dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Why you should want to work. The fable of the 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' is often used to prime the work-shy for shame and deprivation.

Help stop the spread of social anxiety. A fact sheet.  FOMO (fear of missing out) and status anxiety are highly contagious social anxieties. 😨 What are they? The fear of being excluded from knowledge, experiences, and interactions (FOMO), and consequentially being considered unsuccessful by society (status anxiety). What Are the Symptoms?

What more can a poor boy do? Early retirement is based on the idea that cutting the cost of living decreases the amount of time required to build a source of passive income to fund that cost of living . Saving 50% of your income equates to retirement in 17 years. Five years is a common claim for practitioners. At least, for ones who blog about it. However, early retirement blogs like Mr Money Mustache , Early Retirement Extreme , and Go Curry Cracker ignore the limitations of this practice, particularly for those on low incomes.

Why not? Calculators sure changed mine. A lifetime ago, in a safe but stifling job, I found an online mortgage calculator that visualised the power of extra repayments. Having just borrowed to buy a home, it opened my eyes. I was hooked. Learning that early escape from debt was possible made it my obsession. I checked that calculator after every stymied project and pointless restructuring. So, like, twice a day. With few opportunities to flex my skills in my IT role, I wrote other calculators to rationalise and strategise my approach to life.

Australia's Productivity Commission estimates that the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964, aged 56 - 74 in 2020) will pass $3.5 trillion dollars in wealth to their heirs by 2050. The distribution will not be even.

Inflation in Australia may be driven by corporate profiteers, but not who you think. 

Why are Middle-Aged Men Missing from the Labor Market? ( NY TImes ) Men ages 35 to 44 are staging a lackluster rebound from pandemic job loss, despite a strong economy.

Declining labour share of income is no sign of foul play. "Productivity and profits are up, but real wages are down." is an increasingly common refrain, implying that business and government collude to deprive workers of their fair share.

Which industries are ripest for technological disruption? Australia labour productivity and value-add by industry.

Versus robots. "No! Demo-GRAPH-y!" The flood of low cost Chinese labour will ebb, according to Goodhart and Pradhan in "The Great Demographic Reversal", leading to: higher inflation. manufacturing elsewhere becoming more competitive. ( un-paywalled from Nikkei Shimbun ) Apparently good news for those in developed nations who have long clamoured for fair prices and fair wages, and who blame globalisation for undercutting them. But when? And for how long? Well, not right now . China labour costs are stagnant, not rising. source: tradingeconomics.com Even as China's working age population loses 5 million a year, assuming the baseline scenario. (Source: Reserve Bank of Australia .) One may scoff at the suggestion that these lost workers could be - or are being - replaced with robots or other automation, such as AI. Robots have been around for decades but opinion on how they impact workers vary, from ' a little ' to 'responsible for  50-70% of i...

Protectionists hate this one weird trick. For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken The Labour Force (LF) framework supposedly works like this: If more people enter the labour force than get jobs, the unemployment rate goes up. If less people enter the labour force than get jobs, the unemployment rate goes down. Sounds fair, right?

They've been using social media for centuries. My wife is an academic and constantly in fear of: Senior peers ignoring and not citing her work; Younger peers publishing more, faster; Anticipated critiques of her papers. She's not alone. Her colleagues also live in dread, and academia as a whole has long been described as 'Publish or PERISH.'

The future of Japan's national pension (国民年金/Kokumin Nenkin), and that of Japan. Japan is at the vanguard of indebted aging societies, so there's a lot of debate about whether it's going to be OK, seeing as more than a few developed nations will also Japan-ify. Team "Prep for Armageddon" points to the huge national debt. Team "Shrug" points to that debt being overwhelmingly yen-denominated and domestically held. If indeed  each Japanese citizen is owed 9 million yen  (about USD90,000) what realistic claim do they have to it? Because how they might access it has ramifications not just for citizens, but the future of the country. That's what we're here to tease out.

You are probably selling your time for less than it is worth. The personal value of your time gets scarcer as you age and therefore more valuable. However employers and everyone else values what you output with your time, so unless you (spend time to) increase your effectiveness, the value of your time to them stays the same. Let's dive into this.

Education plus work equals money. Spend time (and cash) studying at a good school, spend skills on a good job, spend workdays boosting your reputation, and you will be rewarded with a nice middle-class life and retirement account. Well okay, that makes sense, but it may be the least efficient way to get rich.

How closely Inflation tracks Unemployment, Wages, Immigration, Interest Rates (and Debt), Trade, Currency, and Industrial Action, in Australia. Inflation scares a lot of people who remember the 1960s and 1970s with its  double-digit price rises eroding savings, investments, and wage gains. Since then, however, inflation and wages growth in the developed world has been low. Younger cohorts who haven't experienced rocketing prices (except in housing, education, and health) clamour for greater social assistance, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, horrifying their elders who understandably fear that government largesse will re-awaken the inflation monster. Putting aside whether and how much inflation is desirable, many causes have been suggested, including unemployment, wages, immigration, central bank interest rates, the availability of debt, trade, currency strength, and the bargaining power of labour. All are compelling theories, ...

Australian net migration and labour market to scale. 

Skilled migrants to Australia are apparently not doing what they were meant to : get jobs. 🦘👷 [MacroBusiness (MB)]: The notion that Australia’s migration program was ever ‘skilled’ is debunked by the empirical data from the Department of Home Affairs’ Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants. This survey shows that recent permanent migrants experienced higher rates of unemployment and are paid less than the general population: And the government has been sitting on this. Tsk. Tsk. Before borders reopen, let's use the opportunity to re-introduce a little conspiratorial thinking: [MB]: Thus, this ‘skilled’ migration program is actually undercutting local workers and adding to Australia’s unemployment queue. As such, it helped drive Australian wage growth to record lows : How, exactly? Migrant unemployment higher than the general population's implies that employers are preferring to employ local Australians (at presumably higher wages). If migrants are offering to work at sca...

In 1940, 8.6 percent of women with children 18 and under were in the U.S. labor force.  Then America joined World War 2, and around six million women joined the civilian workforce.  Women may have saved the day during WWII, but when the war ended, things quickly changed. Soldiers were returning home and they needed jobs to help them get back on their feet and reacclimatize to civilian life. The managers who had previously begged women to help out were now forcing them back into their kitchens to free up jobs for men. By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over.  Why? 

Emotional Intelligence: yet another thing we can beat ourselves up for not having. Why? The jobs and therefore income of the future will belong to those with a high 'EQ - emotional quotient'. IQ-heavy roles are about to go the way of manual labour. White collar is the new blue collar. Software and robots will replace nerds and jocks respectively. Only the popular kids - those who can creatively connect clients and contacts - will be spared. The future consists of fluffing enthusiastically to keep your five star rating.