quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

i just

fuck

sorry, what i meant to say was

http://gifsoup.com/view/171204/danny-glover-s-thoughtful-nod-o.gif

that use of 'random' has been in popular middle school argot at least, since 1990 / gates not crumbling yet

not sure you are grasping the predictive power of word-cloud as cultural astrology, remy - buchholz gets it

i understand better when there's an interactive piece of scalable text art attached; i'll wait for the meme version.

i'm pretty sure people still move for jobs. even young people. despite what crazy bad writer says.

but but FACEBOOK

the mystifying lack of interest in paying monthly car insurance

i do miss not having a car. i hate cars. i lived in philly for 12 years and never drove once. didn't have a license. i walked everywhere. didn't even take buses or trains. i rarely ever left the city. one of the big draws about where we are now is that i can walk to my store. we can walk to stores if we need to. we have a car but we could live without one if we absolutely had to.

Not much time to comment right now, but Laurel was severely otm about support systems. I'd add that the other main issue with claiming there are jobs elsewhere and hey why don't you leave your community and family is that people have no idea how to do that even if they wanted to! There aren't exactly a lot of role models in poor/small communities who came back there after doing some sort of bootstraps move who is available for advice and questions.

I think the biggest reason north dakota has a 3% unemployment rate is that 95% of people could not tell you that north dakota has a 3% unemployment rate, and the chance of a non-north dakotan knowing about a ()(fairly small) resource boom in a remote part of the country is highly correlated w/ 'I don't want to live in north dakota or work in an oil field, also I don't really need to'

like if a super bowl announcer was like 'wow that was a nice tackle, also did you hear about how many jobs there are in north dakota', north dakota would not have a 3% unemployment rate, because a few thousand people would go there, and then that would be that.

I think I figured out a business model here guys:

- Use riskier drilling/hydraulic fracturing methods in North Dakota near population centers
- Set up a call center to take complaint calls about said methods and locate it somewhere with high unemployment that people actually want to live
- Employment!

Nitpicking individual idiocies out of that piece seems almost pointless, but one other thing it glides over: Nevada's massive unemployment rate now is partly a result of so many people moving there for jobs back when times were (or seemed) good. Chasing hiring booms is risky business.

yeah the states w/ the highest % of people born elsewhere: nevada, arizona, florida

It doesn't help that the jobs in those places were like 90% building houses and selling them to one another.

You can get a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to Nevada real estate right now. If you're willing to buy a partially finished home, probably even more!

been reading ppl actually in nd / in the process of moving there:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/north-dakota/

looks like lots of places have manhattan rents atm

Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.

insert Onion cartoonist's crying Statue of Liberty

i'm all for these local yokel sustainable ecology-minded young people with shitty jobs and no cars!

*The New Yokelism* was gonna be the title of my book. hand-crafted hatchets. farmer's markets. noise bands. you know, my scene.

needs a catchy subtitle though. a la this old thread:

Quick! What Is The Title Of Your New Ludicrously All-Encompassing Zeitgeist-Seizing Non-Fiction Book About The End Of Everything

As an aside, I was just thinking about how "local" has kind of taken the place of "imported" as a signifier of a certain kind of taste. Which is an interesting turnabout. Probably should go on that other thread about craftsmanship and virtue and stuff.

i will NEVER be able to top this one. nobody will. i bow to the master...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51B94Z4SCAL.jpg

gross

i buy from some of these evangelical free-range farmers, by the way -- they are creationists and their many kids all wear identical gingham dresses but they grow some fine organic arugula and they get my liberal $$$.

God Hates Pfizer.

God hates [Big] Ags.

what this guy says about fb & Springsteen is obv dumb & I don't want to speculate on generation limbo's gestalt but the idea of moving to follow the work seems right to me. I get Mordy's point about the value of community & roots, but I don't have those things in the USA (immigrant family) so it's hard for me to relate to. & I guess I have ideas about the value of labor for a good life, & so uprooting for that, if needs be, is worthwhile. clown me all you want for my North Dakota comments, but if there are jobs in California, or Arizona, or overseas, then fine: it seems to me compelling that you would at least take seriously the idea of going there.

Having a very small support system makes the uprooting even more difficult, IMO, because each node in that system is more responsible for the others.

ie looking at the reverse of Vegas-to-Bumfuck ND, a farm kid with two parents, one or two siblings, and little extended family is going to have a more difficult time packing up and moving to a city for white-collar work because they bear more responsibility for their family/parents. That translates all over the place - immigrant families sticking together and having family shops/industries, small households that don't live close to where their families came from in past generations, etc.

Future responsibility for one's aging parents is IMO a major element in keeping working and lower-middle class kids from setting off for parts unknown.

I mean that stuff doesn't 'not matter' but I really just think this is above all an information thing when it comes to the small nd resource boom. outside of that there aren't really many places today you can just travel to w/ a hs education and the clothes on your back and expect a job. parts unknown are economically as bad as home or at least 'still not great', there are relocation costs, and you'll know nobody.

