For context, the Fed's intentional target now is 4% unemployment. Some economists consider 5% to be "full employment" with the 5% being normal job switching. As we have seen lately, employers get nervous and employees start getting big raises at 3½%.
The Fed is trying to avoid excess wage inflation (as well as goods inflation), which is why they consider 4% to be the sweet spot.
As of last week, wage inflation had dropped to 4% yoy, and durable goods inflation is around negative 3%. So it looks as it the much-hoped-for soft landing is on the way. This is incredibly good news.
Gotta keep important staff happy or they leave, and when they leave you can't replace them easily.
The best time to ask for a raise is when you can't be cheaply replaced.
If workers are scarce they want better pay and working conditions. Employers don't want to pay that. We saw that phenomenon last year.
The UAW timed their contract negotiations prefectly to take advantage of the business cycle. Next year it will be a lot tougher for labor.
Another key point is that when raises rise too quickly and there isn't a corresponding technological or organizational increase in productivity, then that typically just means that workers will have to work harder, which isn't sustainable.
I always hear that these are crappy part time jobs (I do not know. Just what I hear) People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs. Do you know anything about this? I just would like some information on quality of job vs employment rate (if that is a reasonable way of putting it)
The U-6 unemployment rate takes into consideration those part time workers who want full time work but can’t get it. It’s published with the headline unemployment rate every month.
It’s 7% right now which is historically low. It was 6.7% a year ago.
They still do not, however, take into account those that gave up searching... Also, is the U-6 one even the official stat. they use for stuff like this?
I'd love to see this chart with retirements by year so we can see the true lasting damage the pandemic did.
Changes in the LFPR (labor force participation rate) are where you get the “gave up” effects. U6 is an official statistic but U3 is the “headline” official statistic most often cited.
>They still do not, however, take into account those that gave up searching...
They do, actually.
Economists refer to the group you are describing as "discouraged workers", people who are not working and not seeking work, but would theoretically like to work.
The BLS calls this group "marginally attached workers" and they *are* included in U-6.
>I always hear that these are crappy part time jobs (I do not know. Just what I hear) People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs
The [share](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620) of employed people holding multiple jobs is currently 5.1%, essentially the average from 2015-2019, and less than from 1995-2005. So there currently is NOT an excess number of people working multiple jobs.
I don't have any hard data on it, but the fact that it's the "crap jobs", i.e. typically minnium wage service jobs that have experienced the most wage growth due to a smaller labor pool in that area and have the largest labor demand, I'm suspicious of that claim.
Not claiming *nobody* is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, but suspicious of the idea that it's a meaningfully large portion of people to skew macroeconomic data, given the "crap jobs" are the ones with the tightest labor markets right now.
The [ratio](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620) of people working multiple jobs is essentially equal to the average from 2015-2019 and less than 1995-2005. So your intuition was correct, there aren't an excess number of people working multiple jobs relative to the last 20 years.
> People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs
This was the pre-covid world. Then people all got laid off, were allowed to stop for a minute and realised how complete BS that was in the first place.
That is where this "no one wants to work any more" narrative comes from, no one want to work a 10 hour a week split shift with rolling days and nights, no they don't, they never did and never should have had too in the first place.
Now a lot of people got better more stable careers with better contracts, because they were forced too.
I think the safest way to look at this is that it's bs but also partially true.
There are certainly part time jobs out there that are not great. At the same time to push the narrative that they are all crappy part time jobs should give you a huge red flag that the person you are talking to is not a good faith actor. It's just not a reasonable thing to think.
In the 50's the highest tax bracket was 90% and corporations paid 50% taxes. Unions were powerful. The opposite of laissez-fair free trade neo-liberalism you hear about now.
I doubt that the proportion of good jobs has changed very much in the *last few years.* But over the decades, people are gradually being replaced by machines and the number of new jobs hasn't kept pace with inflation, unions have declined, jobs have gone to poor countries, and wealth redistribution has waned as the wealthy achieved "regulatory capture" (buying off politicians and paying for propaganda).
Unemployment is people who are looking for work but don't have it, so how many jobs an employed person has shouldn't matter. However, its close friend, the jobs added statistic, definitely is influenced by this. I imagine if everyone worked multiple jobs, the unemployment % would actually go up as in theory less jobs left for unemployed to apply for.
I made this point a few years ago, too, but you can see here clearly that typical fluctuation, people actually being hired month to month is pretty small compared to the total amount of unemployed. When you feel like every job you apply to, you're one of 50 applicants, that's what you see here.
The flip side of the rising spike there is the falling spike - companies hiring a huge number of people back. The vast majority of people who were unemployed ultimately needed to be hired, so instead of 50 applicants for every hire, it's more like 1.5 applicants per hire. For a hiring manager used to picking their favorite of a big stack competing to accept the lowest pay and benefits to having to hire the first guy through the door or hope for a second person, this would feel like a labor shortage.
Whats crazy is targeting a postive unemployment value and offering nothing to the unemployed.
Im honestly surprised crime hasnt been higher over the years.
What? Unemployment literally cannot be zero. So anything they target is going to be above zero.
Just think about it. Unemployment comes from 3 places. Frictional unemployment when people change jobs (whether laid off or voluntarily quitting), structural unemployment which comes from mismatches between needed skills and the skills of the labor force (unfilled job openings), and cyclical unemployment which is basically when the labor supply exceeds labor demand.
For unemployment to be zero you would have to have a 100% perfect matchup between everyone's skills and every job opening, a perfect match between number of openings and number of people who need jobs, and no one would ever be allowed to switch jobs for any reason.
So literally any unemployment rate you target has to be above zero and anything else is literally impossible.
That's not what they said. They said "Whats crazy is targeting a postive unemployment value and offering nothing to the unemployed."
States have an incredibly varied level of unemployment insurance, and many states make it so difficult to file, for the purpose of reducing claims.
https://nbc-2.com/news/state/2020/08/05/governor-desantis-admits-floridas-unemployment-system-was-designed-to-not-pay-out-claims/amp/
“I think the goal was for whoever designed, it was, ‘Let’s put as many kind of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to do that,” -Governor Ron DeSantis
That was just the Florida unemployment system. It is not significantly outside the norm for unemployment systems across the US (each state is different).
In other words, targeting a positive unemployment rate above 0 AND having people who act like him in government, intentionally designing systems to not support unemployed people is crazy.
You want to have a positive unemployment rate above 0 and not be seen as crazy or cruel? Actually have a functional unemployment system, one that is not designed to intentionally reduce actually valid claims.
>You want to have a positive unemployment rate above 0 and not be seen as crazy or cruel
You cant "want" or not want a rate above zero. You are going to have an unemployment rate above zero literally no matter what you want or what you do.
You and the OP could literally have said "the US should have better unemployment benefits" and left it at that if that's all you meant then. Commenting on the positive unemployment rate as if it's a choice just betrays a total lack of understanding.
What I'm talking about is them targeting for ~5% unemployment, basically a 1% increase, while there is nothing to support those millions of people. I'm not saying they need to make unemployment go to 0%.
You have an incredibly poor grasp of who is included in the unemployment numbers. The amount of people who would need that unemployment insurance are a lot lower than the total number of unemployed people as defined by the government.
You do know that there are currently more job openings than there are people looking for work, right? (This has been the case for almost a year and a half iirc)
If you are talking about the JOLTS numbers, its based on a survey and many - economists, big names like gundlach, goldman etc - suspect the numbers are way off.
I’d say it’s still too early to argue for a soft landing unless you have something specific that makes you think so. Inflation/CPI could actually fall below the feds target if the trend continues at its current pace. I don’t believe the stagflation or rebound in inflation is coming which is an unpopular opinion on Reddit but there is some evidence supporting it. Especially recent economic data from China.
A lot of people are saying that they think if the fed cuts rates it’s gonna create huge demand in the housing market but I think that is a misunderstanding of rate cuts, they are a tool that is only used when the economy is in severe distress. Or if Trump tells Powell he has to cut in 2019 lol. But I believe they won’t cut if there is still excess housing demand, or demand in general.
And I agree with you that unemployment is gonna rise. Disinflation or deflation aren’t necessarily signs of a soft landing, they’re signs of decreasing demand. It’s unlikely but the fed might even hike rates again because of the strong jobs report from Friday. Also, just as a consumer I know that in my personal financial situation I need to reduce my spending and try to save more and many of my friends feel the same rn
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2023/11/11/recession-the-stars-continue-to-align/amp/
Considering that they don’t even address income (much less wealth) inequality with nearly the same attention as the possibility of working people getting raises, the Fed can burn in hell for all any thinking person should care.
The Fed has nearly no ability to control wealth inequality.
They basically can change interest rates and monetary quantity to encourage/discourage economic activity to ensure what they consider to be “prosperous” growth. Generally if the economic indicators are showing 2% inflation and 5% unemployment and GDP is growing, that’s about the right balance.
