growth in housing and jobs, Dallas edition

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A report on the growing numbers of housing and jobs in the Dallas metropolitan area over the last decades highlights the connection between the two:

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From 2010-2020 the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area added 438,000 new housing units, increasing the housing stock by 18%. Dallas’s growth in new housing ranks No. 9 fastest among the nation’s 100 largest metros, Zillow’s stats show.

Over the same period, Dallas added 802,000 new jobs, an increase of 29%. A healthy housing market should add a new housing unit for every 1-2 new jobs as the local economy grows, according to the Zillow report and industry rule of thumb

.In Dallas-Fort Worth, 1.8 jobs have been added for every new housing unit, indicating that the area is building enough new housing to keep pace with demand, according to Zillow, although many realtors, homebuilders, and would-be buyers argue that’s not the case, at least right now.

Many American communities would like to have this problem: more residents and more jobs. Growth is good. Yet, growth in one area that outpaces the ability for other areas to keep up could become a problem.

In this case, the issue is housing. A flood of new workers could lead to higher demand for housing, driving up prices and increasing competition. In the long run, this could be discouraging both to new workers as well as long-term residents who find themselves in a different housing market.

I could imagine other issues in the Dallas area and elsewhere where growth happens. Take schools. This often comes up in booming suburbs where new residences are plentiful. This puts a strain on local schools and construction has to take place rather quickly to avoid having a lot of students in temporary settings. But, at some point, population growth will slow down and then there might be too much education infrastructure and costs that are difficult for the community to sustain.

Another example could be traffic and congestion. Adding all these jobs and housing units means many more people have to travel between them. Can the current roads and mass transit (roads in the case of most American metropolitan areas) handle all of this? New lanes can be added but putting in additional roads or highways is expensive and time-consuming. And studies show that adding road capacity just leads to more driving and more traffic.

The Dallas area might be fine in the long-run with roughly 1.8 new jobs per new residence but it will take some time to catch up with and settle in to the growth.

$741 million in tax incentives for Amazon in NE Illinois – with a bigger price tag for economically challenged communities

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Amazon has constructed 36 facilities in the Chicago region since 2015. And they got a lot of help from taxpayers in disadvantaged communities:

WBEZ

To help pay for its vast expansion, the company and its developers have won at least $741 million in taxpayer-funded incentives in northeast Illinois alone, according to a Better Government Association/WBEZ investigation…

Amazon collected less than $100 million in public incentives for the 15 warehouses it built in predominantly white communities but won more than $640 million in taxpayer incentives for the 21 projects built in communities with larger nonwhite populations, the examination found. Many of those communities are either mostly Black, mostly Latinx or have higher concentrations of low-income residents, and with municipal budgets already short on cash.

Records show the three largest incentive packages Amazon received — totaling $512 million — all came from predominantly Black suburbs. By contrast, the company built warehouses in at least seven mostly white communities that reported offering no public incentives at all…

While many of the communities may get more jobs, experts interviewed say the lost revenue from taxpayer incentives will strain public resources to rebuild crumbling roads from the truck traffic, mitigate pollution from the exhaust fumes and noise and to pay for other services such as police protection and fire prevention.

That big companies seek out tax breaks and local incentives is not new. Amazon played the game on a grand scale with its proposed second headquarters.

But, this illustrates one of the problems with tax breaks in general: it is a race to the bottom. Companies look for communities that will have a hard time saying no. What mayor or local official wants to turn down local jobs? Or, turn away a big company with the status like Amazon? Once they have such a company in town, communities often build on this when marketing land and facilities to other firms by saying they are home to Amazon.

Yet, the deal may not be a good one. Jobs are not the only factor that matters in a community. As the story above notes, traffic, pollution, noise, the strain on local budgets and services, and the quality of the jobs also matter. Does the addition of Amazon or another large company make the community as a whole better down the road?

The system could be improved in multiple ways. All the communities in a region could stop competing in this way; that Amazon locates within one municipality could also have spillover benefits for other communities. One community’s gain is not necessarily one community’s loss; the region operates as a whole. If revenue was shared across a region, then tax breaks in a particular community would matter less. Or, communities could just commit not to offer tax breaks at all. If companies cannot play the game, they would have to locate places for other reasons.

These possible solutions do not solve the underlying issues: jobs and capital in a metropolitan region are not evenly distributed. Patterns by race and class continue for decades as companies, residents, and other seek out particular locations and not others. That some communities have to pay more for Amazon to locate there just compounds the problem.

Tech jobs continue to congregate in particular metropolitan regions

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A new analysis looks at where tech jobs located between 2005 and 2017:

Researchers from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Fund, a tech-industry-backed think tank, arrived at their conclusion by looking at a fairly narrow slice of jobs—13 industries that involve the highest rate of research and development spending and STEM degrees per worker. That includes much of the software industry, as well as jobs in areas like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. The researchers found that, between 2005 and 2017, five metro areas—San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston— not only added lots of jobs, they were also becoming more dominant in those industries overall.

