Say Hello to Full Employment • Hacker News Board

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#121

Post by jazzyk » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

canada_dry wrote: post #101

shams93 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goes to show that Obama did much better than he was often given credit for. While Obamacare fell fall short of the medicare for all that is needed by business - imagine not having to worry about covering healthcare for employees for your startup - his overall job of captaining the ship through incredibly hard times was very successful.

This. Sadly, it's highly likely that the current administration will - of course take credit - but more importantly - reap all the rewards (i.e. votes) in the next federal election. I still am amazed at how Obama pulled the US from the brink of utter financial collapse shortly after taking office. Hopefully the next incoming administration will be as lucky.

He did not pull us out of anything - just delayed the inevitable and prolonged the mis-mangement of the monetary policy by the Fed (with cooperation coming from other central banks).

The public debt almost doubled from 11T to 20T during his presidency). He also created moral hazard by not only NOT prosecuting people who he himself called "fat cats of Wall Street", but actually continuing to bail them out (started by W. Bush)

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#122

Post by Veelox » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:02 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #76

Veelox wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, how about instead of requiring employers to pay more we reduce the cost housing, medicine, and schooling which are the biggest drains on people expenses.

That doesn't make a lick of sense. Why are employers entitled to cheap labor?

The same reason that landlords are entitled to expensive rent, doctors to high salaries, and colleges to high tuition. Its the market rate for those things. I would say there are much better second order effects from focusing on bringing prices down than the second order effects of focusing on forcing employers to pay more.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#123

Post by oblio » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #45

saudioger wrote: post #7

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 (…

Australia had (has?) the benefit of feeding China (both actual food and minerals and other resources). At some point China will grow like a normal country.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#124

Post by Veelox » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

retbull wrote: post #69

Veelox wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, how about instead of requiring employers to pay more we reduce the cost housing, medicine, and schooling which are the biggest drains on people expenses.

So instead of having someone pay more for what is a scarce resource lets just reverse inflation? I'm not seeing how that is easier.

Rent, medical expenses, and college expenses have all out paced inflation so it is more important to fix the underlying issues in those markets than force employers to pay more.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#125

Post by jandrewrogers » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #13

exclusiv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Wage growth has been non-existant for a long time. Every administration is basically like "hey we're doing great - look at these unemployment numbers" and then you talk to people and they're saying the opposite. Savings is atrocious too. Some of that is people being bad with money but a lot is that the lack of wage growth and rising expenses on things like healthcare, education and home ownership makes it har…

this comes up a lot, and I can never find the actual questions that get asked on these surveys. do they mean an actual savings account at a bank? the kind that pay 0.02% interest? few people I know, even with high net worth and liquidity, have much of anything in a 'savings account'. But... "Only 41% of adults reported having enough in their savings account". Do they just mean 'savings'? Or liquid cash? I can never f…

Yes, they literally mean "savings account", which is an anachronism. Most people I know leave their money in a checking account instead, since the interest rates are comparable for all practical purposes (most people do not expend effort to chase twenty extra dollars in interest per year).

Given that the median American household has $1000/month in discretionary income -- money they can spend on beer or savings -- it wouldn't make sense that 60% of Americans don't have $500 to cover an emergency. Unless it was defined as cash in a "savings account", which most people (myself included) don't use.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#126

Post by slavik81 » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #110

throwawaymath wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to rehash the finer points of a debate that stubbornly refuses to die among armchair economists online. But for the benefit of everyone else reading this thread: 1. The market, and the macroeconomic system in general, is not a purely stochastic process. This is a meme. 2. If by "naive chartism" you mean technical analysis, then sure, I agree. But if you're attempting to reduce the entirety of academic a…

You appear to be making an effort to come off as intelligent and I thought you might like to know that your accusations of arrogance when your post drips with it seriously undermines that. You fail to grasp a fundamental reality: data about the past can only tell us about the past. Data about the present can be useful for making predictions. Some of it is so useful that using it is criminally prosecuted by the SEC. B…

Less is more. Your third paragraph makes a strong argument and cuts right to the heart of the disagreement. The rest is a distraction.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#127

Post by jacksproit » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #114

shams93 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goes to show that Obama did much better than he was often given credit for. While Obamacare fell fall short of the medicare for all that is needed by business - imagine not having to worry about covering healthcare for employees for your startup - his overall job of captaining the ship through incredibly hard times was very successful.

This isn't about the President, at least not directly. Obama doesn't deserve credit any more than Bush Jr. deserved credit for navigating us through the .com bust. Since days of Alan Greenspan, the Fed has been inflating us out of recessions, into longer and more unsustainable booms, which are naturally followed by even worse busts. Our economy is like an over-correcting tightrope walker in slow motion. It's teeterin…

Are the busts worse by % or just by $ amount?

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#128

Post by mc32 » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

spir wrote: post #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 mont…

Yep, there are plenty of people who could be sucked up back into employment. I’m excited to see if after decades of atrophy, the blue collar worker of yesteryear can have another go at it.

With enough demand, we may begin to see employers willing to retrain these workers and bring them back into the fold.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#129

Post by module0000 » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #57

wgerard wrote: 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.” >…

“There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work." That's a good thing. Welding is hard to learn and takes a lot of practice to get right. There shouldn't be people sitting around idle with that skill. Ask employers who are whining about a shortage of skilled labor "how many people do you have in training right now?"

FWIW, I sit around idle all day long as a 6g certified welder. By "idle" I mean sitting at a desk writing python and trading commodities. Welding is for the birds, and humans that want to lose their sense of smell and eventually degrade their vision. Welding is not fun over any stretch of time.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#130

Post by cmurf » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #92

adventured wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business just got a massive tax cut. They can dig themselves out by spending on increasing productivity and paying higher wages. The economy needs to be run very hot for an extended period of time, instead of getting crashed by an obnoxiously over-eager Fed that likes to kick the economy into a recession to dampen wage growth for the benefit of businesses in the guise of controlling inflation. Businesses need to be m…

Not much point increasing wages if you are just going to erode them with inflation.

Avoiding worker revolt is the point. If the inflation is bad enough, workers feel pain, demand wage increases. So far inflation has been low, wage increases low and thus cancel each other out (June wage increase 2.7%, May inflation 2.7%).

But from a business standpoint, no point in increasing wages above inflation until workers revolt. So what's needed is a healthy dose of inflation to get workers to revolt, and make business compete for workers by taking the risk, instead of hoarding, and paying more. Businesses and their shareholders have had it really good compared to workers, because workers have been docile and shareholders have been there to scoop of the profits that workers refuse to fight for.