YouSaid · the spoken record

Diane Swonk

lines on the record: 40
first: 2016-09-12
most recent: 2016-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am optimistic, but I think it's a process and it won't necessarily all be resolved in a short while. It's going to go on for a long time as new challenges come up. But the focus, the political and social focus on the need to rethink the systems, need to rethink the institutions and come up with creative ways of helping people adapt to a very different labor force than one they started out in, that gives me optimism because it's not a problem to be shunted aside. It's something that people are really working on now.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Institutions and our systems to allow them to make those transitions. Early in the paper, we make the point that when you look at society, you sometimes think this is technology sort of filling up all available space of displacing people. But in truth, when you look at it more closely, what it is is a situation where relative to the amount of machines and software or technology and capital, we have fewer and fewer people available to coordinating control the economy. We're more short labor than long labor, to use the financial terms. We need people. It's this interesting thing, right? We're always short jobs and we're always short people for the jobs. Those are two constant refrains in the economy. And what we're saying is, yes, they are constant refrains. And what we need to do is change the system so that we're better at matching the people who don't have the jobs to the jobs that don't have people.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that technology. As we get to watch this real time, it becomes clearer and clearer this has actually been about the enabling of people to do new and interesting things, that it really is a process of where the old repetitive, data-driven gets put in the back seat and driven by the machines, and the front seat is all about the new and the interesting. And that's true whether you're talking about farms, factories, service jobs, or professional jobs. All of them are going through that same process where individuals are getting to focus on more interesting things, new things accomplish more in a day, in an hour than they used to be able to do. Those skills are more transferable from topic to topic. There's an incredible influx of new activities and new things to do, but that creates an incredible challenge to reallocate, redeploy people to those new functions. And we need to evolve our”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the odd aspects of today's public debate is in the labor markets, we're having this moment of fear and crystallization because of the onslaught of technology. And the macroeconomic productivity discussion, we have people arguing there's no longer any technological progress. And that's the reason there's no productivity gains. What is actually happening is that technology is becoming so pervasive and is changing so rapidly that this is moving from sort of block changes that are clearly defined to a process of continuous evolution where anyone's job is going to evolve. That commonality makes it easier to generate political action. And the fact that it's a series of steps as opposed to one or two giant steps also makes it much easier to make adjustments too. I think the other thing that makes us optimistic is a new understanding of the power of”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one reason for optimism is what we talked about in the very beginning, why people are so focused on this issue right now. The fact that a technological change and innovation affects everybody across the political spectrum and the social spectrum means that there is a lot of focus on finding new approaches to bear the risk and to help people adapt. It can't just be isolated to one segment of society. And so you have a lot of effort really focused on coming up with solutions in a way that you probably didn't in the past”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can take a picture with you. So we can do that today. Now, you ended up with a different kind of pension. Now, the interesting thing about that, and this goes to this life plan as opposed to a retirement plan, the defined contribution plan works a lot better when you go to generalize it to life circumstance and beyond just retirement, as opposed to the old retention programs. We need ways of thinking about how to do health plans in this.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, we've seen lots of innovation in financial programs in the last period. The end of the old defined benefits plan, which was a classic retention, and having it replaced by defined contribution, which has clear portability, is a great example of how you rethink programs. And so take your...”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the core of them, and this is actually a D problem. The core of them was retention. These were programs that were designed to make sure that people stayed with their employer and made it hard to leave. And in an economy where transitions are a necessary component, having your benefits tied into things that are retention programs is going to create an inherent conflict. And it's actually a bigger change. You really need to think about words like portability much more clearly. If you look at the US system, there's a tendency to believe a problem is that we tie this to employer. But if you take a look at Europe, there the problem is you tie it to occupation. Nurses have a pension plan that's separate from manufacturing workers. An economy where people move across things, it either needs to be tied to the individual, which may not be practical, or it needs to be portable from employer to employer and occupation to occupation.