TechJobsWired2005to2017

In part, that’s due to changes in what businesses need, says Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley who wasn’t involved in the study. The enduring dominance of some tech hubs is somewhat counterintuitive. Technology was supposed to be a democratizing force—the internet and iPhone would make it possible to do innovative work from just about anywhere. But instead, high-tech industries became about proximity to your fellow high-tech workers. Businesses clustered around hubs of investment, in places where skilled workers could stick around after school, hop between jobs, and stay in touch with contacts. That plays out on an individual level too, Moretti says. In recent research tracking the patent activity of scientists as they moved in and out of places like the Bay Area, Moretti found that they were far more productive in those innovative hubs…

The researchers’ point is that it’s hard to build hubs of innovation from scratch—in places where the economy is really struggling, and where there’s little existing tech talent. Instead, you want to start with places that are already buzzing, and through a mix of investment—in things like R&D, education fellowships, and financing for small businesses—and tax incentives to encourage new business, nudge them to become innovation hubs. In other words, those places are already fertile ground for high-tech companies, but they need a little more fertilizer to get there. The researchers prefer federal investment to local subsidies that try to attract individual businesses—an often fruitless effort for smaller communities, as incidents like the downsized Foxconn factory in Wisconsin and Amazon’s HQ2 search demonstrate.

How exactly these centers of industry arise, thrive, and consolidate (and then maybe fade away or die?) is a good subject of academic study. Through a series of decisions, conditions, and good circumstances, agglomerations start. Inertia can carry them for a long time. As noted in the last paragraph, it can be difficult to introduce competition from other centers or create new centers once the main locations are well-established. Tech center do not just happen; they are the result of multiple social processes, interactions, and decisions.

Additionally, it is interesting to see that there is still a lot of value of actual physical locations near other businesses or organizations – even in a field that can render spatial and time distances less relevant. Being close to other people, being able to actually stop by or talk to them, still matters. All of this can add up to a location with a collection of similar organizations being more than the sum of its parts.

Yea! The Internet enables American workers to work more

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A working paper links the number of hours American white-collar employees put in and the Internet:

In a new working paper, the economists Edward E. Leamer, of UCLA, and J. Rodrigo Fuentes, of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, studied data about working hours from the American Community Survey. They found that hours worked since 1980 increased nearly 10 percent for Americans with bachelor’s and advanced degrees. Leamer told me that he believes this is because computing has shifted much of the economy from manufacturing to neurofacturing, Leamer’s term for intellectually intensive white-collar labor that is often connected to the internet, such as software programming, marketing, advertising, consulting, and publishing.

Neurofacturing jobs lend themselves to long hours for several reasons, Leamer said. They’re less physically arduous, as it’s easier to sit and type than to assemble engine parts. What’s more, the internet makes every hour of the day a potential working hour…

As Leamer and Fuentes write in the paper, “The innovations in personal computing and internet-based communications have allowed individual workers the freedom to choose weekly work hours well in excess of the usual 40.”

The internet has also supercharged global competition and forced international firms to outwork rivals many thousands of miles away. This has created a winner-take-all dynamic that’s trickled down to the workforce. In their 2006 study, “Why High Earners Work Longer Hours,” the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano found that the premium paid for longer workweeks has increased since 1980 for educated workers, but not for less educated workers. Their theory is that at the most competitive firms, ambitious workers putting in super-long hours are sending a clear message to the boss: Promote me! And the boss isn’t just getting the message; he’s actively soliciting it. At many firms, insanely long hours are the skeleton key to the C-suite and the partner track. Thus, overwork becomes a kind of arms race among similarly talented workers, exacerbated by the ability to never stop working, even at home. It’s mutually assured exhaustion.

“Mutually assured exhaustion” is the result of zealous workers, managers asking more of employees, or the product of a unique work ethic in the United States?

This could lead to a basic question that I ask myself from time to time: has the Internet made life better? Is humanity thriving more, feeling better, doing more good, and experiencing a better life because of the Internet? The personal comparison is harder in that I was much younger when the Internet was not available but I can still imagine the comparisons. How might my academic work be different? My family life? My leisure time? And so on.

Additionally, the study also seems ripe for a comparison to other countries around the world that also have the Internet. Is the Internet the driver here or a tool that the American economic and social system utilizes to push a particular kind of work and approach to life? The Internet is not all powerful and cultural and social decisions in other societies seem to provide room for pushing against the possibility of working all day that the Internet allows.

Reminder: only 17% of the jobs in the Chicago region are downtown

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An article I posted about earlier in the week included this statistic:

Downtown Chicago accounts for 17% of jobs in the six-county region, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security…

But most of the region’s jobs — almost 3 million — are outside of downtown and may require more complicated commutes. More than 400,000 people commute every day from Chicago to jobs in the suburbs, according to the Regional Transportation Authority

This 17% is still a sizable percentage of jobs within the region. Put those jobs together with other economic resources, cultural opportunities, political resources, and historical inertia and the Loop is still a center of the region.

