23 ms·

America's True Unemployment Rate

419 points by jbegley 6y ago

mc32 6y ago
What matters is measuring consistency across time and across borders. Also this ignores the nuance provided by the different numbers like U1 through U6 but they’re mainly complaining about U3 and ignore the others exist at all.
gruez 6y ago
Relevant critique on /r/badeconomics: https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jd3p0l/axios_americas_true_unemployment_rate_has/ https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jd3p0l/axios_...
WinstonSmith84 6y ago
> If you measure the "unemployed" as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage... Over 16 years old, a lot of people are at school / university and likely "funded" by their parents. And those who work in order to study because their parents can't/don't help them, they don't obviously pretend to earn more than 20K... they work simply to survive while they study but when they are graduated, it's another story... Is it all counted as "unemployed"?
- maxsilver 6y ago
  It should be. For all practical purposes, all university students should always show up as "unemployed" in any statistics, because they are -- and they'll need to earn all of that cash back and then some extra, at some point in their lifetime.
  - TonyTrapp 6y ago
    If they are "funded" by their parents - why would they need to earn any of that back? Is that really how it works in the US? It's a matter of course in other countries that parents fund the education of their children.
    - creata 6y ago
      > It's a matter of course in other countries that parents fund the education of their children. In some countries. In others (such as Australia), students take out an interest-free loan from the government, and are expected to pay it back, with or without the help of their parents.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      Are most students funded by their parents? I certainly wasn't, and neither was my wife.
      - bluntfang 6y ago
        You can't forget the HN demographic of upper middle class white men who pay for their children's education. I'd say most young adults entering college have a loan in their name. Cursory research [0] says >Today, roughly 70% of American students end up taking out loans to go to college. The average graduate leaves school with around $30,000 in debt and all told, some 45 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in student loans — and counting. [0] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/30/70-of-college-students-graduate-with-debt-how-did-we-get-here/ https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/30/70-of-college-student...
        TonyTrapp 6y ago
        Again that is a very US-centric view. You don't pay 25,000$ a year for attending a university in Europe.
        TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        The post is titled "America's True Unemployment Rate," so it does make sense in this case to assume were talking about USA. I certainly was in my comment above.
        TonyTrapp 6y ago
        Fair point about your comment, I'm just trying to make my point based on the original generalization I replied to: Part of it is simply wrong even for the US (see siblings), and the rest cannot stand as a generalization for the rest of the world, which "any statistics about students" doesn't account for.
  - ecmascript 6y ago
    So why should we not include children of all ages and retied people as well then? They are also unemployed. The reason you don't include full time students is the same for children and retired people. They are on their way to becoming productive citizens or have done their part for society.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Many full time students are employed throughout college. As someone who attended the state colleges my family could afford, most students had part time employment and many were working full time.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      What about retired people who aren't really retired, they are just drawing on their pension sooner than they'd like, as a desperate alternative to employment money to lengthen their rental runway to homelessness? Or they are drawing on a pension while doing food delivery gigs on the side to top it up to pay for essentials? I'd suggest a useful definition of "unemployed" for the purpose of evaluating if there's a problem is: "needs a job but can't get one". That covers retired-but-not-really people, and students who need to work for a living at the same time but are between jobs. But not children, or students with enough to live on from their parents.
  - albntomat0 6y ago
    Your definition differs from the one used in the article "A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed" I expect there's value in the statistic of everyone who lacks a full time job (unemployment in the sense you mention), but a student who has reasonable prospects of employment in X years, post graduation, is significantly different than someone failing to find an adequate job right now.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    > For all practical purposes, all university students should always show up as "unemployed" in any statistics, because they are That’s funny because I worked the entirety of my time as an undergrad, as did many of my peers.
    - maxsilver 6y ago
      Sorry, I worked through my entire undergrad as well. I meant we should never exclude young adults from unemployment metrics. If they aren't employed at a living wage, they aren't employed, being a student should not "bypass" that metric in any way.
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    Go screw yourself. I worked 20/30+ hours a week for rent and to eat.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > a lot of people are at school / university and likely "funded" by their parents That's true only for kids of upper middle class families, and thus a vanishing component for a whole-workforce number like this. Kids of families whose parents bring home something close to the median household income ($70k or so) are not being "funded" at school in any meaningful way, certainly not at a number comparable to employment.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Generically, depends on what you want to know. No measure tells you everything, and measures that try obfuscate everything. Is it useful to know what portion of the population is working, what percentage of 16-22 yos are working? An increase in employment rate among women might mean more good jobs are available. It might mean that times are tough and women (or men) with small children need to work more. It might mean people can't afford to retire, or that 60+ people are having trouble finding a job, etc. IMO the problem is an obsession with creating a measure that maps perfectly to an imprecise term. "Unemployment," in the abstract, is not a perfectly defined thing. The measure should not define the thing. Measures should be used to understand the thing.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  I agree with you, with different reasoning. The number of people without adequate employment (as in, they'd take a full time living wage job over their current situation) is a useful means of understanding the economic situation. Counting a student who has reasonable expectations of living wage employment, post graduation, distorts that measure.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Is it all counted as "unemployed"? Well are they employed by anyone? No. So they're unemployed. It's perfectly valid to be unemployed while studying... but you're still unemployed.
  - gen3 6y ago
    “Unemployed: People who are involuntarily out of work considered as a group.” I think it’s misleading to classify these people as unemployed, since many of them choose to not work. If they wouldn’t have had a job anyways, it skews the statistic. https://www.wordnik.com/words/unemployed https://www.wordnik.com/words/unemployed
  - criddell 6y ago
    That makes it a less useful statistic for talking about problems around unemployment. I think that's why the BLS has so many different measures of unemployment. If I had enough money in the bank to live the rest of my life comfortably, there's no way I'd be employed.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Over 16 years old, a lot of people are at school / university.. This is especially important to note given that unemployment skews towards younger people.
- CamelCaseName 6y ago
  Students attending school are classified as "not in the labor force" because they are not available for work. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#ui https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#ui
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    Eligibility for UI is not related to the BLS classification of "unemployed": https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed A college student may be considered unemployed if it is actively looking for a job, but does not have one. Similarly, it may be considered employed if it does have a job.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
simonbarker87 6y ago
Every country does things to minimise this number (that doesn’t make it right, just a fact that I wish weren’t true). I’m pretty convinced the UK’s push to make all 18+ education a 3+ year university qualification was to improve employment figures for that age category. Bit of a long con, eg: go to uni to study early years development with 3 contact hours a week and once that’s the only way to become a nursery school teacher charge £9k a year for uni fees for a job that pays maybe £20k a year. I know so many 25 year olds who’s student loan interest rate is higher than the amount that is deducted from their pay check by the student loans co earning in the mid 30k region
- martin_a 6y ago
  For Germany there are "training measures". You'll be put in some course for three months and by doing that you are no longer "unemployed". That's great for the statistics but that's about it. I've heard those training are not really great.
x87678r 6y ago
One thing I've noticed in America compared to Europe is that the top salaries pay more which allows more stay at home wives. In Europe a manager/doctor/tech worker doesn't earn as much and its more likely that the wife is also in full time employment. Its anecdotal so I can't be sure, but its what I see in my neighborhood.
- epx 6y ago
  And childcare costs/good free childcare availability/allow you to leave your job at 17:00 sharp are probably other relevant factors, as well.
- newacct583 6y ago
  I don't think that holds. Here's a data set of female/male work force ratio for a bunch of nations. The US at 85% isn't notably different from the rest of the industrialized world. It's a little bit lower than the UK but a little bit higher than Germany, etc... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.NE.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.NE.ZS That doesn't falsify your specific claim, which is about a very small fraction of the population (six figure salaries put families into the top 3% or so), but it's reasonable evidence. Broadly: you're taking a cultural point about upper middle class "America" and extending it to the whole society. Most people don't (can't) live like that.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Staying at home is also religion related. Evangelical and conservative groups (of both genders) want to have women at home regardless of how rich they are.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      It might be, but again the data doesn't really bear it out as a unique thing to the US. The US looks like other industrial nations in aggregate.
- pwlb 6y ago
Upvoter33 6y ago
I've often thought we need many more metrics to gauge the economy. Wage data, actually employment, a much better sense of who is doing well financially. The main numbers shared in the news just aren't that useful, and have allowed a lot of discontent to flourish under our noses, with disastrous political results.
ecmascript 6y ago
> If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage That seems like it will give you a really bad number because they are for sure unemployed but a lot of people in the age 16-20something will go to school. I didn't earn a living wage until I was 22, but I also earn pretty well nowadays and pay a more taxes than most of my friends. Seems like the author has come to a conclusion before writing the article. A pretty dishonest piece imo. Because if you include students, why not include children and retired people as well?
- mcv 6y ago
  Exactly. There's a bit difference between the number of people who want to work but can't find a job, and the number of people who are doing something productive that just happens to be unpaid, because it's going to school or something else. These numbers mean different things and have different uses.
