What causes unemployment?

[Malthus]

I disagree that a law degree that does not lead to a legal career is a "waste". It is often the springboard to all sorts of other career opportunities.

In Canada at least, the Law Society does attempt to exert some control over the number of law students.

Well that was a major selling point and one of the reasons for the current law school bloat.  But obviously when you have so many JDs out there they just become another degreed job seeker.  I am glad Canada is stepping in to put limits on it.

If anything else it is just a matter of educating the students and the public about the current state of the Legal field.  The money from running a law school is so lucrative that marketing campaigns selling a chance to be a big time lawyer are hard for cold hard facts to compete with.

The problem is that the chances to be a "big time" anything are pretty low these days. Is there any field people wishing to make a lot of money really ought to be exploring?

Perhaps some sort of entrepreneurship in the skilled trades - say, becomming a plumber or electrician, with the goal of running a firm of plumbers or electricians. I dunno.

[Barrister]

I disagree that a law degree that does not lead to a legal career is a "waste". It is often the springboard to all sorts of other career opportunities.

In Canada at least, the Law Society does attempt to exert some control over the number of law students.

Well that was a major selling point and one of the reasons for the current law school bloat.  But obviously when you have so many JDs out there they just become another degreed job seeker.  I am glad Canada is stepping in to put limits on it.

If anything else it is just a matter of educating the students and the public about the current state of the Legal field.  The money from running a law school is so lucrative that marketing campaigns selling a chance to be a big time lawyer are hard for cold hard facts to compete with.

The problem is that the chances to be a "big time" anything are pretty low these days. Is there any field people wishing to make a lot of money really ought to be exploring?

Perhaps some sort of entrepreneurship in the skilled trades - say, becomming a plumber or electrician, with the goal of running a firm of plumbers or electricians. I dunno.

The law has been pretty good to you, me and CC though.  I can't say I'd have been better off going to trade school.

[Valmy]

The problem is that the chances to be a "big time" anything are pretty low these days. Is there any field people wishing to make a lot of money really ought to be exploring?

Perhaps some sort of entrepreneurship in the skilled trades - say, becomming a plumber or electrician, with the goal of running a firm of plumbers or electricians. I dunno.

The context here is the crushing debt one has to take on to get a law degree.  There are plenty of fields, nursing or engineering and so forth, that not only have a high demand but also do not come with that burden.  It would be like if we were producing tons of MDs without job prospects.  That would also be a disaster.

[Malthus]

The law has been pretty good to you, me and CC though.  I can't say I'd have been better off going to trade school.

Heh, true enough ... but I'm vain enough to think that there is a certain amount of selection bias at work here. 

I guess the issue as I'd put it is 'knowing how tough it is to get a good position in law in this economy when starting out, if you took 100 random people smart enough to get into law school, which would give 'em a better chance at an upper-middle class lifestyle on average - some sort of self-funded entreprenuership in say the skilled trades, or a legal carreer'?

I dunno the answer. Obviously, I myself voted with my feet as it were, and it worked out for me ... but I could easily have worn a different tie at my articling interview, thus not gotten a good articling position, failed to find a foothold in those vital first years, etc.

[Grey Fox]

Around here, the French University Law programs only accept a small numbers of new students. I don't know how the English Us do it.

[Malthus]

The problem is that the chances to be a "big time" anything are pretty low these days. Is there any field people wishing to make a lot of money really ought to be exploring?

Perhaps some sort of entrepreneurship in the skilled trades - say, becomming a plumber or electrician, with the goal of running a firm of plumbers or electricians. I dunno.

The context here is the crushing debt one has to take on to get a law degree.  There are plenty of fields, nursing or engineering and so forth, that not only have a high demand but also do not come with that burden.  It would be like if we were producing tons of MDs without job prospects.  That would also be a disaster.

That's more of a US-specific problem; though costs in Canada are rising too, it is nothing compared with the US.

When I went to law school, by living at home and working as a research assistant in the summers and in my (heh heh) copious spare time during the school year, I made enough to do law school at one of the top Canadian schools (U of T) without borrowing anything.

Dunno if that is still possible, though.

[Valmy]

That's more of a US-specific problem; though costs in Canada are rising too, it is nothing compared with the US.

Oh yes it absolutely is...or at least I sure hope it is.  We have tons of private for-profit schools driving the problem as well as traditional schools trying to find new revenue sources with public money drying up.

[Zanza]

While debt is no big problem for students in Germany, there seems to be a glut of law students here too. While there are a few extremely well paid jobs for the top 1-5% of each year, the rest often has to take badly paid jobs as employed lawyers or when they start their own practice will often live some years in poverty and might have to live of state welfare payments until they have established their business.

[crazy canuck]

Certainly, one strategy could be to not hire really junior lawyers at all and simply attempt lateral hires from the firms that do ... but most young lawyers by that time will have developed client and mentor contacts and be less willing to leave.

Another strategy is to pay junior lawyers more like, you know, junior lawyers.

[Ideologue]

So I guess that's a no, Mal?  Fine, I don't want to work at your dumb firm with your unsafe windows anyway.

[Zanza]

One of these days we will have to realize that barring any major scientific breakthrough creating new industries or anything, full employment is a pipe dream. There is simply no need for this much unskilled work, and this is is also getting into the skilled part of the workforce, especially since globalization means an Indian will go and do a UK skilled job, or a Hungarian will do the IT job two Germans were too lazy to do properly.

What to do about it? I have no idea. Sooner or later we will solve it via a big war, or an epidemic as usual, I just hope it will happen after my time.

We lowered our unemployment considerably in the last few years. A positive explanation could be that we liberalized our labor market (a bit) and make stuff that is in demand. A negative explanaition could be that we leech off our neighbors that are bound to us in a currency union and can't out-deflate us as we already mastered that particular policy.

[crazy canuck]

And I'm going to guess $95k for a 1st year lawyer at Malthus' firm.

I have now sided with CC, but only for law students

Yeah, it is ridiculous.  And it is because in the late 90s there was a kind of insane competition for new law grads, London started poaching from New York who started poaching from everywhere including Toronto who started poaching from Vancouver etc etc etc.

My first year salary was I think about 40k and only about 5 or 6 years later first year lawyers were being paid more than double that.  Of course what the big firms were not telling them was that the attrition rate was high and most of them would be looking for another job in about 2 years.  The market craziness never corrected itself because no big law firm wants to be the first to lower wage rates back to reasonable levels.  So the profession has adjusted.  The result as been many fewer starting positions for lawyers and a drop in articled positions - they are just too expensive.  It takes a good 2-3 years to train a lawyer to the point where they can justifiably bill at a level that might recover their expense.  That is a pretty big training expense for an employer to take on.

Now take what happened in the Legal community and apply it across many professions and industries where for a whole variety of reasons, including salary expectations, the cost of hiring a new employee has sky rocketed and employers have to look long and hard at whether it is worth hiring that young person.

[Iormlund]

There are way too many grads in humanities and especially law over here as well. If my friends are anything like the norm, the degree is mostly a vehicle to high-tiered public service. After many years studying for the exams, all but one of them are working for the public sector (a judge, a diplomat and a couple IRS inspectors). The other guy is a junior manger at a savings institution.

[Malthus]

So I guess that's a no, Mal?  Fine, I don't want to work at your dumb firm with your unsafe windows anyway.

My firm has safe windows.

It is the *exterior* bits of the building that fall off and crush people. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Canadian_Place#Cladding

[Jacob]

My firm has safe windows.

They have safe windows now.

Still, are you confident enough to test them by bouncing against them?