But, this also suggests 83% of the jobs in the region are outside Chicago’s downtown. Many Chicagoland residents do not need to go near downtown for work. Many commutes are suburb to suburb. As the second paragraph above notes, even hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents travel from the center to the suburbs for work.

At the least, such numbers should help us reconceptualize cities, suburbs, and regions. The varied pieces within a region are interdependent. Problems need to be solved across communities and taxing bodies. Celebrations take place across the region. The problems of either cities or suburbs are not only theirs to address. The communities are competing against other regions more than each other.

Three larger issues underlying mass transit problems in the Chicago suburbs

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Suburbs in the Chicago region are looking for ways to help workers make the “last mile” connection between existing transit and their workplaces but there are few easy solutions:

Transit advocates and local officials are looking at ways to fill the “first mile/last mile” gap, which could include shuttle buses, bikes, scooters, better sidewalks, ride-share vehicles and, eventually, autonomous or self-driving vehicles…

Suburbs with manufacturing and warehouse businesses offer examples of the last-mile problem. Bedford Park has just 600 residents, but 400 businesses and about 30,000 jobs at big companies like Cintas, FedEx, Home Chef and CSX. Located near Midway International Airport, the village has for years promoted itself as business-friendly, and has seen jobs grow…

The last-mile problem goes beyond Bedford Park and into other other suburbs with light manufacturing like Addison, where it’s difficult for workers to connect with Metra because of varying shifts, Wennink said. It also affects white-collar work zones, like the office complexes of Naperville and Warrenville, Wennink said.

A longer-term solution to the job/worker disconnect is to have more jobs located in transit-oriented development areas, Wennink said. But in the meantime, businesses, employers and towns are trying a patchwork of fixes.

These commuting issues connect to three broader issues that, if addressed, could help address the last mile problem:

1. As noted, the Chicago region operates on a hub-and-spoke model where train lines and other transit options tend to radiate out of downtown but then there is little connecting the spokes. As one example, efforts to create a rail line that would connect some of the existing rail lines and job centers did not get very far.

2. Individual suburbs will find it difficult to address these issues on their own without more regional or metropolitan-wide support (and resources). These are collective problems but the preference for local governments in the suburbs plus limited organizational capability or power in the Chicago region means the efforts will likely remain just a patchwork.

3. While this might look like a transit problem, it could also be a housing issue. If people do not or cannot easily live near where they work, then transit is needed. The deeper underlying issue, however, might be residential patterns regularly organized by race/ethnicity and class that makes it difficult for many of the workers described in the article to be close to their place of employment. The social science term for this is spatial mismatch.

Living close to work

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Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke tweeted earlier this week about the ability of workers to live near their place of work:

https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1171238016289034240

There is a lot to think about here. A little historical context: most workers lived very close to work up until the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization that came with it. The separation of home and work life is a relatively recent phenomenon for humans.

A little data on commute times. The 2017 American Community Survey showed the average commute time was 26.9 minutes. Commuting time can differ quite a bit across metropolitan regions:

McKenzie says the East Stroudsburg, Pa. metro area has among the longest average one-way travel time, clocking in at about 37.9 minutes. The U.S. Census Bureau contacted NPR with new information to include the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area, which has a travel time of 37 minutes. Travel times for the two metro areas are not statistically different from one another.

Among the shortest average travel times, usually less than 20 minutes, were in Cheyenne, Wyo. and Grand Forks, N.D.

There is an academic term that addresses this issue: spatial mismatch. In this theory, jobs available to lower-income workers are located far from their residences. Imagine a typical well-off suburb: can the workers at the local Target or McDonald’s or gas station or hotel live in that community or nearby? Patterns of residential segregation and exclusionary zoning can mean that cheaper or affordable housing is not available close to certain jobs. This can be a more hidden form of inequality as longer trips to work mean less time for other activities.

This might get trickier for people with more resources and the options of where they want to live. A common American trade-off for the middle-class gets at this: should a homeowner move further out from work to purchase a larger home or live closer to work and job centers (which can include urban downtowns as well as suburban job centers dozens of miles away from urban downtowns)? Is a shorter commute worth having if it comes with paying more money for (possibly smaller) housing?

And perhaps the wealthy can truly live the closest to work if they so choose. Some of them might even locate their business or firm to where they are. Others might have multiple homes, including ones significant distances away where they can get to work by means not available to many such a private jets and helicopters.

So perhaps the issue here is not really living close to work but deeper issues involving mixed-income neighborhoods and moving away from resources (income and wealth) determining where people can life. O’Rourke gets into this a bit more, calling for smarter and denser cities that he says will lead to numerous positive outcomes – which could include shorter commutes.