I doubt it. McDonalds' jobs are intended for high school and college students or people needing a little extra income. Let's face it, those jobs do not require valuable skills. People who develop beyond the basic skills at McDonald's can move on to other jobs and make way for new entry-level workers.

If you want to make comparisons, why is it that a teacher, who we expect to be educated and we entrust with our children, is paid little more than a McDonald's employee?

We should all be focussing on building an economy based on skilled work rather than minimum wage (or less) jobs.

Given the abilities of some of the teachers I had, they didn't deserve to be paid much more than McDonald's employees

Joking aside, my mother is a retired teacher (mostly grade school, but a few years of highs school thrown in) and she was paid well, her benefits were and still are superb, and she got to "retire" a year before she actually retired, because she was allowed to bank up to a years worth of "personal days, and use them all in that final year.

Yeah, some teachers are paid well, and they used to be paid much better. My wife is a teacher, although she's a college professor, and she gets paid very well. But in general it is not unusual in much of the country for teachers to make $25k or so during their first few years. If we are dismissing $22500 a year as inadequate for an entry-level position that requires no experience or education, what does that say about $25k for a job that requires a Bachelor's degree, state certification in many cases, and for which we expect a high level of professional responsibility and accountability?

DH, you're comparing apples and oranges. As someone with a good share of teachers in my own family, the jobs (burger-flipper at McDonalds and public school teacher) are nowhere near comparable.

First of all, on the compensation side of things, you're comparing base salary with hourly wage. Even if they do work out similarly, there's still the matter of paid vacation/sick days, accrued pension benefits, health benefits, maternity leave, family leave, and all the other compensation that the teachers get that the burger-flippers don't.

On the other side of the coin is workplace conditions. You're comparing unpredictable, sporadic shiftwork with steady 8-4 employment. Not to mention all weekends, holidays, and entire summers (!) off.

Teachers have a pretty sweet deal.

Are you talking about the world population? If so, I disagree. There's a lot of talk that the planet is overpopulated. And what demographic is it most overpopulated with? Some cultures won't voluntarily cease to procreate. Along that same thought some cultures need to procreate more out of fear of extinction in the long run.

Let's consider this: all the world population in one city. The city has the population density of Manhattan. That city would be the size of Texas. Picture that. One Manhattan-like city the size of Texas contains all the human population. The rest of the planet is empty. Sounds awful, right? Now consider the size of Texas relative to the rest of the planet.

That's a lot of empty, un-touched, planet.

But that's really not a good analogy at all. That Texas colony would still require vast hinterlands to grow food and produce other resources. The limitation on how many people the earth can support has nothing to do with space to live. The limitation is from resource availability.

Who with that education makes $22.500 in the US? Does anybody who work 40 hour weeks?

In Sweden a 21 year old working at McDonalds would make something like $16,32 an hour, but with >6 years experience $17,52. Where I live you would pay 19-20% income tax on such income. Everyone have free health care, 18 months of payed parental leave (per child), spending cap on medicine (>$135/year), sick leave pay and five weeks of payed vacation. Public pension will give about 50% of the average income during their career, adjusted for inflation - but imployer would also pay 4,5% of salary towards retirement, funds that you can invest on your own.

I think the lowest payed people in Sweden is cleaners working for the city/municipal, and they would probably not make less than $27.000-28.500 a year, with the same benefits as mentioned above.

My financé is a teacher and makes about $57.000 a year, with 8-10 weeks of payed vacation. Same (partly public) benefits as mentioned above.

No, the US economy is not turning. I would advise below to find the youtube video about the Great Depression. These are similiar times except we have the Fed now to fill in the lack of demand that we didn't have back then. Europe is slowing, the US is slowing, China is slowing, its not a good situation. We are going to crash again, most indications are to another recession in 2013. I think it will also create a stock market crash and perhaps a real estate crash again as well. Not 100% sure since real estate is so location based, it will put downward pressure on asset pricing regardless.

Nothing is getting better, don't believe it, build up cash positions and be safe. You can buy assets again once we crash again.

Follow my blog here:
http://financeinlife.blogspot.com/2012/ ... -time.html

That's what I like to see - pessimism. It's a great sign that it might be time to start buying again.

Kidding aside, I am not too worried. I think we are currently in the next "great depression." Many of the same factors are at work - crushing of stock euphoria (1929/2008), poor consumer demand driven, dissillusionment and retreat from globalism, drags from external factors (drought in the 1930s, security costs and debt now). But after studying and modeling it for several decades, brilliant economists like Bernanke know that flooding the system with money can keep it from getting too bad until conditions improve again. (Remember they called him Helicopter Ben.) That's exactly what they have been doing - creating a monetary flood to fill in the gaps left by everything else dropping. Can they continue that forever? Well, actually, maybe in theory but not credibly. But they shouldn't need to. We are about 5 years into whatever this is and we are beginning to climb out. We're at about 1934 or 1935...and things got better from there.

While few agree on the causes of the GD, the solution was the New Deal and government spending - a fiscal approach. This time, for arguable reasons, a monetary approach is being used and it seems to be working just as well. My biggest worry is not a crash but rather a long period, perhaps 5-10 more years, of very slow recovery because a monetary approach must ultimately be withdrawn and that will put a drag on everything. During that time I think unemployment will stay elevated but I think investment returns can do alright as companies restructure to adjust to lower demand.

But after the GD we also had WWII to give us a kickstart. I hope no one hopes for a repeat of that kind of world crisis.

Exactly. That's a lot of resources - open land, open water, open forests - that are uninhabited. That's currently what the population of the world is at right now (minus the ultra-dense super city). There's a lot of untouched planet. I used to live in a sparsely populated area of the US and have seen a lot more. We're not near overpopulated, even in resource and food production.

I've heard estimates that the earth can support about 18 billion people. We're at what, 6, now? So, I guess I agree with your statement that we are nowhere near saturation, but I think we could get there in my lifetime if we are not mindful of how we use the planet. I think we in the west need to be careful how we use up resources and dispose of waste while other parts of the world need to manage their population growth.

Agree 100%

I think economy is not turning back.Because mostly jobs offer in public sector have low income which can create so many problem as unemployment,Low saving and investment,and many other thing so how can you say that economy is turning?
HR Toolkit

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15398149/ns/w ... rt-claims/

I disagree. If you look at peak oil (which has been known about since the 70's), usage of potable water, even environmental degradation and the rate of extinctions of other species (we are considered to be in the midst of a mass extinction), people are already using more resources than the planet can replenish. Not that there aren't more resources out there to tap, but we are using more than can be sustained.
I find the fact that you can fit the entire human race in a certain footprint, without taking in the consideration of how much resources the people inside that footprint would used...

Not that there can't be room for improvement.
I do feel the way that the US in general has been developed, is incredibly wasteful from a land, and hence gas/energy perspective. But since we live in a democracy, don't think we can force -concentration camp style-the population to live in some mega city.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/libra ... 32_04.html
It's pretty compelling we are putting serious pressure on so many ecosystems on this planet. Research suggests, if you want people to live akin to US style prosperity/quality of life, sustainably, can only have 1 billion people on this planet. We are way past that.
So the question of how many people you can fit on this planet is not straightfoward. Who knows, maybe you can get 10, 12, 18 billion people on this planet. But for the vast majority of humans, it will not be a pleasant existence and would spell extinction for many species let along ecosystems found nowhere else in this universe.