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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

• api 7y ago
  Maybe aggregate salary would be a much better measure than unemployment
• rasengan 7y ago
  Unemployment only measures persons in the workforce, not those who never had a job. Thus, the stats are further less rosy.
  • mrep 7y ago
    That is why we also track the labor force participation rate [0]. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
    • the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
      Unfortunately I don't think that number is saying much either because it does not track well why people are not participating.
    • qeternity 7y ago
      I can’t tell from your comment but I’m not sure this is what you expect. This is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated) estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.
      • paulsutter 7y ago
        Participation rate is not politically motivated, but citing it can be. This was widely cited by the right during the Obama administration and now by the left during the Trump administration.
        • datashow 7y ago
          Is the left citing labor participation rate during the Trump administration? This is strange, because the labor participation rate is recovering since Trump elected.
          • wavefunction 7y ago
            >the left I will indulge you, though I doubt my points will perhaps provide any clarity to your understanding of the situation. Trump has undertaken many efforts that will force the impoverished and disabled into the McJobs creation that Trump is so proud of during his tenure. The Trump administration has cut benefits programs that our society's most vulnerable rely upon, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)[0][1] or Meals on Wheels[2] and reduced the number of people qualifying for disability benefits.[3] Trump's plans for 2020 and beyond look to go even farther[4] in targeting the elderly, the disabled and children. [0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/21/trump-food-stamps-cut-snap-benefits-more-hungry-americans/2710146001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/21/trump-... [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/04/trump-administration-tightens-work-requirements-snap-which-could-cut-hundreds-thousands-food-stamps/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/04/trump-adm... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/02/14/what-trumps-budget-would-mean-for-seniors/#34ce139f58cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/02/14/what-... [3]https://www.thenation.com/article/chained-cpi-poverty-score/ https://www.thenation.com/article/chained-cpi-poverty-score/ [4]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/12/18260271/trump-medicaid-social-security-medicare-budget-cuts https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/12/18260271/t...
      • datashow 7y ago
        I have never heard of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics being politically motivated. This is a very new accusation. Do you have any reference?
        • dredmorbius 7y ago
          The notion that unemployment (or other economic) statistics are manipulated is neither novel nor confined to the US specifically. Whether it's generally accurate is another question. But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up multiple discussions: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=unemployment+statistics+%28manipulated%7Cmanipulation%7Cmanipulating%29&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une... I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is so common as to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either. My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.
          • wolf550e 7y ago
            There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they don't get disability, for same medical issue. People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.
• stopads 7y ago
  I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something, anything that was an actual real new product or service. We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.
  • HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    ...username checks out...
  • mlurp 7y ago
    I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that... bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human effort is going into that.
    • stopads 7y ago
      I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful. Not so exciting after all.
• boyadjian 7y ago
  I do not agree with that, having a job is always a good thing for mental health. It is always better than staying at home doing nothing.
  • missingpint 7y ago
    Having work one finds valuable is. Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell. Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans. IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker. You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire. On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes. Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.
    • molteanu 7y ago
      "In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."
• calimac 7y ago
  Sloppy data used to form their position in the article.
• ausjke 7y ago
  Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the society.
  • steve-benjamins 7y ago
    Have you been a jobless adult or on food stamps?
    • throw0x1away 7y ago
      Are you saying that it's better to be on food-stamps than having a "low-paying" job? You are part of the problem. This mentality is extremely harmful for society as a whole, as well as for individual taxpayers.
      • werber 7y ago
        Having a low paying job and being on food stamps is a necessity for a lot of people
  • wycy 7y ago
    Not always. Being in one of these low end jobs tends to beget staying in that low end job longer, making it more difficult to have the time to invest in getting a better job. Numerous studies have shown that giving people a bigger safety net may make them stay unemployed longer, but when they do get a job they end up making much more money and being happier overall.
    • seibelj 7y ago
      You are thinking of people who go to college or get some sort of official training. However, the best way to earn more money is to get on the job ladder and start learning skills. Once you have some experience it’s far easier to earn more. Putting people on welfare doesn’t help people learn skills.
• aldoushuxley001 7y ago
  Similarly, minimum wage isn’t worth much if there’s high unemployment
  • throw0x1away 7y ago
    minimum wage isn’t worth much. period. These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries. Minimum wage should be abolished.
