poised to be "even worse."
recent Department of Labor statistics.
percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States' minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.
This typical reading of historic manufacturing and service jobs stats is ignorant. My first rule of quoting a statistic, which I admit I sometimes violate, is to make sure you understand how it is calculated. Nothing could be truer than with manufacturing jobs statistics.
The best way to illustrate this is by example. Let's takean automobile assembly plant circa 1955. Typically, a large manufacturing plant would have a staff to do everything the factory needed. They had people on staff to clean the bathrooms, to paint the walls, and to perform equipment maintenance. The people who did these jobs were all classified as manufacturing workers, because they worked in a manufacturing plant. Since 1955, this plant has likely changed the way it staffs these type jobs. It still cleans the bathrooms, but it has a contract with an outside janitorial firm who comes in each night to do so. It still paints the walls, but has a contract with a painting contractor to do so. And it still needs the equipment to be maintained, but probably has contracts with many of the equipment suppliers to do the maintenance.
So, today, there might be the exact same number of people in the factory cleaning bathrooms and maintaining equipment, but now the government classifies them as "service workers" because they work for a service company, rather than manufacturing workers. Nothing has really changed in the work that people do, but government stats will show a large shift from manufacturing to service employment.
close to its all-time high.
recorded was 40 percent in 2000. See the Figure.
output, reaching 35.5 percent in the midst of World War II.
So manufacturing is close to an all time high as a percentage of the economy. There is absolutely no way anyone who looks at this graph can, with a straight face, talk about the "shrinking" of America's manufacturing sector. If manufacturing employment is somehow down vs. some historical "norm", then that means that manufacturing productivity has gone up faster than service productivity. So what? And to the extent there has been a shift, as TJIC writes, who cares?
Yeah, we hates the service sector.
Let's get everyone involved in good 19th century atoms-and-mortar activities like raising corn and smelting iron.
The same populists who complain today about the shift from manufacturing to services complained a hundred years ago about the shift from agriculture to manufacturing. And I am sure all of us would much rather be waking up with the sun each day to push a plow.
spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars.
By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345.
it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled.
school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.
There is a lot more good stuff in the article, from class size to teacher pay. I would observe that he misses one component of teacher pay -- that they tend to have higher than average benefit packages, which makes their jobs even more competitive with other professionals. I covered much of the same ground 18 months ago in my Teacher Salary Myth post (which still earns me some good hate mail).
of 53.6 percent in 1970 but up from 45.4 percent in the spring of 2005.
And declares it to be a bad thing. He doesn't really explain, but as a frequent reader of his site I can guess his issue is that he interprets this statement as a sign of the weakening fortunes of the American wage earner.
Aging of population means more people retirement age who take their income in form of dividends, investment returns, pensions, social security, etc., none of which are included in "wages"
Entrepreneurship rates are way up since 1970. This means many more people, particularly in the middle class, have given up working for someone else for a wage and now work for themselves for a business profit.
I know Drum wants to interpret it as a "the poor are poor because the rich take all the money" zero sum game. Anyone know what is really going on behind these numbers?
A recent editorial in the NY Times by Stanford professor David Kennedy really has me flabbergasted. So much so that I have rewritten this post three times and still not been able to adequately communicate my horror of this editorial. Mr. Kennedy argues that the all volunteer, non-drafted, non-coerced-service army is a huge threat to America.
Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."
product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.
burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.
So in other words, its bad that wars are much less costly in lives and property. If wars are less costly, and the combatants volunteers rather than conscripts, then we as a nation are more susceptible to military adventurism. His bio says he is a historian, but what possible historical evidence does he bring forward for this? None.
In fact, there is no evidence that the government is any less likely to send a non-volunteer army (e.g. Korea, Vietnam) into harms way than a volunteer army (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq). In fact, we may actually be starting to see, via reenlistment rates, that the volunteer army provides a useful check against unpopular wars. The author wants to imply that we would fight fewer bad wars with a draft, non-volunteer army. But does anyone think we could have fought the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War with a volunteer army? Only the draft made continuation of that war possible. So where is his argument now?
Beyond the fact that his logic does not hold together, how morally bankrupt is it to long for the day when wars were much more costly in terms of lives and property? Oh for the good old days of the 1960's when we could watch those much higher draft army body counts on the nightly news. My guess is that he is not actually arguing that we should go back to higher body counts, but that the bodies we do have should represent a broader cross section of America. In other words, he wants more elite rich white bodies (but not elite rich white Stanford bodies, since he and the Stanford faculty actively oppose all sorts of military recruiting and ROTC programs on campus).
Sorry, but in a free society, there is not universal duty to service. There is not "link between service and a full place in society." When someone starts arguing that you have a "duty to service" and that government should "make demands on its citizens" rather than the other way around, run the other way because they are selling totalitarianism.
Update: This is a pretty compelling article about a volunteer army at work. Would they really be better off with a draft?
frequently bombed sites in Iraq.
Suicide bombers have killed 198 people here since last year.
Almost all were potential recruits to the country's fledgling armed forces.
Another 465 have been wounded.
suicide bomber struck last week.
to rid it off insurgents.
the murderous south gate, on Zawraa Road.
Postscript: I'm not really into the patriotism finger-pointing exercises so many people are into nowadays, but if you want some of that, try conservative blogger Captains Quarters writing on this same editorial.
After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas; we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion. That is the overriding non-defense task for the second Bush term. It will not be an easy task, particularly with Iraq threatening to consume Bush's political capital.
Reason links to the whole article. I have said on a number of occasions that as a libertarian, one of the downsides of the Iraq war that does not get discussed much is that it diverted Bush II from promised market reforms, including tort reform and social security. There appears to be some hope that these can be addressed in the second term.