I calculate conservation priorities for part of my living and how to communicate with the broader public is something that comes up often. We started using colour ramps that don't go from blue/green to red in an attempt to get people to think about the maps more deeply and not just check if their land was in or out. As a bonus, the ramps we use are consistent in b&w and don't show the lightest colour in the middle of the ramp. Anyway, I'll go read that article now to see if they have any insights.
The restaurant and bar sector is obviously the one that has the most unemployed now.
There are lots of transferable skills between dealing with drunks and dealing with small children. But really I'd rather have the bars back.
Right, and ideally I wouldn't want the industry of small, locally owned food and restaurants to be eviscerated in favor of childcare. That's sort of what I was wondering - if there's a vaccine, and we continue to employee healthy numbers of people in these social programs, which industries would we ideally like to have a shrinking workforce? Eg, coal miners, except there's not that many of them.
Kill Uber/Lyft, replace with actual taxis, and you'll have lots of people. Plus a little more drunk driving, probably.
Health insurance approval and maintenance peons, and the people employed to argue with them.
Private security.
Workers on bad infrastructure (highway expansion), though those workers can more easily simply be moved to good infrastructure (transit, solar).
Can I change my answer? 6.1 is right.
Looking up a list of occupations I think the answer is, "Transportation and material moving occupations" which employs almost 11M people (at an average salary of $32.4K) as self-driving vehicles replace some of those jobs.
We need to keep the telephone sanitizers.
In case anyone is curious, this is the more detailed list. Apparently there are ~3M truck drivers (there are 3.8M Secretaries and administrative assistants of which 600K are medical secretaries but I don't see other line-items specific to the insurance industry).
That chart is fascinating, especially the projections for 2028. Big hit in the postal business. Modest increase in lawyers, big drop in legal secretaries. Big increase in post-secondary business teachers: we're doomed.
9: A dead telephone sanitizer
if there's a vaccine, and we continue to employee healthy numbers of people in these social programs, which industries would we ideally like to have a shrinking workforce? Eg, coal miners, except there's not that many of them.
Prison guards.
What's he doing here?
Instead of showing a cone with the semantics that this is where there's more than a set N% probability of having the hurricane eye being over a specific location, they should:
1. Have multiple colored, regions corresponding to probabilities; I'd probably bucket them into 10 or 20% wide ranges
2. Those regions should be clearly labeled with the probabilities with big numerals: 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, >95%, etc.; anything above 30% should use scary font and color choices
3. The probability expressed should not be tracking where the eye is, but the probability that any part of the hurricane will be above that location at any time. Naively I suppose this could be taken by summing over all locations the eye can go and using an estimate of the hurricane's width at that point in time, but there's probably better ways that take into account where the arms of the hurricane would be and other factors.
Doing that would require less thinking to interpret. This does have the downside that it doesn't disambiguate expected levels of damage, but I dunno if that's a net positive to try to communicate that at any level more granular than a binary. I'm undecided as to whether it'd be better or worse to also include chronological information, as, say, some kind of probabilistic isochrome (which would probably be mostly orthogonal to the probability levels). Might be bette to have timing info as a totally separate map.
I would like to see more health care workers working on things that contributes to health care, and fewer health care workers working to negotiate between providers and insurance companies.
I came here to say 6.1. A point always rolled out against M4A is that the health insurance industry has a lot of middle-class jobs that you'd destroy if there was no longer a reason to push claims paperwork. One person's bureaucratic waste is another person's income. Fine, we'll pair destroying the health insurance companies with a massive ramp-up of other actually useful jobs. Their skills are even transferable to arguing with young kids.
With Minivet, Moby, and SP: 6.1 FTW! More generally, there are entire classes of jobs that are zero-sum. All salesmen, almost all people working in finance, all law-enforcement (when combined with criminals). In all these areas, other approaches need to be tried, and resources shifted from these occupations to those new approaches. So: single-payer health care, cheap/free college/med school [once doctors' pay starts dropping, which it damn well should, along with many other ridiculously paying jobs], more regulation and enforcement of regulations about the largest category of property crime: accounting control fraud, and more social work to help budding criminals find better things to do with their lives.