    • jfk13 7y ago
      "The market" is not some all-powerful, benevolent force that will always achieve the best outcome for humanity or society as a whole. Markets are disproportionately controlled by the current holders of wealth (and therefore power), who will naturally tend to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. And so some kinds of regulation are often appropriate to protect the less powerful participants.
      • throw0x1away 7y ago
        free market IS all-powerful. times change, technological progress moves forward, financial powers rise and fall, it's natural, it's evolution, a chaos controlled by the market (and not by the billionaires, it's not Russia). If you interfere, you are making things worse, delaying the inevitable, promoting dependence, killing individuality (or even progress).
        • SeanBoocock 7y ago
          The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the “free market” and I don’t understand reactions to market failures that amount to “Well we can’t do anything about that”. Of course we can, it exists for us, not the other way around.
• jkoudys 7y ago
  America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.
  • k33n 7y ago
    I don't think it's terribly strange to view lower unemployment numbers as something to strive for. The idea that I might not need a job (when I haven't accumulated the resources to support myself without one) is totally foreign to me, and not attractive at all. I grew tremendously as a person working jobs I didn't enjoy. I only work on what I want to now, and I couldn't imagine I'd be very satisfied with my life I didn't navigate to this position through hard work.
    • burkaman 7y ago
      Do you think it's possible to work hard at something you enjoy?
      • mamon 7y ago
        It is possible, but it is also quite rare, and usually happens for higly paid, white collar jobs. I'm yet to meet, say, trash pickup guy that enjoys his job. EDIT: to clarify - it's not that I look down on any jobs. Trash pickup is very much needed profession. What I'm saying is: Let's say person wins a lottery and suddenly has all the money they need for the rest of their lives. I can imagine that many software developers will still continue to program, writers or musicians would continue writing novels or songs, but I'm pretty sure noone would voluntarily continue their trash pickup work.
        • sokoloff 7y ago
          I know plenty of tradespeople who enjoy their work and find value and some fulfillment in what they do. Do they love it like I love programming? Maybe; maybe not, but it seems possible.
• ikeboy 7y ago
  >In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year. Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that. They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group. I clicked through to https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wage-work-is-more-pervasive-than-you-think-and-there-arent-enough-good-jobs-to-go-around/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag..., which linked me to https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workforce/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor..., which says the definition is on page 5 of https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201911_Brookings-Metro_low-wage-workforce_Ross-Bateman.pdf#page=5 https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201911_.... It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition: > While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so. ... > The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif. They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever. Moving on: >However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on. If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect. >Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed. For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them: >After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent. Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades" The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.
• dvduval 7y ago
  In this global economy, much depends on the quality of education/training our workers are getting compared with other countries. In many cases, there are better educated workers elsewhere. It is not clear to me what the US is doing to stay competitive. Sure, we have top tier universities, but below this level, I think we are getting beat.
• toohotatopic 7y ago
  >53 million people earn low wages, with a median of just $10.22 per hour. That’s nearly half of the 18 to 64 workforce. 10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too. It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all. Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods. *edit: To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
  • MH15 7y ago
    Doubling the minimum wage does not cause costs to double. This is a very flawed analysis- the minimum wage doesn't affect the entire population (less than half!) so raising that wage only raises the costs of things a small, proportional factor, if at all. I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far too often.
    • toohotatopic 7y ago
      You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply cost more because they are able to spend the money. This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value. Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it. Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods. I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.
• seibelj 7y ago
  People need to get that first job. That first job leads to skills, experience, knowledge of how to interact with coworkers, and so on. Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid. This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market. I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.
  • dfilppi 7y ago
    The minimum wage is zero, and always will be.
  • hellllllllooo 7y ago
    The article is saying unemployment is very low so your point doesn't stand. The minimum wage isn't hurting employment. What's hurting people are the low wages.
  • sdinsn 7y ago
    > Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid. This is false. The US ranks very poorly for economic mobility- in fact, even 3rd world countries like Pakistan rank higher.
• kornakiewicz 7y ago
  I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system. In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.
  • Frost1x 7y ago
    Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you? This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.
    • kornakiewicz 7y ago
      Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.
      • sokoloff 7y ago
        There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.
        • sneak 7y ago
          It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.
          • 7y ago
• supernova87a 7y ago
  I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?