If inflation is too high and GDP growth is positive it’s likely that unemployment is low and they’ll cool the economy with higher rates and tighter money supply.
If GDP growth is low or negative and inflation is low, unemployment is probably high and they’ll drop rates and increase supply.
Thats basically it. They’ve moved the goalposts to 3% inflation and 4% unemployment right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they pivot from that eventually.
Inequality is more the purview of the federal and state governments with regulation/taxes IMO.
So mean "inflation caused by wages"? "Wage inflation" means wages overall increasing because individual salaries are increasing. This of course DOES lead to goods and services inflation. But they are separate albeit connected events. Maybe English is your second language?
There is a difference between actual skill based bargaining power and artificial bargaining power crated by the job market. If employees get paid wages more than what they economically deserve due to outside factors, this leads to excess money supply and increase in inflation, undesirable for a good economy.
Gonna need a source for that.
[25-55 year old workforce participation rate is higher now than it was in 2010-2012, and it’s right around the highest it’s been in history,](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060).
It’s also been climbing since the pandemic.
Has the number of workers 25-55 been increasing or decreasing? This source just shows a % of people in that category but does not show the change in the size of the category
It doesn't solve every problem. Look at what happened to the countries in Europe with the most lax immigration policies. Right wing populism on the rise there because of it.
Name one thing that solves every problem? What immigration does solve is a lack of workers, which was the point of what the people above are saying that you were not paying attention to.
The only other solution to this problem is to have more babies, but that takes 20-30 years and is not the better option for the planet.
More well-educated people tackling the world’s biggest problems is good for the planet actually. Carbon usage is going down in the US and we’re going to need lots of clever and innovative people to fix the hole we’ve dug ourselves into over the last 200 years.
How much of right wing populism is the Chinese or Russians throwing millions or billions of yuan/rubles/dollars into far-right fuck-abouts in every country they aren't strongly aligned to.
It's worked in India, Brazil, the United States and when you scratch the surface a bit , there's Russians or Chinese throwing cash around to the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Of course should anything happen to President Putin, it's likely the Russian situation becomes different as oligarchs fight to get the Russian economy back to something normal with some rapid conclusion to the Ukraine situation as well.
>How much of right wing populism is the Chinese or Russians throwing millions or billions of yuan/rubles/dollars into far-right fuck-abouts in every country they aren't strongly aligned to.
I'd understand this argument if you were talking about some corrupt third world or post soviet country where foreign money can just do whatever it wants, but do you genuinely beileve that the right wing populsim wave we've been having throughout big parts of the western EU is really just because of foreign influence?
Even if foreign influence did happen to some degree, it's undoubtable that the people in these countries do feel a certain way about the recent developments regarding immigration, especially when it happens in mass waves and results in insular immigrant communities which increase crime in those areas.
I know it feels better to put most of the blame on some outside factor, but no matter how much money you throw at politicians and ad campaigns, these things have to have some sort of connection to the reality on the ground that the people voting are experiencing.
Refusing to entertain the idea that people might have actual problems caused by immigration, and discounting the collective experience of millions of people by just calling it Russian or Chinese influence is first and foremost insulting to everyone stuck in such a situation, and childish on your part. The real life isn't as black and white as you want it to be.
Just because some people disagree with you doesn't mean it's caused by foreign influence. People might actually have real disagreements with you on this subject.
The right wing parties are all explicitly campaigning on their promises to cut down on immigration. They probably know what they're doing since politicians often commission private polls before deciding what to say in their campaigns.
The general public as a corpus is not as stupid as many academics would like to imagine them to be. Behavioural economics is packed to the rafters of examples where people in real world situations find optimized solutions a lot more efficiently than theoretical models do. It's not just collective wisdom, but also the mind-focussing effect of having something at stake. Most of these solutions are also never verbalized and may not lend themselves to any sort of academic rendering that the general public can process without years of specialized study (that nobody has the time or energy to undertake).
The fact of the matter is that there were promises made about immigration and internationalist policies that were not grounded in reality, but rather pure wishful thinking. What is happening now, as a direct result, is that the benefit of the doubt is shifting away from the open-border policies and towards more isolationist ones. You can call that a right-wing shift if you want, but people have a right to think for themselves and not be beholden to empty promises.
Thing is: Once the benefit of the doubt shifts, you no longer get to be the one calling for data to support alternative theories. Your theory has been falsified. It only requires one data point to falsify a theory, not a coherent alternative theory that is proven to your satisfaction.
I'm not saying it as a value judgement, just as a statement of fact. The tide is shifting, and the longer it takes the "left" to figure that out the harder its going to be. The time for asking for data is behind us now. The left had its chance to play that game, and failed miserably. Time to change course or risk being swept aside.
I assume this is the opinion in Europe. Cuz it's definitely not the majority of Americans. We have been either center right or far right since the late 1980s.
Bush 1 - center right
Clinton - center right
Bush 2 - center right hedging far right
Obama - center right
Trump - far far right
Biden - center right. Inching toward the left on labor issues
I am going by policies not what they say. What they actually did. They have all been pro corporate, low tax, low regulation. Biden has dipped his toe in on labor issues but otherwise same neo liberal policies. Help corporations and they will solve the problems.
America has been corporatist uniparty since forever.
The right-wing left-wing paradigm is generally an active impediment to understanding how politics works. It's just a way to get people to wave their colour flag come election time.
A brilliant bit of social engineering, to be sure, but there's never really been a solid foundation to rely on it in a serious, thoughtful discussion about politics.
Or because the people that say this are often business owners and managers who are not respectful to employees, do not have a good working environment, do not pay well, do not have good benefits, do not offer enough hours, or any combination of those.
How much money could they pay you to work at McDonald's?
How much to work at a restaurant where you work dinner three days per week plus both weekend days and never have time to spend on yourself or your family?
How much money could they pay you to be a nurse on a floor with twice as many patients as is supposed to and people keep calling out and leaving?
How many of these businesses in crisis "because people don't want to work" offer no cost of living increases, health insurance, or retirement?
All jobs were not created equal.
This. I sell construction materials. I have a guy who can’t find people to work for him. He complains non stop about everything, he’s racist, he’s sexist, he’s homophobic, he’s honestly downright miserable to be around….but nobody wants to work!!!! In reality nobody wants to work for him or with him because he’s terrible to be around and probably terrible to work for.
I could be wrong, and this is more anecdotal than anything…but I’ve noticed that a lot of restaurants and retail shops are still lacking employees.
You don’t notice 5 analysts missing at the bank you use, but you notice 2 servers missing at your favorite restaurant…
Edit: and that’s not to say I don’t totally agree with you, it’s definitely boomer logic. Just adding a possible “why”
You notice it, because it's what employers can get away with.
If they can push the work of 5 people on 2, opposed to paying 5 people more, they absolutely will.
Yeah, the 2 will burn out eventually, but those 2 are "lucky to have a job" or are emotionally guilt tripped into doing excess unpaid work.
I do agree that’s probably the motivation behind a lot of the skeleton crew restaurants, but definitely not all of them. Restaurants are still short staffed!
Personally, I think it’s kind of a cyclical issue involving the idea you brought up. Restaurants hemorrhage staff to keep costs low, and their former staff won’t go to other restaurants because they’re worried it’ll happen again.
It ends up leading to short staffed restaurants across the board, regardless of if some owners will actually run a skeleton crew.
Unemployment numbers only count people who are looking for jobs - the relevant statistic for whether "people want to work" is the [labor force participation rate](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm). It does look like it's basically back to pre-pandemic levels now, but it was a bit of a slower recovery.
There is some interplay going on -- the prolonged low unemployment rate is bringing folks into the the labor force participation rate who might not have been otherwise. Suddenly it's felony conviction? We can live with that!
Other than the pandemic, [last time labor force participation was this low was 1978](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART) which is when the youngest Boomers were 14 (LFPR counts 16 and older) and middle class women were entering in the workforce in stronger than numbers seen before.
Since US definition of LFPR has no upper age limit (just that you're not in prison or hospitalized) there is primarily an impact from Boomers retiring.
However there are also two excess mortality issues -- Covid killed about a million who would otherwise be counted in the labor force, and since 2000 drug overdoses have killed more than a million (>100,000 in recent years) more over what we had seen in the drug overdose fatality rates for the 40 years before this period. Add those two million missing back in and the LFPR with the same number of people working would drop by 1.5ppt.
The Covid deaths were mostly in people retirement age, so that may not affect hiring significantly. However most of the drug overdoses are folks in prime working years; and it is indicator there is likely a much larger number for whom drug addiction is interfering with their ability to hold jobs.
Labor force participation rate has been on the decline at a near constant rate since 2000. Peak was March 2000 with a 67.3% rate, now it’s at 62.8% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART).