Consulting just needs to pay well for about seven years.
It's striking to me how many of these are gendered. Phasing out traditionally male gendered occupations, phasing in traditionally female gendered occupations. I'm sure the workforce will be readily enthusiastic.
It's striking to me how many of these are gendered. Phasing out traditionally male gendered occupations, phasing in traditionally female gendered occupations. I'm sure the workforce will be readily enthusiastic.
I had that thought and, logically, that's the likely outcome (in that it is likely that we, as a society, are over-invested in traditionally male gendered occupations and under-invested in traditionally female-gendered occupations) and something that already happens in the economy (I wonder to what extent, "project manager" is a neutral gendered name for work which had been traditionally done in female-gendered job titles).
22: All the more reason to use insurance arguers! Everybody you ever see leafing through paperwork at a medical office is a woman. Relieve them of this zero-sum drudgery.
Crazy to call salespeople zero-sum. Sales basically = telling people about stuff. If you're selling a good product you're doing a good thing.
As for finance, innovations in insurance and loans have made a huge difference in helping people start businesses and buy houses. I agree that some of finance is zero-sum (HFT) but "almost all" is a huge exaggeration.
I nominate the farmers who are getting paid to grow corn that ends up as ethanol or high-fructose corn syrup. Insurance arguers and prison guards are also good ones.
I don't disagree with any of the suggestions, but I do encourage people to look at the BLS numbers to get a sense of how many people work a given job. It's interesting!
For example, Correctional officers and jailers are 434K. Childcare workers are currently 1.14M. So cutting the number of correctional officers in half (unlikely) would be the same number of people as a 20% increase in childcare workers.
25.1: That's what percentage of the actually existing sales workforce?
OP.1. I actually rather liked the NYT chart that showed a bunch of paths (probably made up, alas). If you showed the paths in color such that the most probable were BRIGHT RED and the least were boringggg grey, I think it would get the point across better than the blobs. In fact the blobs have the additional defect that they don't give you a good idea of where the associated rain and wind are going to be, and I've encountered people who thought that was what the blob actually represented. (To be fair, the NHC has other maps that do show those.)
torque: you're probably thinking of retail salespeople. I should have been more specific: business-to-business relathionship salespeople. Willy Lohman. They add nothing, b/c almost all of that sort of sales is by relationships, not by actual value of product. I should know, having seen it work in the I/T biz for two decades. Also, *marketing* is what informs people about products. There's a saying by salespeople: "it's not a sale until after the first NO; until then, it's just marketing." Also another one: "a good salesman doesn't learn too much about the product; it gets in the way of being sincere with the customer". There is no value in having these sorts of salespeople in our economy -- none.
Finance is much the same: if you ACTUALLY go into the details of how finance works, you'll find that most of what happens is one gang of thieves trying to rip off another gang of thieves, and all of them trying to rip off widows and orphans. Warren Buffett put it really well in one of his yearly letters, where he noted just how much of corporate America's profits were siphoned off by the financial sector. It's an abomination. And the way that it siphons off the most talented people: scientists, mathematicians, engineers, all to make a buck trying to beat each other to some evanescent trade -- really, you should learn about things like pair abitrage, and maybe you'll understand just how *useless* it all is.
Last: there is an argument for investment markets. There is an argument even for trading with time-horizons of months, maybe even weeks. But not milliseconds. That's just front-running. And it's where all the investment and talent is going. It's just front-running. Thieves.
29: That's interesting. My father-in-law worked in both sales and marketing. He said that one of the things that was wrong with marketing was that people did not get a sales background first. (He marketed latex gloves and then sold other medical equipment for J and J to doctors. He thought that sales was crucial to Understanding what your customer needs. And the relationship piece was key. If it was a good customer and they bought too much product one year, you took it back.
