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

brookings.edu

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

#441

Post by itronitron »

pdimitar wrote: post #420
300bps wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation. I do a lot of hiring. You are correct and further - literally any gap at all is viewed as suspicious. And there aren't many reasonable explanations that help the situation.

So... "I gathered savings and wanted to rest for half a year" is suspicious? Maybe I am misunderstanding here.

This is hopefully a specifically US thing, some companies' HR departments are extremely risk averse and will likely interpret that as you were in prison or rehab for six months.

I once, as an intern, had an HR assistant bring my application for a permanent position back to me because she wanted an explanation for why I was unemployed between June and August of the previous year (a year in which I was enrolled at a university.) I explained that I was in school and most companies don't hire people for only 3 months over the summer so I spent that time learning a programming language. She walked away looking annoyed.

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

#442

Post by Seanzie »

contingencies wrote: post #274

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because,…

My mom and i were just discussing my dog's visit to the veterinarian. She said that her father would never have taken a dog to the vet for those symptoms, but my dog got a blood analysis and a stomach X-ray. I spent a lot of money on all this, which paid the vet and their staff and the lab and the equipment manufacturers. Conclusion: increased wealth creates increased opportunity to work.

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

#443

Post by rini17 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #421
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #37

Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and irregular), education, and childcare. If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people. If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone su…

I don’t think you’ll fix high housing costs. There’s a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it do pay it and are competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New York or Bay area housing ever go down? Time for more people to admit they can’t afford to live in the best + most popular places and instead move to “l…

Actually, housing is easiest to fix, just allow building more densely and provide public transportation.

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

#444

Post by MuffinFlavored »

playing_colours wrote: post #361

I see the future as grim anti-utopia: Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. S…

How would flooding the economy with “free money” (UBI) not just cause mass inflation? Every experiment I’ve read has been on a small scale. How do economists know what will happen if you give an entire country (both rich and poor) extra money to blow every month?

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

#445

Post by AdrianB1 »

ngold wrote: post #434
rayiner wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

Because that is not a war and there is no win, poverty is a moving target and it will always be, unless forced equality is imposed to everybody.

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

#446

Post by andrekandre »

quotemstr wrote: post #337
turbinerneiter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.

> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century. > have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to t…

> Profit is not a sin

not necessarily.... it really depends on your (many times religious) world view [1]

[1] http://www.lulu.com/shop/skip-worden/gods-gold/paperback/pro...

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

#447

Post by contingencies »

Seanzie wrote: post #442
contingencies wrote: post #274

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because,…

My mom and i were just discussing my dog's visit to the veterinarian. She said that her father would never have taken a dog to the vet for those symptoms, but my dog got a blood analysis and a stomach X-ray. I spent a lot of money on all this, which paid the vet and their staff and the lab and the equipment manufacturers. Conclusion: increased wealth creates increased opportunity to work.

Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health are involved.

At a political / social impact / behavioral hacking level, there's probably an argument to make near human grade medical services for domestic pets free, as it would likely assist with the reduction in human population growth (aside from companionship, etc.).

I am consistently amazed how cheap and fast medical services are in developing countries. The equipment costs so much less outside of western regulatory oversight, and to the consumer standard blood test batteries are often ~5-10 minutes and ~free.

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

#448

Post by harryh »

ngold wrote: post #434
rayiner wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504

"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

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

#449

Post by aaomidi »

quotemstr wrote: post #312

> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All atte…

If you made $10,000 per day, every day, for the past 200 years. You would still not be a billionaire.

But yes somehow some people are "productive" enough to be worth more than that.

We have a broken system, stop trying to defend it.

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

#450

Post by [deleted] »

lazyjones wrote: post #436
contingencies wrote: post #274

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because,…

Technological breakthroughs mean that goods become more affordable, not that the inventors must be punished by making them support people who aren't productive.

[deleted]
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