The Youth Unemployment Bomb(businessweek.com) |
The Youth Unemployment Bomb(businessweek.com) |
I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new normal for him has become that he works 15 minutes a day or less on his job search. (Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.)
The welfare-reform efforts of the past 15-20 years in most western countries have tended to do exactly the opposite, oddly enough. Out of a worry that people were just receiving benefits without really looking for work, you must now demonstrate that you're actively sending out resumes and filling out applications. Some jurisdictions even require you to show up every so often to a center where they help you search job listings and send out resumes.
During this time (over 1 year), she has applied for many jobs (including an interview with a nursing home facility (sorry, don't know the details) on a reservation in New Mexico, where she would have to commute an hour each way to work--where she was a good fit and the daughter of one her teachers arranged for the interview). Some have been at traditional companies (HR), others have been at Target, Macy's, and other temporary jobs. Here's what she's found:
1) If you have a college degree, it's hard to get hired even for jobs that are 9 months with no chance of permanent employment, because you are "over qualified" 2) These unemployment centers are fairly useless for those with an education. If you go in everyday and a job happens to come in that matches you, then good. Otherwise, you're better off searching the internet yourself. Also, most of the money that's provided for training is for pretty basic jobs, like "medical coding" which seem like good outsourcing targets. Even though you go through the hoops for these, getting authorized to take these certificate programs can be Kafka-esque.
For my sister, while she's still looking for a job, she's decided she wants to go the entrepreneurial route. She got a chance to pitch her idea to an incubator in Ann Arbor, but she only had crude drawings and while they liked the idea, they really wanted a prototype. She is not a coder, so she's enrolled for some courses at the local community college.
But, I will say that I've seen some bias against hiring people who have been unemployed for some time. For example, a friend works as a pharmaceutical researcher and was told by recruiters that they are only interested in people who currently are employed (she was)...I think there's a tendency to believe that the jobs are out "there" and people are just too lazy to find them.
However, I'm increasingly believing that we've moved to a two fluid model (to coin a physics phrase) where for people with specialized skills, or experience (for example, I've talked to people in sales at IBM and other companies who have told me that they've found it hard to hire people with the skills they want), the job market is actually not that bad and they are being actively recruited. On the other hand, there are people with lower skills and for them the outlook is rather bleak.
It seems silly, but if we truly recognize that long term unemployment has a horrible way of killing one's ability hold a job, then Keynes idea is rather practical.
The government not as welfare but simply as employers of last resort. Much like the Fed is the lender of last resort.
Obviously this has the danger of government employees lobbying for ever better pay until it is economically irrational for people to seek work in the private sector.
The general objective was to renew/refresh our public infrastructure (via WPA) and to reforest-ate clear cut areas and improve problematic drainage (via CCC). Both programs were accused of being socialist (and perhaps they were).
I've been working to find jobs that meet my fit (fairly high education and experience in a specific field) but many of these position take a week or two in order to schedule a full day of interviews.
Yet, in order to get any sort of benefits (I'm in MA so, I can't drop off health insurance even for a short time) I need to send out resumes for obviously bs jobs.
But instead of working on things that could improve his chances to get a job, he just watches TV all day long. If he put in only maybe three hours of open source coding time a day, his chances to score a job should increase tremendously. If you are an unemployed software developer, it is much easier to stay on top of things than in many other professions but in the end you have to have the motivation for it.
and yes sending resumes isn't as productive as having connections, but a lot of people just don't have that many connections that they can tap to get them a job
For some people (see my other post about my sister), they spend part of the time crafting resumes for companies either in their field, or trying to get temp jobs, volunteering, and trying to intern in hopes of getting a job in a new field. If that doesn't fill the time, they may try to take classes, or try to start a business (but that requires skills and funding).
1 interview out of 3 resumes seems like a good rate. I've only sent three, but that's because I realized the economy wasn't getting better any time soon.
"Ran an advice blog" definitely looks better on my resume than "got really good at writing resumes."
I'll start sending them out again once unemployment drops a couple percentage points, but I've made more money from this blog than I would have lost driving around asking for jobs (which is a double digit number, but still meaningful).
I mentioned this here some months ago in a similar thread, and I'm only more sure of the value in doing this now. :)
If unemployment among youths is around 50% or whatever today, then just imagine what it will be in ten years when gas is $8 per gallon and we're facing food shortages. There is simply no way this is going to solve itself without massive government intervention, and I have trouble seeing that happening considering that there has been basically zero progress made by the federal government since I've been alive.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01...
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/07/the_zmp_hypothe....
It's certainly consistent with the data. The data shows that corporate profit, GDP and industrial production have all recovered. This is exactly what you expect when a recession ends and aggregate demand recovers. However, employment did not recover, suggesting that the workers unable to find a job have a marginal product close to zero.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP
What is interesting in this particular study how quickly the market acquires the information.
So, if the unemployment is a global phenomenon across many different markets, in the same civilisation, it is possible that it changed somewhat permanently.
(just an idea; I'm not fully convinced as well)
A trade is a gateway to self employment (once you have your hours in for licensing).
My brother has his master electrician's license in two states. He has more work than he knows what to do with.
I have two friends who recently went back to school (one finishing undergrad business/marketing the other MBA). Their job outlook is _poor_. The market is flooded with people that have _soft_ skills.
Our company is still hiring network technicians. Again a two year degree with _hard_ skill requirements. (Cisco certs, etc).
Tech school is way cheaper than college and your job prospects are good.
I'm sure I'm right, but I didn't think about how a recession would impact it.
On the plus side, there were endless streams of entry level positions I was well-qualified for before things went south, and I'll probably be able to find a job related to my degree when the economy starts improving.
Wealth is manufactured by machines not people.
Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how much average member of society has to work for same basic needs.
You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work because that work thanks to technology is producing more and more wealth.
You can't keep prices of meals to be higher than recent technological wonder. Someone at some point will call bullshit on that. "My sandwich is not worth same amount of wealth as 4GB flash thumb drive. They just want me to pay this much for sandwich to keep me working because I need sandwich. I'll just pass on working, buy cheapest food and see how this works out. They don't seem to want me in their companies anyway."
This unemployed generation can be the first one to take advantage of wealth humans get from technology en masse without need to cunningly trick everyone else out of their share. They'll get their share just by being more or less human dead weight that rich won't be able to shake off because they can't kill them or even let them die because there's for the first time too many of them.
Mmm, what? Don't make it sound like overturning dictators is a bad thing, dude.
Maybe it's much better for "society" to have unemployed young people with not only the courage to fight for freedom but also nothing better to do with their time, than to have people with jobs who tolerate authoritarianism.
The party leaders have got rich by telling everyone else the country is booming - when it was all a property scam. Now they have 30% youth unemployment and are cutting school and college funding to pay for it.
They were quiet happy to support terrorists in another country for their own political gains - they might want to start worrying about where the next car bomb will be placed.
And this is isn't in the middle east ......
Passed down to myself and my brothers, we're both skilled in welding, my brother now has his own electrician shop. I work in IT. If suddenly my IT job goes away, I have a trade to fall on.
Skilled trades and physical labor it seems to be lost arts on my generation (I'm 25) and that depresses me.
I've got to wonder what kind of industry takes 12 months to get up to speed unless you've got workers coming in with absolutely no training and education. For most programmers I know, the worst case ramp up time is around 3 months. That is often with a project that will never be profitable, much less make it for 18 months.
There are other fiscally attractive reasons to hire young so I'd think if training was the only problem, we could solve that problem. The problem I see with regards to education in most companies is that there is simply no one on staff who can do the training effectively or is given the time to do so. Perhaps this will open the door for the return of a mini trade school in the form of an app.
a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just aren't addressed at the same level.
b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or Wasabi).
c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc.
d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months.
e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU.
This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.
But, here's a question: currently sites like ODesk provide contract labor. Some of the jobs are for people to do research (for example, I wanted a listing of high schools/contact information for a side project I'm working on). I've only done a couple of postings, but I got very few American applicants. Is it just not well publicized? The rates are low, so it's not a good long term solution, but in some cases for "simple" research jobs, the rates could be $10/hr, which compared to some service jobs is competitive (since many service jobs here also don't provide health care)--especially in some lower cost of living states.