  - ecmascript 6y ago
    The thing is, it's obvious that it is a political piece intended to stir up confusion and anger towards the current administration. When you point out the very obvious flaws, it gets you downvoted as well because orange man bad. HN has become a sad place just like everywhere else.
    - smolder 6y ago
      It's a sad place if you assume all the flaws in the article are obvious to everyone, then reduce everyones behavior to "orange man bad", and then complain about how it's a sad place.
      - slingnow 6y ago
        Given that this is generally place of intelligent people, it should be concerning that they didn't pick up on the fact that the article is quite obviously using a massive portion of the population to inflate their argument (16-20 year olds). This is likely the effect of the argument fitting in with everyone's preferred narrative.
cik 6y ago
Felix Salmon has always been a pleasure to read. If you like his writing, you might enjoy him on the Slate Money podcast. https://slate.com/podcasts/slate-money https://slate.com/podcasts/slate-money
mountainb 6y ago
This is phrased in a very deceptive way. There are lots of issues with the 'Unemployment' metric. It is indeed a deceptive metric. However, it is deliberately misleading to append 'True' to 'Unemployment Rate' with a custom definition intended to make an argument. You are stacking confusion on confusion instead of clarifying. If you want to create a different metric around a 'living wage,' then it should be defined in a way that makes that more clear. There are also serious regional differences in what such a wage might be. $2000/month is enough to live comfortably with a personal car in low cost of living regions. In NYC it means you are probably stacked into a decaying apartment with many other people with no car.
- AQXt 6y ago
  > $2000/month is enough to live comfortably with a personal car in low cost of living regions. In NYC it means you are probably stacked into a decaying apartment with many other people with no car. It's funny how many Americans conflate "living" with the possession of a car...
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    In many regions of the US, it's a simple necessity to have a car, just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe. I know people who work as farmers in the north of the Netherlands, and a car is as essential a commodity for them as it might be for a rural Midwesterner.
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      "just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe." Even europeans often have this urban blindspot. In some places (eg netherlands), you may be able to live conveniently without a car. For a lot of places (eg >50% of ireland), not having a car is a major lifestyle inhibitor. Transport (or lack thereof) dictates a lot of your life... from work opportunities to whether or not you can access a supermarket.
      - bkor 6y ago
dalbasal 6y ago
Am measure measures what is measures. Generally, measures like unemployment are useful in determining trends. Note how most of the unemployment measures are correlated. OTOH, it may be wrong (eg) over very long periods. If underlying behavioural changes happen (eg employment seeking behaviour, drifting of underemployment/unemployment ratios) it may miss long term trends. The problems start (almost immediately) when when the measure becomes the definition. Measures are tightly defined, objective and legible. That's attractive. So, we start to define (eg) unemployment as "that which IQ tests measure." This is totally off track, if the measures weaknesses are (they usually are) justified by arguing the measure is just for trend detection. Definition and trend detection are different purposes. In any case, the only way to get a less superficial understanding to define the measure in terms of what it actually measures, not what it's trying to measure. "people trying to find work" is an actually useful thing to pay attention to. It just isn't "unemployment" in the widest sense of the term. Personally, I hate the "index/metric" solution. This is chasing the rabbit down a hole. We can't have a measure that perfectly maps to unemployment (or financial wellbeing, or whatever). Efforts to do so end up measuring something even more abstract and difficult to understand. The alternative is to just use these measures as incomplete. We can look at "job seeker" rates, nonemployment rates, etc. No measure will tell us what's really happening. That's up to us human intellect to determine.
gd1 6y ago
FACT CHECK FALSE: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jun/16/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-real-unemployment-rate-18-20-per/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jun/16/donald-tru... Ahahahahahahhaahahahhahahahah
gregwebs 6y ago
The other important number that is manipulated is inflation (CPI). When you add the manipulation of inflation and joblessness together along with encouraging financial asset bubbles you can pretend to have a great economy when there is actually a recession or even depression. [1] The government has every incentive to manipulate the CPI: it even reduces their social security payouts. [1] https://www.georgegammon.com/will-there-be-a-great-depression-2020-shocking-answer-revealed/ https://www.georgegammon.com/will-there-be-a-great-depressio...
- burlesona 6y ago
  I don’t know that the government excessively manipulates the CPI, given it shows constant steady inflation since the 1950s[1]. My sense is merely that the metric is focused on “cost to survive” measures and does not reflect the changes in “cost to thrive.” Food, clothing, transportation, and technology are actually getting cheaper over time. But it’s hard to care when housing, education, and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Also, as a footnote, I was interested to read the article you linked, but I seriously distrust any information presented as a video under the headline “shocking answer revealed!” 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    You can manipulate it by deciding what's included and by using reduction in costs of say big flat screen TV's over time.
thehappypm 6y ago
“If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it's 59.2%.“ A large portion of high school students, stay-at-home spouses, college students, under-the-table workers, and the retired will likely fit into this category. I was excited about this article but it just isn’t compelling.
- thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  It’s somewhat useful in a broader context of income and wealth inequality discussions.
burlesona 6y ago
For a simpler source of better food for thought just check the official participation rate. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... The article crafts a nice shocking headline, but the substance is disappointing. The BLS measures unemployment many different ways (U1-U6)[1] plus the civilian labor force participation rate, so the official data also shows these higher unemployment rates as U6, and has tracked them over time. Of course politicians and the media like to pick apart that data and focus on whichever part of it best supports the narrative they intend to tell. But the data is all there for all of us to see and interpret for ourselves. 1: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
- lettergram 6y ago
  I don’t know if participation rate is fair either. Largely because (a) the population is aging and is likely to retire (with wealth amassed and (b) this is really only possible because the government has started subsidizing pretty much everything (food, healthcare, housing, etc) either generally or for those “too poor”. I personally know a significant number (at least 10-15) that exclusively live from government handouts (this is beyond simple social security). They have little incentive to try and find a job, frankly and many actively live with food stamps, housing subsidies, free healthcare, and just kinda bum around.
  - piva00 6y ago
    > I personally know a significant number (at least 10-15) that exclusively live from government handouts (this is beyond simple social security). They have little incentive to try and find a job, frankly and many actively live with food stamps, housing subsidies, free healthcare, and just kinda bum around. I will be very honest: this is a very unsubstantiated claim, even if you know personally 10-15 people who are just bumming around and living on benefits that is a very small portion of benefits claim in society and this kind of behaviour will always exist. Benefits fraud is a thing, the good that benefits and welfare does to a society are much larger than the impact of fraud. Do you really believe that someone who lives with handouts from the government have very little incentive to get better? Do you believe that this almost less-than-baseline level of living is enough to make a significant portion of the populace unwilling to work? To the level where participation rate would become unfair? Have you ever lived on that lifestyle to check your assumption that they have "very little incentive to try and find a job"?
asdffdsa 6y ago
Doesn't account for part-time, doesn't account for households, doesn't account for students. Add in "Black Americans" and voila, you have a run-of-the-mill lazily-written racebaiting clickbait pseudointellectual blog post.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
There is no true single facet of looking at this data. We already know the pandemic and the response have been disastrous for unemployment. If you aren’t in the top 1%, good luck.
messo 6y ago
This explains a lot. Anger and desperation is the only logical outcome when almost half the nation is living in (or at the edge) of poverty.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Thanks for posting. Yours is the first comment that doesn't futz with the definition of a term and instead considers the effect of unemployment on actual people. Imagine being a daddy or a mommy with no way to earn enough this month to bring up your kids halfway to what you were taught is decent.
  - messo 6y ago
    I have recently been watching a documentary series by a Norwegian musician that grew up in the rustbelt in America in the 70'ies [0], but moved with his famliy to Norway in his youth. He has been going back, visiting family, friends and random people and interviewed them, and it is frankly heartbreaking to witness the struggle the the 'average joe' has to endure. I'm living well below the poverty line here in Norway, but it is nothing compared to being poor in America. I do not need to worry about health care or expensive insurance. Me and my partner own an old but nice house with a big garden in a semi-rural community (15min from the nearest city), and can afford all the basic necessities by being frugal. In America, we would have lived in constant fear of becoming ill, seeing a doctor or going to the hospital. The idea that you have no real safety net to help you in tough times is terrifying. I can only begin to imagine the stress that goes with it. I have great sympathy for regular people who are struggling, that voted for Trump. They have long been ignored, neglected and forgotten, and I am sure many voted for him either in desperation or to defy the system they rightly feel have left them behind. People in Norway couldn't imagine how the American people could vote for such an obvious clown and a demagogue, but we have not seen the extent of the suffering and hardship before recently. We see the Hollywood version of your culture for the most part, and are shocked when we find out that American women actually have to pay the hospital when giving birth ("wtf, it isn't covered by paying taxes?"). I really hope that it gets better, but am afraid it has to get worse first. [0]: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/uxa-thomas-seltzers-amerika https://tv.nrk.no/serie/uxa-thomas-seltzers-amerika (Norwegian language, but many segments are in English)
deugtniet 6y ago
I think the definition of unemployment has been contentious for as long as it exists. Axios is choosing to go with the definition of 'People looking for work or working while earning less than 20,000 USD per year'. The employment numbers are naturally going to be higher than when the definition is just 'People earning nothing and looking for work'. If one takes the living wage as a measure of unemployment, it should also include place of residence IMO. I heard living wage in the bay area is > 100K USD. I'm not advocating for anything and have no stake. But all these statistics are proxies for how citizens are doing. In general, hardships increase as unemployment goes up, whatever way you measure it. It's usually better to look at all of them jointly, and focus on differences instead of the absolute rates of a statistic.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >But all these statistics are proxies for how citizens are doing. In general, hardships increase as unemployment goes up, whatever way you measure it. It's usually better to look at all of them jointly, and focus on differences instead of the absolute rates. Well stated. We see the same issues with GDP; people claiming it doesn't capture a country's well-being. This is not surprising, since it's a measure of economic output. But we know there's a correlation between economic output and societal quality-of-life. In general, more GDP > less GDP. If you find anomalies that raise interesting questions (ie Canada vs US) you can compare other measures.
