Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

brookings.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 685 posts

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

#611

Post by ghastmaster »

jogjayr wrote: post #281
ghastmaster wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business.…

> civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964. That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what you were talking about. "Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allow…

Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination. In the United States small businesses account for the most employees. Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them. There is less risk to not hire than there is to hire due to the Civil Rights Act. This results in less minority hires.

If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities they have a greater risk of being sued because it is easier for a person in majority race to prove discrimnation.

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

#612

Post by ghastmaster »

petermcneeley wrote: post #220
ghastmaster wrote: post #172

"...we need to rethink the fundamentals of our economic and social policies" They suggest fixes in the next paragraph that are not fundamental, have already been implemented, and have directly contributed to the problem: "Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security. Boosting wages through tax credits, a higher minimum wage, or supporting sectoral bargaining;…

Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863?

No. What happened in 1776 was a Constitutional Republic whose amendment process led to the 13th amendment. Liberty is a good thing.

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

#613

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>Limited supply (real estate)

This is just artificially limited, because existing home owners don't like to see their property prices fall due to increased supply.

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

#614

Post by kamaal »

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #547
ernst_klim wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php. > The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that don't require you to be smart. You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web program…

>agriculture is way harder than php an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

No Sorry. Once you understand how a loop and a decision statement works, most of the programming is already demystified. You can make bank on incremental learning and writing applications.

The stakes in agriculture are higher. Who ever thinks manual labor is easy doesn't know what they are talking about. Apart from the tiredness, fatigue part of it. You also get injured, could lose crop to disease, floods etc.

Agriculture is harder than writing code. In fact that's the whole reason why so many of us chose to write code than be a farmer.

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

#615

Post by kamaal »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #444
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?

The term UBI is misleading. Think of it as UBS. Universal Basic Sustenance. If you were given X amount of eatables, a home and healthcare, you could now focus on a lot more.

Sure, you could then say food, home and healthcare wouldn't be much worth(inflated). Then yeah that's the whole point. That's where we want to be.

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

#616

Post by tekknik »

300bps wrote: post #357
Aloha wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not even going to school sometimes, often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation.

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.

Started a business that ultimately failed, consulting, taking a health break, there are plenty. Which field do you hire for? I’ve taken 2 years off before and didn’t have a bit of a problem getting back into my field.

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

#617

Post by kamaal »

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,…

This was also popularly known only a few years back as 'On the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs'

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

#618

Post by jogjayr »

ghastmaster wrote: post #611
jogjayr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964. That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what you were talking about. "Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allow…

Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination. In the United States small businesses account for the most employees. Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them. There is less risk to not hire than there is to hire due to the Civil Rights Act. This results in less minority hires. If a minority runs a business and only wants to h…

> Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination.

It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and businesses respond to incentives.

> small businesses account for the most employees.

That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in 2019.[1]

And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, housing, and other opportunities.

> If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities

A small business (1. https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt

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

#619

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

thereisnospork wrote: post #570
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If Uber disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account. Another problem with this line of reasoning is that people assume that they can always utilise 15m in a productive way or that not doing anything is not productive. How many times…

> I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If indoor plumbing disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account. Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.

False equivalence. Indoor plumbing is nothing like an app to call a taxi.

Also see both my points. You don’t know if their lives would get worse. You’ve just assumed that the main goal of everyone is to hyper optimise their lives.

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

#620

Post by JDiculous »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #415
JDiculous wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing. I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizin…

$29/hr wasn’t sustainable based on what the consumer would buy the product/service for, hence the inevitable closure. Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it. How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?

People should be able to pursue whatever work they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone else since we can afford it.
Post reply on HN