Sam Wilkinson: . So far, everything I have proposed has been dismissed with an insistence that to do anything differently will cause suffering. So perhaps the better question is: what changes would you be willing to consider?
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
That’s a nice idea and all, but the question isn’t, “Should it exist?” Lots of things exist that are either useless are actively harmful. The question is whether the cure is worse than the disease.
Agreed, totally, with all of that.
However something taking money
involuntarily
out of someone else's pocket is, by definition, actively harmful.
I've no idea whether or not the typical union can justify it's existence to it's typical worker, but I'm sure it should.
Large organizations do what is good for the large organization, even at the expense of it's members. There needs to be a way to hold them accountable and making it "voluntary" seems like the minimum.
Are work regulations, welfare provisions, etc. good or bad? I understood you thought they were bad, but I don’t know anymore.
The first dollar of something, including gov regulation, is amazingly good. Your city's first cop, outlawing abuse of workers/child labor, preventing people from starving, etc.
However every election we get a fresh group of politicians who need to justify their existence, we're LONG past the first dollar and deep into negative returns.
It's a good thing to prevent management from killing the workers. It's a bad thing that management needs an army of bureaucrats and compliance officers who do nothing but deal with their opposite numbers in other companies or the gov. It's a bad thing that we have a tax code too complex for any human being to understand. It's a bad thing that we believe a group of gov paper pushers are going to control the banks better than the market. It's a bad thing that we view job creation as a privilege we hand out to companies.
All of these things have invisible costs and retard growth, we badly need growth if we're not going to be breaking promises about pensions.
Sam Wilkinson:
@Oscar GordonOne would think that a parent receiving the news that their daughter does not in fact have the ailment being claimed would be good news; that it was in fact not responded to in that fashion should have been a red flag, even if the failed test was not. And yet, in both cases, medical professionals ignored both in quick succession.
That's because a negative test is NOT "good news" for a parent.
Your kid is suffering, maybe even dying. Her symptoms match something really nasty but at least well understood. The tests come back negative... so the medical types have NO CLUE what is wrong with your kid.
A positive test tells you what is going on, a negative test means more suffering and there may not be a cure or even a treatment because whatever-it-is is that rare.
Kid in my high school died, slowly, because there weren't enough people like him to bother researching a treatment.
A *monopoly* of labor would hurt the *purchaser* of labor, not labor who was part of that monopoly.
Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
Unions want to pay everyone equally or by seniority, that's a problem for rockstar employees who are above average. Twice over my career I've negotiated 40% pay increases for myself. If I had to take whatever the union standard was, that would have been less.
There's also the bigger issue which is, what prevents the union from abusing me if it's a monopoly and I'm forced to be a member? Unions have a rep for intimidation and violence, those shouldn't be needed if they're doing something positive for me, rather than a lack of something negative.
One of the stated premises of the efficient market model is that there are no entrance or exit barriers. But starving is an exit barrier, so labor is not an efficient market.
Across the entire nation, the number of unemployed is currently between 8 million and 40 million people.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/
Excluding mental illness, crime, and extreme isolation, the number of people who starved to death last year was roughly zero.
Including mental illness (etc), the number was less than four thousand in 2014.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-starve-to-death-each-year
What about workers safety? How does the market manage that?
At the moment, with government agencies. That's why you can't see Orcas swimming with their trainers any more.
@davidtc
The usual things which are illegal would still be illegal. So no 'occupying' buildings against their owner's wishes, no beating up people for crossing picket lines, etc. Without the threat of violence, I think some companies would simply break the union and that would be that. Without the union actually contributing something to the company or the workers, I don't think it survives.
But, remember, no union regulation, so we’re talking about random, mid-shift strikes, just flat walkouts. And sympathetic strikes, don’t forget those.
And we’re talking about slowdowns, we’re even probably talking about systemic minor lawbreaking like ‘accidentally’ breakages of machinery and goods and individual strikers, one at a time, getting arrested for blocking an entrance.
