GWST 3510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Productivism, Proletariat, Precariat

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bluesea-lion249

23 Apr 2017

School

York University

Department

Gender and Women's Studies

Course

GWST 3510

Professor

Jan Kainer

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Document Summary

Defined in relation to secure forms of employment, such as standard forms of employment. Standard employment: secure, provides full range of employment and benefits, and is viewed as better employment. Employment that is secure, that provides a full range of benefits, and that has a possible career path is generally viewed as better employment, and it is often referred to as a standard. People will use ser to refer to this notion. Precarious employment: covers anyone who does not have full-time employment, entails part- time work, seasonal employment, self-employed, and work that is contingent, casual, impermanent, or transitory. Almost 1 in 2 jobs are not permanent full-time. 13% of the workforce engaged in temporary employment. 20% of all new hirers are temporary, a large number of whom are women, racialized, and new immigrants. In 2016, labour force reports show that most new jobs available were in the service sector.

Related Questions

Question 1 A recession occurs when there is a six consecutive month fall in Question 1 options:

A) real GDP.

B) nominal GDP.

C) the trade balance.

D) the price level.

Question 2 Since 1929, real GDP in the United States has grown at an average annual rate of about Question 2 options:

A) 0.5 percent.

B) 1 percent.

C) 3 percent.

D) 7.5 percent.

Question 3 Suppose that after reading a two-year low, the index of leading economic indicators rises for several months. Which of the following economic events will likely follow? Question 3 options:

A) A recession.

B) Severe inflation.

C) Increased production.

D) Reduced investment.

Question 4 Which of the following people would be officially counted as unemployed? Question 4 options:

A) A person who works only 5 hours per week for pay.

B) A full-time college student who chooses not to have a paying job.

C) A family member who works 20 hours per week in the family business without pay.

D) A jobless high-school graduate who is actively looking for work.

Question 5 Assume a country's population (age 16 and over) is 1 million people. What is the unemployment rate if there are 750,000 people in the labor force, 60,000 of whom are unemployed? Question 5 options:

A) 6%.

B) 8%.

C) 12.5%

D) 16.7%

Question 6 If a sizable number of workers were switched from full-time to half time employment, then the official unemployment rate would Question 6 options:

A) rise.

B) fall.

C) remain unchanged.

D) react unpredictably.

Question 7 Which of the following people would be classified as structurally unemployed? Question 7 options:

A) Computer programmers who lost their jobs because of a recession.

B) Construction workers who are on temporary layoff.

C) Discouraged workers who have given up looking for work.

D) Textile workers who lost their jobs because of new foreign competition.

Question 8 The economy is fully employed when there is no :

A) seasonal unemployment.

B) frictional unemployment.

C) structrual unemployment.

D) cyclical unemployment.

Question 9 The GDP gap measures the nation's monetary losses of real goods and services from :

A) operating at less than full employment.

B) discouraged workers who have stopped searching for employment. C) murders, suicides, and other sociological impacts of sustained unemployment.

D) seasonal and frictional unemployment.

Question 10 In the United States, the unemployment rate for blacks is :

A) roughly the same as the unemployment rate for whites.

B) about 1â2 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate for whites.
C) more than twice the unemployment rate for whites.

D) between 3 and 4 times the unemployment rate for whites.

Few fields of empirical economic research offer virtual unanimity of findings. Yet, independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development (Baade and Dye, 1990; Baim, 1992; Rosentraub, 1994; Baade, 1996; Noll and Zimbalist, 1997; Waldon, 1997; Coates and Humphreys, 1999). These results stand in distinct contrast to the promotional studies that are typically done by consulting firms under the hire of teams or local chambers of commerce supporting facility development. Typically, such promotional studies project future impact and almost inevitably adopt unrealistic assumptions regarding local value-added, new spending, and associated multipliers. They often use a regional input-output model that depends on outdated technical coefficients which are treated as invariant to shifts in supply and demand (Center for Economic and Management Research, 1991; Deloitte & Touche, 1994, 1996; KPMG, 1996; Economic Research Associates, 1996; KPMG, 1998; C.H. Johnson Consulting, 1999). The academic work on the economic impact of sports facilities and teams does not rely upon projection. Rather, it compares the local economic performance of areas with and without stadiums, arenas, and teams, controlling for other variables that affect local economic conditions. Among cross-section studies, for example, Baade (1994) found no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not. Looking at 46 cities over the 1990-94 periods, Waldon (1997) found that higher high school graduation rates and more spending on police are what encouraged economic growth, while the presence of a major league sports team actually put a drag on the local economy. Both Baade and Waldon controlled for other factors affecting underlying trends in economic growth. Time-series studies confirm the cross-section results. Baade and Sanderson (1997), for example, found no perceptible net increase in economic activity or employment in 10 cities that acquired new sports teams between 1958 and 1993 after factoring out other economic trends affecting each area. They did observe a reordering of leisure expenditures within the cities that acquired new teams, but there was no evidence that the new sports teams brought output or employment growth to the local area. A more recent study, by Coates and Humphreys (1999), finds that new stadiums and sports teams actually reduce per capita income in the host communities. This result is consistent with a higher (negative) multiplier for the displaced leisure expenditures than for the expenditures on a new team or in a new stadium because the latter likely involve substantial leakages from the local economy to the remote residential locations of some players and team owners. The conclusion that sports teams and facilities do not stimulate economic growth is surprising to many people. With live telecasting of games, daily coverage on television news and in the sports sections of newspapers, professional sports play a huge role in U.S. culture. Yet sports teams are small businesses. Yearly average team revenues in 1999 are around $55 million in the NHL, $75 million in the NBA, $85 million in MLB and $100 million in the NFL. For a medium-sized city like St. Louis, the baseball team accounts for less than 0.3 percent of local economic activity; for a large city like New York, a baseball team contributes less than 0.03 percent of economic output. Sports teams typically employ between 70 and 130 people in their front offices. Beyond this, they hire approximately 1000-1500 day-of-game personnel who work in unskilled, low wage, temporary, part-time jobs. An NFL team is assured of playing 10 home games a year (including preseason games). At four hours of work per game, an NFL team provides day-of-game employment for the equivalent of 20 to 30 full-time, year-round jobs. As we shall see, however, it is problematic to attribute even these jobs to the sports team. Of course, the controversy about the economic impact of professional sports teams on their local economy is not just about the teams themselves, but also about how specific local restaurants, hotels, and other businesses might be affected. However, even if one assumes, optimistically, that on average people spend as much outside the sports facility as they do inside, the economic impact of sports teams in proportion to a typical metropolitan economy is diminutive. Apart from their relatively small size, there are three key reasons why professional sports teams do not promote economic development: the substitution effect; extensive leakages; and the likely negative effect on local government budgets. The analysis of these three effects that follows describes the situation when a team or a facility is new to an area. Of course, in many cases, the choice is whether or not to build a facility for a team that is already there. In such a case the incremental consumer surplus, external benefits or new spending will be considerably less. From the city's perspective, however, the opportunity cost of not building a facility with public funds may be perceived to be the loss of the team and all of its attendant benefits.