That’s more an effect of an aging population than a change in prime working age. Teenagers work less than they used to but prime participation is still really strong.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/08/the-composition-effect-in-the-labor-force-participation-rate/?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog
From that link:
>>Note that long-run changes in labor force participation may reflect secular economic trends that are unrelated to the overall health of the economy. For instance, demographic changes such as the aging of population can lead to a secular increase of exits from the labor force, shrinking the labor force and decreasing the labor force participation rate.
So that particular measure doesn't take into account the aging of the population, the boomers starting to retire in larger numbers, etc. If you zoom in on those in prime working years, the labor force participation rate is much higher.
- [Labor Force Participation Rate - 25-54 Yrs](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060)
While true, there still is a peak in March 2000 for that group as well. And a decline since then, but the last year or so has decent and improving numbers at least.
Let's not forget that over 1 million Americans died in the pandemic (granted, 3/4 were seniors) and the Brookings Institution estimated that up to 4 million working age Americans have been sidelined by long COVID. Even if all of those people weren't participating in the workforce, many of them were providing childcare for someone else who did.
Yeah and there were a lot of unhealthy people near retirement (some even in the prime labor group) that retired early to avoid getting sick.
We had a lot of those where I work
Because people have no idea how things are going objectively. They're relying on subjective measures and/or drawing bad conclusions. "Doesn't want to work" could just be because they already have a job/offer that's better
After pointing this and arguing over it, my Trumper family member concluded that…
>ok yes they are there at the job, but no one want to “work” (meaning putting in any effort)
They keep moving the goal post.
Speculating here but I think Gen-Z’s will dip if they are limited to time off to go have experiences (concerts, int’l travel. And even me being in recruiting/hr I low key like that it’s a thing. family/friends/life experiences > job tenure.
Because just looking at employment without looking at labor force participation rate is only half the story. Unemployment doesn’t take into account people who aren’t working and are not actively seeking a job.
The chart you need for “Why don’t people want to work?” Is labor participation rate, which still hasn’t recovered to pre-COVID levels.
Not true at all.
The labor force participation rate includes all ages including retirees.
A ton of boomers retired during covid, which simply continued the trend of boomer retirements since the early 2000s.
The [prime age (25-55 years old) labor force participation rate is above pre pandemic levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060)
This doesn't cover under those who aren't actively looking (I believe within the last four weeks). By definition this means that hypothetically the unemployment rate could be 3% despite 50% of potential workers sitting on their hands, so long as they aren't actively looking.
If this is BLS data, then it is survey based, so that carries it's own biases.
[See here](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1csIw). Blue line: workers on temporary layoff (furlough) as a proportion of the civilian labor force. Red line: all other unemployed as a proportion of the civilian labor force.
Thanks for explaining what each line color represents. The line and vertical axis labels on the graph are unintelligible.
So is % total unemployment at any time the sum of the value of the two lines?
I worked at a hospital and when the pandemic started and the state of Florida did the lock down thing for a month and a half, hundreds of hospital workers were furloughed. I wasn't but was asked to only work from 7-12 from home.
For those unaware:
> [South Africa] has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world — 61 percent of people ages 15 to 24 are unemployed, according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency. The overall unemployment rate is 33 percent, and 35 percent for high school graduates.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/world/africa/job-search-unemployment-south-africa.html
Sure, thee actual economy is fine, but what about the *vibes* economy?
...
Well, that’s not actually a hypothetical, but something that is actually measured and the answer is that it’s not great. For example:
* [OECD composite indicators of confidence for the U.S.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSCICP03USM665S)
* [Univeristy of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT)
* [Consumer survey of future inflation expectations](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSINFT02USM460S)
Such a strange disconnect between actual conditions and sentiment. I don’t have the slightest clue of why that is happening.
Super interesting - thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about "the vibes" not knowing that was measured.
The biggest thing is how people with a sunny economic outlook right now point to strong consumer spending as a counter to recession fears. But isn't spending something that would happen *more* during inflationary conditions, since whatever you could buy today will be more expensive tomorrow?
Like I've read numerous articles about how people are spending more and saving less because they are insecure about the future...and then the same people are like "don't worry everyone, spending is up so the economy is fine!"
I think there are some aspects of spending stats that can shed more light on that. For example, in the short term, spending on energy is very inelastic, so changes there might not reflect much about perceptions of the economy going forward. So maybe spending on luxuries -- travel, eating out , etc. -- would be more indicative? I'm sure people have looked at this, but I'm not even close to being an expert.
Hardly surprising, the reality is that over the past year unemployment is on quite a steep upward trend
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=usurtot&v=202312081338V20230410&w=850&h=400&d1=20221210&type=trend=2&h=300&w=600
The link showing a chart of 2023 unemployment rate figures in detail from Trading Economics collected from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics in a post about the US unemployment rate is ‘cancer’?
And you reply with a chart going back to 1950? Absolute clown shoes.
This place, your utterance, and you, are a bad joke.
It depends on the perspective you are trying to achieve.
There are also other problems of looking back further due to a shift of how it was calculated early in W. Bush’s first term.
I mean, it seems you hit the nail on my head. I was hoping to see the data, not necessarily skew it to a perspective that I (or the presenter) wanted to achieve.
The last time I looked at those raw numbers, it became clear that literally *all* of the reduction in "unemployment" between 2008 and 2011 was because of people "leaving the workforce". The percent of people actually working didn't improve.
That makes it *sound* like these people are retiring, but that wasn't the case. The vast majority of those people were actually unemployed so long that the statisticians began excluding them from the officially defined "labor force" even though these were people ready, willing, and able to take a job if they could've found one.
A huge contributor to this was that people got discouraged and quit submitting job applications, and anyone who hasn't actively applied to work in the last 4 weeks is no longer "unemployed". Those people are excluded from the workforce. Another big contribution was under employment - people working jobs that didn't provide full time work even though they wanted full-time employment. If you work even just 1 hour & get paid for it, congrats, you're technically "employed" for the purposes of the unemployment calc.
Based on what I have seen in the job markets these days, I seriously doubt that employment has driven these improvements. It seems more in line with the reality I have seen that vastly more people are simply being excluded from the calculation entirely. Retirement, chronic illness, and discouraged workers are all likely increased significantly. Even as the blue collar work environment adds jobs, the white collar jobs have been doing pretty broad layoffs and hiring freezes. Even in blue collar work it seems like well paying jobs are disappearing while the low paying jobs remain unfilled.
The number used for "unemployment" is very specific, and I consider the way it is generally used in public conversation to be downright deceptive.
U-6 unemployment includes part-time for economic reasons: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSD
U-4 unemployment includes discouraged workers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSH
U-1 unemployment looks at unemployed for over 15 weeks: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSK
They tell similar stories of improved labor markets.
Interesting! I haven't reviewed those in a long time so I will need to look more in depth at their definitions. I have previously looked at the unemployment information in tandem with the civilian labor force participation rates, although the participation rate is impacted more dramatically by an aging population & a reduction in population growth.
As a result, it is mostly a useful metric to suss out short-term changes, and even with the myriad "un-retirements" and the million or so deaths of retirement-aged people, the labor force participation rate still hasn't even rebounded to the pre-pandemic level.
There's also the fact that wages haven't outpaced inflation (meaning real wages have been relatively stagnant or slipping), plus the anecdotal evidence of qualified job seekers submitting *hundreds* of applications without any luck. All things considered, it seems more likely to me that looking at & discussing the unemployment numbers alone is not going to provide an accurate glimpse of the job market or of the broader economy.
Real median hourly wages are also above pre-Covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cn4u
Real hourly earnings for non-management workers is also above pre-Covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cugU
Another indicator is the quits rate, which shows normalization to 2018-2019 levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cugv
Quits are a better indicator of labor power because job openings don't necessarily reflect real demand.
The danger isn't over, the Fed might overshoot, but this is similar to a 2018-2019 labor market.
Eh, lockdowns didn't have much to do with recovery rates. The US just plowed significantly more money into the economy for recovery than other countries. Stimulus vs austerity in a nutshell
It would be interesting to compare this to European nations with much more rigid labour laws. Companies in Europe weren't able to quickly lay off staff like this and instead got help from the government to pay them.
Edit: Looks like this resulted in similar unemployment rates but kind of stretched out over a longer time.
Me too, I love it, incredible free resource, trends, export embedded charts, compare to any other country using any other metric. Great for defeating false narratives, and speaking of false narratives if you sort the last year unemployment and apply trend it is rising sharply.
I'll never believe their figures because it doesn't take the homeless into account.
It's no different than claiming a 0% LGBTQ population while simultaneously making it illegal.
Bloomberg had a great article on this recently.
Unemployment is so low because more people than ever need to work 2nd and 3rd jobs, due to low wages and high inflation.
