Tag Archives: jobs

Those with the right jobs and resources can move where they want in the United States

Posted on by

In a story about people leaving Texas (even as the state gained population last year), I was struck by the patterns in the stories of people moving out the state: they could do so. Here is what I mean:

Photo by Terrance Barksdale on Pexels.com

While people have been moving into the Lone Star state to take advantage of its relatively affordable real-estate market, political atmosphere, and work opportunities, some of those same qualities are driving others out. Over 494,000 people left Texas between 2021 and 2022 (though the state gained a net population of 174,261.) It’s a trend that could intensify as housing costs surge and the state’s political landscape becomes more polarized…

For Texans, “the Midwest has emerged as popular recently because it is just by and large the most affordable region,” Hannah Jones, Realtor.com’s economic research analyst, told Business Insider in October. “We’re seeing this trend of buyers looking for affordability really explode.”…

In Austin, some tech workers who flocked to the city during the pandemic just can’t seem to get out fast enough…

Jules Rogers, a reporter who relocated from Portland, Oregon, to Houston in 2018 for a position at a local newspaper, left Texas less than two years after moving to the city…

Theoretically, Americans can move wherever they like. In reality, the ability to move is constrained by a variety of factors, including financial resources and jobs.

In this story, people can move in and out of Texas relatively easily. Some came in recent years and want to move back out. Others are leaving Texas for cheaper housing elsewhere.

This may be possible for some. But, it is not easy for everyone to do this. Americans do not just move to places where housing is cheaper. People have numerous reasons for locating in certain places and not others. Those with resources and particular jobs that are in demand or available in many places have some flexibility that others may not have. White-collar workers, in particular, may be able to more easily move from big metro region to big metro region (or even out of these regions as some did during COVID-19).

This would be hard data to collect but it would be interesting to compare people moving for different reasons and how long they stay. Do retirees who move to certain places stay longer than those who move for jobs or cheaper housing?

“Stuck between the hot housing market and the hot job market”

Posted on by

Housing values are up and there are jobs to be had – but many of the jobs to work are in places where housing is expensive. What gives?

Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

All over the country, employers like McDonnell are finding themselves stuck between the hot housing market and the hot job market. In Oregon, rural school districts have puzzled over how to provide enough housing for teachers. In rural Arizona, hospitals are renting out rooms to staff members. In Massachusetts, the state has helped support temporary housing for summer workers on Cape Cod.

The result is a kind of tug-of-war between two of the economy’s main pillars. On a small scale, these transactions are just business owners and employees working things out in one-to-one agreements. But the underlying tension caused by the housing market could permanently shape how people decide where to live, what jobs to take — and whether the economy is working for them.

No one thinks a lack of housing is enough to spoil momentum in the labor market. Employers have added workers for 34 consecutive months, after all, and the job market is still churning. But some economists still worry about the knock-on effects of the country’s housing challenges. Until enough homes get built in the places that need it most, more companies will have to get creative — through higher pay, remote work options or other perks — to ensure their workers can find a place to live…

Martin estimates that offers don’t work out more than half the time, largely because of housing issues. And even when they do, Martin said, she’s never seen so many professionals in mid-level management roles, earning $60,000 or $75,000 per year, who still need roommates to make it work.

I remember a presidential candidate suggesting people should be able to live near where they work…

The most interesting part of the article above is that it sounds like at least a few employers are getting creative in providing housing so they can have workers and stable employees. If the market or government cannot provide housing, employers and organizations can help.

This is a long-term issue in the United States that sometimes goes by the name of “spatial mismatch.” This refers to the situations where the jobs available do not line up with where people live. Particularly with jobs scattered throughout metropolitan regions, workers have difficulty finding housing near work opportunities and/or need to commute long distances.

Since job growth has continued for a while now, does this mean only certain workers have been able to take advantage of certain jobs? For example, those with more resources or housing equity in their current location or an ability to commute long distances could have an advantage for jobs. At some point, will there not be enough workers to fill some of these spots?

Almost all new American jobs in recent decades in urban areas

Posted on by

Urban areas in the United States – cities and suburbs – contain over 80% of residents in the country. Yet, new job growth happens even at even higher rates in these areas:

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Pexels.com

Meanwhile, researchers at Cornell University estimate that 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 happened in urban counties.

Many would not be surprised to hear that cities are job centers. Whether thinking about offices, industry, or service sectors, cities are often viewed as centers of innovation and economic activity.

But, one of the lesser known aspects of suburban growth in the United States is the amount of jobs in the suburbs. As part of a complex suburbia where suburbs are more than bedroom suburbs dependent on urban centers, suburbs are full of work and business activity. When I wrote the Oxford Bibliographies entry on Suburbanism, I made sure to include “Economic Activity in the Suburbs” as one of the sections.

It sounds like this also means that rural areas are not experiencing much job growth. The job growth is not close to the percent of Americans who live in rural areas. Without seeing historical data, it is hard to know whether this is a big change from the past or whether this has been the case for a long time. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that many rural areas can thrive when they experience little new job growth.

The importance of statistics on college campuses

Posted on by

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

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

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

Posted on by

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

Photo by James Anthony on Pexels.com

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

Posted on by

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

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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

Posted on by

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:

Photo by Mizzu Cho on Pexels.com

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.