I’m personally skeptical of unemployment stats as a useful singular metric to judge the economy on since around 2010 when independent contracting exploded in accessibility (if you’re an Uber driver you do not count as unemployed).
It’s no surprise unemployment has been low since then. Coincidence? You can decide.
I’m more curious what the ratio is between the median monthly “necessary” expenditure is, adjusted for locale to median salary. My hypothesis is that it’s drastically going up - that is, the median person working the median job requires an increasing high percentage of their salary to afford the “median lifestyle”. And in some cases this could be over 100%, meaning the median lifestyle is sustainable only through debt or other compromises like roommates, below median quality of life etc.
People have tried to get around this with brutal commutes, but we are seeing the limits of that as living far away no longer yields much savings but still results in a long commute.
There are different measures of unemployment. Typically, U3 is used, but you can use U6, which is "all unemployed, marginally attached and part-time for economic reasons individuals as a percent of the civillian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."
I didn’t look for anything more current because I was more interested in the GP’s claim that said explosion occurred in 2010.
> We find that the number of workers in the gig economy grew between 8.8 and 14.4 percent from 2002 to 2014. For comparison, overall employment increased by 7.2 percent over the same period. Independent contractors constitute a significant portion of gig workers, and grew by 2.1 million workers from 2010 to 2014, accounting for 28.8 percent of all jobs added during the recovery. The online gig economy has experienced significant growth as well. Faster growth in taxis and boarding rooms since the arrival of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb indicates that online gig jobs are transforming the labor force. In particular, the data suggest that the ride sharing industry has helped bring in an additional $519 million in economic activity from 2009 to 2013, and created 22,000 jobs in the sector.
I’m unqualified to endorse any of these studies, I just figured that I’d share them. Trying to parse the formal distinctions between “gig workers”, independent contractors, and other “nonstandard workers” is a lot of work.
Gig work would fall under U6 unemployment if the person believes they are underemployed and would prefer a full time position with benefits or otherwise only marginally attached to the labor market and would prefer better employment.
Someone working gig jobs (even multiple) and satisfied with hours worked/pay and benefits would just count as employed.
Number of people dependent on EBT/SNAP benefits seems like a reasonable proxy, though even that won't capture the folks who can't/won't navigate access or reside in states more aggressively disqualifying them...
For the non-Americans, or just those not familiar with how numbers are massaged by the US government, this is NOT a measure of the people who are out of work. It's the number of people on government unemployment assistance / welfare. It only lasts for a certain amount of time and then once a person is dropped from this dole, the official measure of 'unemployment' goes down.
If you want to learn how many people are out of work, it's significantly more difficult and estimates tend to vary wildly depending on who's doing the math.
When the talking heads on TV and the AI's writing "news" articles talk about unemployment they don't tend to mention the measure they're using. And it's almost always the best looking one, at least if they like the current President.
Hardly; they are outnumbered 2:1 by Millennials and Gen Z. Gen Alpha is coming out of HS, slamming into the same reality as their elder siblings.
GenX had cushy youths and young adult lives, the “start a family” time, the opportunity to afford a house or 3 by now.
GenX is the cohort leading the decline in allegiance to church and American civic life pageantry. The original “eh capitalism is just old guys selling high minded memes about human future just like religion” generation. The let’s forget “stuff” for experience.
They did not have the same pressure to sell widgets Boomers raised by a Silent Generation of post world war shellshocked Cold War paranoids huffing leaded gas fumes.
The only way I see them “shining” is by laying low like they do and let the next generation get started living a life decoupled from the olds demands we serve their vacuous decrees.
Exactly. People act surprised when labor force participation has declined since 2008, at least until they’re told when the first baby boomer hit retirement age.
And they’re going to have to fork over all that boomer money if they want us to take care of them. ;)
Actually, perhaps not joking. Wouldn’t people with money retiring cause there to be a growing wealth source in search of a sink? Do retiring people hoard savings as much? Why would they?
it could be that those retiring are quite productive (e.g., old but experienced etc). Them retiring, but perhaps did not train an equivalent replacement (which almost nobody does), and the firm hiring junior people, means that the total productivity drops.