Without a union, management's answer to this sort of thing is "fire everyone involved".
If there are enough workers to make this work, a majority or even a significant minority, then management is so dysfunctional that they deserve to have a union inflicted on them. But it's not just management which can be abusive and dysfunctional, unions have a sordid history of that sort of thing as well.
The market cannot solve most externalities, the problem of the commons, and other similar issues. It can’t. It never could. It does not have feedback mechanisms to tackle those.
The problems on the table are worker-pay and employment, for which the market does have feedback mechanisms. The problem here isn't that the market isn't working, the problem is that it is working and various people don't like the message it's sending.
Whenever people speak of free trade, they almost always also speak, with equal vehemence, of robust protection of property and contract even though those concepts always interact with each other in ways that harm different people’s interests.
The problem is that, in practice, hiring a bunch of people who refuse to join the union is an effective way for employers to undermine unions.
If management is oppressing the workforce, then the union has a great reason to exist and hiring people who refuse to join the union will be a non-issue because they'll change their mind.
If the workforce is poorly served by the union (which includes simply having no reason to exist or worse, oppressing the workforce itself), then it shouldn't exist at all.
A union is not a good thing simply because it's a union, it needs to justify it's existence with something other than rhetoric and ancient history.
Not a whole lot for the 50+ crowd who just got obsoleted.
The descriptions of some of these programs seem like they're exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to help workers displaced by free trade. As far as I can tell, the $18 Billion a year we're spending on job training does indeed do that sort of thing, just so badly no one notices.
The Trade Adjustment Assistance Act of 1962 provided subsidies to workers who lost their jobs due to import competition. The Manpower Development and Training Act, also enacted in 1962, aimed to retrain workers displaced as a result of automation. (etc). The JTPA (1982).
I think many of these were created during the horse trading of free trade, we forget how badly they work in practice, and then recreate the wheel on the next free trade bill.
My family has run into this. It's important to understand how this works.
- Every doctor will have run into anxious parents every day.
- Every doctor will have run into tests that simply fail.
- This is a rare disorder, likely each doctor will have never run into a lying parent of this nature.
- Dee Dee will have been a world class liar and actress.
- Dee Dee will have been knowledgeable about medical matters and able to drop all of the buzz words and discuss all the 'symptoms' in a reasonably professional manor.
- Dee Dee will have been quoting everyone not in the room as supporting her.
- For every doctor, this will have been their FIRST encounter with Dee Dee.
- If and when a doctor becomes suspicious, or even knowledgeable about the kid, Dee Dee will have ended the relationship.
- Any single incident wouldn't have been enough to strip child custody. Good parents can make bad calls, and even bad parents don't have their custody stripped, you have to be a monster.
- Dee Dee was deliberately misspelling her name and moving around so that the authorities couldn't put together all the information.
The legal/medical/social system is not set up to deal with this, and perhaps can't be. When I think of the tools it'd need to do something I end up thinking about forcing people to take mental health exams and taking kids away from 'concerned' parents. By the nature of the math those tools would be directed at innocent people FAR more than the guilty.
This is a rare disorder, divorce is common, people lying is common, concerned parents are common, accusations of Muchausen by proxy are roughly 10x (or more) common than the actual disorder. If the system had better tools to deal with this I'd expect false positives/accusations would be 100x or 1000x as common.
We don't know what to do with the mentally ill who are well enough to claim they're not mentally ill. Dee Dee was both that and smart enough to abuse the system. Dee Dee could/would have hired lawyers to 'represent her rights' and the system would be forced to take her seriously.
Or gov aid enables mom with child to leave an abusive husband.
And agreed, this is a good thing.
But trying to pretend that all uses of welfare are 'good' is not. Welfare is a tool, it can be misused, and people being people, it WILL be misused.
One hopes my extended family's experience was atypical... but all three could be presented as gov 'success' stories and were probably counted that way in the stats.
