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The Dropout Economy

March 15, 2010 /

Mobile Phone Chargers

sacramento tent city

Resilient communities hit Time:

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias. […]

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

Time: The Dropout Economy

(via Global Guerrillas)

See also:

My Evoke post Dinner 2020.

Posts tagged “recession hacking”

How to make an addictive video game

March 10, 2010 /

human sized hamster wheel

Cracked has a surprisingly interesting article on the psychology of rewards and how it’s applied to game design:

Do you like your job?

Considering half of you are reading this at work, I’m going to guess no. And that brings us to the one thing that makes gaming addiction–and addiction in general–so incredibly hard to beat.

As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void.

Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don’t even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

Most people, particularly in the young gamer demographics, don’t have this in their jobs or in any aspect of their everyday lives. But the most addictive video games are specifically geared to give us all three… or at least the illusion of all three.

Cracked: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

(via Social Physicist)

On 81st birthday, Oregon man gives company to employees

February 24, 2010 /

Bob Moore

Scores of employees gathered to help Bob Moore celebrate his 81st birthday this week at the company that bears his name, Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods.

Moore, whose mutual love of healthful eating and old-world technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of products, responded with a gift of his own — the whole company. The Employee Stock Ownership Plan that Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals and bread mixes.

Read More – Seattle Times: On 81st birthday, Oregon man gives company to employees

(via Cryptogon)

Nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers underemployed

February 23, 2010 /

underemployed

Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce lacked adequate employment in January and struggled to make ends meet with reduced resources and bleak job prospects, according to a Gallup poll released on Tuesday.

n findings that appear to paint a darker employment picture than official U.S. data, Gallup estimated that about 30 million Americans are underemployed, meaning either jobless or able to find only part-time work.

Underemployed people spent 36 percent less on household purchases than their fully employed neighbors in January, while six out of 10 were not hopeful about their chances of finding adequate work in the coming month, the poll said.

Read More – Reuters: Nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers underemployed

(via Cryptogon)

Follow-up essay on why you shouldn’t go to grad school in the humanities

February 8, 2010 /

the big lie

Here’s the original essay. There was also a previous follow-up that I missed.

She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.

Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about “the life of mind.” They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’

(Thanks David)

See also:

What’s a Degree Really Worth?

Can Ivy League education be provided for $20 a month?

What’s a Degree Really Worth?

February 3, 2010 /

Will code HTML for food

In recent years, the nonprofit College Board touted the difference in lifetime earnings of college grads over high-school graduates at $800,000, a widely circulated figure. Other estimates topped $1 million. […]

Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, calls it “a million-dollar misunderstanding.”

One problem he sees with the estimates: They don’t take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.

Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.

Wall Street Journal: What’s a Degree Really Worth?

I’m a serious college-skeptic, but here are two important additional considerations:

1) Slack. Are the jobs college graduates get better jobs, regardless of how much they pay? And remember, one person’s slack is another person’s toil. (See: The Case for Working With Your Hands“)

2) Not all majors are created equal. What are the lifetime earning differences between BS and BA degree holders who hold higher degree, for instance?

Those Less Motivated to Achieve Will Excel on Tasks Seen as Fun

January 20, 2010 /

team work puzzle

Those who value excellence and hard work generally do better than others on specific tasks when they are reminded of those values. But when a task is presented as fun, researchers report, the same individuals often will do worse than those who say they are less motivated to achieve.

The study appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The findings suggest that two students may respond quite differently to a teacher’s exhortation that they strive for excellence, said University of Illinois psychology professor Dolores Albarracín, who conducted the research with William Hart, of the University of Florida.

One may be spurred to try harder, while another could become less motivated.

The study also suggests that those who are “chronically uninterested in achievement” are not operating out of a desire to do badly, Albarracín said. Their differing responses simply may reflect the fact that they have different goals.

Science Daily: Those Less Motivated to Achieve Will Excel on Tasks Seen as Fun

I read about a similar study years ago statistics class that I’ve never been able to track back down*, so I’m very glad to have found this article today. The study I read about found that different groups of people performed differently on certain puzzles depending on whether they were presented as “work” or “games.”

*I thought I read it in my statistics text book, but I’ve scoured it cover to cover so now think it must have been a hand-out or part of a test question.

(image from Lumaxart)

The Disposable Worker

January 13, 2010 /

As an independent agent, Smith has no health insurance, no retirement benefits, no sick days, no vacation, no severance, and no access to unemployment insurance. But in recession-ravaged Ormond Beach, she’s considered lucky. She has had more or less steady work since she signed on with LiveOps in October 2006. “LiveOps was a lifesaver for me,” she says.

You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn’t likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That’s because this recession’s unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions’ influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers’ economic standing.

Business Week: The Disposable Worker

Here’s the depressing thing: even if millions of corporate execs read this article and agree with it, they will be powerless to actually make any serious lasting changes within their organizations.

Interestingly, this article makes no use of the term precarity.

(via Global Guerrillas)

Americans’ job satisfaction falls to record low

January 8, 2010 /

Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work.

That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs. […]

Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for a variety of reasons:

– Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

– Incomes have not kept up with inflation.

– The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.

AP: Americans’ job satisfaction falls to record low

(via Cryptogon)

Arrow Trucking Strands Drivers During Layoff

December 28, 2009 /

Layoffs are a fact of life in this economy, but there are humane ways to do it. Then there’s the Arrow Trucking Arrow Trucking method.

The Tulsa, Okla., trucking company stopped payment on the gas cards of its drivers, leaving some of them stranded Tuesday around the United States, miles from home. No explanation on the website. No one at the company answering phones.

The 200 or so employees at Arrow Trucking’s headquarters were told to pack up their belongings and go home Tuesday morning, according to the Tulsa World.

The only acknowledgement was a brief recorded message on the company’s main phone number, asking drivers of its Freightliner and Kenworth trucks to turn their rigs in to the nearest dealer and to call a special hotline to arrange for a bus ticket home. Drivers of the company’s Navistar trucks were told to call back for more information.

ABC News: Arrow Trucking Strands Drivers During Layoff

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