I wasn't just talking about hs only people, though.

well I don't think nd has a drastic shortage of marketing execs or bloggers or w/e

non-coast america isn't experiencing a drastic shortage of college grads cause they all moved to brooklyn.

tbf I'm just reflecting on the remarks of people on this message board who complain about not having (enough) work in places that are evidently nice to live in; & irl I know people moving out of NYC back to ATL. most of my acquaintances irl these days are academics who just go wherever they get hired, whether it's a postdoc or a real job. & my community, Latinos, have been moving to all kinds of places that elites consider shitty, western Kansas e.g. The work is shitty but it's work. so this is where I come from on this.

welllll ilx is actually not particularly representative of the american economy at large. a large % of people here have careers that don't exist in western kansas, let alone jobs that would *pay better* in western kansas. that said, I believe you can find some ilxors who have left nyc for opportunities elsewhere.

in any case, there are far more people with not enough work in places that aren't ilx-nice-to-live-in than people with not enough work in places that are nice to live in, so you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist. most people in my gf's grad program wouldn't be happy living in alabama, and yet, somebody from a good grad program is still going to take that job in alabama. some people put more weight into location than others when it comes to decision making, just as some people aren't willing to work 80 hour weeks for more money. but the general economic malaise makes people risk averse, and moving somewhere new is a decision with risks.

one of things about the north dakota 'example' (and really the dude is just throwing fairly arbitrary and unexamined 'facts' onto a thing he just has decided to believe) is that its sorta interesting to think about why (more) people arent moving there, and whether the unemployment rate is really that telling or descriptive a statistic when discussing economic migration but i dont think you can just jump to 'young people are lazy' or 'there arent enough lofts' w/o seeming like an asshole/stupid

yeah I'm thinking about this less as a macro strategy for "how to solve America's economic problem" b/c who knows, & more as a micro strategy of "what would I do if I were fucked jobwise?" which was exactly the situation of my family for the last few generations, & of my community more generally. we move. & again. & again. Location's not key; work is.

again you don't have to act like your family is particularly different or virtuous.

tens of thousands of college grads now teach english abroad cause they were fucked jobwise. when people learn about sure-ish-opportunities for a steady income somewhere else in the world, many of them take it. I know plenty who have. and that's a far more alienating and difficult decision than moving to a boring part of the country. w/ nothing but 'work' in mind, moving to korea is a better decision than moving to kansas, which is why...it happens.

totally in favor of Americans leaving the USA for work

yeah i guess my 'point' is that five minutes of google research and i can look at IRS data that shows plenty of people were moving states in 2010 although i couldnt find it broken down by age. so if we accept that people are still willing to move from high unemployment states like nevada and michigan why arent more of them moving to north dakota? and like we could theorize that the type of jobs on offer in north dakota dont match those jobs that people able to easily move for work can fill or that because of the lack of infrastructure moving to north dakota is simply much more costly than moving to say, texas. or maybe as iatee suggest theres simply an information gap and job seekers are unaware of potential employment in nd. again theres also the fact that 'unemployment rate' isnt really the best proxy for what drives ecnomic migration. i mean there are larger arguments too about economic potential and you can argue that people moving to non-coastal cities to chase temporary and uncertain contract employment are the ones making irrational decisions...

You can argue that people expecting anything but temporary and uncertain contract employment are irrational.

right, which is probably a good reason to aim for a part of the country w/ diversified and flexible economy and not in an oil boom town

a "diversified and flexible economy" only matters if you get a job in it!

So many people have already moved to North Dakota that there’s no place to put them. Browsing Craigslist recently, I saw an ad offering a 27-square-foot trailer for $1,800 a month. An actual two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot house in Minot can be yours for $3,900 per month. The Wal-Mart in Williston recently announced that it will no longer be letting people squat in its parking lot.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-09/what-new-york-city-can-learn-from-north-dakota-matthew-yglesias.html

but why look at facts when u can feel good abt yourself thru john steinbeck fantasies

yeah i think we have effectively dismantled that dude. good work, folks. onward and upward!

..I know people moving out of NYC back to ATL. most of my acquaintances irl these days are academics who just go wherever they get hired, whether it's a postdoc or a real job. & my community, Latinos, have been moving to all kinds of places that elites consider shitty, western Kansas e.g. The work is shitty but it's work. so this is where I come from on this.

So, your examples are:
1. out of one urban center to another urban center where they presumably came from
2. Academics who are going to another academic institution or a real job, both of which are expert work that pay well, most positions of which are going to come with a community, especially if it's a college town
3. "Latinos," although I'm sure this could be generalized to most immigrant populations, who often either bring families, move to where family have already settled, or are likely to send money home to their families.

i pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would've stayed home

I was just explaining where I'm coming from! it wasn't an argument.

but re. 3: I don't get your scare quotes. but more to the point: I admit it's a good thing to have a family when you're mobile. is that an objection?

Not really scare quotes, just saying that generalizing to immigrants as a whole is probably possible, no reason to limit to one group. I was trying to make the point that there's a specific model and family expectations for immigrant families where there really might not be for other unemployed people.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generation-stuck-why-dont-young-people-move-anymore/254349/

Alright, you might say, so that's an argument for these kids to move somewhere they can get a job. But where is that exactly? All the old affordable places were blighted by the downturn. Riverside, Phoenix, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, and Las Vegas were among the ten most popular cities for interstate migrants each year in the mid-2000s. But by 2009, these were the worst-hit metros in the recession. By 2010, Florida's net migration had stopped entirely. The Buccholz's say: "Move to North Dakota!" Let's be sensible. North Dakota is tiny. It's the population of Washington, D.C. It can't support millions of migrants, and it's straining to support the migration it's already got. Rents are rising -- even doubling and tripling! -- in parts of the Dakotas, as an oil and mining boom meets limited housing stock to create a run on rents.