But there are a lot of details that maybe the market isn’t’ the best at. That is where other values might be more important than what the market wants.
Open that door and we mostly find out those 'other values' equate to 'political power', and the person picking up the check is the taxpayer.
dark-matter: “Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers …
J_A: By the time the agreement is signed, both parties have agreed on the winners (industries covered by the treaty) and the losers (industries not covered). The rights of the winners are strengthened. Those of the losers weakened.
Free trade is politically painful and everyone agrees to how much they're going to allow. We'd be better off with just turning it on full but whatever.
However, as imperfect as these agreements are, they're still FAR better than letting every politician at every level put his finger in the pie and try to 'protect' whoever is giving him 'contributions' that day/week/month.
The solution thus is either some sort of mandated redistribution of gains (German style), higher taxes more welfare transfers (Scandinavian style) or a bloody revolution.
As an alternative, how about a per person payment. Say, $5k to $10k, not linked to anything (meaning Bill Gates would get it). Welfare has problems with discouraging work, mandated redistribution of gains probably punishes employment.
But the concept of Unions is something that has value even today, because it does, perhaps imperfectly, balance out the power of the employer/employee relationship.
I think the 'concept' of Unions has value as far as keeping management in line. Meaning if management lets things degenerate to the point where a union is needed, then they've earned what they get.
RE: Reforms
I think being a member of a union needs to be voluntary, as opposed to involuntary. If a union is adding value to it's members, then that shouldn't be a problem. If it's not adding value, then it should instantly be a problem and this is a good way to accomplish that.
I also think gov unions unbalance the relationship between the employees and the consumer/taxpayer. The 'employer' isn't the politician sitting across the table, it's the taxpayer whose money he's going to spend. Having a union elect a politician with taxpayer money and then 'negotiate' with him on how much taxpayer money he's going to give them seems corrupt on the face of it.
I think these show pretty substantial increases in local+state spending, mostly between 2000 and 2010 (although it hasn't gone down since). It looks like state spending basically doubled and local increased by 50%.
I realize my own biases are creeping in here, if people are upset at an economic problem, my first thought it to look at what the gov is doing and seeing if it's making things worse... but I think there's an argument that it is. I haven't found good 'after tax take home historical income' charts, but I suspect they'd show downward trends because of taxes going up.
This is where our elites should have had a plan, for how to enable those displaced workers to get retrained.
IMHO you're giving our 'elites' FAR too much credit for their competence, foresight, and control over events. Being able to figure out who the market winners are going to be a decade down the line is an exceptionally rare and profitable skill. Saying it was obvious and should have been expected is much easier.
Further, how many federal jobs training programs do already we have? 49? 47? Is one more really going to move the needle?
Treating workers better is a negative in the market and to powerful people so there is no incentive to do it.
Not "better", "better than the market wants". From a corp's standpoint, ideally they'd be paying every one of their workers Zero. That doesn't work because the number of people who'd sign on is zero.
As awful as the market is, all the other alternatives have shown themselves to be worse. The market lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, communism's gov decrees resulted in mass starvation.
Three of my cousins decided to not get married to the fathers of their kids so they could get more gov 'help'. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why.
You can think Welfare has issues and enabled bad decisions without pulling irrational emotion into it.
Where does the “taxes have probably been going up” part come from?
Federal is only about half of all gov spending. Here's a graph of state+local spending as a percentage of gdp
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3bGnkNeoPxk/SbEbx4MWJrI/AAAAAAAACfA/AIxIVAJ5tTc/s400/Government-Spending-Graph.PNG
The trends look a lot like a linear line upwards, and presumably state+local are more prone to have balanced budgets, which strongly implies more taxes.
This is not proof... but if people feel they're falling behind, perhaps they are. All that gov spending needs to come out of someone's pocket, and most local communities don't have a handy billionaire to soak.
