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Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States:

Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States: > On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1] Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker. Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed. [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...

HenryKissinger 7y ago
Health care is not tied to employment in Canada, for one.
- CivBase 7y ago
  Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees. You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper. Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. Yeah... thought so. You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.
    - docbrown 7y ago
      I understand your point but you’re also attempting to portray that low income folks have no chance at obtaining health insurance. Thankfully Medicare and Medicaid coverage gives health insurance to millions of people. 63 million to be exact were enrolled through some form of Medicaid in October 2019 (Center for Medicare, 2019)[1]. Another 10 million or so people are eligible for Medicare (prior to age 65) due to a disability. [1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medicaid-and-chip-enrollment-data/report-highlights/index.html https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
      - vertex-four 7y ago
        The problem is there's a gap between having low enough income (and being able to jump through enough hoops) to qualify for Medicaid and having a good enough job to be able to afford adequate health insurance to receive healthcare in anything but an emergency.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      > Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important. The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded. > You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response. > we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Emergency care means they stabilize you so you won’t die right away and then kick you out. Many of the things that you will die from will never even qualify for it, e.g. treatment for cancer. You need money, insurance, or real charity to get care for that.
  - behringer 7y ago
    You can't get treatment for life-threatening "conditions". You can only get treatment for life-threatening "emergencies". You got a tumor? Good fucking luck. You got a seizure because of your tumor? Come on in and we'll make sure to send you an absurd bill later.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      I was trying to find a word that covered "illness" and "injury", but you're right. I've edited my post with the fix.
    - jandrewrogers 7y ago
      I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it. The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        On the one hand, good for them and it would be nice if you elucidated whatever you know about how they pulled this off. On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially. America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.
        ReallyAnonymous 7y ago
        General surgeon in the South here. What I've seen is that uninsured individuals will prolong going to the doctor for symptoms because of cost and that sometimes costs them their lives because of the advanced presentation of their disease. On the other hand, once you get diagnosed with cancer in South Carolina, you automatically qualify for Medicaid so that you receive some treatment. This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets. Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs. Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Lots of medium sized (and larger) companies self insure and pay an outside company for administration rather than insurance (insurance companies often offer this type of service).
  - lowtolerance 7y ago
    Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      Thanks. Edited my post to say "some US employers".
    - ReallyAnonymous 7y ago
      I take care of a lot of people who work for Fortune 500 companies that have Medicaid. My taxes, therefore, subsidize these companies' profits. Moreover, when I was in private practice, I accepted sub market fees for my services when I took care of them. This is the reason why I am a hospital employee. I get paid regardless of whether the hospital gets paid.
  - _jal 7y ago
    > Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers That's hilarious. I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 Econ 101 is insufficient for understanding the world.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      I do not want to spread misinformation. If that statement was incorrect, could you let me know how to correct it?
      - _jal 7y ago
        It is mainly that economic factors regarding employment insurance bundling are side effects of having employment-based insurance, not the cause. It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.
shkkmo 7y ago
You care completely mis-citing / mis-reading that study. It specifically is an attempt to measure the non-material effects of unemployment on persona well-being and happiness. "Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Financial stress explains upwards of 30% of the cross-sectional variance of life satisfaction.[1] If the hypothesis is that the US unemployed are significantly more financially stressed than the Canadian unemployed, then that would almost assuredly be reflected in differing life satisfaction scores. [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536.7683&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536...
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Again, you are conflating two different things, financial risk and financial stress. You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people. This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.
ramphastidae 7y ago
Your comment seems unnecessarily dismissive and misses the point. The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses. You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.
endothrowho333 7y ago
> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't. Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1). Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!
- bigcohoneypot 7y ago
  For those of us familiar with science, and not social science can you explain why we can't conclude anything from data without further experimentation? Or is this a claim about the scientific method as opposed to say how art is criticized.
  - endothrowho333 7y ago
    It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions: >1). There is a relationship in your data >2). There isn't a relationship in your data From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true! It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science! What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference. Here's a very brief primer: https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I'm guessing your data is comparing satisfaction of employed (nationality) to unemployed (same nationality). If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.

HenryKissinger 7y ago

Health care is not tied to employment in Canada, for one.

CivBase 7y ago
Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees. You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper. Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.
- vertex-four 7y ago
  Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. Yeah... thought so. You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.
  - docbrown 7y ago
    I understand your point but you’re also attempting to portray that low income folks have no chance at obtaining health insurance. Thankfully Medicare and Medicaid coverage gives health insurance to millions of people. 63 million to be exact were enrolled through some form of Medicaid in October 2019 (Center for Medicare, 2019)[1]. Another 10 million or so people are eligible for Medicare (prior to age 65) due to a disability. [1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medicaid-and-chip-enrollment-data/report-highlights/index.html https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
    - vertex-four 7y ago
      The problem is there's a gap between having low enough income (and being able to jump through enough hoops) to qualify for Medicaid and having a good enough job to be able to afford adequate health insurance to receive healthcare in anything but an emergency.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    > Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important. The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded. > You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response. > we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Emergency care means they stabilize you so you won’t die right away and then kick you out. Many of the things that you will die from will never even qualify for it, e.g. treatment for cancer. You need money, insurance, or real charity to get care for that.
- behringer 7y ago
  You can't get treatment for life-threatening "conditions". You can only get treatment for life-threatening "emergencies". You got a tumor? Good fucking luck. You got a seizure because of your tumor? Come on in and we'll make sure to send you an absurd bill later.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    I was trying to find a word that covered "illness" and "injury", but you're right. I've edited my post with the fix.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it. The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      On the one hand, good for them and it would be nice if you elucidated whatever you know about how they pulled this off. On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially. America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.
      - ReallyAnonymous 7y ago
        General surgeon in the South here. What I've seen is that uninsured individuals will prolong going to the doctor for symptoms because of cost and that sometimes costs them their lives because of the advanced presentation of their disease. On the other hand, once you get diagnosed with cancer in South Carolina, you automatically qualify for Medicaid so that you receive some treatment. This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets. Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs. Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Lots of medium sized (and larger) companies self insure and pay an outside company for administration rather than insurance (insurance companies often offer this type of service).
- lowtolerance 7y ago
  Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    Thanks. Edited my post to say "some US employers".
  - ReallyAnonymous 7y ago
    I take care of a lot of people who work for Fortune 500 companies that have Medicaid. My taxes, therefore, subsidize these companies' profits. Moreover, when I was in private practice, I accepted sub market fees for my services when I took care of them. This is the reason why I am a hospital employee. I get paid regardless of whether the hospital gets paid.
- _jal 7y ago
  > Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers That's hilarious. I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 Econ 101 is insufficient for understanding the world.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    I do not want to spread misinformation. If that statement was incorrect, could you let me know how to correct it?
    - _jal 7y ago
      It is mainly that economic factors regarding employment insurance bundling are side effects of having employment-based insurance, not the cause. It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.

shkkmo 7y ago

You care completely mis-citing / mis-reading that study. It specifically is an attempt to measure the non-material effects of unemployment on persona well-being and happiness. "Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.

dcolkitt 7y ago
Financial stress explains upwards of 30% of the cross-sectional variance of life satisfaction.[1] If the hypothesis is that the US unemployed are significantly more financially stressed than the Canadian unemployed, then that would almost assuredly be reflected in differing life satisfaction scores. [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536.7683&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536...
- shkkmo 7y ago
  Again, you are conflating two different things, financial risk and financial stress. You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people. This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.

ramphastidae 7y ago

Your comment seems unnecessarily dismissive and misses the point. The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses. You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.

endothrowho333 7y ago

> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't. Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1). Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!

bigcohoneypot 7y ago
For those of us familiar with science, and not social science can you explain why we can't conclude anything from data without further experimentation? Or is this a claim about the scientific method as opposed to say how art is criticized.
- endothrowho333 7y ago
  It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions: >1). There is a relationship in your data >2). There isn't a relationship in your data From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true! It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science! What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference. Here's a very brief primer: https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I'm guessing your data is comparing satisfaction of employed (nationality) to unemployed (same nationality). If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.