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The freelance economy is extremely helpful as a source of income to tide you over during these transition periods. Supplemental income, it draws on assets that people already have, whether it's a spare room in their house or their driving skills or their cooking skills. It allows people to monetize things that couldn't be monetized before. And from an income standpoint, that's extremely helpful. But as you say, it doesn't go to the benefits. And so there needs to be some rethinking of this very strict line between employee and independent contractor so that people have the ability to develop their own pensions pools, that they have the ability to get healthcare, and you can have the flexibility to move between a full-time job, a part-time job, a freelance economy job without these very rigid lines as, say, some people have access to a lot of benefits, but other people don't have any.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five years. That's right. One that's cited most often is the German apprenticeship program, but that's in manufacturing and very classic sort of narrow jobs. We need a broader notion of that that works for the modern corporation and the service corporation. The other thing we need to do is rethink retirement accounts so they're drawable for these life moments. They need to be life accounts as opposed to retirement accounts. From both standpoints, we as a society are having difficulty with the notion that retirement isn't what it meant in the 1960s. We're learning that people actually need to stay active later in life. We're also beginning to realize that they need gaps in the middle of their lives to retrain and redeploy their skills. And so we need to rethink those programs so they're adaptable to life as opposed to end of life.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in most cases, if you talk to the companies about those programs, there are more retention tools than they are training programs. There's an implicit assumption there's a fair chance on completion of training the person may leave. But while they're”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And currently, that happens, but it's relatively small and it's relatively bespoke in terms of firms providing a little bit of money for someone to go retrain themselves. But there's no industry-wide standard in that space.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back to the investment problem. There's a couple things you need to make it easier to invest in people. The first, which is perhaps the single most basic component of modern finance, is diversification. One person investing in one person as their only investment is the toughest possible way to make this work. So bringing the employer into that equation, bringing the government into that equation, and creating a sort of insurance market become critical to making that work. Now, when you're talking about people as opposed to events, those words all mean something slightly different than they do in finance. So it means a job training program where the company is bearing a chunk of the tuition. It means a situation where if it doesn't work, sort of like no fault divorce, they can separate without a legal problem. But if it does work, a certain amount of service is due. It means situations where...”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Miss people who think of the new needs that people didn't realize that they had. So people think of the needs, people create the ways to fill those needs over time you get the data. Things are done at scale. You can automate it. But it's always that novelty, that invention and innovation that comes from the person, not from the machine.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways they're more vulnerable. The core of whether a job is vulnerable or not is how easily measured its output is and how often it's done, how well structured it is. What you need to automate a job is data. So the more it's done and the more clearly defined it is and the more data about it, the easier it is to automate, the newer it is, the more adaptive it is, the more it has to change with circumstance, the more you can't automate it. Where people dominate is new, different and adaptive. And that goes to the heart of why teaching people how to learn is critical, because that's the thing people do better. People can do something that's never been done before. Where machines win is things that have been done five million times before.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, I started my career programming computers. Unless you go to a museum, you can't find any computers that will run those computer programming languages. And even if you go back 10 years, most of the computer languages that are in the jobs board top 10 didn't exist 10 years ago. So that sense of renewal is core to the modern job market, regardless of the profession you're talking about. And that requires an approach that's all about learning and resiliency and change, not about what we really need as carpenters or what we really need is computer programmers. What we really need is people who can adapt to today's needs.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's also important to understand how broad-based that notion is, because it's often too easy to think that's a description of a new business school curriculum. We used to have assembly lines for cars. We now have teams that assemble cars. Those teams now put together multiple cars as opposed to a single model because that flexibility has become inherent to the modern economy. And so at its core, there's a notion of resiliency that sits at the base of education, not technical skills. And so that requires you can learn a computer.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we used to study, I need to learn how to do this math table. These days, I mean, a calculator can do the math for me. I need to learn to be able to work with others to solve a problem that has maybe had math at its core but requires teamwork and a multitude of insights. Right.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Study STEM is important, but it doesn't future-proof anybody because those professions will evolve just as rapidly, if not more rapidly, than the rest of the employment and the labor force. And so what people really need to learn is how to be adaptable, how to learn new skills later in life, how to work in groups, how to be creative, because the process of working is much more about managing, organizing teams of people to put things together than a single person working on a single project in isolation. And so in a lot of ways, this is about changing the way things are taught rather than the actual subjects themselves, making them more interactive, more real life feel, and more team-oriented so that people have these adaptability skills and they're able 20 years on to go back and learn something else.