Tim buys instruments for his lab, and the sales people train him on how to use them.
29: There's a lot wrong here. There are crooked sales folks and the economy is structured to allow way too much financial manipulation. But sales folks and financial markets are essential functions.
I'm with you on algorithmic traders. The millisecond traders are leeches on society. They should be taxed out of existence. Nothing wrong with pairs arbitrage, though. It's not functionally distinct from any other type of investing that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies. Such trading makes markets more efficient.
30: I am a creator of a product, and therefore someone who is socially acceptable, I guess, but in any internal bureaucratic conflict, the sales folks are always my allies, because like me, they care about what our customers are interested in.
I know about pair arbitrage -- used to work in HFT actually. I was just sad you didn't say it was negative sum because I love having that argument. Wikipedia history of insurance is a pretty good read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance#History
I am a creator of product. Oatmeal plus fruit plus coffee every morning.
29.2 and 29.3 are exactly right.
AHIMSUB: One of my favorite calls at work is when a broker calls up and wants to do some mutual fund trade that they can't actually do for whatever regulatory or policy reason. Then they come back with "but the wholesaler at the fund company said I could do it", and I am forced to explain, to a salesman, that the wholesalers are salespeople too, and thus don't have a lot of incentive to say "no" about anything. Also, salespeople who sell sales software to other salespeople are at a pretty huge remove from anything really productive.
As I know I've said before, my initial ideal job-creation program would just be to hire everyone without a job to answer phones for a government agency. They wouldn't have to know anything about the agency, it would just be a way to ensure that the caller got to talk to a real person right away instead of being on hold for 3 hours with only a recording for company. And you could train them on the most common requests or whatever, but the point would be a live person answering the phone.
"Nothing wrong with pairs arbitrage, though. It's not functionally distinct from any other type of investing that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies. Such trading makes markets more efficient."
The idea that anything that removes pricing anomalies from a market, is automatically a good thing, is precisely part of the problem. Inefficiency, fat, slack, in a system, is part of what makes it resilient to external impacts: remove then, and you have a tightly-wound system that falls down when shocked externally.
Another example: Banks work hard to make the most "efficient" use of their capital -- so they can deploy as much of it as possible, all the time. They do things like order their payments in order to get the best interest rates, etc, etc. There's a book about it all: _Payment System_ by David Nacamuli. It describes in excruciating detail all the payment systems in the Western World, and how complex, how much effort and investment, they all are. It's quite daunting. And yet, we're talking about a virtual good! We're talking about "central bank money". If banks worked less hard to lend out their capital as many times-over as they could, then the Fed could just lend out more of that central bank money to those same banks, to make up for it. And so all the *work* that the banks do, is *strictly* dead-weight. There's no gain to society from it at all. At. All.
This adulation, this idol-worshipping at the altar of Capitalism, that anything invented by Capitalists must be good, any idea from these "Freshwater Economists" at U Chicago necessarily is Good and Right and Decent .... that's nuts. Not to mention, if you read books like _Econned_ (by Yves Smith) you learn just how much of it all is *hooey*. Complete hooey.
Take the Lords of Finance Capital and get 'em busy spec'ing out wind turbines and inventing new solar cells.
Yves Smith is really awful -- a leftist, sure, but one with very little interest in factuality. Often a sophisticated bullshitter, but still a bullshitter.
Inefficiency, fat, slack, in a system, is part of what makes it resilient to external impacts: remove then, and you have a tightly-wound system that falls down when shocked externally.
This is just silly. It's metaphysical nonsense -- the kind of thing Smith would do in a much more obscure way, and therefore be less obviously spouting bullshit. I suppose market efficiency can be oversold as a positive good, but it is a positive good. Certainly one of the defining characteristics of the 2008 crash was the market inefficiency created by poorly regulated derivatives markets.
