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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

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.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > 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. Because we don’t have the technology to actually do that? We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders. (“You want one Big Mech?”). This discussion is pointless and premature. There are enormous economic incentives to automate away every job that can be done efficiently though automation. It’s just that our technology is actually very primitive, and that shows when trying to apply it to replacing service workers.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather). There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.
      - majos 7y ago
        If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table. (My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)
        nitrogen 7y ago
        McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.
        rfmw19 7y ago
        McDonalds seems to be rolling them out slowly, but are actually cutting staff while simultaneously increasing their fleet of touchscreens. I see a lot more employees alternating between doing work in the kitchen vs. taking orders at the cashier. This is even during relatively high demand times with long customer wait lines. This is just an anecdote though, the data may disagree. I'd also be curious to see any user interface studies on these touchscreens. In my limited experiences, they are completely slow and thus an awful experience. They clearly are trying to sell more at every step instead of being useful and efficient for the end user.
- kaitai 7y ago
  The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability. Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.
  - orangecat 7y ago
    The point is there are a lot of people in this position. Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.
    - baddox 7y ago
      What is the mechanism to identify and count people who were voluntarily retired but now wish they could find a job but can’t?
      - orangecat 7y ago
        If they're actively looking for work, then they're unemployed. If they're not looking for work because they assume there are no opportunities, they're "discouraged workers": https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp. Discouraged workers aren't counted in the primary unemployment rate, but are counted in U4 and U6, which are also historically low; see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE.
wavefunction 7y ago
That or all the people working multiple of these mcjobs. If one job were enough for every American to at least provide for their basic needs and some reasonable leisures then I might be impressed by low unemployment.
koheripbal 7y ago
Even the lowest wage bracket of jobs has kept up with price inflation overall.
- SeanBoocock 7y ago
  That doesn’t ring true but I’d be to learn otherwise. What data are you referring to?
- twojacobtwo 7y ago
  Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
  - Nuzzerino 7y ago
    I'm sure it varies by region and time period, but for 2000-2019 in california, the cumulative inflation was 49%, while the minimum wage rose 108%. And in the most recent years, wages are going up across the board at the low pay tier: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigger-raises-11577442600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigge...
    - mindslight 7y ago
      Continuing to talk about "average" inflation, rather than housing / asset inflation, is borderline disingenuous. Of course the price of consumer products has fallen - that was the primary gain of technological progress and outsourcing it all to China. The price of housing (and healthcare, education) is what has everyone over a barrel, and that's a direct result of the policy to make that average continue to go up in the face of technological progress.
      - Nuzzerino 7y ago
        Was this comment meant for me? I think the parent commenter used the word "overall" and not "average". I was simply providing a source and not making any sort of argument from it.
dfilppi 7y ago
Yes, it is. As opposed to starving or being a freeloader.
- twojacobtwo 7y ago
  Is it still good if that 60+ year old has never been a 'freeloader' and has made the best choices possible to provide for their self/family with the income that the person was able to make prior to retirement? If the 60+ year old has been a net benefit to society, should they not be provided a means of living after retirement age?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Are you discounting social security and Medicaid here? If you have to live on social security alone, you will have a meager existence, but you need not starve. If you want a better retirement, saving along the way is strongly recommended.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    If that 60 year old is expecting to live until he is 90 then it is rather funny he or she thinks retirement at 60 is the thing unless that person has enough money to saved to cover half of his or hers lifetime.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Wouldn't it be a third?
      - notyourday 7y ago
        If a person is 60 and expects to live until 90 then: 90-60 = 30 30 is 0.5 of 60.
- kaitai 7y ago
  Freeloader... like those women who have been unable to work due to being full-time caretaker for a disabled spouse or child, or cared for their own parents until death, and so didn't have much or any income to save from...
Frost1x 7y ago
I don't think most politicians are ignorant enough to believe this. It's part of the marketing used that also seeds self-doubt into many citizens and saves politician's faces: "How can something so complex (at scale) and studied as unemployment be wrong? I must be the problem finding gainful employment, everyone else is doing great based on these numbers, I guess I need to work even harder to pickup my slack. My representatives even tell me everyone is doing great, look at the GDP and DOW soaring! What am I doing wrong?? Why cant I find a job, I guess I'll have to take whatever I can get." etc.
heelix 7y ago
I guess the question is what age should a person retire? For those of us born after 1960, retirement with full benefits, is age 67. Technically, you can retire at age 62... and draw a percentage. (Bonus, if you can wait till you are 70, you get an even higher multiplier). Most people don't have savings like they should. There are older folks who are gobbling up jobs tat were historically what younger kids would work. Those benefits are not large sums, so one could imagine someone working into the late 60's to maximize the actual retirement cash flow. For those who did save... likely don't need to start pulling benefits early. Over all... wages rise if there is competition for talent. Even if it is on the low end of entry level jobs. If there should be so many low end jobs, without 'normal' benefits... is another really good question.
