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True Rate of Unemployment

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Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#141

Post by ElProlactin »

foxglacier wrote: post #123
ElProlactin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Have shelter and food" is surviving. That's the point. And speaking of food, the USDA says that over 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household in 2024. That's 1 in 7 people. In the world's richest country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity.

Doesn't the term "land of opportunity" imply to you that it's also the "land of risk"? That's certainly how I've always seen lands of opportunity - places where you can fight it out on you own and have a chance to succeed - or fail. Not a comfortable safe zone to relax in.

That's not what "land of opportunity" means in the US. It means upward social mobility, plentiful job opportunities across a wide range of inudstries, decent work for decent pay, ample rewards for hard work.

Socioeconomically, the post-WW2 era is widely considered America's peak. The strong economic growth was broadly shared and created the largest and most prosperous middle class in modern history.

During this time, a single breadwinner could buy a car, a house and support a family. This is the "land of opportunity" and "American Dream" people talk about today and politicians have been promising the return of for decades.

The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#142

Post by teiferer »

boxed wrote: post #73
xbmcuser wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

> You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down If any price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.

And it's economics 101. The price is the symptom. The root cause is a shortage. Fix the shortage and the symptom follows. Try to fix the symptom and the root cause will make things worse.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#143

Post by stdbrouw »

anotherhue wrote: post #109
afpx wrote: post #104

Tangential 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…

Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting. That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent. So I would say, you don't want to find a person,…

This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!

Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.

A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.

When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.

Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.

And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#144

Post by bartread »

BrtByte wrote: post #132
afpx wrote: post #104

Tangential 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

I think the thing is it’s no easier to hire someone to do a job you need done outside of work (at least the first time you need that job done) than it is to hire someone for a job at your workplace.

Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.

Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#145

Post by johnnyanmac »

globalnode wrote: post #53
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.

better off taxing people that own more than 1 property and leave people just trying to live alone.

Pied-à-Terre Taxes are pretty easy taxes to implement, because usually the ones affected may not even live in the town/state to vote against it to begin with. But ultimately this only covers a very small slice of homeowners.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#146

Post by teiferer »

esseph wrote: post #110
teiferer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them. It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements. Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic. I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...

I surely didn't. But knowing to not know is an inherent and central lesson from higher education, one would think.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#147

Post by MoltenMan »

ElProlactin wrote: post #108
Aurornis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household This statistic looked suspect so I had to look it up. The study defined multiple levels of food insecurity. The big 47 million number included mostly households where eating patterns were not disrupted and people did not reduce their food intake. So most “food insecure households” actually had enough food and maintained their normal eating patterns. That’s not…

Food insecure is defined as "lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet". In the wealthiest country in the world. I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long because the idea that Americans would say "actually, it's not really that bad because they're technically not starving" shows just how far the country has fallen.

No, I think the person you're responding to is just saying that they really just are not starving or having trouble getting access to food at all. It's difficult in the US to really not have access to nutritious food.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#148

Post by Gareth321 »

dfdydx wrote: post #124
Gareth321 wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

You're applying nuance to a discussion which so often does not lend itself to nuance. Successive governments love to focus on the unemployment figure as though that is the mark of a healthy jobs market. As you've pointed out, it's not. It's not even close. We should be speaking about it far less, and about other, more qualitative metrics far more. We don't, though, and the cynical reason is that the unemployment metric was designed to make things appear better than they are.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#149

Post by Den_VR »

Gareth321 wrote: post #113
afpx wrote: post #104

Tangential 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…

Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want. I think AI will solve this in the future. It's…

Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#150

Post by johnnyanmac »

ChickeNES wrote: post #115
DaSHacka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it. Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way. Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you…

Sounds like more at the expense of immigrants than companies? Scabs? What is this, the 1950s?

>Scabs? What is this, the 1950s?

Yes, that was the last time we had unions strong enough in the US to bear teeth. We should strive back towards that.

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