  • orangecat 7y ago
    Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills? A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
    • maratd 7y ago
      To add to this, only those who are actively seeking work and are not employed, are considered unemployed. A retired person (or a person who has given up looking for work) is not counted as unemployed, but will be counted once employed.
    • arcticbull 7y ago
      I think they meant if lots of them were doing it, not just one, in which case the denominator would go up, well, a lot. I think this was also an example of a hypothesis: Why have people doing crap jobs that are better automated just because they can’t afford to live otherwise? The system is broken, in that we need to better support the folks on the fringes so we can just automate away a lot of mindless, repetitive boring work. The remaining jobs can pay well, and we can stop benchmarking the economy of how many people we put to work regardless of the meaningfulness of what they’re doing. Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.
• Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and irregular), education, and childcare. If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people. If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.
  • pytester 7y ago
    It would still make these things more affordable. And, save perhaps childcare, increasing the cost of low waged labor would not have an outsized inflationary effect on them. Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.
    • dfilppi 7y ago
      Untaxed? Where? Got the car gassed up.
      • pytester 7y ago
        Untaxed as a verb. E.g. California reducing property taxes to absurdly low levels with prop 13, diverting the spoils of the land to the owners instead (in the form of ridiculously high valuations and streams of rental income).
      • Agathos 7y ago
        If it's a DeLorean, just head back to 1978 when Proposition 13 passed in California.
    • Ozzie_osman 7y ago
      Wouldn't be the opposite? Supply-constrained, limited housing. Everyone is suddenly twice as rich competing for the same fixed number of units. Price has to go up.
• howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
  Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated. I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.
  • rexreed 7y ago
    Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment market for such service, which motivates employers to seek higher productivity and automation rather than increase wages, which furthers the cycle above.
    • GrinningFool 7y ago
      These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.
      • rexreed 7y ago
        In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be "subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.
  • HarryHirsch 7y ago
• jnordwick 7y ago
  This is based off of 2016 data and an self admitted overly expansive view of what the proper cohort is. (eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers). All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period. edits: strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results. And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much. Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy. Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• rexreed 7y ago
  I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity. I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI. For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well. For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity. In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system. This is just food for thought.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • maxerickson 7y ago
    The typical low wage job is meant to (using your term) build wealth for the employer.
    • rexreed 7y ago
      That is often the case. The function of the low wage job is for the benefit of the employer, not the employee. The function of UBI is neither to build wealth for the individual nor the economy as a whole. Wealth still becomes concentrated with the smaller pool of individuals in control of resources and means of production.
• dfilppi 7y ago
  Since employment is tied to not starving, I'd say its worth a fair amount.
  • wavefunction 7y ago
    Very tenuously tied to not starving. There are plenty of working-class people who have to avail themselves of community food pantries and at least in my large city the homeless have access to three meals a day. And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly low standard.
  • sdinsn 7y ago
    Not really, since you are counted as "employed" if you work 1 paid hour per pay period.
• fredgrott 7y ago
  we have a problem world wide When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of high costs of rent or homeownership. Its not going away and its going to get worse.
• gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  I tend to think work gives some sense of purpose to a person’s life. That’s incalculably valuable.
  • pytester 7y ago
    This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more. While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.
    • retrac 7y ago
      Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the market and so is not compensated. Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc. There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.
      • opportune 7y ago
        Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth. For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off? Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.
  • decebalus1 7y ago
    That's mostly the work that you want to do. The work you must do when being forced by economic factors, especially the extra job one might take in order to make ends meet, gives a sense of dread to a person's life. We can talk about a sense of purpose when people are more-or-less financially stable (at least nothing threatening their first level in Maslow's pyramid) and they get to pick whatever they get to work on. But when you're one step away from homelessness, the sense of purpose and the value derived from that takes the backseat.
• esotericn 7y ago
  Aren't all of these metrics that try to capture the bottom end inherently flawed because we don't know what an acceptable "minimum standard" for a long term job is? For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at >30% or so. It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a family should be possible.
• rayiner 7y ago
  > Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many regions. It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.
  • akvadrako 7y ago
    Even if it’s not a public school they mostly get government guaranteed loans.
  • opportune 7y ago
    If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost + state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California). These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.
    • GarrisonPrime 7y ago
      How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free? This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.