The same is true here, as many of our chronically "overqualified" unemployed could attest. What's worse, some of what counts as "training" here is a set of dubious commercial vocational schools --- cosmetology schools, and the like --- which soak up student loans, and leave the trainees with large debts that are hard to dismiss, even in bankruptcy.
(And these are pretty big business. One of them, Kaplan, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post corporation that has over $2 billion in revenue, accounts for just about all of the parent corporation's profits. Not without controversy by the way; reports of abusive practices from Kaplan have led to allegations of fraud: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html The Washington Post, of course, has editorialized in favor of its baby.)
19 years old like me are trying to build a living on the internet by writing, programming, and selling ads. It's a lot of hard work to find clients and more scary when you're trying to deliver the work.
Hopefully, the network of clients I am building will grows to such portion that I am able to find constant work as well charge more.
Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. After 3-5 years of higher education, many of the graduates can't solve even the most basic programming problems. I suspect that this must be the case in other professions as well. Something has to be done about the completely defective higher education systems.
Many interesting stories from dealing with MS audits in a mixed source environment.
The most interesting classes were those where he had us solve a real world problem (like researching and preparing an executive summary for a purchase).
Or the time he mangled all the computers while we were on break and had us troubleshoot them.
fib a b 1 = 1
fib a b 0 = 0
fib a b n = (fib a b (n - 1)) + (fib a b (n -2))
I've been working in industry for over 10 years and the only time I've ever had to write a fibonacci sequence generator was during a code challenge (that lead to an interview).
Hmm, but how hungry? Compared to say people who came of age in the 40s or 50s? I'm not sure hungry is the right word. Restless maybe. Peckish.
I see it again and again, students pick silly, simple or just useless degrees, such as
* philosophy
* international relations (every single one of those wants to work for the UN, maybe 0.001% ends up there).
* arts, all kinds
* history (how many historians do we really need)
What I said is that people pick these majors, and then we see these crazy unemployment stats. Most of these unemployed people are not qualified to do anything that society is willing to pay money for.
There are people that go into them for "silly" reasons, and there are people that go into them that come from upper-class backgrounds where being bankrolled by your parents while doing an international relations degree at a private university and spending time at unpaid internships in cities with high cost of living is a status symbol and a way to weed out the lower class from certain career tracks.
Generally, I think the more well rounded a person is they can usually lead a more successful (fulfilling) life.
... the other day I checked out a site for finding tech/design-oriented interns. There were 50 listed in my city (Philadelphia)... and most of the eye-catching descriptions the interns had written for themselves were things like:
* "Coming soon"
* "19 years old"
* "I'm a recent graduate of the University of Miami"
* "My name is Brittany"
* "My name is [redacted] and I am a 19-year-old Korean-American student."
This was the only part of the profile that was really custom to them, other than checking off a list of skills & available times/dates.
Don't even get me started on the usernames they chose to present to potential employers. (Musicbabi_87?!)
Their chances are pretty much zero. Obviously nobody taught these kids (and, in a few cases, adults) anything at all about professionalism or the fact that when they take a job, their job is to serve the employer. And they obviously haven't been reading books on their own that would teach them that.
Only a precious few mentioned anything that would tell me what I'd get out of the deal, how they could help me/be useful to me. Almost none even expressed any interests or goals of their own.
So, obviously, I'm not hiring any of them -- when I would have liked to. They got in their own way. This is, sadly, their fault.
My sister in law got a 2 year biz degree. You're qualified to be a secretary (without experience). She went back and got LPN with an additional year at school.
Her job outlook is amazing. Her income is 2 to 3 times what she could have made with only her business degree.
Associated degree/some college includes a lot of things like child care/business, etc.
I have a few trade's friends, and a few programmer friends (well, one hacker, one QA / side project hacker). The plumber friend makes $50k in this down market, typically $80k at 1-3 years of experience. The hacker / QA make ~50-55k at 2-4 years. Its all relative to your skills and contributions, but, I am only agreeing that you can make "good" money at a trades skill.
