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

True Rate of Unemployment

lisep.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 381 posts

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#31

Post by ElProlactin »

bpodgursky wrote: post #27
ElProlactin wrote: post #8

> ...or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes. I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street. The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.

This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1]. https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...

Take a step back.

A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.

But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#32

Post by skrebbel »

runako wrote: post #11

Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

Soo was it more or less than that? Don’t leave us hanging like that!

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#33

Post by defrost »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #30
RachelF wrote: post #15

Similar statistics for Australia: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemploy... It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.

Thanks, this is interesting. Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers. We don…

> We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all

Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.

> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.

Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#34

Post by annzabelle »

I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#35

Post by reddozen »

hirako2000 wrote: post #22
mc32 wrote: post #2

I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie. If you apply their stat methodologies to other G-7, you get similar results.

The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.

There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides.

"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#36

Post by nostrebored »

ElProlactin wrote: post #31
bpodgursky wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1]. https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...

Take a step back. A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year. But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.

As someone who grew up below the poverty line for much of my life — 2x the poverty line seemed like wealth to me. There are absolutely people getting by on “feels like” 50k a year.

There are not really frills, but in terms of “have shelter and food” it can work. Not everywhere is SF.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#38

Post by jandrewrogers »

xbmcuser wrote: post #17
runako wrote: post #11

Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.

Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. The lower tax rate is simpler than actually accounting for these differences.

Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.

Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#39

Post by snovv_crash »

ryan_lane wrote: post #29
jaredklewis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.

If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate. I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford. LVT simply wouldn't be a good sy…

LVT can be deferred to the time of sale.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#40

Post by [deleted] »

ryan_lane wrote: post #29
jaredklewis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.

If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate. I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford. LVT simply wouldn't be a good sy…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN