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True Rate of Unemployment
131–140 of 377 posts
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#132Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
That may be the case but it doesn't prevent anybody from borrowing against it, which turns that fiction and illiquidity into very real liquid dollars. That same mechanism could be used for paying your taxes as it reveals that this is merely an excuse.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, I (and most economists) disagree. I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electric…
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#135Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative. I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
The problem is that different unemployment statistics measure different things, and the headline number often gets interpreted as "everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one"
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#136Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
Competence is chain of trust. Chain of trust is adversarial to current market forces.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#137What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this reason I use the employment rate instead. The unemployment rate, as you've correctly pointed out, is very narrowly defined. Obviously so as to trick voters into thinking that everything is fine. The employment rate can't really be gamed like that. The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortuna…
I don't understand the issue with saying that someone who is employed is ... employed. If the claim is that a single number (the unemployment rate) does not capture all the high dimensional features of society & work, then well of course! If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure? It's not a particularly contentious position th…
>If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure?
Yes, the gaslighting is the biggest problem. If we can't admit there's a problem (and politicians never want to admit the numbers are bad unless [other team] is in charge) then we can't begin to approach a real solution.
>It's not a particularly contentious position though
You'd be surprised. Even colloquially, that single number is how a lot of people try to justify that "job market is good, people are lazy". Because that person is not in a situation of searching for a modern job. This thread getting it right or wrong is irrelevant to that end. This isn't a board full of policy makers nor economists (at least, I don't think it is...)
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#139Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
> So what do people actually do?
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.
Neither is true.
The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation.
The risk of a wage earner is to lose their employment because the business folds. Just like the shareholder in that business. It's again unclear why the tax system should compensate both differently for this.