Live data from Hacker News

Say Hello to Full Employment

theatlantic.com

41–50 of 348 posts

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#41

I hate these kinds of numbers because they hide the fact that most of these jobs do not provide a living wage.

The article says the exact opposite.

"employers bidding more to attract new workers and offering raises to retain their existing staff." "The rate of wage growth has doubled of late"

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#43
post #39
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The openings seem to be largely in trades or nonskilled labor: > Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” >…

I don't know much about the job market, but it seems weird that they push people throw college for degrees they can't use. My friend got a masters degree in pharma and he didn't get a job for about 2 years, his wife had to work as a retail manager to support their whole family, and he had a mental breakdown because of it. That's the point I was getting at.

> masters degree in pharma

Is that a pharmacist degree? Don't those need a PhD equivalent to be most beneficial?

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#44
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop getting your economics reports from political news sources. "They don't count people who've stopped looking" is not a meaningful statement. There are many statistics that report this. Labor force participation rate is the one I always look at next to unemployment rate and gives a better overall picture. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 In this case, I think you make a valid point. Why is the labor for…

A large part is demographics, and the drop was known for decades before it happened, as mentioned in papers from Census. FRED reports also explain this. Another part is people staying in college longer (or going back to college) to get more education which is needed for a modern workforce, and the result of that is more lifetime earnings, not less. A third part is many people are opting for one income, since many cou…

> More people moving from the middle class did so by moving up rather than down.

[Citation Needed]

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#45

We're also 9 years away from the end of the last recession. The longest we've gone without a recession in the past 100 years is 10 years.

Australia has not had a recession since June of 1991. That simultaneously does not mean they can go another two decades without a recession next time, and it does not mean their expansion has to end shortly.

There's no rigid guide that the US expansion has to end anytime soon just because ten years was the longest expansion in the prior century. Perhaps this one will last 19 years and set a new benchmark, who knows (answer: nobody).

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#46
post #4

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job."

No way. WWII, for example.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#47
This article seems to use the terms "unemployed" and "jobless" interchangeably.

People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.

On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.

From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/edward_glaeser.html

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> few people I know, even with high net worth and liquidity, have much of anything in a 'savings account' Really? It's fairly common advice to store an emergency fund in something akin to a savings account (or at least something with FDIC backing). Either way, it seems bizarre for a high net worth individual not to have at least $500 in something extremely liquid like a checking/savings account. Either way, it's fair…

> Really? It's fairly common advice to store an emergency fund in something akin to a savings account (or at least something with FDIC backing) That’s where I have my emergency fund (earning nearly zero interest of course). If OP knows of some other type of account with enough liquidity to use as an emergency fund AND generates significant interest, you have my full attention!

Search out checking accounts from local credit unions. Mine pays around 2% APY on balances up to $25k with some very minimal requirements. I have $5 in my savings account there because I have to in order to maintain my membership, but I have ~5 months expenses in my checking.

Obviously, this might not work as a single solution if your monthly expenses are much higher than mine, but it could still be a decent supplement.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? It's fairly common advice to store an emergency fund in something akin to a savings account (or at least something with FDIC backing) That’s where I have my emergency fund (earning nearly zero interest of course). If OP knows of some other type of account with enough liquidity to use as an emergency fund AND generates significant interest, you have my full attention!

allybank, capital one savings, personalsavings.americanexpress.com, and some others all offer >= 1% interest now. Some are >= 2% that I've run across. Still lower than inflation, but better than .001% Increased fed fund rates and tapering off QE has been having effects. Retail customers generally are unaware of this, so retail banks are still able to not pay any actual interest. A lot of the weirdness in the market (…

Which options over 2% APY do you know of?

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#50

We're also 9 years away from the end of the last recession. The longest we've gone without a recession in the past 100 years is 10 years.

Australia has not had a recession since June of 1991. That simultaneously does not mean they can go another two decades without a recession next time, and it does not mean their expansion has to end shortly. There's no rigid guide that the US expansion has to end anytime soon just because ten years was the longest expansion in the prior century. Perhaps this one will last 19 years and set a new benchmark, who knows (…

There was a wobble around about 2k just after the olympics and just before the mineral boom.
Post reply on HN