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Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

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Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#41

Post by crooked-v »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #39
advael wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in our population samples people who have income from a job report feeling like they have more money than people who have no income from being long-term unemployed. But due the cross-sectional design of our study it's impossible to determine causality

The point of my comment clearly didn't register. I'm not arguing any technical point about this study but the more obvious point that the more you work, the less poor you are. People who aren't looking for work usually aren't counted as unemployed, which would additionally contribute to the obvious outcome that working is inversely correlated with poverty. The causality (making money makes you less poor) is as obviou…

You're arguing with sarcasm.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#42

Post by pempem »

Aurornis wrote: post #13
nine_zeros wrote: post #3

The employment model needs to change. With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, large 30 year debts or school debts on people are unsustainable. So is healthcare being tied to employer and 401k tied to employer. The risk is all individual, the gains are all to corporations and lenders aka asset owners. This is unsustainable. Something has to change.

> With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. If you had to pick a point in the last century to enter the job market, now is certainly not the best time. However it is far, far from the worst time. I think it speaks to just how distorted the tech job market was in recent years. For a couple yea…

I think you might be overestimating the number of people who could do this: "you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language".

Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring 'gig' workers. Most of these people, uber drivers, doordashers, thumbtackers, etc, etc cannot tell you whether an LLC is better for them than an SCorp, cannot navigate a defined benefit plan and cannot afford insurance, retirement, sick days, and so on. This was purposefully strategic and shared openly.

30 year mortgages are not recent, but their relationship to the average income has changed drastically in just two years. Educational debt has been on the rise for 20+ years. These honestly are all well documented.

People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65. For many 65 means a job at walmart, sam's club, or other forms of low level employment.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#43

Post by techsupporter »

pempem wrote: post #42
Aurornis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. If you had to pick a point in the last century to enter the job market, now is certainly not the best time. However it is far, far from the worst time. I think it speaks to just how distorted the tech job market was in recent years. For a couple yea…

I think you might be overestimating the number of people who could do this: "you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language". Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring…

> People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.

And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.

From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.

(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)

Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).

Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:

If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.

If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.

People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.

People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.

Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#44

Post by fsckboy »

advael wrote: post #15

I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this In most countries in the world, money is what allows you to have any control over your life. For most people who aren't already rich, their having money relies on being employed, and we tend not to describe people who don't work because they'…

you bring up psychology, then completely botch it, just as the study did.

>sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true.

you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of finding work, and even doing a poorer job of keeping a job; people whose self esteem is more fragile being more likely to lose their jobs, reinforcing their negative self images: but that's not unemployment doing it (the study does hedge a lot by saying "associated" as if they are not suggesting cause).

I'll bet if they had done a Big 5 Factor analysis of the samples in the study we would see lots of clustering, a much more interesting result than what the study found, and Big 5 Factor results are not known to change as the result of unemployment.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#45

Post by marcus_holmes »

SoftTalker wrote: post #40
marcus_holmes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. So the chronic effects that the study found are not linked to the lack of a job, but the lack of income that a job brings. Because people without a job but with money don't suffer those effects.

This isn't complicated. People like the feeling of doing productive work. If you are independently wealthy, you can do whatever you want. Hobbies or volunteering, among other things, fill that need. If you are employed, you get that reward with your paycheck at least. Ideally the work itself is also rewarding, providing the satisfaction of doing something productive. This is why people can be happy doing rewarding wo…

> If you are unemployed and looking unsuccessfully for work, you have no income reward and no work accomplishment reward. If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.

So you're saying that you think the chronic long-term effects found in the study are not from having little money, but from the lack of rewards?

I mean, there's no data on that, so you could be right. We'd have to find a bunch of people who have little money but find their own rewards and see if they suffer the same consequences.

Possibly the "starving artist" folks - people whose motivation is their art but who earn no (or very little) money doing it. Anecdotally, the ones I've met veer wildly (almost daily) between euphoria and despair. But I think that's different from the symptoms the study is talking about.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#46

Post by anigbrowl »

fsckboy wrote: post #44
advael wrote: post #15

I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this In most countries in the world, money is what allows you to have any control over your life. For most people who aren't already rich, their having money relies on being employed, and we tend not to describe people who don't work because they'…

you bring up psychology, then completely botch it, just as the study did. > sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true. you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of find…

It's equally plausible that employers treat people with particular trait cluster poorly, and that eventually they give up on getting abused.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#47

Post by droptablemain »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #16
advael wrote: post #15

I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this In most countries in the world, money is what allows you to have any control over your life. For most people who aren't already rich, their having money relies on being employed, and we tend not to describe people who don't work because they'…

I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.

If someone is not working because they received a windfall it's probably better to think of them as "retired" rather than "unemployed."

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#48

Post by gmd63 »

droptablemain wrote: post #47
marcus_holmes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.

If someone is not working because they received a windfall it's probably better to think of them as "retired" rather than "unemployed."

Definitely. To be classified as "unemployed" you have to be seeking work.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#49

Post by tbrownaw »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #33
nradov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment is a specific term in economics which refers only to workers who don't have a job and are actively looking for a job. People like your friend aren't unemployed they just don't have a job.

Exactly. So the chronic effects that the study found are not linked to the lack of a job, but the lack of income that a job brings. Because people without a job but with money don't suffer those effects.

> not linked to the lack of a job, but the lack of income that a job brings

Or to the constant failure / hopelessness / whatever from a constant job search getting no results; if it was just money then the correlation would very obviously be with peoples monetary situation rather then their employment status.

Re: Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy

#50

Post by hluska »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #16
advael wrote: post #15

I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this In most countries in the world, money is what allows you to have any control over your life. For most people who aren't already rich, their having money relies on being employed, and we tend not to describe people who don't work because they'…

I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.

Keep in mind that they’re studying unemployment whereas your anecdote is about retirement. The article argues that unemployment leads to a loss of control which leads to certain significant attitude changes.

It would be quite irregular for someone who received a career ending windfall in their mid-30s to feel a lack of control. There is a whole other can of angry cobras for them.

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