      • opportune 7y ago
        Well in the example I provided, state money only amounted to a 28% subsidy (assuming if the state funding were cut, the only way to raise as much money would be to raise tuition+fees). Doesn't seem effectively free to me. Keep in mind I was replying to a critique of "Education and health care are out of reach for many" which obviously implies higher education
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions. This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment. I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless. Due to so-called identity politics, if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all. I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows. Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive. But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to work at all. I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don't work that much. I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem. Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were poor by the standards of less developed countries like India. Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible to articulate. I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more. When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it. I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons. I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more. Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty. I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh especially heavily on the lower classes who have less money. But I am less convinced that the trend of low paid work, whether from jobs or gig work, is really some kind of evil, malicious, abusive trend where rich people are being intentionally awful to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. I think it's far more complicated than that and I don't think it gets acknowledged at all. I don't think we are even discussing that angle, in part because no one wants to suggest that poverty isn't really a problem or be accused of implying such by wondering out loud about some of this stuff. I can afford to occasionally comment on it because I'm already a social outcast that everyone thinks is crazy. I'm not risking that much. But anyone with any kind of "nice life" and decent reputation either has zero idea how the other half lives or has no real choice but to keep such thoughts private lest they be accused of being up to something nefarious.
• ThomPete 7y ago
  While true it's important to point out that salaries are rising and most for the lowest income. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-second-quarter-2019-accelerated-to-4-percent-over-the-year-300890012.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-wage-increases-fueling-faster-wage-growth-those-bottom/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...
• jeffdavis 7y ago
  It's worth discussing subgroups. An unemployment rate of 5% is probably fine if it is uniformly distributed; but we know it's not. Some subgroups, like minorities and young adults, have been plagued by much higher numbers which are a problem. Someone who can't get a foothold in the job market will likely have lifelong challenges. A rate of 3.5% almost certainly mean improvement for these subgroups.
• chadlavi 7y ago
  When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single unskilled labor job, unemployment numbers meant something. Today they mean nothing. A measure of how many households live above the poverty line would be a step in the right direction, but also frankly the poverty line in America is set too low. People 10% above it are still too poor to live comfortably on their income.
  • LorenPechtel 7y ago
    That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.
    • ghastmaster 7y ago
      Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business. It is riskier to hire and fire than it is to not hire. The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot! The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.
      • tryptophan 7y ago
        >The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964. Well this is certainly an interesting take of the situation.
        • ghastmaster 7y ago
          I should have phrased that differently. While it is still my opinion, in this context I should have phrased it: "The worst thing to happen to minority employment..." While your comment does not add much to the conversation, I appreciate your skills in ambiguity.
• wufufufu 7y ago
  I hear agreement that the economy is good, but also that jobs are paying less for more work and that income inequality is larger than ever. At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding. I feel like I'm missing something about the real condition of the economy...
  • trentnix 7y ago
    Politics infests everything, so inevitably all economic news is propaganda to be twisted however is deemed appropriate. When unemployment is high, the house organs lament the poor people out of work. When unemployment is low, the house organs lament that it’s the wrong kind of employment. And always, the problems can be solved with putting my candidate in charge with access to a lot of other people’s money.
    • Twixes 7y ago
      Well, maybe it's just that these are actual problems felt by many people and things need to be done about them. The problem is, rarely are things actually done (say, about housing affordability, healthcare accessibility or economic inequality), mostly because doing things endangers interests of privileged groups (property owners, the insurance industry, executives etc.)
  • simple_phrases 7y ago
    > At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding That's because the US housing market is open to the richest people around the world who are looking for a place to store value. US property rights protect value better than property rights in China.
  • resfirestar 7y ago
    Everyone has an agenda but be especially careful of real estate as an economic barometer. There’s so much speculation going on that the level of distortion can often seem criminal in retrospect. A recent example: Manhattan developers seem to be keeping thousands of new, unsold condos off the market. I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine why. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan-s-flood-of-new-condos-could-take-six-years-to-sell https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan...
• mxschumacher 7y ago
  In reference to those low-paying retail jobs: I have done some research on large US retailers like J.C. Penney, Gamestop, Macy's, Sears and Tailored Brands. It's quite scary to see how dire the situation is for these firms. Shrinking revenues, plenty of debt, hardly any profit in sight. The most shocking to is the number of people they employ (more than 90k in the case of J.C. Penney), many of whom can be sure to be laid off in the next few years.
