Lenka S. reviewed Where Did the Jobs Go--and How Do We Get Them Back?: Your Guided Tour to America's Employment Crisis on + 820 more book reviews
If you want to know where the jobs went and why, try Robert Reich. The jobs went overseas and we pay cheap prices for Chinese crap with once trusted American brand names. And the prices have to be cheap,because our pay is so low, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all.
The authors display a wonkish Washington outlook consistent with the wooliness that allows the Brookings Institute to join with the Heritage Foundation in anything but a civil war. Their uncriticl quoting of Alan Greenspan stopped my reading of this book on page 134. The authors had been rehashing the financial crisis for so long I did not believe they would ever get to jobs, and their "non-partisan outlook" indicated to me that they were heading toward the same old corporate solutions.
I was intrigued by the chapter titles looking at jobs from multiple perspectives. But Robert Reich's Supercapitalism is a much better book and makes sense of what has been happening for the last few decades. Where did the Jobs Go, not so much. Chapter 13, Would Reducing Immigration Reduce Unemployment defied evidence and reason. Bittle and Johnson make the familiar argument that immigrants will take the low wage jobs that Americans currently do and then Americans will get more education and get even better, higher paying jobs. I think we all know that has not worked out. Publications that the authors write for have featured Americans with advanced degrees being unemployed and doing survival jobs so one wonders how they could even make such a claim.
They also claim immigration does not drive down wages. Some how the laws of supply and demand don't apply when it comes to immigration. Paul Krugman debunked this point. The over all affect of the increase in unskilled labor may only depress wages a small amount but if you are a worker in one of the job categories typically held by low skilled immigrants your wages have been depressed by about 8%! It's well known that the meat packing used to pay $19.00 an hour in 1980 and now pays half that.
There'so much that is obviously false that it makes everything suspect.
Don't waste your time.
The authors display a wonkish Washington outlook consistent with the wooliness that allows the Brookings Institute to join with the Heritage Foundation in anything but a civil war. Their uncriticl quoting of Alan Greenspan stopped my reading of this book on page 134. The authors had been rehashing the financial crisis for so long I did not believe they would ever get to jobs, and their "non-partisan outlook" indicated to me that they were heading toward the same old corporate solutions.
I was intrigued by the chapter titles looking at jobs from multiple perspectives. But Robert Reich's Supercapitalism is a much better book and makes sense of what has been happening for the last few decades. Where did the Jobs Go, not so much. Chapter 13, Would Reducing Immigration Reduce Unemployment defied evidence and reason. Bittle and Johnson make the familiar argument that immigrants will take the low wage jobs that Americans currently do and then Americans will get more education and get even better, higher paying jobs. I think we all know that has not worked out. Publications that the authors write for have featured Americans with advanced degrees being unemployed and doing survival jobs so one wonders how they could even make such a claim.
They also claim immigration does not drive down wages. Some how the laws of supply and demand don't apply when it comes to immigration. Paul Krugman debunked this point. The over all affect of the increase in unskilled labor may only depress wages a small amount but if you are a worker in one of the job categories typically held by low skilled immigrants your wages have been depressed by about 8%! It's well known that the meat packing used to pay $19.00 an hour in 1980 and now pays half that.
There'so much that is obviously false that it makes everything suspect.
Don't waste your time.