Therefore, if the demand for goods/services doesn't really drop (aka, that retirement money getting spent), but productivity does, it would point to inflation.
I see. Allow me to clarify my statement. This NPR article has zero links. I think my use of “outbound” was improper to a degree. I was referring to links that lead off of the page. A few articles that I clicked through on CNN have links, but they may not be regarded as “outbound” links because they are all appear to just be links to other CNN stories. The few MSNBC articles I checked out at least have what I’m assuming are proper outbound links in that some lead to entirely different websites.
I’m not trying to refute you. I understand why a publication would prefer not to link to other sites (and I commend MSNBC or choosing to do so according to my observations).
I’m more so intrigued by NPR not linking to anything, anywhere. Especially not a source. The numbers come directly from “the Labor Department” and the rest of the article is sentiment.
I wanted to facetiously parrot Elon Musk’s “NPR is state-run media” claims, but if the attempt at humor were to fall flat I’d hate for the more serious observation to not be considered.
The unemployment metric has flawed and inherent attrition and does not reflect the actual number of unemployed. That’s why it works so well as a vanity metric - it has gravity pulling the numbers down.
and if you look at the industries where jobs were added in December 90% of them were directly or indirectly tied to government deficit spending. If/when the government is forced to cut spending you are going to see a lot of job losses
if the economy was good we wouldn't have people doing early 401K withdrawals at record rates, record car repo rates, and record credit card debt. I'm just tired of the apologists who apparently live in a bubble or are outright lying for other reasons
Folks have been Pointing out issues with US economic metrics for some time. Core inflation only works if you don’t buy food or pay market rate housing. On its face, the Fed logic makes sense - most people do not pay market rates for housing in the short term.
Can you elaborate on the housing part? I guess I would have assumed that people paid market rate in the short term and below market rate long term, assuming they owned a house and were starting to see some benefits from locking in that lower mortgage.
Assuming that in The long term individuals get below market rate housing presumes that A) individuals will eventually be able to afford home ownership B) the local economy is stable enough for them to purchase a house C) interest rates/principal are low enough at the time of purchase for this to be worth the opportunity cost D) Once I purchase a home, I needn’t move or purchase another at market rates.
In the post war years the above conditions held for decades leading to relatively steady home ownership rates and ages of first home ownership. However due to the rapidly rising cost of housing since the late 80s home ownership is rapidly changing.
Millennials have famously deferred home ownership, while gen z is starting to believe its is simply impossible to acquire. 22%[1] of all housing sales now go to private equity firms.
Unlike the stats collection used by the Fed of asking private home owners what they would rent their house for - rental rates are now often the subject of collusion through pricing algorithms[2]. Finally, individuals rarely own a single house forever - this would reduce economic mobility and be problematic in and of itself. When a home owner purchases a new home, they are subject to market pricing.
It’s almost like all symbolic logics are leaky abstractions and economics abstraction is being leveraged to leak undesirables in deference to decree of the fiat rich, whose skill is “been alive longer, was born into post world war economy.”
The luck is in being alive this long. Doesn’t say anything about their fitness to steer society via socialized memes there’s a communal upside to capitalism. Sounds pretty socialist.
“It’s good your agency is expropriated and your value deflated for the cause!”
And we know from other data posted on this site that car sales are falling. Which likely means that mostly relatively well-off people who are less likely to default are buying cars.
> I'm just tired of the apologists who apparently live in a bubble or are outright lying for other reasons
I'm tired of the crowd that for whatever reason needs to downplay and attack any positive fact or stat about the US.
From your own sources:
> overall employee contributions continued to hold steady for the first half of the year, and a greater share of participants upped their contribution rate than decreased it.
> “The data from our report tells two stories — one of balance growth, optimism from younger employees and maintaining contributions, contrasted with a trend of increased plan withdrawals,”
While I agree that the internet has a “USA bad” fan club that loves to bash every positive metric, I just don’t see the good in my day to day life. I don’t hear about the positives from my fellow Americans either. It’s great that the numbers are happy, but there’s probably a reason a large number of Americans aren’t vibing with this economy and it’s not just propaganda from Fox News.
As long as the definition used is consistent, it’s fine as one indicator, but I won’t argue with you that it’s not the full picture. Not many know why 4% is considered full employment or how many people that really means.
It works so well cause US has had low interest rates for decades. You have to plot unemployment against credit growth and interest rates.
Hiring people with easy cheap money is not complicated. You don't need to spend your profits on people. Push profits into real estate/stocks/bonds etc. Inflate prices of all them then use them as collateral to take on more cheap debt and keep your plebs employed running on mindless hamster wheels.
Not the person you were replying to, but I'll take one for the team and admit that I don't. If you had a link you could share explaining such, I would genuinely appreciate it.
My understanding is that u3 is what is typically reported, but that u6 is a more full picture (it includes people who are working age but discouraged and withdrawn from the workforce).
Let's say the economy is your Github repo. And unemployment is open issues. But there are too many open issues so you set up a bot to automatically close stale issues. So if you ignore something long enough, it goes away. Nice.
U3 (the official unemployment rate) excludes people who have been unemployed too long, that is "stale" or "discouraged workers".
If the Department of Labor report the article is referring to is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly Employment Situation Summary, then unemployed doesn’t include gig workers (and it probably should).
Once you are unemployed for longer than a certain period of time (six months?), you're no longer counted among the unemployed as you are considered to no longer be in the labor market. Statistricks.
Thats only true if after 6 months you give up and stop looking for work. If you have looked for work (very broadly defined, even just asking friends counts) in the past four weeks you are counted as part of the labor force.
In what capacity are you counted in this situation? I have a hard time believing that "asking a friend" somehow makes it into government labor statistics.
I don't remember the details but it seems to me: active polling (interviews) is involved, and we never see it because they use an amazingly small sample. So that, yes, it can be counted.
That is extremely deceptive as there are many people in such situation. I know many countries are doing this.
For example, I haven't had a job for almost 6 months but I've put 'self-employed' on LinkedIn and have been working on my startup during this time (and already have a fully working product which is easier to use, more scalable and more effective than the competition) but I don't think I'm going to be able to find users in the current environment due to existing media/tech monopoly and insurmountable trust barriers as well as a discriminatory ESG/DEI environment which makes it impossible for me (a straight white male) to raise funding to pay for advertising.
I know other people in similar situations. Apparently in Australia, half of the working age population is on welfare and at the same time there are shortages of many essential services like daycare which prevent people who have children from working as one parent has to stay home. Apparently the government is making it hard for daycare businesses to expand which is driving the shortage.
Also, tax brackets in Australia are based on individual income, not household income and therefore, taxes are very high if only one partner is working (which is often the case due to the shortage of daycare centers as mentioned above).
Property prices are also very high and rent is very high. The government is also ramping up immigration to prop up property prices + rents and foreigners end up taking many of the jobs which increases competition, drives down wages and makes paying rent even harder.
It's like everything is broken and the brokenness compounds. Even the incentives are broken so it's not even fixable with the current political system.
The media and funding environment just doesn't allow new tech ventures to launch and find their first users unless the founders are in some special in-group.
I don't even want to get into the details of what happened to me up until that point in my career. It's been an epic tale about the struggle for survival... Not in some remote forest in the Amazon or lost on some remote island like Robinson Crusoe, but merely survival in a profoundly dysfunctional socio-economic system.
Just kidding. It took me a couple months to find a new job over the fall, and I couldn't believe how grueling the experience was compared to the past. It was a full-time job just searching and interviewing, and at every step I was reminded of how many other candidates there were. Had to pass nine separate interviews to land an offer from my current employer. By that time, I had one other offer, and I was just ready to be done. Luckily, they were my first choice from the beginning.
I think part of what is going on is that tech is highly sensitive to interest rates, but that's not the whole story. There was also a cultural shift that happened. Many places issued return to office policies that acted as stealth layoffs. Most developers that went remote over the pandemic probably wish to remain remote, and remote jobs are harder to get interviews for due to competition. A lot of places also fucked around with replacing US developers with overseas contractors. By now, I think a lot of those places have resumed hiring in the US. Given time, it will get better.
Same. When I got my last job, they struggled to find people and were desperate to hire me with a high salary + a generous share package.... Then 8 months later they were getting 200+ applications for a single developer position. Then I was let go because new candidates were much cheaper.