quadrifoliate 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!"). It's just the kind of marketing that happens to work with the Protestant mentality of the majority of people here. And that's slowly starting to change, with Sanders and other progressive politicians asking about the well-being of Americans as opposed to raw numbers about whether they can work 4 part-time jobs or not.
trentnix 7y ago
It’s certainly a good thing if a 60+ year old can go to work because he/she can’t pay the bills or whatever other reasons they choose to add income. And when jobs are plentiful, it’s inevitable that wages go up as well. Employers are competing for employees, and the skilled and useful ones inevitably become better compensated as a result.
- adamsea 7y ago
  ... and if the same conditions which create work for said sixty-year-old person to return to are the same conditions that led to them being unable to retire at sixty (perhaps because they never had the opportunity to do anything other than low laying work with no opportunity for growth and existed at the poverty line)?
TheCoelacanth 7y ago
Unemployment only counts people who are looking for work, but don't have it, so I don't think that framing is accurate. Someone who is not working by choice is not unemployed.
aleph_naught 7y ago
Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization). Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansion has yielded a large divide in inequality and asset inflation. The non-asset owning working class have effectively been left behind, with now a larger wall to climb in order build relative wealth. I personally don't think unions and collective bargaining are the best solution, as it can in some cases be overbearing on industry---and the burden can be non-uniformly applied across industries. Also, due to globalization, there is effectively a fixed marginal cost for labor: any inefficiencies will be arbitraged abroad. Even if unions and collective bargaining were the solution, there is no inherent law that labor demand and labor supply will always be near parity---especially with increased automation. I think the best solution to resolve this, both uniformly and with minimal aggregate complexity, would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space. The Fed currently has two mandates: low unemployment, and stable currency. I propose a third mandate: wage and productivity parity. This would be facilitated by direct fiscal policy in the form of a floating universal basic income. This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics. The stimulus could be progressive, but would be much more uniform---unlike today's pork projects that have a smaller share of winners. This coupled with universal health, easing the burden of hiring and firing, consolidation of existing entitlement/social programs, could really open up the economic landscape.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  > would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space. This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it. Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures. The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
I don't think politicians actually believe it's a positive. They can't possibly be that naive. They must have basic economic awareness of how $30 p/h FT job in their district has different implications than a couple $15 p/h PT jobs. They don't discuss the important details because it doesn't drive votes. They also as a challenger during the election want to hold the incumbent to a standard they might not be able to maintain. Politicians, as a breed, are adverse to "live by the sword, did by the sword." As a result we get politician-speak as the normalized standard.
JDiculous 7y ago
Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing. I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizing manufacturing jobs have never worked a manufacturing job before. It's absolutely nothing like any cushy office job. At the end of the movie when they talked about how they were replacing the humans with robots, that should be something to celebrate (but it's not because our society forces people into employment to make a living). Those workers were making $12/hour at the Chinese owned company despite having made $29/hour in their unionized jobs at GM before it closed. It's not as if the $29/hour jobs were some utopia, but it's a massive difference in pay that affords one a middle class lifestyle. And as a worker, feeling like you have no representation and no say can make any job soul crushing. Yet politicians talk about "jobs" as some unequivocally good thing as if we're all partners at law firms with corner offices making six figures or whatever they're used to (not that I'd ever want to be a lawyer). They're so clearly out of touch.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  $29/hr wasn’t sustainable based on what the consumer would buy the product/service for, hence the inevitable closure. Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it. How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?
  - JDiculous 7y ago
    People should be able to pursue whatever work they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone else since we can afford it.
- huntie 7y ago
  I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory. As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society. I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at. The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico. [1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.
g_langenderfer 7y ago
Is the alternative better? If the retiree didn't get a low-paying job (Uber driver etc.), his neighbors would be forced to care for him through social welfare taxes. With a job, he supports himself. All the resources freed up can be put to more productive use.
darawk 7y ago
It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment. What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job. If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down. The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.
kelnos 7y ago
Exactly. In the same vein, is it a good thing that someone in their 20s/30s/40s has to take on 2 or 3 jobs, working 10+ hours per day, just to get by?