-------------------------------------------------Question

1. . The authors discuss the role of leakages in determining the impact of sports teams on the local economy. What are they talking about? Be specific so as to convince me that you read the article carefully

raspberryarmadillo231

The opportunity cost of going to college is almost never discussed, yet it is quite high, so high that it is seriously impacting the broader American economy. For non-economists, âopportunity costâ is one of the most important concepts in economics. Because of scarcity we only have limited resources, and when we use those resources to do something like go to college, we cannot use them for other things that we also believe are desirable.

By far the most important resource we use in producing goods and services is labor or âhuman capital.â Based on what we pay owners of resources, we can say that roughly two-thirds of all production of goods and services is attributable to direct human effort â work. When kids go to college, they forego entering the labor force in a major, full-time manner. When six or seven percent of the entire American population is in college, that means a significant reduction in work effort occurs because otherwise highly productive persons in the physical prime of their lives are only lightly utilized in making things or providing services.

Today, only slightly over 59 of every 100 Americans of working age actually work, down from almost 66 in 2000. If we had the employment-population ratio of 15 years ago, we would have at least 16 million more working Americans today â an increase of over 10 percent. Our output would be probably the better part of a trillion dollars higher. The push for âcollege for allâ is one reason we have less work effort today (to be sure, the modern welfare state has also lowered work incentives a lot for other reasons).

The college for all crowd says higher education augments oneâs human capital, and we forego output today from working to bolster output tomorrow from more productive workers. And, no doubt, that is sometimes true. We have many productive engineers and accountants who gained important skills in college, for example. But is that necessarily true of all college graduates, particularly when Arum and Roksa tell us that graduating college seniors typically have only marginally better critical reasoning skills that freshman? And when over 40 percent of those entering four year colleges fail to graduate in six years? What if millions of those who do graduate take jobs similar to those without that college education? What if the debt incurred to pay for the college leads many to delay marrying, delay buying houses? There is evidence that to some extent the push for college has led to all of these unintended consequences.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has published great work showing that there is a very severe underemployment problem amongst college graduates, and other equally good research demonstrating what many of us have been saying for years: the student financial aid programs such as subsidized student loans, have pushed up the cost of college. Now a sister Federal Reserve Bank, namely Philadelphia, is jumping into the act.

The Philly Fed in a new study shows that high student loan debt is preventing young potential entrepreneurs from starting new businesses â they cannot afford the necessary debt. Opportunity cost again: if I borrow a lot to go to college, I cannot afford to borrow to start a business.

Enrollment in all forms of higher education today are up roughly 50 percent or seven million from what they were in 1990. What if enrollments had only risen proportionate to population growth â we would have three or four million fewer enrolled in college today. Would our nation be better or worse off? No one knows for sure, but the continued rise in the proportion of Americans with a college education has been accompanied by a sharp reduction in the rate of economic growth. I bet we would have fewer underemployed recent graduates. I bet we would have less than 17 percent delinquency rates on college loans, and far less than a trillion dollars in loan debt. I bet we would have a higher rate of labor force involvement and entrepreneurial activity among the young. And I bet we would be spending tens of billions less on higher education, and at least a little bit more on capital goods investment, highway construction, et cetera. In short, I suspect we would have been better off as a nation.

Richard Vedder directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, teaches at Ohio University, and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Question :

This is a short article discussing the concept of opportunity cost and college. Provide your views on this topic.Do you agree/disagree with the article? Why? What are your thoughts on the current employment landscape of college graduates? Provide any insight on this topic on a specific industry, your own experience, or the experiences of people that you know who have already graduated.

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GWST 3510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Productivism, Proletariat, Precariat

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