Our poor people, at least in the US, are a lot more wealthy than they were several decades ago. Actually if you dig into the economics of deciding how much to work and for what, how preferences vary depending on how much of a resource you have and how cheap a lot of things are compared to decades ago, this is neither surprising nor terrible, nor really even preventable without actually going down to these people and dictating their economic preferences and proper lifestyle to them, which I at least find a repugnant idea.
If you want to live a simple life with nothing from beyond 1950, no modern medicine, no modern tech gadgets, nothing beyond 1950, you can do it substantially cheaper. But it's just so easy to work a few more hours and get the modern stuff that it's the rare person who will choose to do this.
If there's anything to be horrified by, it would be the cheapening of debt that has made it too easy to get buried under it vs. decades past.
This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
(Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer many objections: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845
In particular, this is not a result of the poor being disproportionately old or young.)
And as near as I can tell you've conjured your "80% of the poor don't work at all." figure out of thin air. You don't adequately address the objections in the linked thread, and you're making the same oversimplifications.
Zinn: There are two issues here: First, why should we accept our culture's definition of those two factors? Why should we accept that the "talent" of someone who writes jingles for an Advertising agency advertising dog food and gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes $40,000 a year? Who is to say that Bill Gates works harder than the dishwasher in the restaurant he frequents, or that the CEO of a hospital who makes $400,000 a year works harder than the nurse, or the orderly in that hospital who makes $30,000 a year? The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the university?
Talent And hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured quantitatively. Since there is no way of measuring them quantitatively we accept the measure given to us by the very people who benefit from that measuring! I remember Fiorello Laguardia (US Senator) standing up in Congress in the twenties, arguing against a tax bill that would benefit the Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, and asking if Mellon worked harder than the housewife in East Harlem bringing up three kids on a meager income. And how do you measure the talent of an artist, a musician, a poet, an actor, a novelist, most of whom in this society cannot make enough money to survive - against the talent of the head of any corporation. I challenge anyone to measure quantitatively the qualities of talent and hard work. There is one possible answer to my challenge: Hours of work vs. Hours of leisure. Yes, That's a nice quantitative measure. Well, with that measure,the housewife should get more than most or all corporate executives. And the working person who does two jobs -- and there are millions of them -- and has virtually no leisure time, should be rewarded far more than the corporate executive who can take two hour lunches, weekends at his summer retreat, and vacations in Italy. ... But better still, why not use as a criterion for income what people need to live a decent life, and since most people's basic needs are similar there would not be an extreme difference in income but everyone would have enough or food, housing, medical care, education, entertainment, vacations.... Of course there is the traditional objection that if we don't reward people with huge incomes society will fall apart, that progress depends on those people. A dubious argument. Where is the proof that people need huge incomes to give them the incentive to do important things? In fact, we have much evidence that the profit incentive leads to enormously destructive things -- Whatever makes profit will be produced, and so nuclear weapons, being more profitable than day care centers, will be produced.
And people do wonderful things (teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, scientists,inventors) without huge profit incentives. Because there are rewards other than monetary rewards which move people to produce good things -- the reward of knowing you are contributing to society, the reward of gaining the respect of people around you. If there are incentives necessary to doing certain kinds of work, those incentives should go to people doing the most undesirable, most unpleasant work, to make sure that work gets done. I worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasurable work compared to the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that created artificially by our culture) do i need more incentive than he does?
End quote.
Not sure how many support people Blizzard has, but it is a shame that doing real business is usually outlawed in most MMORPGs.
Granted, if you meant coming of age in 1947 in Poland, that'd be another matter.
(Meanwhile, a terrorist group with millions of members was setting off about 20 bombs a year plus assorted lynchings and other acts of violence. The response by law enforcement was mainly gun control targeted at the victims of the terrorist group.)
The world of Mad Men is awesome if you get to be Don Draper. For everyone else, it sucked.
Part of the problem is cheaper young workers are laid off to keep fatcat management of an older generation. The workers remaining at the company then get "more productive." Fire the old and bring in 2 young workers(or more) for each of their salaries and things get much better.
