Better Broadband Lowers Unemployment Rates, Study Says (vice.com) 47
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University this week released a new study again tying better broadband to lower unemployment. The study tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates across 95 counties in Tennessee from 2011 to 2016, and found that counties with access to high speed broadband had a 0.26 percentage point lower rate of unemployment compared to low speed counties. Early adoption of faster speeds also aided unemployment rates, researchers found. The researchers concluded that "better quality broadband appears to have a disproportionately greater effect in rural areas" that have been historically neglected by private ISPs, many of which received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies over the last decade. Disinterested with the slow return on investment, many private ISPs have let their networks literally fall apart.
Ice cream melts because it's baseball season (Score:1, Redundant)
Does unemployment drop because of good broadband, or do broadband companies tend to invest their equipment in areas with low unemployment... hmm...
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Does unemployment drop because of good broadband, or do broadband companies tend to invest their equipment in areas with low unemployment... hmm...
The obvious answer is usually the right one, too bad the study and those that report on it with ignorant headlines (like slashdot) can't see it.
Re:Ice cream melts because it's baseball season (Score:5, Informative)
Does unemployment drop because of good broadband, or do broadband companies tend to invest their equipment in areas with low unemployment..
They do actually address this in the paper itself:
This positive association between broadband speed and labor market outcomes does not indicate causality. In particular, it could simply mean that faster broadband was deployed in the “best” locations first – those that already had low unemployment rates. To explore this issue further, we next present our regression estimates in which we explicitly control for various socio-economic factors that help mitigate potential selection bias and reverse causality [...]
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What I want is for people to take it seriously, not to wave their hands and then make a causal claim anyways.
If you do everything imaginable perfectly, you still won't know, did the additional investment in broadband come because somebody doing the planning accurately identified that those various socioeconomic factors were changing in that neighborhood?
You would have to actually create an ISP to run the study, and then expend in different communities randomly, in order to collect the data to make causal cl
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Does unemployment drop because of good broadband, or do broadband companies tend to invest their equipment in areas with low unemployment..
They do actually address this in the paper itself:
This positive association between broadband speed and labor market outcomes does not indicate causality. In particular, it could simply mean that faster broadband was deployed in the “best” locations first – those that already had low unemployment rates. To explore this issue further, we next present our regression estimates in which we explicitly control for various socio-economic factors that help mitigate potential selection bias and reverse causality [...]
The irony here is that it is well documented that ISPs do more upgrades in wealthier neighborhoods, and that wealthier neighborhoods are correlated with lower unemployment. Therefore, this study really just proves a correlation that, barring some unexpected HUGE benefit from having a BAD network (e.g. the "Netflix leads to lazy people who lose their jobs" theory of economics), was almost guaranteed to exist.
I'm baffled how anyone could interpret the study to have shown that "better Internet service results
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Improvements to Internet service attract people who care about good Internet service, who tend to be more affluent, and thus tend to have lower unemployment rates, statistically speaking, which tends to result in more improvements to Internet service. But nothing in there in any way implies any possibility of better Internet service actually making people more employable or creating jobs; rather it implies the creation of segregated enclaves of wealth and jobs in areas with better service amidst a sea of impoverished communities with poor service.
I agree with you that for the most part, the causal link is the opposite of what the headline mentioned. But I think you've also uncovered why a broadband company should invest in more rural communities. Remote jobs for affluent, skilled workers are becoming more commonplace, and a portion of those workers want to live in rural areas, but couldn't before because of the commute times. Now the only thing stopping them from moving into these rural communities is the broadband speeds. If ISPs invest in these co
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No, not really. The main thing stopping them from moving into rural communities is the knowledge that if they lose their job or get tired of it, they'll have a much harder time finding a new employer who will let them continue working from there. Broadband speed probably doesn't even make their top ten list. It is rare to find a place with broadband service so poor that I couldn't work from there as a softwa
Re: Ice cream melts because it's baseball season (Score:1)
Would it be difficult to find another remote job? Like I said, they're becoming more commonplace. Also, if you already worked remotely, a remote job is easier to get because they're already experienced in working remotely.
And no, you need a solid fast connection to work remotely. You need to be able to video conference, regularly download updates to packages and dev software that can be up to a gig for each download period. Then there's remotely debugging issues on a cloud hosted instance.
I've tried
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You might want to look at the UK while making that claim. The main telecoms company BT for example deployed ADSL broadband technology in 1997 initially to economically deprived areas then claimed take up was to low to justify a nation wide rollout.
One of the areas was the Meadow Well council estate. Let's roll out broadband to a deprived area that a few years earlier had rioting at a time (1997) when using the internet required spending best part of a thousand pounds on a PC and be surprised by the low tak
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Unemployment has been dropping steadily for years now. This study was done with data from 2011-2015, a period of steady decline in unemployment rates.
Correlation != Causation
Of course (Score:1, Redundant)
The fact that the better broadband connections are in the wealthier communities with better school systems and are more densely populated urban areas has no bearing on the findings - "Better Broadband = Lower Unemployment" - of course!
So, the simple act of deploying fiber in the neighborhood overcomes lower incomes, poor schools, and limited opportunities? Amazing!
Perhaps - just perhaps - the higher-income neighborhoods are where ISPs deploy better (AKA "more expensive") broadband connections, as opposed to
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You really don't think that in an age where even McDonald's hires through the internet, likely with pages that are too big for dial-up, having broadband wouldn't help people get jobs?
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Oh, right, they're all dumb as doornails that is how they got the job and got promoted, riiiiiiight.
Or, what if journalists did understand, but did it anyways?
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So tired of slower and slower. I want my ISDN back (Score:2)
Yeah I'm so tired of Internet connections getting slower and slower. I want my up to 128k ISDN back!
This is what they're talking about? (Score:2)
“AT&T and Comcast have probably increased their sales staff and local employees to deal with the competition,” Mitchell said. “So that is an impact on unemployment just among the firms offering broadband services.”
How many people does that include? And what happens to those sales and installation contractors once the new high-speed services are widely adopted? (Hint: They'll be back on the unemployment line. Will that lead to another article about how "Better broadband adoption" led to higher unemployment as AT&T and Comcast shed the workers responsible for the "better broadband" build-out?)
How is that a significant amount? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unemployment rates are horse shit. They have enormous fudge factors, and I'm not even talking about deliberately lying by dropping people off of the statistic when they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment. I mean that people's statuses change much faster than our ability to collect meaningful statistics.
The amount of disagreement over the actual unemployment rate is up in the range of multiple whole points, like three to five of them. A quarter-percent is irrelevant.
Re:How is that a significant amount? (Score:5, Insightful)
and I'm not even talking about deliberately lying by dropping people off of the statistic when they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment
That's not a thing, that is you deliberately lying. You've been corrected before, but you still lie.
The government releases a whole book of numbers that include all the different measurements, people still collecting, people no longer collecting but still looking for work, people not employed and not looking for work, etc. They do not release a single number that hides where the rest went.
Maybe you read a crappy story in the "news" that used the word "unemployment rate" to talk about a single number in that series of numbers, and maybe you were so dumb that you didn't realize that it was only the news that was lying. So then you make up this whole horseshit story about the gubermind "dropping people off the statistic," but no you dumb fucker, when the exit one statistic they enter the next one over.
The people who have "disagreement" over the "actual" numbers are idiots who refuse to look up the numbers, that's the entire reason they don't know that those numbers are already being tracked and released in the same document as the other numbers.
Cause and effect or vice versa? (Score:3, Informative)
Is it that better broadband decrease unemployment? Or is it that areas with low unemployment get better broadband? The scientist involved were smart enough to consider this (Bravo!)
The study attempted check this by looking at timing - i.e. did broadcom come first or after the lowered unemployment.
But this still left a third possible interpretation - both are side effects of something else. For example, outside investment in an area.
That is, does new investment in the area improve broadband immediately, then later lower unemployment.
Possible.
Yes the check for causation (Score:1)
The number of comments here asking if the causation runs the opposite way, or if the two are simply correlated is incredible. In the actual article this is made abundantly clear: "...variables are lagged one period to control for endogeneity arising from potential reverse causality"
So yes, they do check. And they talk about it explicitly. So how's about we stop with the ill-informed armchair reckoning and RTFA before posting?
Uh huh. (Score:2)
And I am still unemployed since the end of 2016. :(