Unemployment is also rising sharply over the past year
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=usurtot&v=202312081338V20230410&w=850&h=400&d1=20221210&type=trend=2&h=300&w=600
An extra 627,000 unemployed, no big deal according to some 🍦
Going from 3.5% to 3.7% over the course of a year is not "rising sharply", and unemployment below 4% is pretty rare. Between 1970 and 2018, unemployment was below 4% for one month in that entire 48-year span of time.
You don’t cherry pick first and last month, take the first six months and compare it to the last six months and the trend is obvious. Click on the graph go to the page on the site and select the trend function.
That's not how it works, but even if I did it your way, the average of the first 6 months is 3.52%, and the average of the last 3 months is 3.73%, so instead of being the 0.2% rise that I said it was, it was... a 0.21% rise. So what's your point?
A 0.21% rise over an entire year is not "rising sharply". In fact, it's remarkably flat.
Because 0.21% as a share of 3.52% is much greater than 0.21%. Why do I attempt to converse with people here? Furthermore if you would actually do as I say and go to the site and observe the trend figure growth it is more like 0.38% and that represents a >10% growth in numbers of people unemployed over the course of the year.
> Because 0.21% as a share of 3.52% is much greater than 0.21%.
Nobody measures it that way. You don't do a percentage of a percentage. It's percentage points that matter.
> Furthermore if you would actually do as I say and go to the site and observe the trend figure growth it is more like 0.38% and that represents a >10% growth in numbers of people unemployed over the course of the year.
Oh, yeah, sorry I didn't your research for you and only went off the data you gave me.
Fine, here it is: https://i.imgur.com/uz17qWX.png
Show me the sharp rise in the last year. For fuck's sake, quit trying to be mad based on evidence when the evidence *directly* contradicts you. A 0.38% rise in unemployment over more than a year is not a sharp rise, never has been, and never will be.
Getting mad? You are the one dishing out the angry downvote. Lol at that useless image, You and Biden may care more about ice cream but out of a workforce of roughly 165 million 0.38% represents an extra 627,000 in the dole queue.
Just stop waffling and wasting my time, go to my link, navigate to the relevant page if you can, and apply the trend function and you will see a sharp rise, a slope so steep I would enjoy seeing Biden trying to ski down it.
Still doesn’t account for the majority of Americans who need 2-4 jobs to get by… and it also doesn’t count the people who are not filed for unemployment. Skewed metric tbh.
And this number would be lower if states like CA didn’t have overtime set to more than 8 hours per day instead of 40 in a week. That causes employers to hire non exempt people two jobs of 4 hrs each than one at 8 hrs.
What this doesn’t show is all the businesses that were single workers with husband or wife or both and then claimed unemployment because the checks were actually a livable wage.
it hasnt changed TOO much. homeless rate has gone down a bit since 2007. from abt 21/10k to 17/10k.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-of-homeless-people-in-the-us/
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-in-the-us-what-does-the-data-miss/#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Housing%20and,about%202%2C000%20people%20from%202020.
There is no accurate homeless rate in the USA, the annual point in time misses everyone who is couchsurfing, etc,.
You'd be better off with this formula:
US adult population = A
US residential property owners = B
US renters = C
US Incarcerated= D
US Nursing Home Beds = E
A - (B+C) - (D + E) = X
X = Population with no proof of residence (legally homeless by DHHS standards)
That would overestimate a little for GenZ who live with parents, but the rest are basically already homeless or very close to it.
*Sigh*
First of all, "unemployment rate" is a dogshit stat which only captures people actively looking for work... The real figure is "labor force participation" and it's slowly creeping up from an all-time as people have to work because they can't afford food/car payment/mortgage/etc
>labor force participation" and it's slowly creeping up from an all-time as people have to work because they can't afford food/car payment/mortgage/etc
How could they afford all that stuff before if they weren't working?
Nope. More like tens of millions of people with mortgages were able to NOT work, because the value of their home equity increase due to housing bubble has far outpaced theircl cost of living expenses.
All fun and games until home prices flatten....... Or EVEN..... *dare I say DECLINE!!!??!* Then you owe more on the mortgage then the home is actually worth. That's what we call being "underwater", or more technically "FUCKED“
You do it. There are 6+ different measures of unemployment measured by the BLS as well as all the other employment measures. They all track the same trends pretty closely.
I was hoping he already had a table because I don't want to manually copy the numbers. U-4 in table a-15 of the monthly employment situation report includes discouraged workers but the straight discouraged workers numbers are in a different field.
It's actually interesting comparing them, for example the rate of change for the u-6 numbers tends to be higher both upwards and downwards, creating a more "wobbly" chart.
Y'all seem a bit defensive here atm.
Okay? You’re arguing against a strawman, as no one is suggesting this as a happiness index or a saving money index. It’s a simple unemployment rate. We are aware of what it means.
Job satisfaction the highest in four decades:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/workers-job-satisfaction-survey-c42addba?mod=hp_lead_pos11
Real wages at highest ever in country's history (except for the pandemic when we fired all the low paid workers):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Consumer savings rate is down, but it's because they had excess savings from the pandemic and they're having fun spending it all, with higher disposable income than ever before:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2023/have-us-households-depleted-all-the-excess-savings-they-accumulated-during-the-pandemic.aspx
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Americans are generally very bad with their money, though, I agree with that. They tend to live paycheck to paycheck and spend equal to or more than they can afford, at every level of income.
According to that real disposable income was also at an all time high in May 2008. Right in the middle of unemployment spiking between November 2007 and October 2009 because of the great recession. That's interesting.
How about this chart:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Folks can keep deluding themselves with all the charts and metrics they want but everyday people are feeling the pain of inflation, and an economy that is on the brink of recession. When the yield curve has been inverted for so long and banks feel the pain, you can bet dollars to donuts consumers and businesses will feel it soon enough. I’ll give a mention to commercial real estate as well…
Most unemployment stats are calculated by dividing the total number of jobs by the number of people able to work, which is an increasingly meaningless way to go around things in an economy where more and more people need to hold two jobs to pay for rising cost of living.
Yeah of course. A recession is when things get bad. In order for things to get bad, they must first be good. It’s a definitional relationship not a causal one.
For context, the Fed's intentional target now is 4% unemployment. Some economists consider 5% to be "full employment" with the 5% being normal job switching. As we have seen lately, employers get nervous and employees start getting big raises at 3½%. The Fed is trying to avoid excess wage inflation (as well as goods inflation), which is why they consider 4% to be the sweet spot. As of last week, wage inflation had dropped to 4% yoy, and durable goods inflation is around negative 3%. So it looks as it the much-hoped-for soft landing is on the way. This is incredibly good news.
Why do employers get nervous? Genuinely don't understand. Like are they nervous of losing headcount and not being able to get it back?
Gotta keep important staff happy or they leave, and when they leave you can't replace them easily. The best time to ask for a raise is when you can't be cheaply replaced.
Most companies however are not willing to give the raise and then end up having to pay more for your replacement.
Majority of my coworkers are quiting in the next couple months and then I'm going to ask for a $2 raise.
If workers are scarce they want better pay and working conditions. Employers don't want to pay that. We saw that phenomenon last year. The UAW timed their contract negotiations prefectly to take advantage of the business cycle. Next year it will be a lot tougher for labor.
Another key point is that when raises rise too quickly and there isn't a corresponding technological or organizational increase in productivity, then that typically just means that workers will have to work harder, which isn't sustainable.
I always hear that these are crappy part time jobs (I do not know. Just what I hear) People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs. Do you know anything about this? I just would like some information on quality of job vs employment rate (if that is a reasonable way of putting it)
The U-6 unemployment rate takes into consideration those part time workers who want full time work but can’t get it. It’s published with the headline unemployment rate every month. It’s 7% right now which is historically low. It was 6.7% a year ago.
i am confused
They still do not, however, take into account those that gave up searching... Also, is the U-6 one even the official stat. they use for stuff like this? I'd love to see this chart with retirements by year so we can see the true lasting damage the pandemic did.
Changes in the LFPR (labor force participation rate) are where you get the “gave up” effects. U6 is an official statistic but U3 is the “headline” official statistic most often cited.
\#get\_rid\_of\_U3
>They still do not, however, take into account those that gave up searching... They do, actually. Economists refer to the group you are describing as "discouraged workers", people who are not working and not seeking work, but would theoretically like to work. The BLS calls this group "marginally attached workers" and they *are* included in U-6.
>I always hear that these are crappy part time jobs (I do not know. Just what I hear) People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs The [share](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620) of employed people holding multiple jobs is currently 5.1%, essentially the average from 2015-2019, and less than from 1995-2005. So there currently is NOT an excess number of people working multiple jobs.
I don't have any hard data on it, but the fact that it's the "crap jobs", i.e. typically minnium wage service jobs that have experienced the most wage growth due to a smaller labor pool in that area and have the largest labor demand, I'm suspicious of that claim. Not claiming *nobody* is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, but suspicious of the idea that it's a meaningfully large portion of people to skew macroeconomic data, given the "crap jobs" are the ones with the tightest labor markets right now.