  • hellllllllooo 7y ago
    Walmart, Amazon and Target are doing fine and still pay low wages. I don't understand your point or choice of companies to list.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      Amazon retail is not “doing fine”. It’s a low margin business with high fixed costs.
  • Gatsky 7y ago
    Yes well nobody can afford to buy anything on their subsistence wages...
• htk 7y ago
  I see this as a new tactic from the left. Since they can’t complain about unemployment in the record lows since forever, they complain about the jobs themselves.
  • 8bitsrule 7y ago
    Straw man. What is 'employment'?
  • williamDafoe 7y ago
    See the trump difference? There is NONE: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
  • codegeek 7y ago
    This is not a left or right issue. When Obama was president and unemployment rate was improving under him after the 2008 crash, Trump openly used to claim the same thing. Go google it. We are fighting between left and right while the politicians are laughing all the way to the bank.
• williamDafoe 7y ago
  Unemployment is NOT very low. The government publicizes a fake unemployment number which includes a HUGE imaginary subtraction called "discouraged workers", which was originally imagined during the Clinton administration. To get a real idea about EMPLOYMENT, including those pesky minorities that Clinton excluded, see the employment population ratio, ages 25-54: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060 When Obama left office we were STILL in an economy destroyed by Bush, STILL at employment levels BELOW the bottom of the past 2 recessions! Now that Trump has been in office employment has grown NO DIFFERENTLY THAN UNDER OBAMA, for the past 3 years the Trump difference is INVISIBLE.
  • Miraste 7y ago
    That's still roughly tied for lowest ever.
  • cheriot 7y ago
    So from the FRED series you link to, the current market is the second best for employment in history. How is that "NOT very low"? It's better than any point in history other than a couple years when the dot com bubble was inflating. BLS labor statistics are phenomenal. It's some of the most trustworthy data available. Please don't call them "fake" just because you want to use a different time series than someone else.
• ghastmaster 7y ago
  "...we need to rethink the fundamentals of our economic and social policies" They suggest fixes in the next paragraph that are not fundamental, have already been implemented, and have directly contributed to the problem: "Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security. Boosting wages through tax credits, a higher minimum wage, or supporting sectoral bargaining; supporting families with high-quality child care; and giving workers more control over their time via stable scheduling are just a few options." A fundamental shift occurred in 1776 and has been slowly bastardized since. Read Thomas Sowell, Peter Schiff, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mesis, Ron Paul, etc. The central planners are the problem.
  • petermcneeley 7y ago
    Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863?
    • shijie 7y ago
      It seems a bit disingenuous to assume that the parent commenter laments the emancipation proclamation just because he/she has a differing view on fiscal policy. This is ad hominem by definition. Not very contributory to the conversation. What parts of his/her points do you disagree with?
      • scarejunba 7y ago
        Oh this one is easy. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504 for the statement: > The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964. If you think I’m quoting out of context, entertain yourself with the rest of the comment. It’s on this very story. No digging necessary.
        • petermcneeley 7y ago
          +1 nice find.
• dplgk 7y ago
  Does a person working part time who can't afford their own place to rent (i.e. Live with their parents) count as "employed"? If so, then the sharing economy surely boosts this metric significantly when not actually significantly improving lives.
  • sdinsn 7y ago
    People are counted as employed if they did any work at all for pay, even if it was just 1 hour a week.
• Vlad_Zamfor 7y ago
  >Two-thirds (64%) of low-wage workers are in their prime working years of 25 to 54. I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky that this is a disgrace, y'know? Like, why can't that guy get a real job? Am I the one stopping him? To quote Professor Spock: The answer is, yes and no.
• ralmidani 7y ago
  Regarding health benefits, can I float a crazy idea? Let part-time and gig economy workers pick their own insurance plans, and in exchange for every hour in their contract (or hours driven, etc. in the case of gig economy workers), require the employer (yes, we should close the loophole nationwide like California is trying to do) to contribute around 1.5% toward the monthly premium, until the employee/worker has, say, 60% of the premium paid for. This would work well for people juggling 2-3 part-time jobs or gigs and, at least in terms of health benefits, put them on par with FTEs.
• Merrill 7y ago
  >In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. >The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree, So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are only able to earn "barely enough to live on". Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal convictions, disabling disease or injury after college? Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    I'm thinking mostly poor instruction/irrelevant majors.
  • GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    Are you assuming that everybody who is able-bodied and has a scale degree should be able to find employment? Did over 12 million people in this country really get worthless degrees or become incapacitated? Getting a "good" degree might not matter so much, if so many other people also got those degrees. One could say that degree is therefore no longer so good, but there is not an endless train of "even better" degrees for people to move on towards.
  • sosborn 7y ago
    > Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck. Long term failure also has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.
  • edc117 7y ago
    I'm guessing also high COL areas.
• JetBen 7y ago
  Automation takes a toll, and the market decides the cost of things (e.g. how much an employer is willing to pay an employee for a specific task). One facet of that toll is that employers are much less willing to pay a premium for tasks they believe can be handled by automation.
• finphil 7y ago
  Agreed. "Job quality" / Wages versus cost of living should also be taken into account.
• contingencies 7y ago
  We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. - Buckminster Fuller One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage. - Buckminster Fuller ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
  • rolltiide 7y ago
    Although I also perceive the same things I wonder if there is adequate incentive for the one to create something that provides for others Simply taking their economic output is not incentive
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software https://paragonie.com/software Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2). My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00. When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults. I posit that it only works when you use an oversimplified model of human behavior, rather than the messy truth that is humanity.
      • ernst_klim 7y ago
        > My revenue for all Your revenue may be, but people behind Gstreamer, Linux and other important serious opensource product do it for money (sometimes pretty big money, Linus has $2millions income). > When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? Wikipedia is looking for money constantly, the have sponsors, donators, without them it would cease to exist. Also Wikipedia's quality often is pretty abysmal, especially when it's not in English. > The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults. Sure, let's suggest to abolish patent system and see how many fully self-actualized adults will oppose.
• chiefalchemist 7y ago
  How true. But even pay is misleading. Ultimately, it's about cost of living / affordability. For example, if hourly rate increases but housing - sensing the market can bear more - soon follows then the pay increase is a wash, or worse.
• rayiner 7y ago
  The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.
  • contingencies 7y ago
    Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.
      • contingencies 7y ago
        You present a false (and somewhat offensive) dichotomy. Here are some more optimistic ideas. If we reconsidered vehicles, everyone could have access to them when desired. If we reconsidered city layouts, everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others without needing to sacrifice either nature or privacy. If we reconsidered education, medical care and communications infrastructure, they would be universally available and effectively free (indeed, in many places these are already the case). If we reconsidered politics, we could encourage global industry toward environmentally sustainable outcomes without irreversible disaster.
        • tomp 7y ago
          These ideas are beyond delusional (in today's world). > everyone could have access to [vehicles] when desired Uber is trying to do this, but has a lot of problems, from unpredictable pricing, surge pricing, long wait times, shitty drivers, chatty drivers (?), seats with puke all over them, ... self-driving cars could solve some, but not all of these problems. > everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others No, the reason real estate in e.g. NYC is so expensive is that everybody wants to live there! The only way to fix this is to fundamentally decentralize our economy and education systems, but that's a whole lot more complicated than "city layouts". > [education, medical care and communications infrastructure] would be universally available and effectively free Maybe education and communications, but with medical care almost certainly not... The main issue is that medicine doesn't save people's lives, it just prolongs them, and that can always be done better... So fundamentally, the demand for medicine is unlimited, whereas the supply (doctors) is limited, so whatever system of "free and universally available" system you design, there's going to be tradeoffs. Tradeoffs like, "do I fix my teeth or my eyes" and someone is going to have to make that choice. Personally, I'd prefer that to be me (with my money) rather than my government.
• quotemstr 7y ago
  > We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All attempts turn into coercion and atrocity, because it's only natural to want to be rewarded for one's work, and the alternative is slavery. It really amazes me how many people in tech push for a social system that would have prevented tech emerging in the first place and that would have led for lower status for themselves personally. They can't seriously be in favor of the world they advocate.
  • soperj 7y ago
    Or because they're essentially sanctioned by the biggest economy on earth. Do you honestly think the people of Russia are better off under capitalism?
    • kofejnik 7y ago
      yes. Communism is no better than nazism. Source: grew up in the USSR.
