7 ms·

The New Face of American Unemployment

86 points by edward 10y ago

drpgq 10y ago
"Nearly half of U.S. children now have at least one parent with a criminal record." That's somewhat dystopian.
- donald123 10y ago
  Here is the link of the report referenced in the article. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/12/10/126902/removing-barriers-to-opportunity-for-parents-with-criminal-records-and-their-children/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015...
- chucknelson 10y ago
  Definitely, but they keep it pretty vague. I'm assuming they're not just counting felonies, but also maybe someone who had some minor incident when they were a teenager. I could see a lot of parents having some stupid minor on their record from when they were a bit more reckless.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Most crimes committed by minors in the US are expunged from their records when they come of age.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      I believe you're slightly misreading chucknelson. I don't think he said "minor" to mean "underage", but rather "not felony". ("Minor" may have a distinct meaning from "misdemeanor", but IANAL.) And unfortunately, teenage bad judgment doesn't automatically end on the 18th birthday...
      - sp332 10y ago
        If the crime was committed when they were 13-17, it would usually be erased when the person turns 18. And then it wouldn't show up in any studies.
- watty 10y ago
  They're including everything from traffic violations to felonies. I guess it wouldn't be as interesting of a statistic if they explained what it actually was.
  - jweir 10y ago
    > between 70 million and 100 million Americans, or as many as one in three American adults—have some type of criminal record. Many have been convicted of only minor offenses, such as misdemeanors—and many only have arrests that never led to a conviction. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/12/10/126902/removing-barriers-to-opportunity-for-parents-with-criminal-records-and-their-children/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015... This is the source of the stat.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Traffic violations now count as "criminal record"? According to what definition of "criminal"? I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is so intuitively wrong that I wonder if you (or the article) is using a non-standard definition of "criminal". If not, is this a change? Has it always been defined this way?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - amyjess 10y ago
      Two thoughts: 1. I guess this is the origin of "lies, damn lies, and statistics". You can manipulate statistics to paint any picture you want, really. 2. They're probably pulling the information from the number of people who have an FBI number or an SID number. You get one of those if you've ever been so much as charged, regardless of whether or not you get convicted. Here's an example of a source that cares whether or not you even have such a number: when I legally changed my name a few years ago, my court petition had a section that said "Have you ever been charged with a Class A or B misdemeanor or a felony? [] Yes [] No. If yes -- write your FBI or SID numbers, if known: FBI #_______ SID#_______"
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Has anyone advocated, in states where the war on drugs is receding, retroactively sealing (and banning discrimination based) nonviolent drug offenders' records?
  - dsg42 10y ago
    Yes, although advocacy has been much broader than that. It's generally called, "Ban the Box," (for the checkbox asking about recent felony convictions you often see on job applications). Perhaps it would be more successful if it were more targeted. That's an interesting thought.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      No, "ban the box" is not about sealing records, or even prohibiting background checks, it simply is about prohibiting "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" (which is not restricted to either recent or felony convictions) as a front-end filtering question.
- tomcam 10y ago
  It's also untrue.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  One of the fun side effects of living in a country with the highest number of prisoners (by total count and per capita) in the world. "For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them." - Thomas More
- senorjazz 10y ago
  really? Surely not. I hope not
lgleason 10y ago
Note one of the white elephants in the room. Ageism.
- dimgl 10y ago
  Scares the hell out of me to be frank...
  - city41 10y ago
    Scares the hell out of me too. I think the ageism problem will eventually get solved. But my concern is will it get solved in time for me? In the meantime, I try to think up things I can do to combat it and I pretty much completely draw blanks. I'm seriously considering exploring small bootstrapped start ups in my free time for no other reason than to hopefully have an income stream I can use should I find myself out of a job due to age.
- brightsize 10y ago
  Yeah, one of these stories is not like the others. '“It just kills me to sit here, and not work, and have the abilities that I do,” he said. “I call it a rainy day that turned into a rainy month that turned into a rainy year.”' He's in Buffalo (NY presumably), not exactly Smalltown. Based on the calls/callbacks he says he's getting, there are employers that are looking for people with his skills ... who are young.
Animats 10y ago
The manager of the wire mill in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania (pop. 4200 and dropping, 98% white, median income $32K, "archetypal Rust Belt town") says “We’ll just about hire anybody that we can get our hands on if the person comes in drug-free and they show up for work on time.” They still have problems finding people. Who would move there? This is the plight of small-town America.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.