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about the types of retraining. You've talked a lot about rethinking education, re-education or to build skills people need in the future, but you're not focused, as many commentators are, on STEM. And a lot of people talk about the need for America to up its STEM education and for people to dive deeper there. Why does the education of the future necessitate a more broad-based curriculum?”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could have tax advantaged savings accounts for the sort of mid-career retraining that could not only fund the training itself, but also give you income in this time when suddenly your income is dried up.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Essentially, we need to extend those programs so that they cover the middle. But that's going to require rethinking them at the ends. Otherwise, you simply don't have enough money to make it work.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a very high level, that has a straightforward answer. When you get down to the practical political implications of this, it's not so easy. The broad general answer is this has to be thought of and embedded in the same things that we now think of retirement. The funds that are really available are the things that we now think of that allow you to exist after you're employed. We need to think of those resources something that can take you through redeployment. But that's going to also require rethinking retirement.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Benefits for training programs, a more structured apprenticeship program so that there's an easy way to slot in older workers. Or the idea of a standardized labor contract where the employee agrees to commit a certain amount of time in the job in exchange for a certain amount of training. And just to have this in sort of a standardized format that people understand and recognize would probably make it easier for people to want to take these jobs and for companies to want to offer them.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The risk is that the employee can come, be trained up, get skills, and then walk across the street to a competitor and take the value of the company's investment with the person. The company doesn't actually own the value of its investment in that case. So you have to create some incentives to make it more worthwhile for the company to make that investment. And these can range from things like greater tax.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But corporations don't necessarily today have the right incentives either because the more advanced tenure of that worker is to retrain them doesn't look like a great risk reward for the company to reinvest in that person and retrain them.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First thing we have to do is we need to understand the size of that decision. The notion that an individual doing it on their own is probably not reasonable. So we have to find ways of bringing corporations and the government into that risk sharing. We do it as a matter of course without even thinking with young people. Student loans, placement decisions, apprenticeship programs where other people bear part of the risk. That's an even bigger problem mid-career. The risk is bigger, the time to pay off is shorter, the ability to switch decisions a second time is lower. And yet for that person trying to seek a second career, we have none of the same assistance. We have to find ways where corporations can bear part of that risk. We have to find ways where the individual gets some income maintenance over that period. And they're probably going to need real-life assistance with the life problems. When you're 20, you're worried about your”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in this paper, you talk about this as a classic investment problem. You also discuss the need for a new approach to risk sharing. What do you mean by this, and how would you redistribute those risks?”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, is exactly the same kind of financial decision. And that's why when you look at the institutional arrangements today, it's so hard for individuals to take that step because they have all the risk, they don't really have the resources, and it's not a one day or even six-month decision. It's a five to ten year decision because very often you have to give up your current location, you have to go to school, you then have to rebuild up the network and other connections to create actual employment. And then in almost any employment you care to name, you then begin to build the income and client list seniority, whatever the particular profession requires, so that that's another five-year process, even in professions that have quick startups, it can be a 10-year process in others. That's an incredibly big concentrated risk position to ask an individual to take, particularly some”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's take one step away from the job decision and repose that as advice on your retirement account. And I think that makes it easier to understand what going back to school means. So you're at this point in your career. You now have to reinvest your retirement funds. You go to a stockbroker and they tell you, we have the perfect investment for you. We're going to have to put 100% of your money into a single stock. It has a 10-year lockup. And you don't get to change your mind for the entire ten years. This is the perfect IRA for you.