Surviving the Post-Employment Economy

The author argues that in the new economy, it's people, not skills or majors, that have lost value -- this unfortunate view seems to be accurate. Here's the first part of this article (click on the link below for the full text).

"Sarah Kendzior, November 2013 (Sarah is a St Louis-based writer who studies politics and media.) --

A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher.

What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed - working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams - journalism, art, entertainment - for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable.

Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. They should have chosen a more "practical" major, like science or engineering, and stayed away from the fickle and loathsome humanities. The reality is that, in the "jobless recovery", nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labour, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.

Changing your major will not change a broken economy.

People devalued

In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs. Even in the military, that behemoth of the national budget, positions are being eliminated or becoming contingent due to the sequester.

It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.

Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. "You got a PhD - what did you expect?" they are told when they note that 76 percent of professors work without job security, usually for poverty wages.

It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. But until 2008, PhDs could have expected more. Since 2009, most disciplines have lost roughly 40 percent of their positions, while the backlog of qualified candidates continues to grow. Most PhDs work as adjunct faculty or in the new euphemistic sectors of high-brow impoverishment: "non-stipendiary fellow", "special assistant professor" or "voluntary development opportunity".

Best of bad options

Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enrol in graduate school. Detractors roll their eyes: Why would a young person spend years earning a degree of questionable value? Why not "go get a job"? To which the 20-something laughs, having graduated into an economy where peers spend years vainly looking for a job, finding only unpaid internships or low-wage contingency labour, often while living at home. A funded graduate programme, with health insurance, seems a welcome escape.

"But it is not just about your current earnings," the detractor continues, "It is about the wages you lose while in the programme." To which the 30-something, having spent their adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the 20-something aside, and explains that this is a maxim they, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. They tell the 20-something what they already know: It is hard to plan for what is already gone.

We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.

If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

Higher education is merely a symptom of a broader economic disease. As universities boast record endowments and spend millions on lavish infrastructure, administrators justify poor treatment of faculty, or lecturers, by noting that they: 1) "choose" to work for poverty wages, and 2) picked specialisations that give them limited "market value" - ignoring, of course, that almost no one is valued in this market, save those who are reaping its greatest profits."

http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201311373243740811

Emerging markets hold the key to smartphone success for Microsoft-Nokia

An insightful explanation of the Microsoft-Nokia strategic rationale.  Here's the first part of this article (click on the link below for the full text).

"GSMAintelligence.com, Sept 2013 -- Microsoft announced yesterday that it is acquiring Nokia Devices & Services for $7.2 billion, a bold move by the software giant aimed at strengthening the position of Windows Phone in a smartphone market that continues to be dominated by devices running Android and iOS. This deal is expected to close in Q1 2014 subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.

In this analysis, we look at the strategic rationale for the acquisition, focusing on the next wave of mobile growth driven by demand for data services in fast-growing markets, and assess how well Microsoft-Nokia is positioned to benefit from it.

What is the strategic rationale behind Microsoft-Nokia?

From a Microsoft point-of-view, there are two main reasons for the acquisition, which are intricately intertwined. The first is to consolidate its mobile position. For many years it has articulated the importance of being firmly in the mobile space, but has largely been unsuccessful throughout a number of platform iterations, leaving it increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC era (which, of course, it dominated during the 1990s and 2000s). Its share of global smartphone sales (through Windows Phone) languishes under 5%. Nokia has been its principal supporter since the formation of their strategic partnership in February 2011. Both firms have essentially bet their respective futures in consumer mobile on this, so we see the acquisition as a logical extension from partnership to full integration.

The company has positioned itself for the future as a 'devices and services' business. While this can be read a number of ways, we believe the most prescient is in a mobile context where it seeks to control an integrated ecosystem of hardware, software and content/services to challenge the ecosystems of Apple and Google. While it can claim to have control over two of these without Nokia, this deal provides it the missing piece in hardware. In addition, Nokia provides a ready-made, proven capability in supply chain management, marketing and distribution. The alternative (if it was even considered) of investing in all of these on its own would have been extremely difficult and costly, and a particularly unpalatable option for Microsoft given an increasingly impatient investor base looking for clear success in mobile."

https://gsmaintelligence.com/analysis/2013/09/why-emerging-markets-hold-the-key-to-smartphone-success-for-microsoft-nokia/400/

Anthropomorphism of computers: mindful or mindless?

Interesting article that has bearing on the human-computer user interface design methods as well as my prior research in this domain.  Here's the first part of this article (click on the link below for the full text).

"ABSTRACT -- Youjeong Kima and S. Shyam Sundarb.    In analyzing the human tendency to treat computers as social actors (CASA), researchers tend to rule out the anthropomorphism explanation because anthropomorphism is understood to be “a sincere, conscious belief” that computers are human and/or deserving of human attributions. But, does anthropomorphism have to be necessarily mindful? Could it not also be a mindless tendency, especially given that most of us have somewhat long associations with our computers and have built human-like bonds with them? We examined these questions empirically by investigating whether the user tendency to treat computers as human beings is conscious (mindful) or non-conscious (mindless). We manipulated two variables (presence/absence of human-like agent and the low/high interactivity) on a health website and experimentally investigated whether they serve as anthropomorphic cues to trigger mindful attributions of human-ness to the website or mindless evaluations of the site in human terms. We found evidence for mindless anthropomorphism, with implications for user judgments of credibility of information on the site."

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563211001993