Say Hello to Full Employment • Hacker News Board

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#171

Post by mgkimsal » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #125

mgkimsal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah, thanks. it's a weird old-fashioned thing, although, as I replied to someone else, I realized I do have a 'savings account', in one of those fancy new online banks, paying ~50x what my local brick and mortar pays. It's such a weird situation, because... if they even paid something like .7% or 1%, I wouldn't have bothered to move money out. Slowly, I will probably just stop using them when all new activity is done online, but I'm a child of B&M banks, and breaking the connection 100% is hard to do.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#172

Post by vvanders » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

claydavisss wrote: post #151

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.

The President of the United States does not plan the economy.

They certainly set directions and champion initiatives.

Also, impose tariffs as we're seeing with the last 24 hours.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#173

Post by s73v3r_ » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

sbjs wrote: post #52

pkaye wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It may be a PhD for pharmacist, yeah. We lost touch a few years ago when they moved away, but he went to school for something like 10 years. So I think it is a PhD. But there were no jobs. Last I heard, even the job he has now doesn't cover insurance, so he pays for that himself and they're still living like he works at Burger King.

There was a 10 year lag time between when he started school and when he finished. It's extremely difficult to predict what's going to be in demand and what's not over that time period.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#174

Post by tylerhou » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:34 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…

In June: "And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent." - NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/upshot/we-ran-out-of-word...

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#175

Post by pkaye » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #173

sbjs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a PhD for pharmacist, yeah. We lost touch a few years ago when they moved away, but he went to school for something like 10 years. So I think it is a PhD. But there were no jobs. Last I heard, even the job he has now doesn't cover insurance, so he pays for that himself and they're still living like he works at Burger King.

There was a 10 year lag time between when he started school and when he finished. It's extremely difficult to predict what's going to be in demand and what's not over that time period.

Even still there should be plenty of steps in a career between a PhD in Pharmacy and working at Burger King.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#176

Post by vivekd » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

BadassFractal wrote: post #161

tmpz22 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel the unemployment rate is so politicized that its facts and statistics will continue to be cherrypicked outside of reality.

Very similar to the conversation around the gender wage gap as well.

Why was this downvoted? Women tend not to be crazy like men and thus are more likely to choose fulfiling careers that have lower pay, and seek more work life balance. When accounting for these factors, the existence of a gender pay gap becomes more questionable.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#177

Post by pedasmith » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #165

canada_dry wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The financial rescue and QE happened in 2008 while Bush Jr. was in office.

You might remember that Bush agreed to making a brand-new "Office of the President-Elect" just so that there could be a single plan of action.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#178

Post by throwawaymath » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:48 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…

I don't think this response should be getting downvoted; I'll upvote it for the third paragraph, which I largely agree with.

We can agree to disagree on the exact definition of "virtually impossible", but in the broad strokes I think we're both saying some factor analysis can be sometimes productive. In particular, I definitely agree that 1) an "actual understanding of underlying causal factors" is imperative, and 2) an approach based on trends (and trend following) is naive.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#179

Post by felix_nagaand » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

vivekd wrote: post #176

BadassFractal wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar to the conversation around the gender wage gap as well.

Why was this downvoted? Women tend not to be crazy like men and thus are more likely to choose fulfiling careers that have lower pay, and seek more work life balance. When accounting for these factors, the existence of a gender pay gap becomes more questionable.

Citations needed

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#180

Post by vivafrance » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

neffy wrote: post #134

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not actually the case. If you look at the money supply for the US it has a pretty constant growth rate over the last 8 decades - while the Federal Reserve claims to be messing around with the interest rate to control the economy, the actual evidence that this is the case is quite lacking. (Illusion of Control problem) So yes, it's not about the President, but the nature of control over the financial system is…

The Fed stopped publishing the amount of M3 money a long time back. Do your homework. They literally printed 4 trillion dollars to buy up everyone's debt following 2008.