It was like WTF. Obviously the entire economy has turned into some insane scheme. There's no way these sudden market changes are natural.
What sickens me about modern society is that whenever they cheat you, they always accompany it with gaslighting... Which is exactly what this 'record low unemployment' rhetoric is.
Just like ESG/DEI/wokeness it's pure media gaslighting designed to cover up the fact that they had started discriminating against straight white people. Now whenever a young white person tells their parents "I can't get a job because they're discriminating against me," they give a weird look and respond with something like "Uhhhh, no, no, no, it's everyone else who is being discriminated against, that's what the media said. Sounds like you're just lazy, too lazy to even come up with your own excuses."
Thankfully I'm good at explaining things and my parents are intelligent so I think they understand what's happening now but there was a moment of tension. Reminded me of the COVID vaccine mandate + media hysteria breaking families apart.
I try not to take anything seriously and just focus on survival. It's like everything is fucked in the most optimal way imaginable. Optimized for fuckery, not efficiency...
That’s the goal the way I see it. Companies are working people to the bone because they and other companies aren’t hiring. It’s definitely coordinated.
Higher than that. The data is not accurate. Most cities in the giant corporate I have info, the unemployment is way higher, just that it is being reclassified as something else to keep the number lower. Take a data scientist out of job for 6mths, he can do Dash or being a TikToker. But either he choose not to, or he did, the number not reflected in the government numbers. And it is NOT just data scientist. Plenty of jobs retrenched or in the process of doing so as require at least 3 mths in advance to report to government bureau before actual retrenchment can be performed. Wait you see Apr-May.
In Australia, you're considered employed if you get at least one hour of work per week. And there's a fairly strict cap on how much you can earn before unemployment benefits are cut off, meaning the under-employed must carefully navigate the gap between full unemployment and adequate earnings that pay all their bills.
The US unemployment system is run on a state by state basis. So there’s a lot of different requirements and caveats. When I was unemployed I had to report any income so it could be deducted from my payment as well as what jobs I had applied to that week. I was receiving benefits from Washington state (fairly liberal) which were pretty generous and the requirements were pretty easy to comply with. Other states make it much harder and are far less generous.
More broadly though, the “welfare trap” that you describe is definitely a thing. I’m not in the states anymore, but the best healthcare I ever had was when I went back to school and qualified for “Medicaid” through the state of Colorado because my income was close to 0. That health plan was far better than any that are offered for sale so I had to make sure to not exceed the income threshold until I took a high paying dev job that came with good benefits.
Sort of, I’m not sure if the earnings cap for welfare is at a similar level to the US, but somewhere between underemployed and full-time welfare also cuts off, so people face similar decision making.
EDIT: reading the sibling comment, I want to clarify I’m only speaking anecdotally. Everyone I know to ever have gone on welfare (at least those I was close enough with to discuss) lived in Pennsylvania state.
In reality, like inflation or jobs reports, the numbers are really just a shell game played by politically inclined departments. To put it simply, the actual employment rate is down ~2% since 2008. In real terms, we have ~2% less Americans employed since 2008. That said ~60% currently are employed.
That’s because the government calculates the unemployment rate as “those seeking employment” but there’s a bunch of criteria for that. In truth, 40% of people aren’t working, 60% are.
FRED (using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) claims that 83% of men, and 78% of women, aged 25 - 54 are working. In the prime working years, there isn't much of a problem, if any.
(The data series are Activity Rate: Aged 25 - 54 years: Males for United States, and Activity Rate: Aged 25 - 54 years: Females for United States.)
Adults younger than 25 are often still in school, although there is a growing share of stay-at-homes. Older than 54, well, they may have enough, or they may have health problems.
Just saying "40% of people aren't working" presents a less-than-nuanced picture. Some of them are kids and the very old.
If, when surveyed by the BLS, they say that they are working (part time, whatever) or have looked for work in the last six weeks, they are counted as "in the labor force". (New jargon: "economically active".) Unemployment figures are subject to more massage.
It’s really interesting seeing the HN crowd aging out and considering their plight unique. I wonder how much empathy their 20-something selves would have for them.
