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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

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Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#141

Post by cpitman »

jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

I travel around the US constantly, and have never heard anything remotely close to comparing unemployment with Canada. Any talk of unemployment is always internally focused, comparing the rate to the past.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#142

Post by CivBase »

vertex-four wrote: post #99
CivBase wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees. You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheap er . Health care - at least…

Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. Yeah... thought so. You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try s…

> Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work.

I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important.

The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded.

> You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals

I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response.

> we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people.

I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#143

Post by tehjoker »

syshum wrote: post #109
GavinMcG wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor, and to only allow them to subsist. UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough time to find more substantial opportunities. And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on the ambulance. UBI would make it…

>>The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good income. Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you are out of a job. Sometimes that cut off…

That's right, but we don't have a society unless people have incomes so maybe this isn't a good model for funding a civil society?

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#144

Post by LorenPechtel »

chadlavi wrote: post #132

When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single unskilled labor job, unemployment numbers meant something. Today they mean nothing. A measure of how many households live above the poverty line would be a step in the right direction, but also frankly the poverty line in America is set too low. People 10% above it are still too poor to live comfortably on their income.

That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#145

Post by CivBase »

lowtolerance wrote: post #130
CivBase wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees. You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheap er . Health care - at least…

Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment .

Thanks. Edited my post to say "some US employers".

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#146

Post by dfilppi »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #137
jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

To be fair, American smugness about this is likely driven by the fact that most Americans lack perspective concerning how other systems work. They just don't get it that a better medical system that doesn't tie medical access to having a job at all brings stress levels down enormously.

You dont need a job to have access to health care in the US. All you need is the ability to pay for the services you use.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#147

Post by endothrowho333 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #45
jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States: > On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1] Your claims rel…

> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data.

Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.

Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).

Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#148

Post by vladimirralev »

ikeboy wrote: post #23

>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year. Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that. They then make a bunch of broad…

The other day I got one of those insightful hedge fund newsletters with a deep dive in inflation and unemployment. The dynamics are really complicated but one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up and those at the bottom suffer the most (due to Cantillon effect, negotiating power and other queuing phenomena). Higher wages as a platform is meaningless.

Perhaps the best measure that matters is the U6 underemployment which cleverly captures the utilisation of education and skill. It looks like this is as good as it gets as of right now in the US.

There are 15+ measures of inflation indeed, varying from 0 to 20%. Inflation is further segmented by demographics, younger people suffer far more inflation than older people (mostly due to housing, education and legacy cheaper medical plan expenses). Poor people also suffer higher inflation than the others.

The rabbit hole is deep and confusing. You can make just about any claim and it will be accurate for some definition of unemployment or inflation. And it's very easy to find contradictions. I'm sure somebody understands all this stuff, but this privilege is probably reserved for the top finance gurus.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#149

Post by GrinningFool »

rexreed wrote: post #50
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #40

Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated. I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the tim…

Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment m…

These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#150

Post by DoreenMichele »

dcolkitt wrote: post #45
jkoudys wrote: post #22

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States: > On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1] Your claims rel…

I'm guessing your data is comparing satisfaction of employed (nationality) to unemployed (same nationality).

If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.

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