I mean, cars are not merely free to move from Japan to America, but the property and capital are protected by newly empowered government forces, the contracts enforced by jurisdictional agencies created by treaty.
Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers, i.e. to reduce the gov's ability to let politics distort economic outcomes.
The thing about preventing that, i.e. letting the gov pick who wins and who loses, is it won't be the little guy who benefits (although he will be paying for it). If we're going to decide things based on political connections, then the way to bet is political connections will trump everything else.
On the face of it this seems like a good way to make people poorer.
It wasn’t all rainbows and ice cream, but Engineers didn’t worry about serious votes to strike every 4 years.
Yes, but no union would also mean no strikes.
As far as I can tell the purpose of a union is to prevent management from killing/abusing the workforce. That was a real problem before 80 years ago, thus the glorious history of unionism. In the modern era unions appear to be mostly serving as a fund raising arm of the democratic party and advocate for the expansion of government.
I fully admit that a management which abuses it's work force deserves to deal with a union, so from that standpoint society needs unionism... but the ongoing reduction of unionization as a percentage of the workforce is the market saying it's not worth the cost.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@sam-wilkinson
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
:sigh: I meant "involuntary" to be bold.
"
@pillsy
Agreed, totally, with all of that.
However something taking money
out of someone else's pocket is, by definition, actively harmful.
I've no idea whether or not the typical union can justify it's existence to it's typical worker, but I'm sure it should.
Large organizations do what is good for the large organization, even at the expense of it's members. There needs to be a way to hold them accountable and making it "voluntary" seems like the minimum.
"
@j_a
The first dollar of something, including gov regulation, is amazingly good. Your city's first cop, outlawing abuse of workers/child labor, preventing people from starving, etc.
However every election we get a fresh group of politicians who need to justify their existence, we're LONG past the first dollar and deep into negative returns.
It's a good thing to prevent management from killing the workers. It's a bad thing that management needs an army of bureaucrats and compliance officers who do nothing but deal with their opposite numbers in other companies or the gov. It's a bad thing that we have a tax code too complex for any human being to understand. It's a bad thing that we believe a group of gov paper pushers are going to control the banks better than the market. It's a bad thing that we view job creation as a privilege we hand out to companies.
All of these things have invisible costs and retard growth, we badly need growth if we're not going to be breaking promises about pensions.
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@sam-wilkinson
@oscar-gordon
That's because a negative test is NOT "good news" for a parent.
Your kid is suffering, maybe even dying. Her symptoms match something really nasty but at least well understood. The tests come back negative... so the medical types have NO CLUE what is wrong with your kid.
A positive test tells you what is going on, a negative test means more suffering and there may not be a cure or even a treatment because whatever-it-is is that rare.
Kid in my high school died, slowly, because there weren't enough people like him to bother researching a treatment.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
Unions want to pay everyone equally or by seniority, that's a problem for rockstar employees who are above average. Twice over my career I've negotiated 40% pay increases for myself. If I had to take whatever the union standard was, that would have been less.
There's also the bigger issue which is, what prevents the union from abusing me if it's a monopoly and I'm forced to be a member? Unions have a rep for intimidation and violence, those shouldn't be needed if they're doing something positive for me, rather than a lack of something negative.
"
@j_a
Across the entire nation, the number of unemployed is currently between 8 million and 40 million people.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/
Excluding mental illness, crime, and extreme isolation, the number of people who starved to death last year was roughly zero.
Including mental illness (etc), the number was less than four thousand in 2014.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-starve-to-death-each-year
At the moment, with government agencies. That's why you can't see Orcas swimming with their trainers any more.
"
@davidtc
The usual things which are illegal would still be illegal. So no 'occupying' buildings against their owner's wishes, no beating up people for crossing picket lines, etc. Without the threat of violence, I think some companies would simply break the union and that would be that. Without the union actually contributing something to the company or the workers, I don't think it survives.
Without a union, management's answer to this sort of thing is "fire everyone involved".