In particular, Table A shows that even with the downward revisions, the unemployment rate has been below 4.0% every month of the year (up through November); and in only one month (October) was the revision significant to increase the reported unemployment rate.
The BLS revises monthly employment figures when it receives data late; in 2023, every month (except December which I think has not been revised yet) has been revised downward -- meaning fewer new jobs were added than initially reported. I'm not sure how it compares to previous years, but as I point out in my other post, it is not enough of a difference to push the unemployment over 4.0% at any point in 2023.
This is just your usual stupid headline. The article is more useful and concerns itself with now compared to just months ago. Now is a long stretch of low unemployement official numbers - just like then - and that's the extent of the article's claim on that. Continuing strong (by some measures - is fair) US job market versus inflation and increasing interest rates is the interesting part. And that is not all that useful without talking about labor participation which is increasing again after the gross Covid drop. That is, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that nominal unemployement is still low as labor participation has still not recovered from the Covid drop. Not much to see there.
Comparing to the Vietnam War times would be fraught with unknowns because of so many differences between that period, now, and in between. For example, labor force participation by gender thoroughly changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Labor_Force_Participat... And for another, gig work appeared.
So did education and, it feels to me, minimum wage policy.
Also I hear lots of stories of techies in long unemployed gaps. While in theory there is still plenty of talk of companies having a hard time finding people.
That's great! But nearly everyone I know not in tech is right at the end of their rope. Like one event will quite literally destroy their precarious lives, and in the US there is basically NO safety net.
So while I'm happy for the numbers, IMO they don't represent the reality people face. Which makes the statistics pretty useless.
I'm not in US but unemployment where I am is shockingly flat. Like literally net 100 jobs in December. Problem is when you see stats like the number of gig workers doubling in a year... Those aren't exactly the good, steady jobs with benefits that lead to a happy retirement.
Unemployment is obviously just one of many metrics.
I would like to see a chart with overlays of GDP, unemployment, average CEO-to-worker-pay-multiplier, average congressional and presidential election campaign expenditure, average net worth increase for different brackets (including top 0.1% individuals), etc.
I highly suspect that the CEO multiplier, campaign expenditure, and 0.1% net worth increase lines would move similarly... and would imply that they are more significant indicators of how (poorly) the normal people are faring compared to other/previous years.
In 2023, most workers had wage growth stronger than inflation, which is also true for the post pandemic recovery.
"The data reveal that as of late 2023, most workers are earning more, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they were one year prior, and the fraction of workers receiving real wage increases is about the same as it was in the years before the pandemic. The data also suggest that most individual workers are earning more today than they were before the pandemic; every prime-age worker cohort has higher inflation-adjusted median wages than before the pandemic. "
The impact of that chart on real prices means that it would take about two decades for people to have the same economic power as they did before the pandemic.
Let's not forget that we have price misalignment because of a decade of zero interest.
>>> average net worth increase for different brackets
>>> the normal people are faring compared to other/previous years.
The economic disparity is gross, you can't argue excess.
Comparing to the past is isn't going to play out the way you think. What time period do you want to compare to? Is that a period where "better off" was for a narrow segment of the population, where "better off" was robbing tomorrow?
The problem is that life looks a lot like the classic game design dilemma of "power creep".
If it was 1950, no cell phone (1 house phone bill), no internet, no cable, no streaming, no Spotify, no computer... You might have a tv (one, singular), radio, those are one time costs. Power, water, phone, food, house/transport (and likely 1 car for many family's). My neighborhood grocery story is a gym... so we traded a close by place to shop for more travel for food, and a place you pay to go exercise.
People ate canned and frozen veg, not fresh trucked in from everywhere items. And before you make the argument for health, go look at the nutrient content of a flash frozen green bean vs one that sat in a box for a week to get to your plate, the frozen wins.
Guess what, all of what we have, unsustainable. 8 billion people can't live like middle class Americans! As more of the globe wants in on the action things are only going to get HARDER for people, unless we make some drastic lifestyle changes.
Absolutely nobody is arguing that optional items are what is making it tough on people. It's housing and basic groceries.
In 2005 I managed to wiggle my way out of poverty by splitting a $615/mo apartment 4 ways on minimum wage (and I considered that quite lucky at the time). I ate mostly rice, soy, beans, and frozen veggies because that was the cheapest thing I could eat. Eggs were a luxury.
That same apartment is $1799/mo now and minimum wage is virtually the same. I would probably be dead or worse trying to escape poverty in those same conditions. Add in that the humiliation people must feel driving for Uber or running Doordash. You're helping others live a lifestyle that's unreachable for you, ever.
Even though I can afford it these days I still refuse to Doordash / Uber because I feel like these services are fundamentally dehumanizing. I will fetch my own food, and drive/transport myself. It's not hard.
These unemployment numbers just bury the struggle of regular people with a numerical handwave.
> The Labor Force Participation Rate is defined by the Current Population Survey (CPS) as “the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population […] the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work.”
No desire today != no desire tomorrow. A lower participation rate might indicate untapped potential or barriers to employment, such as lack of childcare or training opportunities.
How healthy would the economy be if 100% had no desire to work? That depends on why those people don't want to work and the overall situation, but until all of our needs are served by robots in reality likely not so healthy.
It's true that sentiment seems low, but are we sure that's an objectively relevant measurement? Sentiment is impacted by many things beyond reality; are we sure there isn't some other underlying problem in society that's causing people to be substantially more pessimistic and negative about their lives?
People today are more able to see people who are doing better than them economically, through social media etc., than at any time in the past. This is a huge contributor to the negative sentiment.
It seems like you're using words like "objectively" and "reality" carelessly as synonyms for "true" which they simply are not.
We can be sure it is objectively relevant because it is what people are experiencing, which is of course reality. If you can demonstrate that there is some other non-employment related reason people feel this way, does that mean they don't feel it? Or are somehow wrong to? Where does that even get you?
Maybe there is something else! There are probably lots of things going on. People keep saying this is affecting them though, and we have to believe them that it is.
Luxembourg has a 6% unemployment rate, the US has a 3.7% unemployment rate, and
North Korea has a 0% unemployment rate.
Those unemployment numbers are objective realities in terms of being a reflection of a set of collection methods and definitions. But those are not merely a poor proxy for the population's overall wellbeing, they are actively _misleading_.
Prices for food, housing, medical care, education, and used cars going up in the US by 20-50% in a 3 year period while corporate profit margin percentages are at historical highs does not inspire confidence in the future.
Throw in an ongoing decline in life expectancy that puts the US firmly in the category of developing countries while paying 250-400% more GDP for medical care than other industrialized countries, two costly proxy wars which threaten to continue growing in scope, outright state and regulatory capture...
...and worst of all, a political, economic, judicial, and cultural elite with a fairly bipartisan mainstream consensus which doesn't appear to be willing or able to seriously address these issues with policy favored by suparmajorities of the voting public but not by the largest donors.
When the people in charge have been pissing on your leg for decades and tell you that it's just raining when you never see them get wet, you can't expect the abuse to stop in the future, not even if you elect the alternative from one of the two oligarch-backed choices.
I was taking issue with the comment's condescending and manipulative use of words like "reality" and "objective" to dismiss people's understanding of their own experiences. My reading may have been uncharitable but, obviously I believe, appropriately so.
I'm not taking a stance on "what is wrong with the world" here per se, but if I were I'm more aligned with what you're saying than thinking 0% unemployment is the solution to our problems or whatever.
We all only have a coinflip chance of inferring tone online so I wouldn't feel bad. It's also possible I misinterpreted both your comment and the OP to a degree.
There's a lot of politically driven economic boosterism in the air right now (more than usual even) and I may have lazily assigned you to that camp with scant basis.
It's natural for politicians and their adherents to cherry-pick the data and intentionally withhold context on it to make themselves look as good as possible, while their opponents do the reverse. Then everyone accuses the other side of ignoring their numbers which they say are the true reflection of "reality."
Ever was it thus, but it's more exaggerated in these conditions where both the "good numbers" and the "bad numbers" break records and can zig-zag suddenly.
Apologies if it seems I'm replacing "true" with "objectively" and "reality." This wasn't my intent. I used them with their dictionary definitions, and what I wrote ought to make sense if taken that way.
Your argument here seems to defend the validation of people's feelings. If my point is accurate, you argue, then how people feel doesn't matter. Instead, consider what makes people feel bad about their general situation; if the cause of low sentiment isn't economic, then an improved economic situation
won't improve sentiment.
It's important to tease out these things. Lumping everything together may allow us to "legitimize" negative feelings, but it doesn't give us a clear view of the causes, prohibiting our ability to consider viable improvements.
The way you're using these words is at best sloppy, something akin to weasel words that position yourself as an authority and others as merely biased observers.
What does it mean for a someone's belief that they are one mishap from financial disaster to be "objectively relevant?" Are you saying they're wrong about their own precarity, or simply wrong to feel bad about it? It's certainly relevant to them that they feel this way. Whether it aligns with a measurable metric is another question but not the one they were talking about.
Similarly, what "things beyond reality" are people using to come to these conclusions? Astrology? Are they hallucinating their dire financial situation and the penurious chasm beneath them?
Using the words correctly doesn't mean you are using them rightly. In this case you are not.
Like I said, you’re pitching my argument as, “People feeling bad is not valid.” This isn’t what I said.
At this point, only someone who wants to fight would read what I wrote as you have. A more reasonable interpretation of what I’ve written would be that sentiment may not be entirely associated with economic safety. “It is unlikely that sentiment would improve if unemployment dropped further”, would be a good illustration of my argument, for example (a point you alluded to elsewhere in this submission).
I recommend trying to read what I wrote with a less aggressive agenda, because the way you’re approaching this interaction is too hostile for a reasonable person to presume positive intent. It seems more likely to involve your own bad mood than anything I’ve actually written.
Sorry for coming in hot, I believe you that that's not what you intended.
But even rereading it now, as charitably as I can, it still to me seems to say something pretty close to "people feeling bad is not valid." Even knowing what you intended, that's what it says. So idk, maybe we both have something to learn here regardless of my bad mood or whatever.
Example of what GP is trying to say: crime rate against children are objectively(as in true) lower now than it was a generation before yet parents are more worried about child's safety. And people "feeling" something is a very weak evidence.
Spending less time on YouTube may not improve your financial situation, but it could change how secure you feel. On the other hand a second job can help if you’re actually just drowning in collage debt etc.
> Government employment increased by 52,000 in December. Employment continued to trend up in local government (+37,000) and federal government (+7,000). Government added an average of 56,000 jobs per month in 2023, more than double the average monthly gain of 23,000 in 2022.
On a recent Moody's economics podcast they did not think this was the case. Rather this job growth in government was more about back-filling positions they had struggled to fill when the private sector had been pushing up wages and pulling people out of government jobs.
I vaguely remember George W Bush administration changing the definition of unemployment “to make it look better”. I don’t think the unemployment numbers are comparable before and after that event.
The unemployment rate is a bit of a red herring; it could almost be said to measure regulatory interference. Supply and demand are simple laws that tell us that for practical purposes everyone will find a job - the only real question is at what wage and whether wages are high enough for people to get a job.
We see from the participation rate [0] that wages are not high enough to get men into jobs (or they just don't have the skills to be able to work productively). Women aren't moving in to the labour market any more either which is interesting.
I believe it was another NPR podcast that pointed out that the Unemployment Rate is not designed to tell potential employees how easy it will be to get a job.
But rather it’s designed to inform business about the state of the labour market.
In recent decades of course it’s used as a political popularity tool.
Not at all. Even without minimum wage or low income subsidies, there would be things like price stickiness. This widespread assertion that markets are somehow fully efficient is essentially a piece of misguided faith. If it were true, it's likely that P would be equivalent to NP and central planning would actually work.
It’s no surprise unemployment has been low since then. Coincidence? You can decide.
I’m more curious what the ratio is between the median monthly “necessary” expenditure is, adjusted for locale to median salary. My hypothesis is that it’s drastically going up - that is, the median person working the median job requires an increasing high percentage of their salary to afford the “median lifestyle”. And in some cases this could be over 100%, meaning the median lifestyle is sustainable only through debt or other compromises like roommates, below median quality of life etc.
People have tried to get around this with brutal commutes, but we are seeing the limits of that as living far away no longer yields much savings but still results in a long commute.