  • oliverx0 7y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted. I strongly resonate with this sentiment.
    • exogeny 7y ago
      He’s being downvoted because it’s a highly sociopathic argument. Humans also value empathy and compassion as well as mercenary self-fulfillment. Have you never been to, say, a soup kitchen or an animal shelter? I sort of suspect that the poster above hasn’t.
      • quotemstr 7y ago
        You can't run a whole economy on altruism --- and the more we transfer wealth from the productive to the unproductive, the closer we get to an altruism economy. Your bio says you're the leader of a 1,000 person startup: would you expect your employees to show up without getting paid? No? Then how can you call pointing out the consequences of a no-pay economy "sociopathic"? Is it wrong not to want to live in a global soup kitchen?
• subject117 7y ago
  This is insane. The rise in wages for the bottom half are higher than they have ever been and it is solely because of low unemployment. How in the world do some people become economists and not understand supply and demand?
  • henrysarabia 7y ago
    There are factors at play other than supply and demand
• jswizzy 7y ago
  Pay is going up despite all these ignorant commenters https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/upshot/minimum-wage-boost-bottom-earners.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/upshot/minimum-wage-boost...
  • m0zg 7y ago
    They aren't "ignorant". They just can't admit Donald Trump did something positive. So they engage in logical contortionism like "tax cuts didn't help the middle class" (they did), "low-earner wages aren't growing" (they are), "he will start WW3" (he won't - he's the least militarist president since Jimmy Carter), "low unemployment doesn't matter" (it does - how else do you expect to create upward pressure on wages?), "he's not building a wall" (in spite of total sabotage, the first 100 miles have already been completed). And that's why he will get re-elected in 2020. The liberal bubble is too strong, and the majority of the US population aren't in it.
    • jasonsamoa 7y ago
      Is there a hacker news type forum for people not in the liberal bubble but interested in computer science and entrepreneurship?
      • m0zg 7y ago
        I wish there was, but I don't know of one. Tech is full of young people and therefore mostly liberal. I was liberal myself when I was younger. I still largely am on social issues.
      • cvwright 7y ago
        I think you’re on it already. While HN certainly gets its share of mindless “Orange Man Bad” comments, overall this place feels more balanced than most.
    • tzs 7y ago
      Most of the low earner wage growth is due to increases in state and local minimum wage.
• subject117 7y ago
  Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.
  • dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • majos 7y ago
    I’m skeptical that America’s forefathers envisioned a future where a reasonable degree of financial security is exclusively for business-owners.
    • AdrianB1 7y ago
      At that time, financial security did not exist at all (or almost). There was no social safety net, no food stamps, no tax to redistribute. There was no reason to envision there will ever be different.
  • Infinitesimus 7y ago
    > Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to. That dream is only viable for a very, very small population. see: Those who have to work multiple jobs to support family, those saddled with crushing loans, those with ailing family while being the sole provider, those who are denied loans because the happen to be born in a zip code a biased algorithm deemed as more risky, etc. etc. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a great move when your privilege and opportunities align well.
  • benignslime 7y ago
    How does someone so painfully propagandized even stumble upon this site? Lmao what a joke
• subject117 7y ago
  Left-wing propaganda
• tu7001 7y ago
  People who lived in socialism know that, there was even 0% unemployment :-)
• macinjosh 7y ago
  If we really wanted to put more money in people's pockets and have a more progressive tax code we should, at the very least, start chipping away at taxing incomes. A good start would be to make any cost of necessities (shelter, food, healthcare, transportation) should be tax deductible.
  • someguydave 7y ago
    Why not just get rid of the income tax and only have sales tax? We could make exceptions for basic food and shelter.
• taurath 7y ago
  We could achieve 100% unemployment by putting anyone without a job in work camps. Living with a bunch of friends who are still struggling, everyone is aware that opportunity isn’t easy even in this “ideal” conditions. And frankly the number of employers who will abuse the hell out of you is somewhere around 30-60%.
• playing_colours 7y ago
  I see the future as grim anti-utopia: Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to tax them in order to pay for social policies. I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation actually can make that move fast and not expensive. In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both countries. Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?
  • ernst_klim 7y ago
    > Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in 1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer. People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs, making more services available, more possibilities open. Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up. Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we couldn't even fancy yet.
    • jlawson 7y ago
      The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs increasingly do. In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a cow when told to. These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python programming - regardless of education. So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job. It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered construction equipment. Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.
• wheelerwj 7y ago
  Yeah, so here's the problem. We now, more than ever, have a key metric for measuring the economy that doesn't really measure the right thing. Just like in every other situation, businesses and startups included, this leads to gamification and optimization for that metric. "Oh, you want more jobs, great! here you go! We'll cut the hours by 1/2 and employee twice as many people!" Unemployment goes to 0% but so does quality of life. So the real question remains, what are the metrics we really value as a society and what do we need to do in order to optimize for them?
  • weberc2 7y ago
    You’re right that this one metric doesn’t tell the whole story, but no metric does and they aren’t meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.
    • wheelerwj 7y ago
      Right, but the point is that not only does this metric not tell the whole story, but that it tells the WRONG story. Unemployment isn't a useful metric anymore.
      • weberc2 7y ago
        Perhaps, but your rationale (“it’s not meaningful if jobs pay half of what they used to”) supports my interpretation (“not the whole story”), not your thesis (“WRONG story”). Correct me if I missed something; haven’t had my coffee yet.
  • MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    What’s the metric to use instead? # of households in America + average household income?
    • mrfusion 7y ago
      It sounds silly but happiness should be the metric. If everyone is happy you presume employment is probably good.
• RickJWagner 7y ago
  Taco Bell has just started experimenting with $100k salaries for their store managers (a raise from about $70k) because low unemployment has tightened the pool of workers available. We're headed in the right direction. With low unemployment, rising blue collar wages, and strong equity markets it would be absolute foolishness to make a big change in any direction.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  I'm really glad that we have a presidential candidate (Yang) sophisticated enough to run on UBI. I've never voted before but I finally have hope that the government might make structural adjustments to the changing realities of our world.
• corporate_shi11 7y ago
  If - in America - we stopped bringing in millions of poor and uneducated young working age people every year - legally and illegally - wages would rise. This is common sense and supported by research [0]. [0]: https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration
• doe88 7y ago
  In these cases I somehow always have the Goodhart's law immediately coming to my mind: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
• jokoon 7y ago
  Fighting against unemployment means you are creating unnecessary jobs. It's creating an army of disposable, obedient, consenting slaves. Think about fast food and the damage it's doing. All this money, metals and resources and all those people could be paid to deliver better healthcare, educate people, etc while people could just prepare their own food instead. I can't count the times I was called either a communist, a moocher, a parasite, an euro-something, etc I'm so jaded from this subject. Sometimes I'm scared that the government might try and find new tricks or excuse to not give me welfare, because I'm certain the public opinion would not have any trouble in seeing me homeless. Misguided economic policies stem from some form of cultural, subjective ideology. I still have to be convinced why it's the government's role to push people to go back to work, instead of just giving them the bare minimum so they can eat and find shelter. The amount of money you need for welfare is ridiculously low compared to the advantage it allows. We're just scared of moochers and people having free time. And even if I'm wrong, it's not like governments will force people to work or continue to let large-scale homelessness happen. The idea of everyone-for-himself is completely the opposite of our species: we're a social society, and civilization needs to help everyone because it's in the interest of all countries. Until we're able to question the "we need workers for civilization to function" meme, nothing will improve. I cannot count how many times I rant about this. I can already hear the pedantic, rational people explaining how I'm stealing their taxes.
• eucryphia 7y ago
  "Unemployment" is the result of a lack of entrepreneurs, don't drive them out of your neighbourhood.
• foogazi 7y ago
  > Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security. Amazed how all these articles gloss over or totally ignore what workers themselves can do to better their situation > These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low wages. >What should be done? By who?
• jariel 7y ago
  Low wages for basic labour are I think the biggest driver of inequality in the US. It's not taxes, or education or anything else. Break your back, barely make it - that's not the American dream. A lift in Minimum wage would make a big difference, the rest of us would have to pay for it in higher prices, we can afford it though. Get medical coverage to the remaining few that don't have it and the US would make great gains.
• coldtea 7y ago
  Relevant, from the UK side: "Jobs of the future may not have stable hours, holiday pay, sick pay, or pensions, DWP secretary says" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-economy-damian-green-speech-holiday-minimum-wage-sick-pay-hours-a7421071.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-econo...