Whither the jobs? real threat to Jobs is not offshoring but automation

Editor: Vladimir Bajic | Tactical Investor

We focus on a wide array of topics ranging from finance to health as they are all interrelated. In other words, the markets are not driven by financial factors. The main driving force behind the markets is emotions. Hence if you understand the emotions the media and Wall Street experts are trying to trigger you can position yourself accordingly. Mass Psychology is the study of the Mass Mindset and when it comes to investing it is imperative to understand what side of the fence the masses are sitting on. We suspect that you will find the following story to be of interest.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak. Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’. This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named. Worldwide IQ scores dropping but Stupidity rising rapidly

The country’s job landscape has changed radically over the past two decades. Currently the accounting/finance, sales/marketing and ICT sectors are top job creators. However, hardly 5pc of total applicants actually succeed in landing a decent job.

Technological disruption, premature shrinkage of the manufacturing sector and demographic changes in an environment of an anaemic growth rate explained the chaos and overcrowding in the job market.

According to human resource practitioners, the unemployment rate is very high and Pakistan currently lacks the capacity to absorb about two million youth entering the already swarming job market every year.

While they do not have figures to back their claim, they estimate that the unemployment rate is at 15pc, three times higher than the current official rate of 5.2pc.

These experts stress that this issue has been ignored for too long and deserves the government’s immediate attention.

“Happenings around the world reaffirm that people care most for jobs. Be it Brexit or Trump’s triumph in the US, it was all about jobs in the end”, said an economist.
He argued that job creation in Pakistan is crucial for three key reasons: sustainability of peace and growth, expanding the constituency for democracy and gaining public support essential for success of the CPEC.

He pressed that poverty and social issues could not be dealt with satisfactorily without mainstreaming the idle work-force that was seeking employment. He thought concessions and direct petty cash transfers can at best provide a temporary relief. Full Story

Large concentrations of employment have developed outside traditional central business districts. Our research focuses on analyzing the changing distribution of employment in metropolitan areas by using tract-to-tract commuting data from Census 2000 to identify high-employment nodes within large metropolitan areas. We propose a new way to delineate clusters of contiguous high-employment tracts based on the job density in these areas. We then compare outlying employment clusters with traditional central business districts and contrast employment clusters of varying job densities. Our method has several advantages over existing methods of identifying employment clusters: it is conceptually simple, can use publicly available data, relies on a standardized geographic unit applicable across the entire United States, and offers the ability to examine data from multiple census years. Full Story

What’s eating the SEC? The SEC’s delay of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (or JOBS Act) is unconscionable and a major obstacle for small businesses and lean start-ups in search of alternatives to the strict terms of banks. How long must we wait for the regulations to be put in place so that the JOBS Act is the law of the land?

The passing of the exemption in the JOBS Act is generally regarded as adding a sense of security to crowdfunded platforms (CFPs). The key statistics of crowdfunding show that the JOBS Act would be a boost to the economy, but without those certainties, we are only witnessing a fraction of the uplift that CFPs could provide.

By mid-2012, those earning over $100,000 per year were the most likely to invest in startups through crowdfunding, according to the American Dream Composite Index. And according to last May’s Crowdfunding Industry Report, CFPs grew at a 63 percent compounded annual growth rate over the last three years.

All told, crowdfunded campaigns launched in 2012 raised 20 percent more on average than they did in 2011. Further, the campaigns grew shorter in 2012 meaning that it’s getting easier to raise money through CFPs. And this year, crowdfund pledges are expected to double. Full Story

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