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.
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.
> 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,”
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
> 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.
(2015): https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/independent-con...
This study also appears to use 1099 filings to gauge growth (2015 also): https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/evaluating-g...
Here’s a more recent study that gives a balanced take and uses BLS data (2018)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/independent-workers-and-t...
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.
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.
No, it is not. BLS provides official definitions of their terms here: https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/overview-o...
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.
Dead Comment
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?
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’m so confident, go to CNN or MSNBC right now. I bet you can’t find one. NPR does this a lot too to be fair.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/business/taylor-swift-new-yor...
Second one as well:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/weather/winter-storms-snow-no...
First one on MSNBC, too:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ahead-se...
Love your confidence though!
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.
> Part time jobs UP 762,000, full time jobs DOWN 1.5 million in December
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
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/08/economy/401k-hardship-withdra...
https://www.gao.gov/blog/american-credit-card-debt-hits-new-...
https://www.pymnts.com/loans/2023/auto-loan-delinquency-rate...
In the long term, everyone pays market rate.
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,”
Who should be included? College students? Stay at home moms? People who retired early?
This is not an easy thing to calculate, and will always include or exclude some group(s) that could be working.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Best of luck.
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...
Companies are also cutting higher salary employees and reducing hiring.
U6 is 7%[0] for the month of December 2023.
[0]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm