Sequester .... still biting

Jared Bernstein has the goods.

The irony is that the Sequester was supposed to be so bad that it would force everyone to make a deal or reject it. Apparently it wasn't bad enough.

Silver lining: it's hitting defense spending. But still, we should be spending more on public programs, not less, especially with the interest rate up against the zero bound, absolutely no sign of inflation and unemployment at unacceptable levels.

I've got a personal stake in this, because high unemployment and lack of public investment is one of the reasons I'm a "makeshift" academic and not a permanently employed one.

Excellent unemployment piece in the NYT

This. This. This. 1,000 times this:

A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward’s middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.

Ms. Barrington-Ward describes it as “my journey through hell.” She was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

“I’ve been turned down from McDonald’s because I was told I was too articulate,” she says. “I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn’t speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was ‘too pretty.’ I’ve also been told point-blank to my face, ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’ And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.”

For Ms. Barrington-Ward, joblessness itself has become a trap, an impediment to finding a job. Economists see it the same way, concerned that joblessness lasting more than six months is a major factor preventing people from getting rehired, with potentially grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans.

Annie Lowry nails it here. Great piece of reporting. Read it. Then read it again. Then staple it to the forehead of your local policymakers and HR directors.

This is my own personal nightmare.

Why should the unemployed work for free?

So I now have a Linked-In account in my latest attempt to network and find a job. They have these "helpful" articles on their site on networking etc. One of the most recent ones noted that employed people tended to volunteer at higher rates than unemployed ones concluded rather blithely that the unemployed people should volunteer their time.

This particular idea is a pet peeve of mine. Why should I give my skills away for free? If my services are needed, a company or the public should compensate me for providing that service.

This seems to be a trend. From the senators who suggested that unemployment benefits be tied to community volunteer work, to unpaid internships (often illegal ones), to publications expecting writers to work without pay.

Look: we can haggle over the price, but zero isn't an option.

I find it quite damning that some elites seem to think that raising the top marginal income tax rate to 45 percent is somehow confiscatory, while making unemployed people work for free is somehow just.

The word "sociopath" is perhaps a bit strong, but is a better fit here than I'm comfortable with.

Thoughts on unemployment (specifically mine)

One of the points of this blog was for me to reflect upon what it feels like to be unemployed. I've gotten away from that over the last month or two as I've focused a lot on health care and a bit on local Houston politics.

But the unemployment frustration continues. Academic hiring processes move on very slow timeline. Even if I get a job, it won't start paying or providing health insurance until July 1, 2014 at the earliest.

Second, is that many institutions aren't looking to give new scholars fresh out of grad school a chance.

For example, there have been 23 jobs posted in American politics on APSA's job site over the last month that are hiring for tenure-track positions. However, one is for a full professor, which indicates that a school is looking for a senior level hire. Three more are for "open-and-multiple" ranks, which mean that the school is nominally looking for anyone who might be a good fit. However, everyone knows that these positions are reserved for mid-career or senior scholars.

That leaves 19 positions hiring for assistant professors, but based on the rejection letters I have received and informal conversations I've had with my colleagues, a substantial number of these slots will go to candidates who are already assistant professors at other institutions. Having had a year or two a research support, salary and other resources will make their CVs much stronger than those of us just out of grad school.

It seems that many institutions (by no means all, but enough) aren't really interested in rolling the dice on developing a new scholar when they can simply raid an established one from another school.

It's understandable -- department rankings in U.S. News and World Report are at stake here. 

So that's what happens in our field. Just like all the other fields, candidates who already hold down existing jobs get preferences, while those struggling to break into the field (or worse yet, those who have been unemployed for a year or two) don't have as much of a chance. The rich get richer and those of us struggling to get into the game lose what little we currently have.

A senior academic with whom I recently corresponded (not on my committee or at a school to which I have sent an application) tried to offer some emotional support. He suggested that the process is full of opaque things that are unobservable to me. He suggested that I should exercise to stay healthy and relieve my stress.

He meant well.

What would relieve my stress is being able to have a salary.

What would relieve my stress is being able to have affordable health insurance.

What would relieve my stress would be having research funding so I have a fighting chance of doing original work before some group of scholars who are better funded and better connected beat me to the punch again.

What would relieve my stress is being able to save for my retirement.

What would relieve my stress is not worrying about having to move my fiance all over the country
when she has her own career to develop.

What would relieve my stress is having a professional identity so I can stop changing the topic when people ask me what I do for a living.

.... which are all things that senior people in academia and other lines of work often take for granted every single day.

Sigh. But I guess, maybe the stress is my fault and if I were to start a regular program of exercise, I would be in a much better state of mind. Maybe like this guy.

This week I'll weigh in on a few ballot measures and some other health care issues. Sometime soon I hope to have a broader post up about the state of play in Texas politics for 2014.