To make it sure that I understand it correctly: this is not the total number of unemployed people, but the number of people who became unemployed recently and now file the forms? Then that number is gigantic, wow.
3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
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Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#12And as an econ/business reporter points out, this should be seen as the lower bound on the true number of lost job, because there are a lot of reasons people didn't file, including confusion, overwhelmed systems, and many lost jobs not qualifying: https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/1243147516784324608
This is also only the beginning, as lockdowns across the nation aren’t in full swing yet.
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#13"The great American job machine"
The whole previous decade needs to come with an asterisk when talking about job growth. Looking at job participation rates and those that have stopped looking completely from BLS paints a completely different story. The pandemic obviously isn't making things better, but it's just always been an afterthought when talking about job growth.
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#143.28 million? Really?
With the lockdowns of retail, hospitality, etc. in Australia, a country of 25 million total, we've seen nearly something north of 800,000 unemployed (temporarily or permanently). This can't be an accurate figure, surely!
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#15Welcome to the Great Depression of the 21st century.
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Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#16And this is only the beginning... if you look for projections (or run your own [1]), we will need a hard nationwide shutdown for at least 2-3 months (not 2 weeks) for this to not kill a million plus Americans.
I suspect even if a shutdown is lifted, when people start seeing body counts it’s not like they’ll return to traveling or eating out.
We’d probably need to see an anti-body test first and/or vaccine. This is going to take years to recover from.
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#17Semi tangent, about dealing with mass unemployment.
I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. There's a lot of recrimination, and even self loathing about being poor or out of work in the US. It doesn't seem based in reality and certainly isn't helpful.
Perhaps it is time we realize that much like a pandemic things in this world change fast and we need to be able to help folks who are out of work pick up skills quickly / retrain (and maybe retrain employers that people with a 'different' resume might actually be able to do other jobs) so that they can get back on their feet.
Maybe it won't be a pandemic but things are changing fast whole industries of people find themselves offshored, jobs change, etc. I think we need to plan for / get comfortable with the idea that on a smaller scale we should be ready to deal with such things dynamically over the course of people's lives with retraining, support for it, and etc. And maybe a workforce with a variety of experiences will be better for it.
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#18Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#19Welcome to the Great Depression of the 21st century.
Things are bad enough without exaggerating the situation. The big problem with the great depression was not the size of the crash but the duration of the recovery. Our view of the money supply seems a bit more effective these days and it seems unlikely that the recession that comes out of this situation will last as long.
Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
#20And this is only the beginning... if you look for projections (or run your own [1]), we will need a hard nationwide shutdown for at least 2-3 months (not 2 weeks) for this to not kill a million plus Americans. I suspect even if a shutdown is lifted, when people start seeing body counts it’s not like they’ll return to traveling or eating out. We’d probably need to see an anti-body test first and/or vaccine. This is go…
other countries are also facing this crisis in different stages. So traveling won’t be back to normal for a long time.