The dangers of sustained unemployment

When Japan’s real-estate bubble burst, young people had no point of reference other than boom times. So when the job market dried up, many of them welcomed the chance for self-exploration. In 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported on these young freeters, who rejected “conformist Japanese culture and its 15-hour workdays” in favor of “working odd jobs for spare cash” and “hanging out.” The freeters pioneered funemployment.

But while the term freeter stuck, the choice to be out of work was soon anything but free. The first freeters are now in their late 30s and early 40s. Almost one-third do not hold regular jobs, and some never have. One-fifth still live with their parents. This perpetual failure to launch has taken a psychological toll. Aging freeters file six of every 10 mental-health insurance claims. Japan’s suicide rate rose by 70 percent from 1991 to 2003, and the proportion of suicide victims in their 30s has grown each of the past 15 years.

What is most alarming is that things keep getting worse for subsequent generations. Today, more than 20 years after Japan’s bubble burst, youth unemployment is higher than ever. Only half of working 15-to-24-year-olds have regular jobs, and another 10 percent are unemployed. The rest are “nonregulars.” Somewhat akin to temp positions in the U.S., Japan’s nonregular jobs pay half as much as regular jobs, offer few benefits, and can be eliminated on a whim—which they often are. The portion of young Japanese working as nonregulars exploded in the mid-1990s and has marched upward ever since.

​Ethan Devine in the Atlantic on lessons the U.S. should learn from Japan about surges in unemployment. They can self-perpetuate. Also instructive for teaching me the terms "freeter" and "funemployment."

The lesson I took away was about the importance of continuing to learn new skills after graduation. Of course, college is much about signaling, and not necessarily about your exact course of study. But it's not clear that the traditional degrees that colleges tend to guide students toward are necessarily the optimal ones for employment in this next phase of our economy.

It's a post for another day, but I see students coming out of undergrad and graduate school these days missing some very basic and important skills which would boost their employability significantly.​

To twist a well-known aphorism, being employed won't necessarily make you happy, but being unemployed can make you very unhappy.​

WHCD

I admire [CNN's] commitment to covering all sides of a story...just in case one of them happens to be accurate.

When Obama leaves office, one of the things I'll miss the most are his comedy routines at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The one he gave last night was one of the best yet.

I recognize that the Press and I have different jobs. My job is to be President, your job is to keep me humble. Frankly I think I'm doing my job better.​

Seriously, he has some serious comedic timing, that's a gift. He also has some great joke writers, and they deserve some ​recognition. Who are they? Conan O'Brien could've used them last night.

Going undercover on social networks

Results show that men in relationships and with large on-line networks are more like to look at women they do not know. In contrast, single men with large networks are more likely to look at women they do know.

From this Harvard Business School paper (PDF) which "proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. Such covers are most valuable to actors in long-term relationships, as those who are already employed or in a long-term romantic relationship should not be seen as participating in the market for a new relationship."​

I wish, like OkCupid did with OkTrends ("Frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else, probably via some bit.ly hack"), social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook revealed more aggregate insight into human behavior culled from their gazillions of users. There's much of interest there, but it's locked away.

I have many theses I'd love to test. For example, the relationship between vain status updates on Facebook and the number of total profile photos you have uploaded, or the relationship between people who cheat at Words with Friends and people who cheat on their taxes.​ Foursquare checkins or Instagram food photo restaurant sources as a predictor of annual income.  I need to finagle access to such data and turn it into a bestselling pop psychology book.

Ritual

Xavier Marquez reviews Randall Collins' book Interaction Ritual Chains.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture. These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.

Perhaps the most important bit is this one (emphasis mine):​

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

Just as Marquez's review caused me to want to purchase and read Collins' book​ immediately, I hope you'll want to go read Marquez's review after this short tease.

The personality of suicide bombers

The fact that suicide bombers are usually mild-mannered members of the middle class seems counterintuitive. After all, the middle class tend to be well-educated, well-behaved, good family membersnothing like the bloodthirsty tough guys or criminals we imagine when we think of terrorists. They bear little resemblance to English football hooligans or rabble-rousers. No other form of violence has a higher proportion of females than suicide bombers, even though females are usually more conformist than males.

Why is this so? I suggest it is because suicide bombing is the easiest form of violence for conventional middle-class people to carry out, if they decide to commit violence at all.

​From an article from 2008 by the great Randall Collins. Still relevant, exposing many myths about violent behavior which are still commonly accepted by many people, including many in the media.

Clandestine, confrontation-avoiding violence such as suicide bombing is a fourth pathway around confrontational tension. It succeeds only because the attacker is good at pretending that he or she is not threatening at all. People accustomed to the typical macho forms of violence are not good at this; gang members would make lousy suicide bombers. But mild-mannered middle-class people are ideal for it. Since they are not confrontational by nature, they do not have to control a blustering or threatening demeanor that would warn their victims. Self-directed introverts, they do not need to hear cheering as they stalk their prey. Middle-class culture is especially accommodative, adept at maintaining a smooth surface of conventionality. Whatever our private feelings, we learn not to express them on the job, in social situations, or in public. This is good training for carrying a bomb under ones clothing until the target is so close that massive damage is certain.