em500 6y ago
There's a good perpetual market for people peddling secret shocking truths that the powers don't want you to know, and everything is secretly much worse than you thought, about pretty much everything, AKA conspiracy theories. Economic conspiracy stories tend to be somewhat less outrageous than those about vaccines or Bill Gates, so the same people who point and laugh at people who believe the later could easily believe stuff from shadowstats, conspiracies around the Private Ownership of the Federal Reserve, or the perpetual unemployment-is-actually-super-high. The mundane Truth About Unemployment is that the current measures are relatively easy to measure in standard way without too much subjectivity (they just ask a bunch of people if they're available for work and looking for work, but couldn't find any). The official docs are pretty clear about what they measure, but they're pretty dry and don't make for good clickbait/blog/youtube stories https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/pdf/cps.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/pdf/cps.pdf. There's no grand conspiracy to suppress the truth at the BLS, it's just a bunch of boring civil servant jobs.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Governments often fiddle with the definition or use other benefits to hide the true rate - in the UK there was pressure in the (1980's) for NHS GP's to put older unemployed people on disability to reduce the headline unemployment rate.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rexreed 6y ago
The stats cited in this article are headline-worthy but they don't make much sense. If you think about what employment means in the context of labor and wage earning, until the early 1900s, most in America would now be counted as unemployed, since they were rather "employed" in agriculture and domestic work, neither of which would be counted as a living wage today. In addition, most women, a large part of today's workforce, did not actively participate in the labor pool (looking for full-time employment as the BLS cites for employment), however that drastically changed in the 1960s and onwards. As such, the current definition of employment is rooted in the realities of where employment was in the early 1900s. Today's definition might not jive with what the Axios article is stating, but what the Axios article is stating is not really about Employment, but rather about Income generation. The notion of generating income must be separated from the idea of full-time employment. In the gig economy, side hustle world, most gig workers would not be counted in the employment rolls. As such, do the employment numbers matter and do we need something distinct to measure what Axios is stating here, which has more to do with income earning than full time employment?
- acruns 6y ago
  Agreed, I am a freelancer making six figures married and my wife hasn't worked since we were dating. So according to their definition my wife is unemployed, not making a "living wage" and so am I. This is a perfect example of why I pay little attention to the news. They or their editor must have known this was bs but decided to publish it anyway for the clicks.
  - rexreed 6y ago
    Exactly. What is currently touted as an Unemployment number should be renamed: "% of those who are seeking full-time employment but not currently full-time employed". Perhaps "Unfulfilled Job Seekers" might be a better term than "Unemployed". The other measure should be "% of working age Households where household income is not at or above average living wage adjusted by region". Then that is a measure of income and poverty and not a measure of "who has a full time job"
  - nradov 6y ago
josalhor 6y ago
I think a lot of contention in the comments would have gone away if, instead of calling it "True Unemployment Rate", Axios had chosen a different term. "Dependent Rate" may have been a good alternative?
egberts1 6y ago
To be counted as unemployed, you must be engaging in job search. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work (except for temporary illness) in order to be counted as unemployed. Otherwise, you’re just idle. That’s why we have various unemployment indexes such as U1, U3, U5 and U6. Me think the author of article is conflating various terms. https://www.thoughtco.com/statistical-measures-of-unemployment-1148112 https://www.thoughtco.com/statistical-measures-of-unemployme...
dfxm12 6y ago
Why do we care that people are working? There are many reasons, probably, which is why there are different measures. I do think most of these measures (incorrectly) presume that having a job means you have a living wage, or at least at some level, that if you have a job you generally don't need so much assistance. Maybe that was true at some point in history, but it is not today. Most minimum wages across the US are not a living wage. Many necessary benefits are tied to full time employment only. Unemployment rates with no context attached don't have such a strong meaning.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Americans seem to have a deep resentment of being taken advantage of. They're not un-generous, but their generosity is only for the "worthy", and they're afraid that the un-worthy are benefitting. There are examples in this thread, where the poster personally knows people who do not wish to work and are somehow living the high life off of their taxes. The implication is that it's worth eliminating the program in order to avoid that; the abstraction of other deserving people who need it is less important. They wouldn't necessarily mind a system that managed to remove all of the malingerers, but even a very tiny number of them invalidates a system. As you say, we can easily afford it: the country produces over $60,000 per person each year. It's more a matter of fairness than resources: people resent a system they perceive as unfair to them even more than they resent a system in which unfortunate people suffer. That's certainly not unique to Americans, but from what I've seen, it dominates the thinking here more than in many other parts of the world. When you describe, say the UK's NHS or a UBI, the American mind seems to go first to "How many people must be abusing that system?"
  - refurb 6y ago
    That shouldn’t be a shocker to you, it comes down to fairness. If you have two 30 year old males, both capable of work and one works a full time job, pay 1/3 in taxes and the other guy chooses not to work and is effectively supported (in part) by the guy working, is that fair? I think most people would say no. And I don’t think it’s unique to capitalism. Even in the Soviet Union they had “social parasites” who refused to contribute to society. Same with communal societies without a monetary system. People who can contribute but choose not to are pretty quickly pushed out. And I see a lot of comments on HN about paying taxes as the cost of enjoying the benefits of society. Even if you ignore the unfairness of one laborer paying for another laborer to be idle (even though they can work), isn’t it unfair to society for someone to not contribute to the system they benefit so greatly from? And I’m not even an American.
Miner49er 6y ago
From the whitepaper: "Furthermore, LISEP calculates the “True Rate of UnemploymentOut ofPopulation”, using the same statistical definition of True Rate of Employment, but instead taking this number from the entire working-age population (aged 16+) rather than the BLS-defined labor force." So am I right that this includes retirees, college students, kids still in high school, stay-at-home parents, etc? Doesn't seem super useful.
zalkota 6y ago
Vote blue and it’ll continue to be high.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Going back at least to the Clinton administration, and probably earlier, every president gets accused of manipulating unemployment rates by using U3 instead of U6 or some other metric. But as far as I know, it's always U3 used between administrations for comparisons but pundits will be pundits, switching their view depending on who is in office. It's the same with "plays too much golf", "uses Air Force One for campaigning" for every incumbent, and of course "goes on too many vacations". Just something to keep in mind no matter who is in office at any given time.
irjustin 6y ago
If everyone knows how the unemployment rate is built[0] is it so bad that it's built that way? No matter how you build a single number to represent a really complex problem (i.e. what is "living wage", what is "really wants one[job]"?) you'll get a bad answer. [0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
nabla9 6y ago
The article redefines unemployment to include underemployment.This is just one example of fudging terms, not trying to educate the public. Experts use difficult and precise terms so lets use our own. BIS has 6 different measures for labor underutilization. The widest is U-6: "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" U-6 is 12.8%
dr-detroit 6y ago
H1B foreigners have no trouble finding work: 1 Cognizant Technology Solutions 28,526 2 Infosys 21,473 3 Tata Consultancy Services 11,868 4 Google 10,577 5 Ernst & Young 8,893 6 Capgemini 8,411 7 Deloitte & Touche 8,258 8 Amazon.Com Services 7,705 9 IBM 7,237 10 Microsoft 6,041 11 Accenture 5,654 12 Hcl America 4,688
frankbreetz 6y ago
>> an important new dataset shared exclusively with "Axios on HBO." This doesn't seem trustworthy. Why not use BLS data? This makes the current economic situation look better then the official Unemployment Rate. When looking at the official rate it goes from 3.6% to 7.9% When looking at the "True White Unemployment Rate" it goes from about 20% to 23.6%, that seems far less severe. Not to mention they don't break the Official Unemployment up by race(this is present in the official Unemployment Situation Report output by the BLS), so you can't do an accurate comparison. All indicators can be gamed, and no single indicator paints the entire picture, but most people can't spend a lot of time comparing different numbers, and this new indicators seem to be correlated, so what is the point? They aren't normalized seasonally, that makes it even more confusing. They haven't strayed too much as far as the graph goes back, so this is not a new issue. The data from this article is suspect, and it gives us no new information.
BunsanSpace 6y ago
Unemployment is just one of several metrics which need to be viewed together to get a proper picture. Labour participation, Unemployment, underemployment, e& need to be considered at the same time. low unemployment, but low labour participation? -> people have stopped bothering to look for a job not good. low unemployment, but high underemployment? -> people are desperate and looking for anything, not good either.
speeder 6y ago
My country uses a similar definition. I graduated right in middle of 2008 crisis and for various reasons never found a full time job (all my work was owning my own contracting companies or startups) so for example my government (Brazil) doesn't count me as unemployed and doesn't let me have some benefits. But many employers instead see my empty employment registry (in Brazil theoretically everyone has one) to interpret I never worked so they refuse to hire me in first place because I might lack experience. Interviews don't go much better, for example Amazon interview all of the interviewers asked questions about conflict resolution in large teams I worked with in the past. I suspect the reason I was not hired was this question, since was the only one I couldn't answer at all.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. Yes, if you add at least underemployment by an arbitrary and probably contentious “living wage” standard to traditional unemployment, the number is bigger than you are used to hearing and sounds scarier. Of course, all the historical numbers you've heard are also using the traditional measure, so while the number sounds scarier, you'll also need to erase your memory and replace it with a different data series to have the right context, which will then probably make the current value of the new measure seem a lot less scary. Or not? While arguments for a different headline unemployment number than is currently employed often put a lot of emphasis on how much bigger the current measure would be using the proposed changes, they rarely out that current level in historical perspective. > The official unemployment ... also excludes anybody who has stopped looking for work or is discouraged by a lack of jobs or by the demands of child care during the coronavirus crisis. So does the definition you just presented, which excludes anyone who isn't looking for work, whatever the reason. Or are you now defining “looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage” to include people that aren’t, in fact, looking for a job of any kind? But it's the relative movement not the a absolute level that drives most policy responses, so aside from a bigger number, what different actionable insight does the proposal provide? The article doesn't even begin to make an argument that this number is more useful for any practical purpose, even if it was coherent, which the contradictions in the first couple paragraphs seems to indicate that it is not.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Yep. U5 and U6 are always bigger than U3, pretty much by definition. You speak of historic perspective; let’s try getting some numbers! A quick Internet has led me to https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate (I’m on my phone so it’s harder to get the original sources linked but I assume that’s just the BLS numbers either way). They all track each other pretty well. A trend in one is a trend in all of them. If you want to expand your understanding then following the changes in something like labor force participation trends is probably more interesting than just switching among these U series. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
pc86 6y ago
> If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage Uh, a lot of 17 year old's don't work during the school year. And they don't define "living wage" in this article - does that mean minimum wage for 17 year old's? Minimum wage for 18+? $15/hr? Something else? This is basically "if you take this ridiculous metric that nobody uses, you can get to 55% unemployment! 59% for $MARGINALIZED_GROUP!!!1"
kelvin0 6y ago
If the current social turmoil in the US is any indication, we can assume a lot of disenfranchised people are currently hurting financially. When everyone works and has enough income to live the 'dream' such unrest is usually not present. As en example, after WWII industry was booming, and standard of living was very high. Not so anymore.
kryogen1c 6y ago
Aside from the other cogent comments about how to effectively measure unemployment and what that might tell us about the economy, this article is pretty shite. > "Axios on HBO." What does that even mean? this is literally out of Idiocracy. -brought to you by Carl's Junior > author of Capital First line under the headline contains a link to marketing material with a prominent sign-up link. gotta pump up those conversion numbers, i guess. > rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it's 59.2% this is such a bullshit, zeitgeisty move. provides no useful info, is a non-sequitur solely for the purposes trying to ride the BLM wave. grab that emotional engagement. > A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% as others have said, the ability to not find any job and whether or not you are above the poverty line is a very different thing. muddling these two makes me strongly doubt the clarity of sight from the author and guarantees i wouldnt sign up for anything related to his opinions.
URfejk 6y ago
September 2020 ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment is 26.9%: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...
beastman82 6y ago
Defund welfare. Perverse incentives yield terrible results, what a surprise
talkingtab 6y ago
It is concerning that the top comment on this article is an attempt to divert the argument from the substance and implications of the article to numbers. It is the equivalent of responding to a statement that "the ship is sinking" with a detailed analysis of the technique to measure the depth of water. The truth is not a number, but a fabric of information. There have been frequent articles describing the large number of layoffs due to the pandemic, and a number of articles reporting that a substantial number of Americans cannot afford an unexpected bill of $300. If you are one of the fortunate people who make a living wage as defined in the Axios article you might well consider what it means if in fact half or more of the people around you do not.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  How do you know the “ship is sinking?” What unemployment number is necessary such that the ship is not sinking? This article admits that the true number has been relatively much higher for nearly the entire history that unemployment has been measured by the federal government.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The problem with unemployment numbers is that you only realize that the ship was sinking after the fact. The exact line of percent unemployment (and length of unemployment) at which a society falls apart isn’t a known factor.
- AndyMcConachie 6y ago
  The point I've always taken away from the US's faniciful unemployment numbers is that the USG could be doing A LOT more research in this area, but instead chooses not to. The Department of Labor, or some other government agency, could publish many different metrics that explore the issue of unemployment in many different ways. Because like any social phenomenom, there are lots of different ways to slice this pie. Instead the USG deliberately chooses not to, because they don't want the issue of unemployment explored. Congress could mandate that unemployment metrics be gathered in dozens of different ways, with dozens of different definitions for what it means to be unemployed. But they don't. This is the point, and really the only point that matters.
ReptileMan 6y ago
His definition of unemployed maps perfectly to the good and often used term underemployed - basically people that want more hours and money and are unable to find them. If you learn in 2020 that there are a lot of working poor, you haven't been paying attention in the last 12 years.
hevelvarik 6y ago
Ok so the article points out well known deficiencies in the widely used definition for unemployment and presents a nation wide figure using a magical undefined number called the living wage applied against a data set revealed only to Axios on HBO whatever that is. So what to make of this? That the unemployment figure doesn’t reflect the actual experience of job seeking in the USA... We know this and there’s nothing in this article adding to our intuition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
karaterobot 6y ago
Goodheart's Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Generally, that's because you start optimizing around improving the measurement rather than the conditions the measurement is supposed to depict. In other words, you start cramming for the test, rather than learning the subject. Half serious, half modest proposal: would it be useful for the BLS or OECD, or whoever, to periodically and unexpectedly change how unemployment is measured and calculated, in order to minimize the tendency observed in Goodheart's Law?
jackfoxy 6y ago
If I were ever to return to being a news junky, axios.com would be at the top of my source list. Notice the objective to the point layout, and link to the data source. My only quibble is axios did not link directly to the white paper explaining the methodology, but that link is prominent on the linked page. So, 2 clicks away from the explanation of the numbers. Much better than the vast majority of articles, whether MSM or blogger, that get thrown around as evidence for this or that. As has been pointed out, the article title is rather click-baity. No information source is perfect...and it is all narrative.
lstroud 6y ago
It’s ironic how folks waffle back and forth on the value of underemployment as political seasons change.
tc313 6y ago
> the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% A look at the chart in the article contradicts the "stunning" element: It seems that this measure has been in the mid-to-high 20%s for at least two decades. So, while this number might inform certain policy decisions, it doesn't appear to be far outside the norm.
- em500 6y ago
  Yeah, but an article that just states that about 20% of the employed earn less than 20k/year (which is all that this article amounts to) is not going to get as many clicks, shares and HN comments.
didibus 6y ago
Why we care about employment metrics anyways? Seems we should just be measuring people's revenu adjusted to their current geography. Though I would argue against the adjustment for geography. It holds true when we're talking about day to day expense, like rent, but generally doesn't when we're talking about life expenses like healthcare. At least we need to be careful how we adjust for geography. If we consider someone is able to pay rent and eat, that seems not good enough, it should also adjust for: and they'd be able to afford cancer treatment and sending children to university as a minimum.
tibbon 6y ago
I have to wonder if a better way to look at this over time would be instead to look at the Employment Rate. What % of people have employment? Maybe have a rate that doesn't even factor out people "not in the workforce".
brighton36 6y ago
Goodhearts law
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
I mean, sure, but why not add additional measures forever, right? I read the "whitepaper" on the LISEP website. They don't even bother comparing their custom measure to U6 which is the broadest rate internationally recognised and collected by the BLS. Literally, no mention. If your thesis is "current measures of unemployment" are not adequate and you want to convince people of that, you should really include what those measures actually are or you will look like a crank.
jjtheblunt 6y ago
slightly off topic, but does Axios seem to have shifted away from political neutrality increasingly often lately?
impalallama 6y ago
>To be classified as employed for LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job and no desire for a full-time job (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in 2020 dollars. ($20,000 is chosen based on the U.S. poverty guidelines put out by the Department of Health and Human Services, which considers a three-person household to be in poverty if it has an income of less than $20,000 per year). I have still more questions but here is more details on their methodology and details for things like self-employment. https://assets.website-files.com/5f67c16a6ca3251ecc11eca7/5f84cf8d3fbecf746ac890a4_Methodology%20for%20the%20LISEP%20OCT13.pdf https://assets.website-files.com/5f67c16a6ca3251ecc11eca7/5f... Looks pretty grim and I can't say I disagree.
supernova87a 6y ago
I am surprised that they don't show the unemployment rate as a map. I am sure that the rural / coastal unemployment rate is a strong driver of why political disagreements are so divided in the last decade.
CoffeeDregs 6y ago
Commenters are arguing about U-3 versus U-x but the question is really: how should our population think our economy is doing? The rhetoric on the news since 2008 has been: oooh, look at those low unemployment numbers! But reality doesn't seem to have matched the claim that low-unemployment-means-people-are-doing-well... Unemployment was near record lows and wages weren't increasing much (even with a suitable time lag)? Whatever measure we're currently using, it doesn't seem to be serving the population well. Certainly is serving politicians well. How is labor force participation down so much over 20 years if we're doing so well? (As raised in the comments, it's good to use universal-ish standards so that countries are comparable.) And I'm not classic "liberal" or "progressive" (I lean (proper, not movement) conservative). This is intended to portray a fairly balanced view of BLS stats...
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% But they actually measured "isn't paid a living wage" (by their definition), and just assumed "looking, but can't find one". That assumption is absolutely false - high school kids, college kids, independently wealthy, non-working spouses, and retired people. The article's methodology doesn't implement their definition. The conclusions are therefore worthless by their own standard.
DesiLurker 6y ago
I am surprised that no one has mentioned shadow stats yet. this is an excellent set of stats maintained privately: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart... he maintains it by following pre-clinton era methodology so its relatively less gamed.

419 points by jbegley 6y ago

mc32 6y ago

What matters is measuring consistency across time and across borders. Also this ignores the nuance provided by the different numbers like U1 through U6 but they’re mainly complaining about U3 and ignore the others exist at all.

gruez 6y ago

Relevant critique on /r/badeconomics: https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jd3p0l/axios_americas_true_unemployment_rate_has/ https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jd3p0l/axios_...

WinstonSmith84 6y ago

> If you measure the "unemployed" as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage... Over 16 years old, a lot of people are at school / university and likely "funded" by their parents. And those who work in order to study because their parents can't/don't help them, they don't obviously pretend to earn more than 20K... they work simply to survive while they study but when they are graduated, it's another story... Is it all counted as "unemployed"?

maxsilver 6y ago
It should be. For all practical purposes, all university students should always show up as "unemployed" in any statistics, because they are -- and they'll need to earn all of that cash back and then some extra, at some point in their lifetime.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  If they are "funded" by their parents - why would they need to earn any of that back? Is that really how it works in the US? It's a matter of course in other countries that parents fund the education of their children.
  - creata 6y ago
    > It's a matter of course in other countries that parents fund the education of their children. In some countries. In others (such as Australia), students take out an interest-free loan from the government, and are expected to pay it back, with or without the help of their parents.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    Are most students funded by their parents? I certainly wasn't, and neither was my wife.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      You can't forget the HN demographic of upper middle class white men who pay for their children's education. I'd say most young adults entering college have a loan in their name. Cursory research [0] says >Today, roughly 70% of American students end up taking out loans to go to college. The average graduate leaves school with around $30,000 in debt and all told, some 45 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in student loans — and counting. [0] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/30/70-of-college-students-graduate-with-debt-how-did-we-get-here/ https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/30/70-of-college-student...
      - TonyTrapp 6y ago
        Again that is a very US-centric view. You don't pay 25,000$ a year for attending a university in Europe.
        TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        The post is titled "America's True Unemployment Rate," so it does make sense in this case to assume were talking about USA. I certainly was in my comment above.
        TonyTrapp 6y ago
        Fair point about your comment, I'm just trying to make my point based on the original generalization I replied to: Part of it is simply wrong even for the US (see siblings), and the rest cannot stand as a generalization for the rest of the world, which "any statistics about students" doesn't account for.
- ecmascript 6y ago
  So why should we not include children of all ages and retied people as well then? They are also unemployed. The reason you don't include full time students is the same for children and retired people. They are on their way to becoming productive citizens or have done their part for society.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Many full time students are employed throughout college. As someone who attended the state colleges my family could afford, most students had part time employment and many were working full time.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    What about retired people who aren't really retired, they are just drawing on their pension sooner than they'd like, as a desperate alternative to employment money to lengthen their rental runway to homelessness? Or they are drawing on a pension while doing food delivery gigs on the side to top it up to pay for essentials? I'd suggest a useful definition of "unemployed" for the purpose of evaluating if there's a problem is: "needs a job but can't get one". That covers retired-but-not-really people, and students who need to work for a living at the same time but are between jobs. But not children, or students with enough to live on from their parents.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  Your definition differs from the one used in the article "A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed" I expect there's value in the statistic of everyone who lacks a full time job (unemployment in the sense you mention), but a student who has reasonable prospects of employment in X years, post graduation, is significantly different than someone failing to find an adequate job right now.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  > For all practical purposes, all university students should always show up as "unemployed" in any statistics, because they are That’s funny because I worked the entirety of my time as an undergrad, as did many of my peers.
  - maxsilver 6y ago
    Sorry, I worked through my entire undergrad as well. I meant we should never exclude young adults from unemployment metrics. If they aren't employed at a living wage, they aren't employed, being a student should not "bypass" that metric in any way.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  Go screw yourself. I worked 20/30+ hours a week for rent and to eat.
newacct583 6y ago
> a lot of people are at school / university and likely "funded" by their parents That's true only for kids of upper middle class families, and thus a vanishing component for a whole-workforce number like this. Kids of families whose parents bring home something close to the median household income ($70k or so) are not being "funded" at school in any meaningful way, certainly not at a number comparable to employment.
dalbasal 6y ago
Generically, depends on what you want to know. No measure tells you everything, and measures that try obfuscate everything. Is it useful to know what portion of the population is working, what percentage of 16-22 yos are working? An increase in employment rate among women might mean more good jobs are available. It might mean that times are tough and women (or men) with small children need to work more. It might mean people can't afford to retire, or that 60+ people are having trouble finding a job, etc. IMO the problem is an obsession with creating a measure that maps perfectly to an imprecise term. "Unemployment," in the abstract, is not a perfectly defined thing. The measure should not define the thing. Measures should be used to understand the thing.
albntomat0 6y ago
I agree with you, with different reasoning. The number of people without adequate employment (as in, they'd take a full time living wage job over their current situation) is a useful means of understanding the economic situation. Counting a student who has reasonable expectations of living wage employment, post graduation, distorts that measure.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Is it all counted as "unemployed"? Well are they employed by anyone? No. So they're unemployed. It's perfectly valid to be unemployed while studying... but you're still unemployed.
- gen3 6y ago
  “Unemployed: People who are involuntarily out of work considered as a group.” I think it’s misleading to classify these people as unemployed, since many of them choose to not work. If they wouldn’t have had a job anyways, it skews the statistic. https://www.wordnik.com/words/unemployed https://www.wordnik.com/words/unemployed
- criddell 6y ago
  That makes it a less useful statistic for talking about problems around unemployment. I think that's why the BLS has so many different measures of unemployment. If I had enough money in the bank to live the rest of my life comfortably, there's no way I'd be employed.
onion2k 6y ago
Over 16 years old, a lot of people are at school / university.. This is especially important to note given that unemployment skews towards younger people.
CamelCaseName 6y ago
Students attending school are classified as "not in the labor force" because they are not available for work. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#ui https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#ui
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  Eligibility for UI is not related to the BLS classification of "unemployed": https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed A college student may be considered unemployed if it is actively looking for a job, but does not have one. Similarly, it may be considered employed if it does have a job.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

simonbarker87 6y ago

Every country does things to minimise this number (that doesn’t make it right, just a fact that I wish weren’t true). I’m pretty convinced the UK’s push to make all 18+ education a 3+ year university qualification was to improve employment figures for that age category. Bit of a long con, eg: go to uni to study early years development with 3 contact hours a week and once that’s the only way to become a nursery school teacher charge £9k a year for uni fees for a job that pays maybe £20k a year. I know so many 25 year olds who’s student loan interest rate is higher than the amount that is deducted from their pay check by the student loans co earning in the mid 30k region

martin_a 6y ago
For Germany there are "training measures". You'll be put in some course for three months and by doing that you are no longer "unemployed". That's great for the statistics but that's about it. I've heard those training are not really great.

x87678r 6y ago

One thing I've noticed in America compared to Europe is that the top salaries pay more which allows more stay at home wives. In Europe a manager/doctor/tech worker doesn't earn as much and its more likely that the wife is also in full time employment. Its anecdotal so I can't be sure, but its what I see in my neighborhood.

epx 6y ago
And childcare costs/good free childcare availability/allow you to leave your job at 17:00 sharp are probably other relevant factors, as well.
newacct583 6y ago
I don't think that holds. Here's a data set of female/male work force ratio for a bunch of nations. The US at 85% isn't notably different from the rest of the industrialized world. It's a little bit lower than the UK but a little bit higher than Germany, etc... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.NE.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.NE.ZS That doesn't falsify your specific claim, which is about a very small fraction of the population (six figure salaries put families into the top 3% or so), but it's reasonable evidence. Broadly: you're taking a cultural point about upper middle class "America" and extending it to the whole society. Most people don't (can't) live like that.
- watwut 6y ago
  Staying at home is also religion related. Evangelical and conservative groups (of both genders) want to have women at home regardless of how rich they are.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    It might be, but again the data doesn't really bear it out as a unique thing to the US. The US looks like other industrial nations in aggregate.
pwlb 6y ago

Upvoter33 6y ago

I've often thought we need many more metrics to gauge the economy. Wage data, actually employment, a much better sense of who is doing well financially. The main numbers shared in the news just aren't that useful, and have allowed a lot of discontent to flourish under our noses, with disastrous political results.

ecmascript 6y ago

> If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage That seems like it will give you a really bad number because they are for sure unemployed but a lot of people in the age 16-20something will go to school. I didn't earn a living wage until I was 22, but I also earn pretty well nowadays and pay a more taxes than most of my friends. Seems like the author has come to a conclusion before writing the article. A pretty dishonest piece imo. Because if you include students, why not include children and retired people as well?

mcv 6y ago
Exactly. There's a bit difference between the number of people who want to work but can't find a job, and the number of people who are doing something productive that just happens to be unpaid, because it's going to school or something else. These numbers mean different things and have different uses.
- ecmascript 6y ago
  The thing is, it's obvious that it is a political piece intended to stir up confusion and anger towards the current administration. When you point out the very obvious flaws, it gets you downvoted as well because orange man bad. HN has become a sad place just like everywhere else.
  - smolder 6y ago
    It's a sad place if you assume all the flaws in the article are obvious to everyone, then reduce everyones behavior to "orange man bad", and then complain about how it's a sad place.
    - slingnow 6y ago
      Given that this is generally place of intelligent people, it should be concerning that they didn't pick up on the fact that the article is quite obviously using a massive portion of the population to inflate their argument (16-20 year olds). This is likely the effect of the argument fitting in with everyone's preferred narrative.

cik 6y ago

Felix Salmon has always been a pleasure to read. If you like his writing, you might enjoy him on the Slate Money podcast. https://slate.com/podcasts/slate-money https://slate.com/podcasts/slate-money

mountainb 6y ago

This is phrased in a very deceptive way. There are lots of issues with the 'Unemployment' metric. It is indeed a deceptive metric. However, it is deliberately misleading to append 'True' to 'Unemployment Rate' with a custom definition intended to make an argument. You are stacking confusion on confusion instead of clarifying. If you want to create a different metric around a 'living wage,' then it should be defined in a way that makes that more clear. There are also serious regional differences in what such a wage might be. $2000/month is enough to live comfortably with a personal car in low cost of living regions. In NYC it means you are probably stacked into a decaying apartment with many other people with no car.

AQXt 6y ago
> $2000/month is enough to live comfortably with a personal car in low cost of living regions. In NYC it means you are probably stacked into a decaying apartment with many other people with no car. It's funny how many Americans conflate "living" with the possession of a car...
- sebmellen 6y ago
  In many regions of the US, it's a simple necessity to have a car, just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe. I know people who work as farmers in the north of the Netherlands, and a car is as essential a commodity for them as it might be for a rural Midwesterner.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    "just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe." Even europeans often have this urban blindspot. In some places (eg netherlands), you may be able to live conveniently without a car. For a lot of places (eg >50% of ireland), not having a car is a major lifestyle inhibitor. Transport (or lack thereof) dictates a lot of your life... from work opportunities to whether or not you can access a supermarket.
    - bkor 6y ago

dalbasal 6y ago

Am measure measures what is measures. Generally, measures like unemployment are useful in determining trends. Note how most of the unemployment measures are correlated. OTOH, it may be wrong (eg) over very long periods. If underlying behavioural changes happen (eg employment seeking behaviour, drifting of underemployment/unemployment ratios) it may miss long term trends. The problems start (almost immediately) when when the measure becomes the definition. Measures are tightly defined, objective and legible. That's attractive. So, we start to define (eg) unemployment as "that which IQ tests measure." This is totally off track, if the measures weaknesses are (they usually are) justified by arguing the measure is just for trend detection. Definition and trend detection are different purposes. In any case, the only way to get a less superficial understanding to define the measure in terms of what it actually measures, not what it's trying to measure. "people trying to find work" is an actually useful thing to pay attention to. It just isn't "unemployment" in the widest sense of the term. Personally, I hate the "index/metric" solution. This is chasing the rabbit down a hole. We can't have a measure that perfectly maps to unemployment (or financial wellbeing, or whatever). Efforts to do so end up measuring something even more abstract and difficult to understand. The alternative is to just use these measures as incomplete. We can look at "job seeker" rates, nonemployment rates, etc. No measure will tell us what's really happening. That's up to us human intellect to determine.

gd1 6y ago

FACT CHECK FALSE: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jun/16/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-real-unemployment-rate-18-20-per/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jun/16/donald-tru... Ahahahahahahhaahahahhahahahah

gregwebs 6y ago

The other important number that is manipulated is inflation (CPI). When you add the manipulation of inflation and joblessness together along with encouraging financial asset bubbles you can pretend to have a great economy when there is actually a recession or even depression. [1] The government has every incentive to manipulate the CPI: it even reduces their social security payouts. [1] https://www.georgegammon.com/will-there-be-a-great-depression-2020-shocking-answer-revealed/ https://www.georgegammon.com/will-there-be-a-great-depressio...

burlesona 6y ago
I don’t know that the government excessively manipulates the CPI, given it shows constant steady inflation since the 1950s[1]. My sense is merely that the metric is focused on “cost to survive” measures and does not reflect the changes in “cost to thrive.” Food, clothing, transportation, and technology are actually getting cheaper over time. But it’s hard to care when housing, education, and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Also, as a footnote, I was interested to read the article you linked, but I seriously distrust any information presented as a video under the headline “shocking answer revealed!” 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  You can manipulate it by deciding what's included and by using reduction in costs of say big flat screen TV's over time.

thehappypm 6y ago

“If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it's 59.2%.“ A large portion of high school students, stay-at-home spouses, college students, under-the-table workers, and the retired will likely fit into this category. I was excited about this article but it just isn’t compelling.

thoughtstheseus 6y ago
It’s somewhat useful in a broader context of income and wealth inequality discussions.

burlesona 6y ago

For a simpler source of better food for thought just check the official participation rate. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... The article crafts a nice shocking headline, but the substance is disappointing. The BLS measures unemployment many different ways (U1-U6)[1] plus the civilian labor force participation rate, so the official data also shows these higher unemployment rates as U6, and has tracked them over time. Of course politicians and the media like to pick apart that data and focus on whichever part of it best supports the narrative they intend to tell. But the data is all there for all of us to see and interpret for ourselves. 1: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

lettergram 6y ago
I don’t know if participation rate is fair either. Largely because (a) the population is aging and is likely to retire (with wealth amassed and (b) this is really only possible because the government has started subsidizing pretty much everything (food, healthcare, housing, etc) either generally or for those “too poor”. I personally know a significant number (at least 10-15) that exclusively live from government handouts (this is beyond simple social security). They have little incentive to try and find a job, frankly and many actively live with food stamps, housing subsidies, free healthcare, and just kinda bum around.
- piva00 6y ago
  > I personally know a significant number (at least 10-15) that exclusively live from government handouts (this is beyond simple social security). They have little incentive to try and find a job, frankly and many actively live with food stamps, housing subsidies, free healthcare, and just kinda bum around. I will be very honest: this is a very unsubstantiated claim, even if you know personally 10-15 people who are just bumming around and living on benefits that is a very small portion of benefits claim in society and this kind of behaviour will always exist. Benefits fraud is a thing, the good that benefits and welfare does to a society are much larger than the impact of fraud. Do you really believe that someone who lives with handouts from the government have very little incentive to get better? Do you believe that this almost less-than-baseline level of living is enough to make a significant portion of the populace unwilling to work? To the level where participation rate would become unfair? Have you ever lived on that lifestyle to check your assumption that they have "very little incentive to try and find a job"?

asdffdsa 6y ago

Doesn't account for part-time, doesn't account for households, doesn't account for students. Add in "Black Americans" and voila, you have a run-of-the-mill lazily-written racebaiting clickbait pseudointellectual blog post.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

There is no true single facet of looking at this data. We already know the pandemic and the response have been disastrous for unemployment. If you aren’t in the top 1%, good luck.

messo 6y ago

This explains a lot. Anger and desperation is the only logical outcome when almost half the nation is living in (or at the edge) of poverty.

wombatmobile 6y ago
Thanks for posting. Yours is the first comment that doesn't futz with the definition of a term and instead considers the effect of unemployment on actual people. Imagine being a daddy or a mommy with no way to earn enough this month to bring up your kids halfway to what you were taught is decent.
- messo 6y ago
  I have recently been watching a documentary series by a Norwegian musician that grew up in the rustbelt in America in the 70'ies [0], but moved with his famliy to Norway in his youth. He has been going back, visiting family, friends and random people and interviewed them, and it is frankly heartbreaking to witness the struggle the the 'average joe' has to endure. I'm living well below the poverty line here in Norway, but it is nothing compared to being poor in America. I do not need to worry about health care or expensive insurance. Me and my partner own an old but nice house with a big garden in a semi-rural community (15min from the nearest city), and can afford all the basic necessities by being frugal. In America, we would have lived in constant fear of becoming ill, seeing a doctor or going to the hospital. The idea that you have no real safety net to help you in tough times is terrifying. I can only begin to imagine the stress that goes with it. I have great sympathy for regular people who are struggling, that voted for Trump. They have long been ignored, neglected and forgotten, and I am sure many voted for him either in desperation or to defy the system they rightly feel have left them behind. People in Norway couldn't imagine how the American people could vote for such an obvious clown and a demagogue, but we have not seen the extent of the suffering and hardship before recently. We see the Hollywood version of your culture for the most part, and are shocked when we find out that American women actually have to pay the hospital when giving birth ("wtf, it isn't covered by paying taxes?"). I really hope that it gets better, but am afraid it has to get worse first. [0]: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/uxa-thomas-seltzers-amerika https://tv.nrk.no/serie/uxa-thomas-seltzers-amerika (Norwegian language, but many segments are in English)

deugtniet 6y ago

I think the definition of unemployment has been contentious for as long as it exists. Axios is choosing to go with the definition of 'People looking for work or working while earning less than 20,000 USD per year'. The employment numbers are naturally going to be higher than when the definition is just 'People earning nothing and looking for work'. If one takes the living wage as a measure of unemployment, it should also include place of residence IMO. I heard living wage in the bay area is > 100K USD. I'm not advocating for anything and have no stake. But all these statistics are proxies for how citizens are doing. In general, hardships increase as unemployment goes up, whatever way you measure it. It's usually better to look at all of them jointly, and focus on differences instead of the absolute rates of a statistic.

itsoktocry 6y ago
>But all these statistics are proxies for how citizens are doing. In general, hardships increase as unemployment goes up, whatever way you measure it. It's usually better to look at all of them jointly, and focus on differences instead of the absolute rates. Well stated. We see the same issues with GDP; people claiming it doesn't capture a country's well-being. This is not surprising, since it's a measure of economic output. But we know there's a correlation between economic output and societal quality-of-life. In general, more GDP > less GDP. If you find anomalies that raise interesting questions (ie Canada vs US) you can compare other measures.

em500 6y ago

There's a good perpetual market for people peddling secret shocking truths that the powers don't want you to know, and everything is secretly much worse than you thought, about pretty much everything, AKA conspiracy theories. Economic conspiracy stories tend to be somewhat less outrageous than those about vaccines or Bill Gates, so the same people who point and laugh at people who believe the later could easily believe stuff from shadowstats, conspiracies around the Private Ownership of the Federal Reserve, or the perpetual unemployment-is-actually-super-high. The mundane Truth About Unemployment is that the current measures are relatively easy to measure in standard way without too much subjectivity (they just ask a bunch of people if they're available for work and looking for work, but couldn't find any). The official docs are pretty clear about what they measure, but they're pretty dry and don't make for good clickbait/blog/youtube stories https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/pdf/cps.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/pdf/cps.pdf. There's no grand conspiracy to suppress the truth at the BLS, it's just a bunch of boring civil servant jobs.

C1sc0cat 6y ago
Governments often fiddle with the definition or use other benefits to hide the true rate - in the UK there was pressure in the (1980's) for NHS GP's to put older unemployed people on disability to reduce the headline unemployment rate.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rexreed 6y ago

The stats cited in this article are headline-worthy but they don't make much sense. If you think about what employment means in the context of labor and wage earning, until the early 1900s, most in America would now be counted as unemployed, since they were rather "employed" in agriculture and domestic work, neither of which would be counted as a living wage today. In addition, most women, a large part of today's workforce, did not actively participate in the labor pool (looking for full-time employment as the BLS cites for employment), however that drastically changed in the 1960s and onwards. As such, the current definition of employment is rooted in the realities of where employment was in the early 1900s. Today's definition might not jive with what the Axios article is stating, but what the Axios article is stating is not really about Employment, but rather about Income generation. The notion of generating income must be separated from the idea of full-time employment. In the gig economy, side hustle world, most gig workers would not be counted in the employment rolls. As such, do the employment numbers matter and do we need something distinct to measure what Axios is stating here, which has more to do with income earning than full time employment?

acruns 6y ago
Agreed, I am a freelancer making six figures married and my wife hasn't worked since we were dating. So according to their definition my wife is unemployed, not making a "living wage" and so am I. This is a perfect example of why I pay little attention to the news. They or their editor must have known this was bs but decided to publish it anyway for the clicks.
- rexreed 6y ago
  Exactly. What is currently touted as an Unemployment number should be renamed: "% of those who are seeking full-time employment but not currently full-time employed". Perhaps "Unfulfilled Job Seekers" might be a better term than "Unemployed". The other measure should be "% of working age Households where household income is not at or above average living wage adjusted by region". Then that is a measure of income and poverty and not a measure of "who has a full time job"
- nradov 6y ago

josalhor 6y ago

I think a lot of contention in the comments would have gone away if, instead of calling it "True Unemployment Rate", Axios had chosen a different term. "Dependent Rate" may have been a good alternative?

egberts1 6y ago

To be counted as unemployed, you must be engaging in job search. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work (except for temporary illness) in order to be counted as unemployed. Otherwise, you’re just idle. That’s why we have various unemployment indexes such as U1, U3, U5 and U6. Me think the author of article is conflating various terms. https://www.thoughtco.com/statistical-measures-of-unemployment-1148112 https://www.thoughtco.com/statistical-measures-of-unemployme...

dfxm12 6y ago

Why do we care that people are working? There are many reasons, probably, which is why there are different measures. I do think most of these measures (incorrectly) presume that having a job means you have a living wage, or at least at some level, that if you have a job you generally don't need so much assistance. Maybe that was true at some point in history, but it is not today. Most minimum wages across the US are not a living wage. Many necessary benefits are tied to full time employment only. Unemployment rates with no context attached don't have such a strong meaning.

jfengel 6y ago
Americans seem to have a deep resentment of being taken advantage of. They're not un-generous, but their generosity is only for the "worthy", and they're afraid that the un-worthy are benefitting. There are examples in this thread, where the poster personally knows people who do not wish to work and are somehow living the high life off of their taxes. The implication is that it's worth eliminating the program in order to avoid that; the abstraction of other deserving people who need it is less important. They wouldn't necessarily mind a system that managed to remove all of the malingerers, but even a very tiny number of them invalidates a system. As you say, we can easily afford it: the country produces over $60,000 per person each year. It's more a matter of fairness than resources: people resent a system they perceive as unfair to them even more than they resent a system in which unfortunate people suffer. That's certainly not unique to Americans, but from what I've seen, it dominates the thinking here more than in many other parts of the world. When you describe, say the UK's NHS or a UBI, the American mind seems to go first to "How many people must be abusing that system?"
- refurb 6y ago
  That shouldn’t be a shocker to you, it comes down to fairness. If you have two 30 year old males, both capable of work and one works a full time job, pay 1/3 in taxes and the other guy chooses not to work and is effectively supported (in part) by the guy working, is that fair? I think most people would say no. And I don’t think it’s unique to capitalism. Even in the Soviet Union they had “social parasites” who refused to contribute to society. Same with communal societies without a monetary system. People who can contribute but choose not to are pretty quickly pushed out. And I see a lot of comments on HN about paying taxes as the cost of enjoying the benefits of society. Even if you ignore the unfairness of one laborer paying for another laborer to be idle (even though they can work), isn’t it unfair to society for someone to not contribute to the system they benefit so greatly from? And I’m not even an American.

Miner49er 6y ago

From the whitepaper: "Furthermore, LISEP calculates the “True Rate of UnemploymentOut ofPopulation”, using the same statistical definition of True Rate of Employment, but instead taking this number from the entire working-age population (aged 16+) rather than the BLS-defined labor force." So am I right that this includes retirees, college students, kids still in high school, stay-at-home parents, etc? Doesn't seem super useful.

zalkota 6y ago

Vote blue and it’ll continue to be high.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

Going back at least to the Clinton administration, and probably earlier, every president gets accused of manipulating unemployment rates by using U3 instead of U6 or some other metric. But as far as I know, it's always U3 used between administrations for comparisons but pundits will be pundits, switching their view depending on who is in office. It's the same with "plays too much golf", "uses Air Force One for campaigning" for every incumbent, and of course "goes on too many vacations". Just something to keep in mind no matter who is in office at any given time.

irjustin 6y ago

If everyone knows how the unemployment rate is built[0] is it so bad that it's built that way? No matter how you build a single number to represent a really complex problem (i.e. what is "living wage", what is "really wants one[job]"?) you'll get a bad answer. [0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

nabla9 6y ago

The article redefines unemployment to include underemployment.This is just one example of fudging terms, not trying to educate the public. Experts use difficult and precise terms so lets use our own. BIS has 6 different measures for labor underutilization. The widest is U-6: "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" U-6 is 12.8%

dr-detroit 6y ago

H1B foreigners have no trouble finding work: 1 Cognizant Technology Solutions 28,526 2 Infosys 21,473 3 Tata Consultancy Services 11,868 4 Google 10,577 5 Ernst & Young 8,893 6 Capgemini 8,411 7 Deloitte & Touche 8,258 8 Amazon.Com Services 7,705 9 IBM 7,237 10 Microsoft 6,041 11 Accenture 5,654 12 Hcl America 4,688

frankbreetz 6y ago

>> an important new dataset shared exclusively with "Axios on HBO." This doesn't seem trustworthy. Why not use BLS data? This makes the current economic situation look better then the official Unemployment Rate. When looking at the official rate it goes from 3.6% to 7.9% When looking at the "True White Unemployment Rate" it goes from about 20% to 23.6%, that seems far less severe. Not to mention they don't break the Official Unemployment up by race(this is present in the official Unemployment Situation Report output by the BLS), so you can't do an accurate comparison. All indicators can be gamed, and no single indicator paints the entire picture, but most people can't spend a lot of time comparing different numbers, and this new indicators seem to be correlated, so what is the point? They aren't normalized seasonally, that makes it even more confusing. They haven't strayed too much as far as the graph goes back, so this is not a new issue. The data from this article is suspect, and it gives us no new information.

