Ezra Klein - Two graphs that should really scare us

The bad news on job loss is that there's no good news:

So a 25-year-old worker whose firm went under in 2008 will still be earning less than the guy in the office park across from him whose firm barely rode out the recession. We tend to think of employment as being binary: You have a job, or you don't. But it's more complicated than that. Losing a job has lingering effects, and not just on income. It also raises your risk of death going forward

Morrissey's Guardian Interview Comes Early: All Bow Down and Shriek - somedizzywhore.com

Vocational advice:

Referring to his own experience, he tells me, "Once you feel it and other people feel it, too, you stand and are authorised as a poet. I was the boy least likely to, in many ways. I was staunchly antisocial. It was a question of being a poet at the expense of being anything else, and that includes physical relationships, strong bonds with people. I think you discover you are a poet; someone doesn't walk up to you, tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, you are a poet.' "

Ezra Klein - The scariest jobs graph you've seen yet

Ezra's right. Even if the economy revs up and generates the highly unlikely number of 500,000 jobs a month, it will take 3 years to get back to where we were before the recession began. As it stands, things are likely to malinger as they are today for the next two decades.

Annual Job Review Is 'Total Baloney,' Expert Says : NPR

It needs to be said:

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

The Plummeting Line

Michael Berube on declines in the job market for English professors:

In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700.  This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250.  “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?”  It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace.  “That would be a Depression-era number,” I said, “because I don’t believe there’s been a time since the MLA started keeping stats when the number was below 1,000.”  Well, it’s now looking like 250 is indeed a very low estimate.  But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000, which is a problem, because all the MLA charts run from 1,000 to 2,000, so that 2009-10 might require the MLA to redesign the things or face the prospect of publishing one of those cartoon-charts where the plummeting line runs right off the page.

Quitter

I am feeling very lame. After just 3 weeks and 2,444 miles logged, I have quit my glamorous new job in Boulder. I can't help thinking that I'll live to regret this decision. But it's not as if there were many tears shed, or they begged me to stay. So perhaps, it was stupid of me to have even tried in the first place. No sour grapes, just disappointment that it should be so hard to make a living.

The good news is that I start my other new job tomorrow. Closer to home, slightly less glamorous, but I can live with that. For now, anyway.