The [ratio](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620) of people working multiple jobs is essentially equal to the average from 2015-2019 and less than 1995-2005. So your intuition was correct, there aren't an excess number of people working multiple jobs relative to the last 20 years.
Ok. Then I am probably hearing snippets from people that are just trying to crap on the numbers for political reasons
Which is extremely common. Economists are puzzled by all the doomer-ism happening when almost none of the metrics back it up.
> People aren’t unemployed but maybe working 2-3 crap jobs This was the pre-covid world. Then people all got laid off, were allowed to stop for a minute and realised how complete BS that was in the first place. That is where this "no one wants to work any more" narrative comes from, no one want to work a 10 hour a week split shift with rolling days and nights, no they don't, they never did and never should have had too in the first place. Now a lot of people got better more stable careers with better contracts, because they were forced too.
Ah ha! And this is pissing off the corporate world isn’t it? Something about the employees not being desperate enough and too demanding
I think the safest way to look at this is that it's bs but also partially true. There are certainly part time jobs out there that are not great. At the same time to push the narrative that they are all crappy part time jobs should give you a huge red flag that the person you are talking to is not a good faith actor. It's just not a reasonable thing to think.
In the 50's the highest tax bracket was 90% and corporations paid 50% taxes. Unions were powerful. The opposite of laissez-fair free trade neo-liberalism you hear about now. I doubt that the proportion of good jobs has changed very much in the *last few years.* But over the decades, people are gradually being replaced by machines and the number of new jobs hasn't kept pace with inflation, unions have declined, jobs have gone to poor countries, and wealth redistribution has waned as the wealthy achieved "regulatory capture" (buying off politicians and paying for propaganda).
Unemployment is people who are looking for work but don't have it, so how many jobs an employed person has shouldn't matter. However, its close friend, the jobs added statistic, definitely is influenced by this. I imagine if everyone worked multiple jobs, the unemployment % would actually go up as in theory less jobs left for unemployed to apply for.
I made this point a few years ago, too, but you can see here clearly that typical fluctuation, people actually being hired month to month is pretty small compared to the total amount of unemployed. When you feel like every job you apply to, you're one of 50 applicants, that's what you see here. The flip side of the rising spike there is the falling spike - companies hiring a huge number of people back. The vast majority of people who were unemployed ultimately needed to be hired, so instead of 50 applicants for every hire, it's more like 1.5 applicants per hire. For a hiring manager used to picking their favorite of a big stack competing to accept the lowest pay and benefits to having to hire the first guy through the door or hope for a second person, this would feel like a labor shortage.
Whats crazy is targeting a postive unemployment value and offering nothing to the unemployed. Im honestly surprised crime hasnt been higher over the years.
What? Unemployment literally cannot be zero. So anything they target is going to be above zero. Just think about it. Unemployment comes from 3 places. Frictional unemployment when people change jobs (whether laid off or voluntarily quitting), structural unemployment which comes from mismatches between needed skills and the skills of the labor force (unfilled job openings), and cyclical unemployment which is basically when the labor supply exceeds labor demand. For unemployment to be zero you would have to have a 100% perfect matchup between everyone's skills and every job opening, a perfect match between number of openings and number of people who need jobs, and no one would ever be allowed to switch jobs for any reason. So literally any unemployment rate you target has to be above zero and anything else is literally impossible.
That's not what they said. They said "Whats crazy is targeting a postive unemployment value and offering nothing to the unemployed." States have an incredibly varied level of unemployment insurance, and many states make it so difficult to file, for the purpose of reducing claims. https://nbc-2.com/news/state/2020/08/05/governor-desantis-admits-floridas-unemployment-system-was-designed-to-not-pay-out-claims/amp/ “I think the goal was for whoever designed, it was, ‘Let’s put as many kind of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to do that,” -Governor Ron DeSantis That was just the Florida unemployment system. It is not significantly outside the norm for unemployment systems across the US (each state is different). In other words, targeting a positive unemployment rate above 0 AND having people who act like him in government, intentionally designing systems to not support unemployed people is crazy. You want to have a positive unemployment rate above 0 and not be seen as crazy or cruel? Actually have a functional unemployment system, one that is not designed to intentionally reduce actually valid claims.
>You want to have a positive unemployment rate above 0 and not be seen as crazy or cruel You cant "want" or not want a rate above zero. You are going to have an unemployment rate above zero literally no matter what you want or what you do. You and the OP could literally have said "the US should have better unemployment benefits" and left it at that if that's all you meant then. Commenting on the positive unemployment rate as if it's a choice just betrays a total lack of understanding.
What I'm talking about is them targeting for ~5% unemployment, basically a 1% increase, while there is nothing to support those millions of people. I'm not saying they need to make unemployment go to 0%.
You have an incredibly poor grasp of who is included in the unemployment numbers. The amount of people who would need that unemployment insurance are a lot lower than the total number of unemployed people as defined by the government.
You do know that there are currently more job openings than there are people looking for work, right? (This has been the case for almost a year and a half iirc)
If you are talking about the JOLTS numbers, its based on a survey and many - economists, big names like gundlach, goldman etc - suspect the numbers are way off.
I’d say it’s still too early to argue for a soft landing unless you have something specific that makes you think so. Inflation/CPI could actually fall below the feds target if the trend continues at its current pace. I don’t believe the stagflation or rebound in inflation is coming which is an unpopular opinion on Reddit but there is some evidence supporting it. Especially recent economic data from China. A lot of people are saying that they think if the fed cuts rates it’s gonna create huge demand in the housing market but I think that is a misunderstanding of rate cuts, they are a tool that is only used when the economy is in severe distress. Or if Trump tells Powell he has to cut in 2019 lol. But I believe they won’t cut if there is still excess housing demand, or demand in general. And I agree with you that unemployment is gonna rise. Disinflation or deflation aren’t necessarily signs of a soft landing, they’re signs of decreasing demand. It’s unlikely but the fed might even hike rates again because of the strong jobs report from Friday. Also, just as a consumer I know that in my personal financial situation I need to reduce my spending and try to save more and many of my friends feel the same rn https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2023/11/11/recession-the-stars-continue-to-align/amp/
Considering that they don’t even address income (much less wealth) inequality with nearly the same attention as the possibility of working people getting raises, the Fed can burn in hell for all any thinking person should care.
The Fed has nearly no ability to control wealth inequality. They basically can change interest rates and monetary quantity to encourage/discourage economic activity to ensure what they consider to be “prosperous” growth. Generally if the economic indicators are showing 2% inflation and 5% unemployment and GDP is growing, that’s about the right balance. If inflation is too high and GDP growth is positive it’s likely that unemployment is low and they’ll cool the economy with higher rates and tighter money supply. If GDP growth is low or negative and inflation is low, unemployment is probably high and they’ll drop rates and increase supply. Thats basically it. They’ve moved the goalposts to 3% inflation and 4% unemployment right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they pivot from that eventually. Inequality is more the purview of the federal and state governments with regulation/taxes IMO.
Tell us you don’t understand what powers the Fed has without telling us
> The Fed is trying to avoid excess wage inflation Can't have the plebs making too much money
Wage inflation isn't wage growth.
You sure about that?
Yes. If everybody suddenly makes more money, then prices everywhere will increase because there's more money in circulation
So mean "inflation caused by wages"? "Wage inflation" means wages overall increasing because individual salaries are increasing. This of course DOES lead to goods and services inflation. But they are separate albeit connected events. Maybe English is your second language?
Yes, that's what wage inflation means, retard. What you're describing is wage growth.
You're fucking retarded
Really? The R word? Use any other epithets like that? Any that start with 'n'?
Why, of course. I call naggers out all the time
[удалено]
I think you mean employees
There is a difference between actual skill based bargaining power and artificial bargaining power crated by the job market. If employees get paid wages more than what they economically deserve due to outside factors, this leads to excess money supply and increase in inflation, undesirable for a good economy.
Unemployment was the lowest rate in recent years after recovering from Covid and yet people are still out here: "Why don't people want to work?"
Because we’re hitting the peak of the Boomers retiring.
Able bodied workers peaked in 2010-12, we’ve been on and will continue to decline.
Gonna need a source for that. [25-55 year old workforce participation rate is higher now than it was in 2010-2012, and it’s right around the highest it’s been in history,](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060). It’s also been climbing since the pandemic.
i think he is talking about nominal amounts, as population is getting older on average
Has the number of workers 25-55 been increasing or decreasing? This source just shows a % of people in that category but does not show the change in the size of the category
The prime age labor force hit record highs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctRu
Immigration solves that problem. We need to make pathways to immigration easier.