People who work in HFT though, will properly be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. The arguments favoring HFT really are a bunch of Chicago School efficient markets crap. (At one time, I worked on products serving high-frequency traders. It's very elegant stuff, finance-wise -- often quite profitable and completely socially useless.)
If banks worked less hard to lend out their capital as many times-over as they could, then the Fed could just lend out more of that central bank money to those same banks, to make up for it. And so all the *work* that the banks do, is *strictly* dead-weight. There's no gain to society from it at all. At. All.
This is wrong, but it's wrong in an interesting way, and a way which is slightly more advanced than the way in which most people are wrong about banks. To put it in meme terms:
Small brain: Banks take in deposits from savers and then lend them out to borrowers. They charge the borrowers more interest than they pay the savers, and their profit margin is the distance between them.
Medium brain: No, this is wrong. Banks borrow money from the central bank, which is called "capital", and then lend it out to borrowers lots of times over.
Galaxy brain: No, this is wrong. Banks create money when they lend it to borrowers. Central bank monetary policy - using the interest rates on central bank reserves - is one of several factors affecting the money supply.
Note two things:
"Reserves" are money that a bank deposits in an interest-bearing account at the central bank.
They are not the same as "capital".
Or, in more detail:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
I don't want to pile on Chetan, but I think if we're having this conversation we need to be clear on terms. CAPITAL is the difference between ASSETS and LIABILITIES. If you are a bank, and you borrow money from the central bank (and they do this all the time; it's called borrowing from the discount window) then you have a new asset - the money you have just borrowed - and you have a new liability - the debt to the central bank.
Take the Lords of Finance Capital and get 'em busy spec'ing out wind turbines and inventing new solar cells.
But Elon Musk did pretty much exactly this and now everyone here hates him.
22: is sales particularly gendered? Traditionally, sure, salesmen were men. But then traditionally most people in most jobs were men. Are they still? I'm having difficulty finding figures because a lot of the time "sales" as a job category includes retail work, which is a) mostly female and b) absolutely huge and so dominates the figures.
And (loon quintuple post) - I would say that both 35 and 36 are wrong: it's not wrong to say that the drive to increase efficiency leads to a more tightly-coupled network through which shocks spread more rapidly. Think, for example, of the move from an inefficient supply chain with great big warehouses at every stage, to a just-in-time supply chain. The "inefficient" one will cope much better with, say, a port closing down for a couple of days due to bad weather.
But I'm not aware of research which shows that inefficiency in the specific sense of poor price discovery contributes to resilience. If anything you might expect the reverse; a market which has pricing inefficiencies may well have them because it's got either poor liquidity or only a few participants, and either of those will make it much less resilient to the failure of one or a few participants.
Yves Smith's book is bad.
With everything involving money, it's important to remember two levels -- there the monetary level, and there's the real level, which is the stuff that happens in the real, physical world with money taken out. The goal of a central bank is to make it so that money doesn't matter. In that world, we would still have banks, because people want to lend short and borrow long, and because someone has to assess credit-worthiness for loans.
Payment systems are overcomplicated, particularly in the US, and it would be good to modernize the system, but it's not the only thing that banks do..
41: I get that, and of course I was talking about "efficiency" in the "efficient markets" sense, but I think you're right that Chetan had changed the subject -- or conflated two kinds of "efficiency" -- and I failed to acknowledge that.
Thanks, ajay, that Bank of England paper was both enlightening and easy to read. If anyone else is also macro-curious, I recommend giving it a read. I had, and continue to have, some misconceptions about how that all works, but it's a bit clearer. That is not where I thought money was created. Of course, now the big question is: why that way? Because having market forces play such a big role (mostly) solves the calculation problem with regard to the money supply? It seems like it has all sort of weird edge case issues, like banks' ability to determine lenders creditworthiness affecting the overall value of money. I should probably read a book on it.