BunsanSpace 6y ago

Unemployment is just one of several metrics which need to be viewed together to get a proper picture. Labour participation, Unemployment, underemployment, e& need to be considered at the same time. low unemployment, but low labour participation? -> people have stopped bothering to look for a job not good. low unemployment, but high underemployment? -> people are desperate and looking for anything, not good either.

speeder 6y ago

My country uses a similar definition. I graduated right in middle of 2008 crisis and for various reasons never found a full time job (all my work was owning my own contracting companies or startups) so for example my government (Brazil) doesn't count me as unemployed and doesn't let me have some benefits. But many employers instead see my empty employment registry (in Brazil theoretically everyone has one) to interpret I never worked so they refuse to hire me in first place because I might lack experience. Interviews don't go much better, for example Amazon interview all of the interviewers asked questions about conflict resolution in large teams I worked with in the past. I suspect the reason I was not hired was this question, since was the only one I couldn't answer at all.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. Yes, if you add at least underemployment by an arbitrary and probably contentious “living wage” standard to traditional unemployment, the number is bigger than you are used to hearing and sounds scarier. Of course, all the historical numbers you've heard are also using the traditional measure, so while the number sounds scarier, you'll also need to erase your memory and replace it with a different data series to have the right context, which will then probably make the current value of the new measure seem a lot less scary. Or not? While arguments for a different headline unemployment number than is currently employed often put a lot of emphasis on how much bigger the current measure would be using the proposed changes, they rarely out that current level in historical perspective. > The official unemployment ... also excludes anybody who has stopped looking for work or is discouraged by a lack of jobs or by the demands of child care during the coronavirus crisis. So does the definition you just presented, which excludes anyone who isn't looking for work, whatever the reason. Or are you now defining “looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage” to include people that aren’t, in fact, looking for a job of any kind? But it's the relative movement not the a absolute level that drives most policy responses, so aside from a bigger number, what different actionable insight does the proposal provide? The article doesn't even begin to make an argument that this number is more useful for any practical purpose, even if it was coherent, which the contradictions in the first couple paragraphs seems to indicate that it is not.

fennecfoxen 6y ago
Yep. U5 and U6 are always bigger than U3, pretty much by definition. You speak of historic perspective; let’s try getting some numbers! A quick Internet has led me to https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate (I’m on my phone so it’s harder to get the original sources linked but I assume that’s just the BLS numbers either way). They all track each other pretty well. A trend in one is a trend in all of them. If you want to expand your understanding then following the changes in something like labor force participation trends is probably more interesting than just switching among these U series. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

pc86 6y ago

> If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living wage Uh, a lot of 17 year old's don't work during the school year. And they don't define "living wage" in this article - does that mean minimum wage for 17 year old's? Minimum wage for 18+? $15/hr? Something else? This is basically "if you take this ridiculous metric that nobody uses, you can get to 55% unemployment! 59% for $MARGINALIZED_GROUP!!!1"

kelvin0 6y ago

If the current social turmoil in the US is any indication, we can assume a lot of disenfranchised people are currently hurting financially. When everyone works and has enough income to live the 'dream' such unrest is usually not present. As en example, after WWII industry was booming, and standard of living was very high. Not so anymore.

kryogen1c 6y ago

Aside from the other cogent comments about how to effectively measure unemployment and what that might tell us about the economy, this article is pretty shite. > "Axios on HBO." What does that even mean? this is literally out of Idiocracy. -brought to you by Carl's Junior > author of Capital First line under the headline contains a link to marketing material with a prominent sign-up link. gotta pump up those conversion numbers, i guess. > rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it's 59.2% this is such a bullshit, zeitgeisty move. provides no useful info, is a non-sequitur solely for the purposes trying to ride the BLM wave. grab that emotional engagement. > A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% as others have said, the ability to not find any job and whether or not you are above the poverty line is a very different thing. muddling these two makes me strongly doubt the clarity of sight from the author and guarantees i wouldnt sign up for anything related to his opinions.

URfejk 6y ago

September 2020 ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment is 26.9%: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

beastman82 6y ago

Defund welfare. Perverse incentives yield terrible results, what a surprise

talkingtab 6y ago

It is concerning that the top comment on this article is an attempt to divert the argument from the substance and implications of the article to numbers. It is the equivalent of responding to a statement that "the ship is sinking" with a detailed analysis of the technique to measure the depth of water. The truth is not a number, but a fabric of information. There have been frequent articles describing the large number of layoffs due to the pandemic, and a number of articles reporting that a substantial number of Americans cannot afford an unexpected bill of $300. If you are one of the fortunate people who make a living wage as defined in the Axios article you might well consider what it means if in fact half or more of the people around you do not.

CyberRabbi 6y ago
How do you know the “ship is sinking?” What unemployment number is necessary such that the ship is not sinking? This article admits that the true number has been relatively much higher for nearly the entire history that unemployment has been measured by the federal government.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The problem with unemployment numbers is that you only realize that the ship was sinking after the fact. The exact line of percent unemployment (and length of unemployment) at which a society falls apart isn’t a known factor.
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
The point I've always taken away from the US's faniciful unemployment numbers is that the USG could be doing A LOT more research in this area, but instead chooses not to. The Department of Labor, or some other government agency, could publish many different metrics that explore the issue of unemployment in many different ways. Because like any social phenomenom, there are lots of different ways to slice this pie. Instead the USG deliberately chooses not to, because they don't want the issue of unemployment explored. Congress could mandate that unemployment metrics be gathered in dozens of different ways, with dozens of different definitions for what it means to be unemployed. But they don't. This is the point, and really the only point that matters.

ReptileMan 6y ago

His definition of unemployed maps perfectly to the good and often used term underemployed - basically people that want more hours and money and are unable to find them. If you learn in 2020 that there are a lot of working poor, you haven't been paying attention in the last 12 years.

hevelvarik 6y ago

Ok so the article points out well known deficiencies in the widely used definition for unemployment and presents a nation wide figure using a magical undefined number called the living wage applied against a data set revealed only to Axios on HBO whatever that is. So what to make of this? That the unemployment figure doesn’t reflect the actual experience of job seeking in the USA... We know this and there’s nothing in this article adding to our intuition.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

karaterobot 6y ago

Goodheart's Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Generally, that's because you start optimizing around improving the measurement rather than the conditions the measurement is supposed to depict. In other words, you start cramming for the test, rather than learning the subject. Half serious, half modest proposal: would it be useful for the BLS or OECD, or whoever, to periodically and unexpectedly change how unemployment is measured and calculated, in order to minimize the tendency observed in Goodheart's Law?

jackfoxy 6y ago

If I were ever to return to being a news junky, axios.com would be at the top of my source list. Notice the objective to the point layout, and link to the data source. My only quibble is axios did not link directly to the white paper explaining the methodology, but that link is prominent on the linked page. So, 2 clicks away from the explanation of the numbers. Much better than the vast majority of articles, whether MSM or blogger, that get thrown around as evidence for this or that. As has been pointed out, the article title is rather click-baity. No information source is perfect...and it is all narrative.

lstroud 6y ago

It’s ironic how folks waffle back and forth on the value of underemployment as political seasons change.

tc313 6y ago

> the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% A look at the chart in the article contradicts the "stunning" element: It seems that this measure has been in the mid-to-high 20%s for at least two decades. So, while this number might inform certain policy decisions, it doesn't appear to be far outside the norm.

em500 6y ago
Yeah, but an article that just states that about 20% of the employed earn less than 20k/year (which is all that this article amounts to) is not going to get as many clicks, shares and HN comments.

didibus 6y ago

Why we care about employment metrics anyways? Seems we should just be measuring people's revenu adjusted to their current geography. Though I would argue against the adjustment for geography. It holds true when we're talking about day to day expense, like rent, but generally doesn't when we're talking about life expenses like healthcare. At least we need to be careful how we adjust for geography. If we consider someone is able to pay rent and eat, that seems not good enough, it should also adjust for: and they'd be able to afford cancer treatment and sending children to university as a minimum.

tibbon 6y ago

I have to wonder if a better way to look at this over time would be instead to look at the Employment Rate. What % of people have employment? Maybe have a rate that doesn't even factor out people "not in the workforce".

brighton36 6y ago

Goodhearts law

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

I mean, sure, but why not add additional measures forever, right? I read the "whitepaper" on the LISEP website. They don't even bother comparing their custom measure to U6 which is the broadest rate internationally recognised and collected by the BLS. Literally, no mention. If your thesis is "current measures of unemployment" are not adequate and you want to convince people of that, you should really include what those measures actually are or you will look like a crank.

jjtheblunt 6y ago

slightly off topic, but does Axios seem to have shifted away from political neutrality increasingly often lately?

impalallama 6y ago

>To be classified as employed for LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job and no desire for a full-time job (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in 2020 dollars. ($20,000 is chosen based on the U.S. poverty guidelines put out by the Department of Health and Human Services, which considers a three-person household to be in poverty if it has an income of less than $20,000 per year). I have still more questions but here is more details on their methodology and details for things like self-employment. https://assets.website-files.com/5f67c16a6ca3251ecc11eca7/5f84cf8d3fbecf746ac890a4_Methodology%20for%20the%20LISEP%20OCT13.pdf https://assets.website-files.com/5f67c16a6ca3251ecc11eca7/5f... Looks pretty grim and I can't say I disagree.

supernova87a 6y ago

I am surprised that they don't show the unemployment rate as a map. I am sure that the rural / coastal unemployment rate is a strong driver of why political disagreements are so divided in the last decade.

CoffeeDregs 6y ago

Commenters are arguing about U-3 versus U-x but the question is really: how should our population think our economy is doing? The rhetoric on the news since 2008 has been: oooh, look at those low unemployment numbers! But reality doesn't seem to have matched the claim that low-unemployment-means-people-are-doing-well... Unemployment was near record lows and wages weren't increasing much (even with a suitable time lag)? Whatever measure we're currently using, it doesn't seem to be serving the population well. Certainly is serving politicians well. How is labor force participation down so much over 20 years if we're doing so well? (As raised in the comments, it's good to use universal-ish standards so that countries are comparable.) And I'm not classic "liberal" or "progressive" (I lean (proper, not movement) conservative). This is intended to portray a fairly balanced view of BLS stats...

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

> A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% But they actually measured "isn't paid a living wage" (by their definition), and just assumed "looking, but can't find one". That assumption is absolutely false - high school kids, college kids, independently wealthy, non-working spouses, and retired people. The article's methodology doesn't implement their definition. The conclusions are therefore worthless by their own standard.

DesiLurker 6y ago

I am surprised that no one has mentioned shadow stats yet. this is an excellent set of stats maintained privately: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart... he maintains it by following pre-clinton era methodology so its relatively less gamed.