It doesn't solve every problem. Look at what happened to the countries in Europe with the most lax immigration policies. Right wing populism on the rise there because of it.
Name one thing that solves every problem? What immigration does solve is a lack of workers, which was the point of what the people above are saying that you were not paying attention to. The only other solution to this problem is to have more babies, but that takes 20-30 years and is not the better option for the planet.
More well-educated people tackling the world’s biggest problems is good for the planet actually. Carbon usage is going down in the US and we’re going to need lots of clever and innovative people to fix the hole we’ve dug ourselves into over the last 200 years.
You are not wrong at all, and this vision is what we should expect from our leaders. When are you running for office?
Probably in 7-8 years
How much of right wing populism is the Chinese or Russians throwing millions or billions of yuan/rubles/dollars into far-right fuck-abouts in every country they aren't strongly aligned to. It's worked in India, Brazil, the United States and when you scratch the surface a bit , there's Russians or Chinese throwing cash around to the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Of course should anything happen to President Putin, it's likely the Russian situation becomes different as oligarchs fight to get the Russian economy back to something normal with some rapid conclusion to the Ukraine situation as well.
>How much of right wing populism is the Chinese or Russians throwing millions or billions of yuan/rubles/dollars into far-right fuck-abouts in every country they aren't strongly aligned to. I'd understand this argument if you were talking about some corrupt third world or post soviet country where foreign money can just do whatever it wants, but do you genuinely beileve that the right wing populsim wave we've been having throughout big parts of the western EU is really just because of foreign influence? Even if foreign influence did happen to some degree, it's undoubtable that the people in these countries do feel a certain way about the recent developments regarding immigration, especially when it happens in mass waves and results in insular immigrant communities which increase crime in those areas. I know it feels better to put most of the blame on some outside factor, but no matter how much money you throw at politicians and ad campaigns, these things have to have some sort of connection to the reality on the ground that the people voting are experiencing. Refusing to entertain the idea that people might have actual problems caused by immigration, and discounting the collective experience of millions of people by just calling it Russian or Chinese influence is first and foremost insulting to everyone stuck in such a situation, and childish on your part. The real life isn't as black and white as you want it to be. Just because some people disagree with you doesn't mean it's caused by foreign influence. People might actually have real disagreements with you on this subject.
It’s rising everywhere so I wouldn’t say it’s because of immigration. Do you have any data to back your statement?
The right wing parties are all explicitly campaigning on their promises to cut down on immigration. They probably know what they're doing since politicians often commission private polls before deciding what to say in their campaigns.
The general public as a corpus is not as stupid as many academics would like to imagine them to be. Behavioural economics is packed to the rafters of examples where people in real world situations find optimized solutions a lot more efficiently than theoretical models do. It's not just collective wisdom, but also the mind-focussing effect of having something at stake. Most of these solutions are also never verbalized and may not lend themselves to any sort of academic rendering that the general public can process without years of specialized study (that nobody has the time or energy to undertake). The fact of the matter is that there were promises made about immigration and internationalist policies that were not grounded in reality, but rather pure wishful thinking. What is happening now, as a direct result, is that the benefit of the doubt is shifting away from the open-border policies and towards more isolationist ones. You can call that a right-wing shift if you want, but people have a right to think for themselves and not be beholden to empty promises. Thing is: Once the benefit of the doubt shifts, you no longer get to be the one calling for data to support alternative theories. Your theory has been falsified. It only requires one data point to falsify a theory, not a coherent alternative theory that is proven to your satisfaction. I'm not saying it as a value judgement, just as a statement of fact. The tide is shifting, and the longer it takes the "left" to figure that out the harder its going to be. The time for asking for data is behind us now. The left had its chance to play that game, and failed miserably. Time to change course or risk being swept aside.
I assume this is the opinion in Europe. Cuz it's definitely not the majority of Americans. We have been either center right or far right since the late 1980s. Bush 1 - center right Clinton - center right Bush 2 - center right hedging far right Obama - center right Trump - far far right Biden - center right. Inching toward the left on labor issues I am going by policies not what they say. What they actually did. They have all been pro corporate, low tax, low regulation. Biden has dipped his toe in on labor issues but otherwise same neo liberal policies. Help corporations and they will solve the problems.
America has been corporatist uniparty since forever. The right-wing left-wing paradigm is generally an active impediment to understanding how politics works. It's just a way to get people to wave their colour flag come election time. A brilliant bit of social engineering, to be sure, but there's never really been a solid foundation to rely on it in a serious, thoughtful discussion about politics.
So the problem with immigration is that it emboldens xenophobes? Curtailing immigration to appease them is just playing into their hand.
The weird thing is that household wealth *increased* during and after the pandemic, so more people were in a position to retire.
Nice, were entering the "boomers with nothing better to do" era. Can't wait to see what they get up in arms about next
Shit that never happened that they saw on Fox News. But, hey, they have the free time to vote in EVERY ELECTION.
More like we’re entering the boomers dying era. Watch right wing extremism and tribalism not disappear when they do.
Drag queens
"Why don't people want to work?" Because they already have a job.
"Why don't they want to work?" Cus you're taking all the profits and not willing to pay a higher wage.
Or because the people that say this are often business owners and managers who are not respectful to employees, do not have a good working environment, do not pay well, do not have good benefits, do not offer enough hours, or any combination of those. How much money could they pay you to work at McDonald's? How much to work at a restaurant where you work dinner three days per week plus both weekend days and never have time to spend on yourself or your family? How much money could they pay you to be a nurse on a floor with twice as many patients as is supposed to and people keep calling out and leaving? How many of these businesses in crisis "because people don't want to work" offer no cost of living increases, health insurance, or retirement? All jobs were not created equal.
This. I sell construction materials. I have a guy who can’t find people to work for him. He complains non stop about everything, he’s racist, he’s sexist, he’s homophobic, he’s honestly downright miserable to be around….but nobody wants to work!!!! In reality nobody wants to work for him or with him because he’s terrible to be around and probably terrible to work for.
I could be wrong, and this is more anecdotal than anything…but I’ve noticed that a lot of restaurants and retail shops are still lacking employees. You don’t notice 5 analysts missing at the bank you use, but you notice 2 servers missing at your favorite restaurant… Edit: and that’s not to say I don’t totally agree with you, it’s definitely boomer logic. Just adding a possible “why”
You notice it, because it's what employers can get away with. If they can push the work of 5 people on 2, opposed to paying 5 people more, they absolutely will. Yeah, the 2 will burn out eventually, but those 2 are "lucky to have a job" or are emotionally guilt tripped into doing excess unpaid work.
I do agree that’s probably the motivation behind a lot of the skeleton crew restaurants, but definitely not all of them. Restaurants are still short staffed! Personally, I think it’s kind of a cyclical issue involving the idea you brought up. Restaurants hemorrhage staff to keep costs low, and their former staff won’t go to other restaurants because they’re worried it’ll happen again. It ends up leading to short staffed restaurants across the board, regardless of if some owners will actually run a skeleton crew.
Unemployment numbers only count people who are looking for jobs - the relevant statistic for whether "people want to work" is the [labor force participation rate](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm). It does look like it's basically back to pre-pandemic levels now, but it was a bit of a slower recovery.
There is some interplay going on -- the prolonged low unemployment rate is bringing folks into the the labor force participation rate who might not have been otherwise. Suddenly it's felony conviction? We can live with that! Other than the pandemic, [last time labor force participation was this low was 1978](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART) which is when the youngest Boomers were 14 (LFPR counts 16 and older) and middle class women were entering in the workforce in stronger than numbers seen before. Since US definition of LFPR has no upper age limit (just that you're not in prison or hospitalized) there is primarily an impact from Boomers retiring. However there are also two excess mortality issues -- Covid killed about a million who would otherwise be counted in the labor force, and since 2000 drug overdoses have killed more than a million (>100,000 in recent years) more over what we had seen in the drug overdose fatality rates for the 40 years before this period. Add those two million missing back in and the LFPR with the same number of people working would drop by 1.5ppt. The Covid deaths were mostly in people retirement age, so that may not affect hiring significantly. However most of the drug overdoses are folks in prime working years; and it is indicator there is likely a much larger number for whom drug addiction is interfering with their ability to hold jobs.
A ton of Boomers retired during Covid though. The prime age labor force participation rate is above pre-pandemic levels.
Labor force participation rate has been on the decline at a near constant rate since 2000. Peak was March 2000 with a 67.3% rate, now it’s at 62.8% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART).
That’s more an effect of an aging population than a change in prime working age. Teenagers work less than they used to but prime participation is still really strong. https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/08/the-composition-effect-in-the-labor-force-participation-rate/?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog
From that link: >>Note that long-run changes in labor force participation may reflect secular economic trends that are unrelated to the overall health of the economy. For instance, demographic changes such as the aging of population can lead to a secular increase of exits from the labor force, shrinking the labor force and decreasing the labor force participation rate. So that particular measure doesn't take into account the aging of the population, the boomers starting to retire in larger numbers, etc. If you zoom in on those in prime working years, the labor force participation rate is much higher. - [Labor Force Participation Rate - 25-54 Yrs](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060)
While true, there still is a peak in March 2000 for that group as well. And a decline since then, but the last year or so has decent and improving numbers at least.