Some of the 'poor' people here in Colombia work 3 hours a day, earn just the same money as someone who recently got a bachelor degree, and stay the rest of the day drinking beer and saving no money for tomorrow.
They also tend to have very big plasmas or LCD TVs and huge sound systems, while their houses are just bricks without any paint on them.
So, I live in a very rich country (you just can't imagine the delicious and cheap fruits here) but full of poor people.
The BLS disagrees. Can you tell me a reason I should trust Howard Zinn over the government agency tasked with measuring such things?
As for working harder jobs, I am agnostic. If you have evidence, cite it. I agree the poor die younger. I won't address the remainder of your post, it's mostly unsupported value judgments and opinion.
I'm potentially interested in reading this but I have to ask, are they measuring the acquisition of information by changes in employment status and salary? Because if so this seems like begging the question.
If I applied for even a small portion of the jobs that pop up on local job boards, it would consume every hour of the day.
In a normal economy you'd see entry level jobs there. But every job wants years of experience and specialized certifications. I don't even have the means to get the certifications.
Taking an alternate route is a coping method. I still probe the job boards during the day.
How hard can it be to say "we're looking for someone who knows enough Java to follow our codebase without needing their hand held. We are also dabbling in Python so that will be a plus if you know it."? Why can't a req for an experienced engineer read "We need someone reliable and knowledgeable enough that they can do all the handholding our other developers need."? There must be some part of this that I'm missing, because actually writing a req seems too damned simple to be this FUBAR'ed.
If you're not working, you are completely out of the loop of those that are.
you have to think outside the programmer mindset where there are lots of opportunities to meet people. For other careers, the only way to meet people in your industry is through a job or a conference.
It can't be harder to meet people than to date people. They go to places and do things. Well known places, most of which are in the phone book, many of which are open to the public, etc.
I mean, take the automobile industry. I think anyone on HN could find a car salesman or MechE willing to talk to you in maybe two phone calls. There, you aren't a stranger anymore. (I further predict that most MechEs would fall over themselves lining up to talk to someone who sounded interested in torque ratios or whatever.)
Yes, Michaelchiasri raised this objection. He didn't bother to do the math, which showed that it has little effect. I addressed his concerns in the reply to that comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441
It's very strange - you read his comment, but not my reply to it. Let me repeat one more time, since apparently you are using a browser in which links only work sporadically: Poor adults have a full time labor force participation rate of 15% (vs 73% for the nation as a whole), rather than 10% for all poor people (and 65% for all Americans). The low labor force participation rate of the poor is not caused by demographic differences.
Labor force participation rates usually include everyone. If you object to this practice, take it up with the BLS.
And as near as I can tell you've conjured your "80% of the poor don't work at all." figure out of thin air.
That's because you didn't bother reading the first paragraph of the BLS report I linked to. I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million. Before you object that I'm including children (just like the BLS does), the figure rises to 31% if you exclude children (and to 85% for the USA as a whole).
It increased the figure from 10% to 15%. Why are you deliberately deflating the figure when it still appears to support your point after removing children?
>I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million.
That figure is the percentage of the poor who work or look for work for at least 27 weeks per year, not the percentage of the poor who do any work or look for work at all. Farm laborers for example could work 50 hour weeks May-October and only hit 25 weeks. And they would be poor.
it's easy to say go walk from business to business shaking hands asking if their company is hiring, and yes for a few people that might actually work...but for the vast majority it'll be an exercise in futility.
Oh, that's easy. The manager you'd be working for, the budget holder he reports to, and the person who writes the ad don't know each other, have never met, and have never spoken or even communicated except via filling in forms designed by HR people who know HR but know nothing about the industry.
My last emotional response comment wasn't such a good idea, so I'll leave you to your bigotry.
Sorry, Roosevelt did that, but nowadays I am pretty sure it would be called socialism.
You're quite right about the rhetoric, but it's completely unmoored from reality.
Those sorts of projects/spending got killed in 08 because womens' groups objected to money going to "burly men" projects.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...
Of course, govt spending is always political. At one time, one could both pay off supporters and build up the country. When we have to choose, the former always wins.
I seriously doubt that's how a governmental program training and employing the youth to repair the infrastructure would be viewed, and especially not as proposed to the more socialistic policy of welfare.
http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/P...