  - eropple 10y ago
    "Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it." It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows. The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else. (Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)
    - wlesieutre 10y ago
      > People aren't spherical cows. And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
theptip 10y ago
The first chart is a good example of why a pie chart is usually not the correct choice for data visualization. Pie charts are usually quite hard to read, but this one is particularly bad as it has an animation looping through different years' data; it's impossible to discern the actual trends at a glance. Much better would be a simple line graph with the trends for each series. More fancy, and perhaps a slightly better way to emphasize the narrative of the article, would be plotting the relative change from the first year (2007) for each series.
- danthemanvsqz 10y ago
  +1 I was thinking the same thing myself. Pie charts are for elementary school kids.
vinhboy 10y ago
I don't understand. Are those five stories suppose to be representative of today's unemployment problems? Because if they are. We need more social programs to help these people. Not more "job creators".
- rhizome 10y ago
  Social programs don't make campaign donations.
- sp332 10y ago
  Social programs aren't self-sustaining. You can't count on them to exist for longer than an election cycle. Setting up some businesses would make a medium-to-long term difference, and people wouldn't have to constantly worry about their benefits being cut. Edit: I don't mean that concentrating capital and picking winners is good either. Helping individuals start their own small businesses would be better, and it would probably lead to less inequality than dumping cash into a single big "job-creating"... thing.
  - pm90 10y ago
    This is exactly right. I would also add that culturally, living on "benefits" is highly frowned upon in American society today so this probably has psychological effects on the recipients as well. Conversely, the ability to get a job and keep it is the source of much pride and admiration.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
1: Single-payer health care. Employer health care is a huge headache for any company that wants to scale. The costs are also too high for individuals and it depresses the economy as a whole. This really should be a no-brainer. 2: Bring back the WPA. Dismantling it was one of the biggest stupid mistakes in American history. Just pay people to show up and work. It doesn't matter if a private contractor is more efficient or if the work can be done more effectively with expensive machines, just pay people to show up and work. Here in Ithaca, NY, many of our beautiful gorge trails were built under the WPA. They have lasted for nearly 100 years, and aside from the occasional falling rock landslide, I bet they could last for 100 more. I don't know about you, but I would be far more comfortable with the idea of starting companies if my backup plan included a state guarantee of work and health care. I may be a software developer but nobody is above picking up a shovel and doing honest work for honest pay.
- pnathan 10y ago
  I would like to see the WPA redone - we have a lot of infrastructure to work on - the American Civil Engineering Society gives the US a D+ grade on our infrastructure (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/). Since it's a public benefit, having people in public service to do that would be pretty grand.
467568985476 10y ago
My heart is broken by individual stories like this one, but I have a hard time sympathizing with these overwhelmingly conservative areas who lectured us "tax and spend liberals" about welfare queens and bootstraps when times were good for them. They were offered retraining and reeducation by the Clinton campaign and overwhelmingly rejected it. I'm happy to help these net-entitlement-consumers via my taxes, but their plight is hardly a priority given that they seem to have no interest in taking proactive steps to fix it.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Funny - I have much the same feelings as you, but I believe in individual guilt rather than collective. If an individual human doesn't seek work, does lots of oxy/other drugs [1], and refuses to do work that Mexicans are happy to do, I similarly don't consider their plight a priority. I hold this view regardless of who demographically similar people voted for. I'm curious why are your sympathies based on collectivist voting habits rather than individual behaviors. To me that's just such a strange way to view things. [1] I recently learned that approximately half of the male leisure class take pain medication daily, and they mostly just sit around watching TV and playing video games. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
- mythrwy 10y ago
  Possibly these people don't want help and retraining from the Clinton campaign. What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again. Will this happen? And if it does will they be able to step in and fill the jobs? I'm not confident but I think that's what is desired. Not government programs.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again. No, what they want is time to rewind to where it was when they were doing well. They've been sold the lie that immigration restrictions and tariffs will achieve (or at least approximate) that. > Will this happen? No. In fact, rising tariffs will (indirectly) make their labor worth less.
AKifer 10y ago
Seen from that optics, the war on drugs makes all its' sense.

86 points by edward 10y ago

drpgq 10y ago

"Nearly half of U.S. children now have at least one parent with a criminal record." That's somewhat dystopian.

donald123 10y ago
Here is the link of the report referenced in the article. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/12/10/126902/removing-barriers-to-opportunity-for-parents-with-criminal-records-and-their-children/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015...
chucknelson 10y ago
Definitely, but they keep it pretty vague. I'm assuming they're not just counting felonies, but also maybe someone who had some minor incident when they were a teenager. I could see a lot of parents having some stupid minor on their record from when they were a bit more reckless.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Most crimes committed by minors in the US are expunged from their records when they come of age.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    I believe you're slightly misreading chucknelson. I don't think he said "minor" to mean "underage", but rather "not felony". ("Minor" may have a distinct meaning from "misdemeanor", but IANAL.) And unfortunately, teenage bad judgment doesn't automatically end on the 18th birthday...
    - sp332 10y ago
      If the crime was committed when they were 13-17, it would usually be erased when the person turns 18. And then it wouldn't show up in any studies.
watty 10y ago
They're including everything from traffic violations to felonies. I guess it wouldn't be as interesting of a statistic if they explained what it actually was.
- jweir 10y ago
  > between 70 million and 100 million Americans, or as many as one in three American adults—have some type of criminal record. Many have been convicted of only minor offenses, such as misdemeanors—and many only have arrests that never led to a conviction. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/12/10/126902/removing-barriers-to-opportunity-for-parents-with-criminal-records-and-their-children/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015... This is the source of the stat.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Traffic violations now count as "criminal record"? According to what definition of "criminal"? I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is so intuitively wrong that I wonder if you (or the article) is using a non-standard definition of "criminal". If not, is this a change? Has it always been defined this way?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Two thoughts: 1. I guess this is the origin of "lies, damn lies, and statistics". You can manipulate statistics to paint any picture you want, really. 2. They're probably pulling the information from the number of people who have an FBI number or an SID number. You get one of those if you've ever been so much as charged, regardless of whether or not you get convicted. Here's an example of a source that cares whether or not you even have such a number: when I legally changed my name a few years ago, my court petition had a section that said "Have you ever been charged with a Class A or B misdemeanor or a felony? [] Yes [] No. If yes -- write your FBI or SID numbers, if known: FBI #_______ SID#_______"
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Has anyone advocated, in states where the war on drugs is receding, retroactively sealing (and banning discrimination based) nonviolent drug offenders' records?
- dsg42 10y ago
  Yes, although advocacy has been much broader than that. It's generally called, "Ban the Box," (for the checkbox asking about recent felony convictions you often see on job applications). Perhaps it would be more successful if it were more targeted. That's an interesting thought.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    No, "ban the box" is not about sealing records, or even prohibiting background checks, it simply is about prohibiting "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" (which is not restricted to either recent or felony convictions) as a front-end filtering question.
tomcam 10y ago
It's also untrue.
knieveltech 10y ago
One of the fun side effects of living in a country with the highest number of prisoners (by total count and per capita) in the world. "For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them." - Thomas More
senorjazz 10y ago
really? Surely not. I hope not

lgleason 10y ago

Note one of the white elephants in the room. Ageism.

dimgl 10y ago
Scares the hell out of me to be frank...
- city41 10y ago
  Scares the hell out of me too. I think the ageism problem will eventually get solved. But my concern is will it get solved in time for me? In the meantime, I try to think up things I can do to combat it and I pretty much completely draw blanks. I'm seriously considering exploring small bootstrapped start ups in my free time for no other reason than to hopefully have an income stream I can use should I find myself out of a job due to age.
brightsize 10y ago
Yeah, one of these stories is not like the others. '“It just kills me to sit here, and not work, and have the abilities that I do,” he said. “I call it a rainy day that turned into a rainy month that turned into a rainy year.”' He's in Buffalo (NY presumably), not exactly Smalltown. Based on the calls/callbacks he says he's getting, there are employers that are looking for people with his skills ... who are young.

Animats 10y ago

The manager of the wire mill in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania (pop. 4200 and dropping, 98% white, median income $32K, "archetypal Rust Belt town") says “We’ll just about hire anybody that we can get our hands on if the person comes in drug-free and they show up for work on time.” They still have problems finding people. Who would move there? This is the plight of small-town America.

throw_away_777 10y ago
Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.
- eropple 10y ago
  "Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it." It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows. The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else. (Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    > People aren't spherical cows. And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

theptip 10y ago

The first chart is a good example of why a pie chart is usually not the correct choice for data visualization. Pie charts are usually quite hard to read, but this one is particularly bad as it has an animation looping through different years' data; it's impossible to discern the actual trends at a glance. Much better would be a simple line graph with the trends for each series. More fancy, and perhaps a slightly better way to emphasize the narrative of the article, would be plotting the relative change from the first year (2007) for each series.

danthemanvsqz 10y ago
+1 I was thinking the same thing myself. Pie charts are for elementary school kids.

vinhboy 10y ago

I don't understand. Are those five stories suppose to be representative of today's unemployment problems? Because if they are. We need more social programs to help these people. Not more "job creators".

rhizome 10y ago
Social programs don't make campaign donations.
sp332 10y ago
Social programs aren't self-sustaining. You can't count on them to exist for longer than an election cycle. Setting up some businesses would make a medium-to-long term difference, and people wouldn't have to constantly worry about their benefits being cut. Edit: I don't mean that concentrating capital and picking winners is good either. Helping individuals start their own small businesses would be better, and it would probably lead to less inequality than dumping cash into a single big "job-creating"... thing.
- pm90 10y ago
  This is exactly right. I would also add that culturally, living on "benefits" is highly frowned upon in American society today so this probably has psychological effects on the recipients as well. Conversely, the ability to get a job and keep it is the source of much pride and admiration.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

1: Single-payer health care. Employer health care is a huge headache for any company that wants to scale. The costs are also too high for individuals and it depresses the economy as a whole. This really should be a no-brainer. 2: Bring back the WPA. Dismantling it was one of the biggest stupid mistakes in American history. Just pay people to show up and work. It doesn't matter if a private contractor is more efficient or if the work can be done more effectively with expensive machines, just pay people to show up and work. Here in Ithaca, NY, many of our beautiful gorge trails were built under the WPA. They have lasted for nearly 100 years, and aside from the occasional falling rock landslide, I bet they could last for 100 more. I don't know about you, but I would be far more comfortable with the idea of starting companies if my backup plan included a state guarantee of work and health care. I may be a software developer but nobody is above picking up a shovel and doing honest work for honest pay.

pnathan 10y ago
I would like to see the WPA redone - we have a lot of infrastructure to work on - the American Civil Engineering Society gives the US a D+ grade on our infrastructure (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/). Since it's a public benefit, having people in public service to do that would be pretty grand.

467568985476 10y ago

My heart is broken by individual stories like this one, but I have a hard time sympathizing with these overwhelmingly conservative areas who lectured us "tax and spend liberals" about welfare queens and bootstraps when times were good for them. They were offered retraining and reeducation by the Clinton campaign and overwhelmingly rejected it. I'm happy to help these net-entitlement-consumers via my taxes, but their plight is hardly a priority given that they seem to have no interest in taking proactive steps to fix it.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Funny - I have much the same feelings as you, but I believe in individual guilt rather than collective. If an individual human doesn't seek work, does lots of oxy/other drugs [1], and refuses to do work that Mexicans are happy to do, I similarly don't consider their plight a priority. I hold this view regardless of who demographically similar people voted for. I'm curious why are your sympathies based on collectivist voting habits rather than individual behaviors. To me that's just such a strange way to view things. [1] I recently learned that approximately half of the male leisure class take pain medication daily, and they mostly just sit around watching TV and playing video games. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
mythrwy 10y ago
Possibly these people don't want help and retraining from the Clinton campaign. What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again. Will this happen? And if it does will they be able to step in and fill the jobs? I'm not confident but I think that's what is desired. Not government programs.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again. No, what they want is time to rewind to where it was when they were doing well. They've been sold the lie that immigration restrictions and tariffs will achieve (or at least approximate) that. > Will this happen? No. In fact, rising tariffs will (indirectly) make their labor worth less.

AKifer 10y ago

Seen from that optics, the war on drugs makes all its' sense.