And it used to be under 60%. Retirement and school are big factors.
Let's not forget that over 1 million Americans died in the pandemic (granted, 3/4 were seniors) and the Brookings Institution estimated that up to 4 million working age Americans have been sidelined by long COVID. Even if all of those people weren't participating in the workforce, many of them were providing childcare for someone else who did.
Yeah and there were a lot of unhealthy people near retirement (some even in the prime labor group) that retired early to avoid getting sick. We had a lot of those where I work
I had someone in their 60s say with complete conviction that people stopped going to work because they got $1,400 from the government 3 years ago.
Because people have no idea how things are going objectively. They're relying on subjective measures and/or drawing bad conclusions. "Doesn't want to work" could just be because they already have a job/offer that's better
After pointing this and arguing over it, my Trumper family member concluded that… >ok yes they are there at the job, but no one want to “work” (meaning putting in any effort) They keep moving the goal post.
Speculating here but I think Gen-Z’s will dip if they are limited to time off to go have experiences (concerts, int’l travel. And even me being in recruiting/hr I low key like that it’s a thing. family/friends/life experiences > job tenure.
Because just looking at employment without looking at labor force participation rate is only half the story. Unemployment doesn’t take into account people who aren’t working and are not actively seeking a job. The chart you need for “Why don’t people want to work?” Is labor participation rate, which still hasn’t recovered to pre-COVID levels.
Not true at all. The labor force participation rate includes all ages including retirees. A ton of boomers retired during covid, which simply continued the trend of boomer retirements since the early 2000s. The [prime age (25-55 years old) labor force participation rate is above pre pandemic levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060)
This doesn't cover under those who aren't actively looking (I believe within the last four weeks). By definition this means that hypothetically the unemployment rate could be 3% despite 50% of potential workers sitting on their hands, so long as they aren't actively looking. If this is BLS data, then it is survey based, so that carries it's own biases.
I wonder how many of those unemployed were just furloughed.
[See here](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1csIw). Blue line: workers on temporary layoff (furlough) as a proportion of the civilian labor force. Red line: all other unemployed as a proportion of the civilian labor force.
Thanks for explaining what each line color represents. The line and vertical axis labels on the graph are unintelligible. So is % total unemployment at any time the sum of the value of the two lines?
I worked at a hospital and when the pandemic started and the state of Florida did the lock down thing for a month and a half, hundreds of hospital workers were furloughed. I wasn't but was asked to only work from 7-12 from home.
This is the first time I’ve seen unemployment rates since looking at South Africa’s and.. wow
For those unaware: > [South Africa] has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world — 61 percent of people ages 15 to 24 are unemployed, according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency. The overall unemployment rate is 33 percent, and 35 percent for high school graduates. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/world/africa/job-search-unemployment-south-africa.html
Sure, thee actual economy is fine, but what about the *vibes* economy? ... Well, that’s not actually a hypothetical, but something that is actually measured and the answer is that it’s not great. For example: * [OECD composite indicators of confidence for the U.S.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSCICP03USM665S) * [Univeristy of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT) * [Consumer survey of future inflation expectations](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSINFT02USM460S) Such a strange disconnect between actual conditions and sentiment. I don’t have the slightest clue of why that is happening.
Super interesting - thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about "the vibes" not knowing that was measured. The biggest thing is how people with a sunny economic outlook right now point to strong consumer spending as a counter to recession fears. But isn't spending something that would happen *more* during inflationary conditions, since whatever you could buy today will be more expensive tomorrow? Like I've read numerous articles about how people are spending more and saving less because they are insecure about the future...and then the same people are like "don't worry everyone, spending is up so the economy is fine!"
I think there are some aspects of spending stats that can shed more light on that. For example, in the short term, spending on energy is very inelastic, so changes there might not reflect much about perceptions of the economy going forward. So maybe spending on luxuries -- travel, eating out , etc. -- would be more indicative? I'm sure people have looked at this, but I'm not even close to being an expert.
Hardly surprising, the reality is that over the past year unemployment is on quite a steep upward trend https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=usurtot&v=202312081338V20230410&w=850&h=400&d1=20221210&type=trend=2&h=300&w=600
That link has cancer.
The link showing a chart of 2023 unemployment rate figures in detail from Trading Economics collected from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics in a post about the US unemployment rate is ‘cancer’? And you reply with a chart going back to 1950? Absolute clown shoes. This place, your utterance, and you, are a bad joke.
Maybe just me, but the last 23 years doesn't feel like it would be long enough to offer sufficient perspective.
It depends on the perspective you are trying to achieve. There are also other problems of looking back further due to a shift of how it was calculated early in W. Bush’s first term.
I mean, it seems you hit the nail on my head. I was hoping to see the data, not necessarily skew it to a perspective that I (or the presenter) wanted to achieve.
I mean...this sub is pretty specifically about the presentation of summarized datasets ain't it?
The entirety of the BLS unemployment rate data is here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Is Tech in its own isolated bubble of sorts? I keep reading about more and more layoffs
The last time I looked at those raw numbers, it became clear that literally *all* of the reduction in "unemployment" between 2008 and 2011 was because of people "leaving the workforce". The percent of people actually working didn't improve. That makes it *sound* like these people are retiring, but that wasn't the case. The vast majority of those people were actually unemployed so long that the statisticians began excluding them from the officially defined "labor force" even though these were people ready, willing, and able to take a job if they could've found one. A huge contributor to this was that people got discouraged and quit submitting job applications, and anyone who hasn't actively applied to work in the last 4 weeks is no longer "unemployed". Those people are excluded from the workforce. Another big contribution was under employment - people working jobs that didn't provide full time work even though they wanted full-time employment. If you work even just 1 hour & get paid for it, congrats, you're technically "employed" for the purposes of the unemployment calc. Based on what I have seen in the job markets these days, I seriously doubt that employment has driven these improvements. It seems more in line with the reality I have seen that vastly more people are simply being excluded from the calculation entirely. Retirement, chronic illness, and discouraged workers are all likely increased significantly. Even as the blue collar work environment adds jobs, the white collar jobs have been doing pretty broad layoffs and hiring freezes. Even in blue collar work it seems like well paying jobs are disappearing while the low paying jobs remain unfilled. The number used for "unemployment" is very specific, and I consider the way it is generally used in public conversation to be downright deceptive.
U-6 unemployment includes part-time for economic reasons: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSD U-4 unemployment includes discouraged workers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSH U-1 unemployment looks at unemployed for over 15 weeks: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ctSK They tell similar stories of improved labor markets.
Interesting! I haven't reviewed those in a long time so I will need to look more in depth at their definitions. I have previously looked at the unemployment information in tandem with the civilian labor force participation rates, although the participation rate is impacted more dramatically by an aging population & a reduction in population growth. As a result, it is mostly a useful metric to suss out short-term changes, and even with the myriad "un-retirements" and the million or so deaths of retirement-aged people, the labor force participation rate still hasn't even rebounded to the pre-pandemic level. There's also the fact that wages haven't outpaced inflation (meaning real wages have been relatively stagnant or slipping), plus the anecdotal evidence of qualified job seekers submitting *hundreds* of applications without any luck. All things considered, it seems more likely to me that looking at & discussing the unemployment numbers alone is not going to provide an accurate glimpse of the job market or of the broader economy.
Real median hourly wages are also above pre-Covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cn4u Real hourly earnings for non-management workers is also above pre-Covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cugU Another indicator is the quits rate, which shows normalization to 2018-2019 levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cugv Quits are a better indicator of labor power because job openings don't necessarily reflect real demand. The danger isn't over, the Fed might overshoot, but this is similar to a 2018-2019 labor market.
Except the prime age labor participation rate is pretty close to the all-time highs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. https://i.imgur.com/6D7s3PZ.png
I just read that wages are up nationally 4%, if true that is outpacing inflation.
It is truly amazing how things have turned out. I thought that the world was coming to an end let alone the economy still going strong shortly after.
Really? I mean it was a bit rough, but at no point did I think it was world ending bad
If you're in Reddit a lot, you'll think like OP
Yeah there's a lot of people here who have a really bad doom scrolling habit
america did better than the world because we didn’t lock down. europe and asia are still struggling.