If there are enough workers to make this work, a majority or even a significant minority, then management is so dysfunctional that they deserve to have a union inflicted on them. But it's not just management which can be abusive and dysfunctional, unions have a sordid history of that sort of thing as well.
"
@j_a
The problems on the table are worker-pay and employment, for which the market does have feedback mechanisms. The problem here isn't that the market isn't working, the problem is that it is working and various people don't like the message it's sending.
"
@chip-daniels
Expand on this please.
"
@pillsy
If management is oppressing the workforce, then the union has a great reason to exist and hiring people who refuse to join the union will be a non-issue because they'll change their mind.
If the workforce is poorly served by the union (which includes simply having no reason to exist or worse, oppressing the workforce itself), then it shouldn't exist at all.
A union is not a good thing simply because it's a union, it needs to justify it's existence with something other than rhetoric and ancient history.
"
@oscar-gordon
The descriptions of some of these programs seem like they're exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to help workers displaced by free trade. As far as I can tell, the $18 Billion a year we're spending on job training does indeed do that sort of thing, just so badly no one notices.
The Trade Adjustment Assistance Act of 1962 provided subsidies to workers who lost their jobs due to import competition. The Manpower Development and Training Act, also enacted in 1962, aimed to retrain workers displaced as a result of automation. (etc). The JTPA (1982).
I think many of these were created during the horse trading of free trade, we forget how badly they work in practice, and then recreate the wheel on the next free trade bill.
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/labor/employment-training-programs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Training_Partnership_Act_of_1982#Employment_and_training_assistance_for_dislocated_workers
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
My family has run into this. It's important to understand how this works.
- Every doctor will have run into anxious parents every day.
- Every doctor will have run into tests that simply fail.
- This is a rare disorder, likely each doctor will have never run into a lying parent of this nature.
- Dee Dee will have been a world class liar and actress.
- Dee Dee will have been knowledgeable about medical matters and able to drop all of the buzz words and discuss all the 'symptoms' in a reasonably professional manor.
- Dee Dee will have been quoting everyone not in the room as supporting her.
- For every doctor, this will have been their FIRST encounter with Dee Dee.
- If and when a doctor becomes suspicious, or even knowledgeable about the kid, Dee Dee will have ended the relationship.
- Any single incident wouldn't have been enough to strip child custody. Good parents can make bad calls, and even bad parents don't have their custody stripped, you have to be a monster.
- Dee Dee was deliberately misspelling her name and moving around so that the authorities couldn't put together all the information.
The legal/medical/social system is not set up to deal with this, and perhaps can't be. When I think of the tools it'd need to do something I end up thinking about forcing people to take mental health exams and taking kids away from 'concerned' parents. By the nature of the math those tools would be directed at innocent people FAR more than the guilty.
This is a rare disorder, divorce is common, people lying is common, concerned parents are common, accusations of Muchausen by proxy are roughly 10x (or more) common than the actual disorder. If the system had better tools to deal with this I'd expect false positives/accusations would be 100x or 1000x as common.
We don't know what to do with the mentally ill who are well enough to claim they're not mentally ill. Dee Dee was both that and smart enough to abuse the system. Dee Dee could/would have hired lawyers to 'represent her rights' and the system would be forced to take her seriously.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@greginak
And agreed, this is a good thing.
But trying to pretend that all uses of welfare are 'good' is not. Welfare is a tool, it can be misused, and people being people, it WILL be misused.
One hopes my extended family's experience was atypical... but all three could be presented as gov 'success' stories and were probably counted that way in the stats.
"
@greginak
Open that door and we mostly find out those 'other values' equate to 'political power', and the person picking up the check is the taxpayer.
"
@j_a
Free trade is politically painful and everyone agrees to how much they're going to allow. We'd be better off with just turning it on full but whatever.
However, as imperfect as these agreements are, they're still FAR better than letting every politician at every level put his finger in the pie and try to 'protect' whoever is giving him 'contributions' that day/week/month.
"
@j_a
As an alternative, how about a per person payment. Say, $5k to $10k, not linked to anything (meaning Bill Gates would get it). Welfare has problems with discouraging work, mandated redistribution of gains probably punishes employment.
"
@oscar-gordon
I think the 'concept' of Unions has value as far as keeping management in line. Meaning if management lets things degenerate to the point where a union is needed, then they've earned what they get.
RE: Reforms
I think being a member of a union needs to be voluntary, as opposed to involuntary. If a union is adding value to it's members, then that shouldn't be a problem. If it's not adding value, then it should instantly be a problem and this is a good way to accomplish that.
I also think gov unions unbalance the relationship between the employees and the consumer/taxpayer. The 'employer' isn't the politician sitting across the table, it's the taxpayer whose money he's going to spend. Having a union elect a politician with taxpayer money and then 'negotiate' with him on how much taxpayer money he's going to give them seems corrupt on the face of it.
"
@j_a
Agreed, I'm not real happy with that chart either. I dug a bit more and...
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/state_chart_gallery
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/local_chart_gallery
I think these show pretty substantial increases in local+state spending, mostly between 2000 and 2010 (although it hasn't gone down since). It looks like state spending basically doubled and local increased by 50%.
I realize my own biases are creeping in here, if people are upset at an economic problem, my first thought it to look at what the gov is doing and seeing if it's making things worse... but I think there's an argument that it is. I haven't found good 'after tax take home historical income' charts, but I suspect they'd show downward trends because of taxes going up.
"
@oscar-gordon
IMHO you're giving our 'elites' FAR too much credit for their competence, foresight, and control over events. Being able to figure out who the market winners are going to be a decade down the line is an exceptionally rare and profitable skill. Saying it was obvious and should have been expected is much easier.
Further, how many federal jobs training programs do already we have? 49? 47? Is one more really going to move the needle?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/
"
@greginak
Not "better", "better than the market wants". From a corp's standpoint, ideally they'd be paying every one of their workers Zero. That doesn't work because the number of people who'd sign on is zero.
As awful as the market is, all the other alternatives have shown themselves to be worse. The market lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, communism's gov decrees resulted in mass starvation.
"
@leeesq
Three of my cousins decided to not get married to the fathers of their kids so they could get more gov 'help'. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why.
You can think Welfare has issues and enabled bad decisions without pulling irrational emotion into it.
"
@j_a
Federal is only about half of all gov spending. Here's a graph of state+local spending as a percentage of gdp
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3bGnkNeoPxk/SbEbx4MWJrI/AAAAAAAACfA/AIxIVAJ5tTc/s400/Government-Spending-Graph.PNG
The trends look a lot like a linear line upwards, and presumably state+local are more prone to have balanced budgets, which strongly implies more taxes.
This is not proof... but if people feel they're falling behind, perhaps they are. All that gov spending needs to come out of someone's pocket, and most local communities don't have a handy billionaire to soak.
"
@chip-daniels
Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers, i.e. to reduce the gov's ability to let politics distort economic outcomes.
The thing about preventing that, i.e. letting the gov pick who wins and who loses, is it won't be the little guy who benefits (although he will be paying for it). If we're going to decide things based on political connections, then the way to bet is political connections will trump everything else.
On the face of it this seems like a good way to make people poorer.
"
@oscar-gordon
Yes, but no union would also mean no strikes.
As far as I can tell the purpose of a union is to prevent management from killing/abusing the workforce. That was a real problem before 80 years ago, thus the glorious history of unionism. In the modern era unions appear to be mostly serving as a fund raising arm of the democratic party and advocate for the expansion of government.
I fully admit that a management which abuses it's work force deserves to deal with a union, so from that standpoint society needs unionism... but the ongoing reduction of unionization as a percentage of the workforce is the market saying it's not worth the cost.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.