In his lifetime though we already did this. If you were too poor to get by then you could go live at the town farm where you would receive public assistance in exchange for working.
Of course to balance this you would need to raise unemployment benefit and get rid of this shameful "food stamp" concept. Everyone on unemployment gets a fair living wage, they just have to work part time in some government job with bursts to full time when needed (e.g. holidays, etc.).
If people are still able and looking for jobs, their time is better spent looking for jobs than doing pointless tasks. This can be a real problem - writing applications (if that is your approach) takes a lot of time, and if you do 14 hours of taxi driving per day, there is less time for finding that job that would suit you better.
Then there are the people on welfare who are really sick or disabled - why should they have to build giant structures, and how?
Lastly there might be people exploiting the system, but I suspect they are not that many. At least were I live, being on welfare is actually work, anyway, because you have to wade through tons of bureaucracy to get it and stay on it.
Of course, but the statement itself is a bit meaningless and appeared to me to be flippant, at that.
When the government pays people not to do things, that's a more extreme form of socialism.
To me, the question is one of subsidy. UI[1] is a 100% subsidy. A WPA type of deal could potentially be no subsidy at all, at least to the individuals. It would merely be directing tax money at a particular kind of boondoggle.
[1] Notwithstanding that the I stands for "insurance," since it's structured as a tax, at least here in the US.
I do not debate her devotion to her education or her job duties, but the misfortune of modern youth is that our educational backgrounds often bear no resemblance to what will bring value to an employer.
If her resume says "BSc, Disadvantaged Female Chimpanzee Sciences, Harvard," it might well be that she studied hard. However, her studies are likely to have done little to improve her value to most employers.
Perhaps because the WPA is a lot more recent, it seems to be the thing Americans think of when a make-work program is suggested. I don't think I've ever heard them criticized as Dickensian; instead they tend to be criticized as socialist.
Paying people to do made-up jobs (e.g. most of the UK public sector) just destroys wealth.
To mix it up I've also said I'm in school now, hence some hours I can't work, and don't show the degree or say that it's for a grad program. Just let prospective employers think it must be undergrad.
Really since losing my job (started grad school part time before then) as tough as it is being "over qualified" people don't want students either. A number of places have said they require "full-time" availability even for part-time employees because the hours change week to week.
For those who say the jobs are out there and that Gen Y is lazy, try losing yours. It can suck. Bad.
It's not really wealth destruction as you've noted, but it does hamper the countries business environment that could otherwise potentially lead to even more productive jobs as companies can afford to hire more productive people.
Giving people pointless jobs creates stability, which in many cases is more valuable than any sort of physical good.
So the society/government has, broadly speaking, three alternatives (and a continuum therebetween):
* Do nothing for the unemployed * Give the unemployed some money * Act as employer of last resort
Doing nothing acts as less drag on the productive aspects of the economy, and also it's really easy to implement. The downsides include civil unrest, and also arguably have long-term negative consequences on the productiveness of the entire workforce (compare with economically-inefficient government subsidies of shipbuilding in nations that wish to maintain the ability to go to naval war, e.g. the US).
Giving them money eases the civil unrest problem. Yay, less revolutions! And hopefully for people who go through temporary rough spots, it permits them to reenter the productive workforce, instead of falling into inescapable poverty. The main downside is screwed-up economic incentives for the unemployed.
Work projects have no greater drag on the productive economy than EI, but might have less drag. Also, they act as work experience, and they eliminate the wicked incentive for the underemployed workers. BUT, they create screwed-up incentives for the employers, who now have a source of cheap labour, which they are now incented to victimize. (Compare with the incentive problems with US for-profit prisons.) Work projects may prevent recipients from seeking new better jobs (through being busy during the workday). Work projects compete at the low end with non-government-run businesses, in ways that are sometimes seen to be economically troubling (I don't follow this argument, myself).
So, sometimes the arguments against work projects also apply to 100% subsidies: "that's anti-capitalist, anti-competitive, pinko commie socialism". But there are some other arguments that the left levy against work projects, like the victimization/incentive issue.