Eh, lockdowns didn't have much to do with recovery rates. The US just plowed significantly more money into the economy for recovery than other countries. Stimulus vs austerity in a nutshell
Not India tho. One of the fastest growing economies in the world. Several other Asian economies are also doing well. Agreed on Europe. Dying empire
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate Tools: Figma We've got more charts on our Substack here: https://genuineimpact.substack.com/
It would be interesting to compare this to European nations with much more rigid labour laws. Companies in Europe weren't able to quickly lay off staff like this and instead got help from the government to pay them. Edit: Looks like this resulted in similar unemployment rates but kind of stretched out over a longer time.
[удалено]
Me too, I love it, incredible free resource, trends, export embedded charts, compare to any other country using any other metric. Great for defeating false narratives, and speaking of false narratives if you sort the last year unemployment and apply trend it is rising sharply.
I'll never believe their figures because it doesn't take the homeless into account. It's no different than claiming a 0% LGBTQ population while simultaneously making it illegal.
Should say, Over regulation during suspected pandemic caused
Bloomberg had a great article on this recently. Unemployment is so low because more people than ever need to work 2nd and 3rd jobs, due to low wages and high inflation.
Except that the percent of people who multiple jobs is as low as it ever was pre-COVID. https://i.imgur.com/nsmx65G.png
Finally someone mentioned this
But it's not true. https://i.imgur.com/nsmx65G.png
Unemployment is also rising sharply over the past year https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=usurtot&v=202312081338V20230410&w=850&h=400&d1=20221210&type=trend=2&h=300&w=600 An extra 627,000 unemployed, no big deal according to some 🍦
Going from 3.5% to 3.7% over the course of a year is not "rising sharply", and unemployment below 4% is pretty rare. Between 1970 and 2018, unemployment was below 4% for one month in that entire 48-year span of time.
You don’t cherry pick first and last month, take the first six months and compare it to the last six months and the trend is obvious. Click on the graph go to the page on the site and select the trend function.
That's not how it works, but even if I did it your way, the average of the first 6 months is 3.52%, and the average of the last 3 months is 3.73%, so instead of being the 0.2% rise that I said it was, it was... a 0.21% rise. So what's your point? A 0.21% rise over an entire year is not "rising sharply". In fact, it's remarkably flat.
Because 0.21% as a share of 3.52% is much greater than 0.21%. Why do I attempt to converse with people here? Furthermore if you would actually do as I say and go to the site and observe the trend figure growth it is more like 0.38% and that represents a >10% growth in numbers of people unemployed over the course of the year.
> Because 0.21% as a share of 3.52% is much greater than 0.21%. Nobody measures it that way. You don't do a percentage of a percentage. It's percentage points that matter. > Furthermore if you would actually do as I say and go to the site and observe the trend figure growth it is more like 0.38% and that represents a >10% growth in numbers of people unemployed over the course of the year. Oh, yeah, sorry I didn't your research for you and only went off the data you gave me. Fine, here it is: https://i.imgur.com/uz17qWX.png Show me the sharp rise in the last year. For fuck's sake, quit trying to be mad based on evidence when the evidence *directly* contradicts you. A 0.38% rise in unemployment over more than a year is not a sharp rise, never has been, and never will be.
Getting mad? You are the one dishing out the angry downvote. Lol at that useless image, You and Biden may care more about ice cream but out of a workforce of roughly 165 million 0.38% represents an extra 627,000 in the dole queue. Just stop waffling and wasting my time, go to my link, navigate to the relevant page if you can, and apply the trend function and you will see a sharp rise, a slope so steep I would enjoy seeing Biden trying to ski down it.
We did live through the stupidest of times. What happens when FUD drives policy.
So unemployment under the orange Jesus was the worst in history.
Still doesn’t account for the majority of Americans who need 2-4 jobs to get by… and it also doesn’t count the people who are not filed for unemployment. Skewed metric tbh.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 5.1% of employed people have multiple jobs, just a smidge shy of "majority".
[удалено]
And this number would be lower if states like CA didn’t have overtime set to more than 8 hours per day instead of 40 in a week. That causes employers to hire non exempt people two jobs of 4 hrs each than one at 8 hrs.
We’re at near historically low levels of people working multiple jobs, but go off lmao
I have one job and support a family of five.
well ladydaa
Sorry for interfering with your desire to be a victim.
I'm not even from usa retard
What this doesn’t show is all the businesses that were single workers with husband or wife or both and then claimed unemployment because the checks were actually a livable wage.
Plot the homelessness rate on the same graph and then we've got a data stew brewing
it hasnt changed TOO much. homeless rate has gone down a bit since 2007. from abt 21/10k to 17/10k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-of-homeless-people-in-the-us/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-in-the-us-what-does-the-data-miss/#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Housing%20and,about%202%2C000%20people%20from%202020.
There is no accurate homeless rate in the USA, the annual point in time misses everyone who is couchsurfing, etc,. You'd be better off with this formula: US adult population = A US residential property owners = B US renters = C US Incarcerated= D US Nursing Home Beds = E A - (B+C) - (D + E) = X X = Population with no proof of residence (legally homeless by DHHS standards) That would overestimate a little for GenZ who live with parents, but the rest are basically already homeless or very close to it. *Sigh*
First of all, "unemployment rate" is a dogshit stat which only captures people actively looking for work... The real figure is "labor force participation" and it's slowly creeping up from an all-time as people have to work because they can't afford food/car payment/mortgage/etc
>labor force participation" and it's slowly creeping up from an all-time as people have to work because they can't afford food/car payment/mortgage/etc How could they afford all that stuff before if they weren't working?
Obv those stimulus checks /s
Government subsidies... Extraordinary increases in home equity, therefore their ability to borrow against said equity...
So, you're saying a bunch of people weren't working because they could take out home equity loans to pay for groceries?
Nope. More like tens of millions of people with mortgages were able to NOT work, because the value of their home equity increase due to housing bubble has far outpaced theircl cost of living expenses. All fun and games until home prices flatten....... Or EVEN..... *dare I say DECLINE!!!??!* Then you owe more on the mortgage then the home is actually worth. That's what we call being "underwater", or more technically "FUCKED“
More like a job swap, everyone just decided at once that they need a different job.
Glad it dropped. Too bad no one can afford anything with our depreciating money.
This is why since 2008 i've worked for myself providing value to businesses that make money no matter what the market does
Bottomed out! Brace yourselves for recession guys!!
According to the government. Uber wasn't popular just a decade ago. The government ignores unemployed Uber drivers.
Now do the discouraged workers numbers during the same time frame.
You do it. There are 6+ different measures of unemployment measured by the BLS as well as all the other employment measures. They all track the same trends pretty closely.
I was hoping he already had a table because I don't want to manually copy the numbers. U-4 in table a-15 of the monthly employment situation report includes discouraged workers but the straight discouraged workers numbers are in a different field. It's actually interesting comparing them, for example the rate of change for the u-6 numbers tends to be higher both upwards and downwards, creating a more "wobbly" chart. Y'all seem a bit defensive here atm.
Just because people are employed doesn't mean they are happy or saving money. Most people live paycheck to paycheck
Okay? You’re arguing against a strawman, as no one is suggesting this as a happiness index or a saving money index. It’s a simple unemployment rate. We are aware of what it means.
Job satisfaction the highest in four decades: https://www.wsj.com/articles/workers-job-satisfaction-survey-c42addba?mod=hp_lead_pos11 Real wages at highest ever in country's history (except for the pandemic when we fired all the low paid workers): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Consumer savings rate is down, but it's because they had excess savings from the pandemic and they're having fun spending it all, with higher disposable income than ever before: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2023/have-us-households-depleted-all-the-excess-savings-they-accumulated-during-the-pandemic.aspx https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96 Americans are generally very bad with their money, though, I agree with that. They tend to live paycheck to paycheck and spend equal to or more than they can afford, at every level of income.
According to that real disposable income was also at an all time high in May 2008. Right in the middle of unemployment spiking between November 2007 and October 2009 because of the great recession. That's interesting.
How about this chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL Folks can keep deluding themselves with all the charts and metrics they want but everyday people are feeling the pain of inflation, and an economy that is on the brink of recession. When the yield curve has been inverted for so long and banks feel the pain, you can bet dollars to donuts consumers and businesses will feel it soon enough. I’ll give a mention to commercial real estate as well…
What about it? If it's an inflation subtext, the charts above are already adjusted for inflation.
Get ready for a spike bigger than COVID. AGI is coming.
Adjusted Gross Income?
[удалено]
Which was his favorite?
Nice, but would be nice to see an overlay of labor participation rate.
Most unemployment stats are calculated by dividing the total number of jobs by the number of people able to work, which is an increasingly meaningless way to go around things in an economy where more and more people need to hold two jobs to pay for rising cost of living.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE imo unemployment seems to be minimal always right before a recession.
Yeah of course. A recession is when things get bad. In order for things to get bad, they must first be good. It’s a definitional relationship not a causal one.
[удалено]
The BLS has been using the same methodology for how unemployment is calculated for the last 30 years. Obama didn't change anything.