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.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > 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. Because we don’t have the technology to actually do that? We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders. (“You want one Big Mech?”). This discussion is pointless and premature. There are enormous economic incentives to automate away every job that can be done efficiently though automation. It’s just that our technology is actually very primitive, and that shows when trying to apply it to replacing service workers.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather). There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.
    - majos 7y ago
      If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table. (My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)
      - nitrogen 7y ago
        McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.
      - rfmw19 7y ago
        McDonalds seems to be rolling them out slowly, but are actually cutting staff while simultaneously increasing their fleet of touchscreens. I see a lot more employees alternating between doing work in the kitchen vs. taking orders at the cashier. This is even during relatively high demand times with long customer wait lines. This is just an anecdote though, the data may disagree. I'd also be curious to see any user interface studies on these touchscreens. In my limited experiences, they are completely slow and thus an awful experience. They clearly are trying to sell more at every step instead of being useful and efficient for the end user.
kaitai 7y ago
The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability. Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.
- orangecat 7y ago
  The point is there are a lot of people in this position. Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.
  - baddox 7y ago
    What is the mechanism to identify and count people who were voluntarily retired but now wish they could find a job but can’t?
    - orangecat 7y ago
      If they're actively looking for work, then they're unemployed. If they're not looking for work because they assume there are no opportunities, they're "discouraged workers": https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp. Discouraged workers aren't counted in the primary unemployment rate, but are counted in U4 and U6, which are also historically low; see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE.

wavefunction 7y ago

That or all the people working multiple of these mcjobs. If one job were enough for every American to at least provide for their basic needs and some reasonable leisures then I might be impressed by low unemployment.

koheripbal 7y ago

Even the lowest wage bracket of jobs has kept up with price inflation overall.

SeanBoocock 7y ago
That doesn’t ring true but I’d be to learn otherwise. What data are you referring to?
twojacobtwo 7y ago
Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
- Nuzzerino 7y ago
  I'm sure it varies by region and time period, but for 2000-2019 in california, the cumulative inflation was 49%, while the minimum wage rose 108%. And in the most recent years, wages are going up across the board at the low pay tier: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigger-raises-11577442600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigge...
  - mindslight 7y ago
    Continuing to talk about "average" inflation, rather than housing / asset inflation, is borderline disingenuous. Of course the price of consumer products has fallen - that was the primary gain of technological progress and outsourcing it all to China. The price of housing (and healthcare, education) is what has everyone over a barrel, and that's a direct result of the policy to make that average continue to go up in the face of technological progress.
    - Nuzzerino 7y ago
      Was this comment meant for me? I think the parent commenter used the word "overall" and not "average". I was simply providing a source and not making any sort of argument from it.

dfilppi 7y ago

Yes, it is. As opposed to starving or being a freeloader.

twojacobtwo 7y ago
Is it still good if that 60+ year old has never been a 'freeloader' and has made the best choices possible to provide for their self/family with the income that the person was able to make prior to retirement? If the 60+ year old has been a net benefit to society, should they not be provided a means of living after retirement age?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Are you discounting social security and Medicaid here? If you have to live on social security alone, you will have a meager existence, but you need not starve. If you want a better retirement, saving along the way is strongly recommended.
- notyourday 7y ago
  If that 60 year old is expecting to live until he is 90 then it is rather funny he or she thinks retirement at 60 is the thing unless that person has enough money to saved to cover half of his or hers lifetime.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Wouldn't it be a third?
    - notyourday 7y ago
      If a person is 60 and expects to live until 90 then: 90-60 = 30 30 is 0.5 of 60.
kaitai 7y ago
Freeloader... like those women who have been unable to work due to being full-time caretaker for a disabled spouse or child, or cared for their own parents until death, and so didn't have much or any income to save from...

Frost1x 7y ago

I don't think most politicians are ignorant enough to believe this. It's part of the marketing used that also seeds self-doubt into many citizens and saves politician's faces: "How can something so complex (at scale) and studied as unemployment be wrong? I must be the problem finding gainful employment, everyone else is doing great based on these numbers, I guess I need to work even harder to pickup my slack. My representatives even tell me everyone is doing great, look at the GDP and DOW soaring! What am I doing wrong?? Why cant I find a job, I guess I'll have to take whatever I can get." etc.

heelix 7y ago

I guess the question is what age should a person retire? For those of us born after 1960, retirement with full benefits, is age 67. Technically, you can retire at age 62... and draw a percentage. (Bonus, if you can wait till you are 70, you get an even higher multiplier). Most people don't have savings like they should. There are older folks who are gobbling up jobs tat were historically what younger kids would work. Those benefits are not large sums, so one could imagine someone working into the late 60's to maximize the actual retirement cash flow. For those who did save... likely don't need to start pulling benefits early. Over all... wages rise if there is competition for talent. Even if it is on the low end of entry level jobs. If there should be so many low end jobs, without 'normal' benefits... is another really good question.

quadrifoliate 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!"). It's just the kind of marketing that happens to work with the Protestant mentality of the majority of people here. And that's slowly starting to change, with Sanders and other progressive politicians asking about the well-being of Americans as opposed to raw numbers about whether they can work 4 part-time jobs or not.

trentnix 7y ago

It’s certainly a good thing if a 60+ year old can go to work because he/she can’t pay the bills or whatever other reasons they choose to add income. And when jobs are plentiful, it’s inevitable that wages go up as well. Employers are competing for employees, and the skilled and useful ones inevitably become better compensated as a result.

adamsea 7y ago
... and if the same conditions which create work for said sixty-year-old person to return to are the same conditions that led to them being unable to retire at sixty (perhaps because they never had the opportunity to do anything other than low laying work with no opportunity for growth and existed at the poverty line)?

TheCoelacanth 7y ago

Unemployment only counts people who are looking for work, but don't have it, so I don't think that framing is accurate. Someone who is not working by choice is not unemployed.

aleph_naught 7y ago

Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization). Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansion has yielded a large divide in inequality and asset inflation. The non-asset owning working class have effectively been left behind, with now a larger wall to climb in order build relative wealth. I personally don't think unions and collective bargaining are the best solution, as it can in some cases be overbearing on industry---and the burden can be non-uniformly applied across industries. Also, due to globalization, there is effectively a fixed marginal cost for labor: any inefficiencies will be arbitraged abroad. Even if unions and collective bargaining were the solution, there is no inherent law that labor demand and labor supply will always be near parity---especially with increased automation. I think the best solution to resolve this, both uniformly and with minimal aggregate complexity, would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space. The Fed currently has two mandates: low unemployment, and stable currency. I propose a third mandate: wage and productivity parity. This would be facilitated by direct fiscal policy in the form of a floating universal basic income. This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics. The stimulus could be progressive, but would be much more uniform---unlike today's pork projects that have a smaller share of winners. This coupled with universal health, easing the burden of hiring and firing, consolidation of existing entitlement/social programs, could really open up the economic landscape.

jorblumesea 7y ago
> would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space. This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it. Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures. The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

I don't think politicians actually believe it's a positive. They can't possibly be that naive. They must have basic economic awareness of how $30 p/h FT job in their district has different implications than a couple $15 p/h PT jobs. They don't discuss the important details because it doesn't drive votes. They also as a challenger during the election want to hold the incumbent to a standard they might not be able to maintain. Politicians, as a breed, are adverse to "live by the sword, did by the sword." As a result we get politician-speak as the normalized standard.

JDiculous 7y ago

Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing. I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizing manufacturing jobs have never worked a manufacturing job before. It's absolutely nothing like any cushy office job. At the end of the movie when they talked about how they were replacing the humans with robots, that should be something to celebrate (but it's not because our society forces people into employment to make a living). Those workers were making $12/hour at the Chinese owned company despite having made $29/hour in their unionized jobs at GM before it closed. It's not as if the $29/hour jobs were some utopia, but it's a massive difference in pay that affords one a middle class lifestyle. And as a worker, feeling like you have no representation and no say can make any job soul crushing. Yet politicians talk about "jobs" as some unequivocally good thing as if we're all partners at law firms with corner offices making six figures or whatever they're used to (not that I'd ever want to be a lawyer). They're so clearly out of touch.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
$29/hr wasn’t sustainable based on what the consumer would buy the product/service for, hence the inevitable closure. Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it. How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?
- JDiculous 7y ago
  People should be able to pursue whatever work they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone else since we can afford it.
huntie 7y ago
I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory. As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society. I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at. The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico. [1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.

g_langenderfer 7y ago

Is the alternative better? If the retiree didn't get a low-paying job (Uber driver etc.), his neighbors would be forced to care for him through social welfare taxes. With a job, he supports himself. All the resources freed up can be put to more productive use.

darawk 7y ago

It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment. What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job. If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down. The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.

kelnos 7y ago

Exactly. In the same vein, is it a good thing that someone in their 20s/30s/40s has to take on 2 or 3 jobs, working 10+ hours per day, just to get by?