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the report describes a basic conundrum, which is that the individual who would benefit from retraining oftentimes doesn't have the right incentives to do so or the risks are too high for that individual to leave their job, retrain new skills at a time when they might be earning money instead. So explain how that problem works and how we fix those incentives”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One other way we've thought about this is that people have shifted from actually doing work to supervising and coordinating the inputs into the work so that now people can do much more than they could in the past. And so a lot of jobs have changed quite fundamentally, even as their occupation titles remain the same. So think of a lawyer who used to have to sift through document after document in discovery, trying to find a few key words. Now that's done by a machine. That person is still a lawyer, but the content of the job is very different.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and that's been the history of work in a very basic way. We used to have to organize large masses of people to do fairly simple tasks. As machines took that over, the people were able to supervise those machines, they were able to coordinate greater activities. And so it's that ability to reallocate to those smaller tasks that really has created the wealth and the prosperity we have.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's exactly the right question. And part of what makes this so pervasive is it's affecting every kind of job everywhere. As Sandra was talking about, we can now put sensors on activities we couldn't. Warehouses can almost self-guide. And so very basic jobs are the ones most subject to this. On the other hand, a lot of basic jobs require human interaction, require customizing to the moment, require understanding what the client just asked for. There's a certain immediacy and smallness to life that actually creates many, many job opportunities. It's one of the reasons when you look at some of the newest, biggest internet startups, they're not about big tech processes. They're actually about helping you rent out your house to guests so that ability to deal with a specific location, a specific issue for the individual is what sits at the heart of the modern job effort. That's what makes jobs work today.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's absolutely right, but that makes it sound like you're getting more technical. In some cases, it's less technical. You can think about food preparation, where you used to have to master chopping. Now you can use a food processor and the embeddedness has to go into coming up with a new cookie that's got 20 ingredients that people want to buy as opposed to six they don't want to buy. And so it's not really more STEM, more intellectual, more of this. It's really more about the understanding what people want. understanding where things are going, understanding what makes things interesting as opposed to the technical act of doing something over and over and over again.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything is replicable. But if it's new, if it's different, if it's the first time, the second time, the third time, that's when you need people. And so it's new businesses, small businesses, inventive businesses where people get engaged. And it's the large superscale businesses where you see computers and machinery begin to dominate. And I think one of the real challenges as a result for public policy has always been when you talk about jobs programs, you want to create a lot of them. But at heart, if you create a lot of anything, you've already invited the machine in where when it's new, entrepreneurial inventive, that's where humans really have the advantage and always will. It's coordinating and dealing with all of those issues.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is part of an ongoing process. As Sandra was already talking about, this has been going on a very long time. We used to think about jobs as doing things, but computers and machinery keeps getting better, and they can do more and more things. But there's always been a second part of the job, which is the ability to supervise, the ability to organize the factors of production, other people, and to guide them as to what they ought to be doing. And machines have never been good at that. The core of this has always been if you do a lot of it, It makes sense to invent a machine so that you can do more of it more easily.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New industries are creating new jobs. The problem is that the people who are being displaced from the old jobs often aren't well suited for the new ones. They've invested a lot of time and energy and money in their existing careers. They've built up a lot of social capital. Suddenly they're being told 20 or 25 years into this career that they need to switch to something entirely new, something that entires a new investment of money and time and effort that may in fact be in a different place in the country. And so this isn't just inconvenient for them, it's expensive and it's very hard to match up the needs of the new jobs with the people who are being displaced from the old ones.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in the past though, innovation may have destroyed some jobs, but it certainly created new jobs as well. So is that happening today? Are there new industries producing jobs that will replace the old ones?”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It certainly isn't a new idea or a new problem. And if you think about the last couple centuries, American history 200 years ago farming dominated the economy and the labor force, almost everybody was involved in farming in some way. Today, only about 2% of the labor force works in farming. There's a bigger population. There's more food, but people are doing different jobs. And so technology has been affecting employment for a very long time. What's different today, I think, is that the pace is faster thanks to advances in computing power, data processing, sensors, jobs that were previously off limits to automation are now becoming susceptible to automation. Probably the best example there is the self-driving car, which was a dream in the not so distant past and is now a reality. And related to that, secondly, the scope is broader. People are seeing the effects of automation in jobs that were seen as safe before and in their everyday lives.”
2016-09-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Narrowing the Jobs Gap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT