I want to make this quick....
"The idea of a mobile America could be a myth" by Evan Horowitz Globe Staff August 05, 2016
It’s time to drop the nostalgic narrative about how our lives have become unmoored, how the whirl of the 21st-century economy drives us around the country in search of new opportunities and keeps us leaping from job to job at a pace our one-career elders never knew.
I kind of have a long time ago when it comes to the endless parade of lies about the economy coming from government, state, and its mouthpiece pre$$. Sorry.
It just isn’t so. Americans actually change houses less frequently than in the past. And on average, we switch careers about half as often as we did a generation ago.
Why is that? This is still an area of active research but it seems like opportunity itself may be diminishing, with fewer enticing job offers and fewer affordable housing options in the most desirable cities.
And there’s a real cost to all this staying put: It’s made the US economy more sclerotic. Among other things, poor states have stopped catching up. And when manufacturing towns get hit by competition from places like China, people give up on work rather than move away....
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I want to leave but....
"Massachusetts, the stay-put state" by Evan Horowitz Globe Staff August 06, 2016
Massachusetts has trouble attracting new residents.
Related: Mass. population growth close to national rate, stats say
Yeah, if you thought Bo$ton was crowded now....
can you see why I'm sick of recycling the same old sh**?
As statistics goes, this is unexpected — maybe even shocking.
No, not really.
Massachusetts has a thriving, knowledge-driven economy built around science, information technology, and other high-skill fields. You would expect this to attract bright people to the state and unleash a fight for talent that regularly lures people into competing firms and neighboring industries.
What’s more, we have some of the finest colleges in the world. Surely, some of the people who study in our slice of America should fall in love with local culture and decide to stay.
Yet, there’s one more reason to be surprised. Massachusetts has the best-educated workforce of any state in the country. You’d think that would translate into greater labor market fluidity. After all, a well-educated worker should be a flexible worker, someone with the intellectual skills to adapt to economic change and succeed in a variety of fields, but this doesn’t seem to be true.
They are trying to convince young workers that manufacturing isn’t the dirty, difficult work of their parents or grandparents.
This poses a challenge to one of the fundamental premises of American education, namely that college is the key to economic success in the 21st century, because only a well-educated worker can keep up with the rapidly changing needs of businesses.
The fact that Massachusetts has the most college-educated workers — and the second-lowest level of job-switching — suggests that this “keeping up with a changing economy” idea may not be quite right.
More people would rather believe the myth and hope.
To reinforce the point, look at what’s happened to the entire US labor force over the past few decades. Since 1980, the share of American workers with a bachelor’s degree has roughly doubled. And yet, at the same time, the number of people changing occupations has dropped by half.
At least all that student loan debt was built up to the benefit of.... ?
Somehow, the remarkable increase in the number of workers with a bachelor’s degree hasn’t translated into greater labor market flexibility — not here in Massachusetts and not across the country as a whole. Counterintuitive though it may sound, Bay State workers were much more likely to move between jobs and careers back in the 1970s, when we were a rust-colored manufacturing economy.
This isn’t a knock on college. Education really does help people earn more money, to say nothing of its ability to feed curiosity and expand people’s minds. And Massachusetts’ highly educated workers have made the state one of the richest, most productive in the country.
But more flexible? It doesn’t seem so....
Not when you are a sanctuary state and can have either illegal or work visa immigrants flowing in.
It's all a big $hell game for the benefit of the u$ual $u$pects, and I know I should be jumping for joy about the Globe letting $ome truth $lip but that was long ago when I first started. Not anymore.
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Of course, the backup plan after the computer takes over your job is selling your organs to the highest bidder.
