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Personally, I don't buy this argument. Economics doesn't care about your feelings or your dreams. If you need money to pay your bills and the only way to get

• ffggvv 5y ago
  yeah, i’m sure it applies to a few thousand peoples but not the millions of jobless people. not everyone even has a dream they are passionate about following in the first place. for the most part people just want a stable job and to be able to enjoy their life outside work. there aren’t millions of new entrepreneurs out of nowhere. it’s a romantic idea
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• junon 5y ago
  > the government paid a huge amount of money to people to not work for a long time They did? I remember three teeny tiny payments. Certainly not enough to live on for a long time.
  • ctrlp 5y ago
    Did you go on unemployment benefits?
    • xvedejas 5y ago
      This is an important question. The pandemic response added both extensions to unemployment and additional payout beyond the typical maximum ($300/week extra, if I remember correctly). If you were laid off any time over the last 18 months, you would be making well over minimum wage by doing nothing. That's a pretty big incentive for plenty of people.
      • bink 5y ago
        But if that were the case I'd expect to see the employment numbers dramatically shift in states that removed their unemployment assistance earlier than others, which I don't think we've seen any evidence of yet.
        • xvedejas 5y ago
          Has it been quite a month yet? If there is an effect I'd guess we won't even see it in the statistics yet, and that's without accounting for the fact that it takes time to find and start a job even in a favorable market.
        • downWidOutaFite 5y ago
          So far the evidence is that job growth is worse in those states. https://www.reuters.com/business/amid-covid-surge-states-that-cut-benefits-still-see-no-hiring-boost-2021-09-17 https://www.reuters.com/business/amid-covid-surge-states-tha...
      • guenthert 5y ago
        If you received maximum benefits and the extra $300, then you got more than you would have earned on minimum wage. You'll receive however maximum benefit only if you earned fairly well before. So I don't see anyone getting more benefits than they could plausibly earn, if the jobs they held before were still available to them. Last year, for a time, $600 were paid in addition to unemployment benefit, which changed that equation.
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    The stimulus checks were a very small part of the overall program.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    For several months last year there was a $600 a week federal unemployment supplement, and there has been $300 a week since the beginning of this year (it expired a couple weeks ago). Netting out $400 a week (state+federal) isn't a huge amount of money of course. Several other rules were also changed, but there are still limits on the number of weeks people can collect unemployment. What I've seen here and there is that the states that ended benefits earlier did see a small bump in employment (but not a particularly meaningful one).
  • theflork 5y ago
    Massively, they did, yes. By both injecting money directly and taking away the burden of repayments. And this unemployment boost that expired is just one small piece of equation: 1 - unemployment boost 2 - stimulus payments 3 - extending unemployment to workers who would normally be ineligible (contractors etc) 4 - eviction moratorium 5 - mortgage forbearance programs 6 - student loans forbearance 7 - locally available , utilities payments pauses 8 - ppp grants
  • listless 5y ago
    I have at least 3 friends who were working retail jobs who were on unemployment for over a year. 1 has gone back to work. 2 still milk it. They just figured out how to live VERY modestly. It’s mostly trailers and video games.
    • kingTug 5y ago
      Trailers and video games sounds preferable to any type of "customer is always right" retail job. Retail jobs are abusive and cause depression. They are not viable careers. I too would live on the poverty line before returning to that life.
      • unpolloloco 5y ago
        Easy solution: pay more. Easy to get people to go back if they get paid well enough! At some point, the employer will find enough people to go back to work - and that point is what (economically) the job is worth. A lot of people realized their number is higher than they thought because their alternative was not as bad as they thought.
        • fragmede 5y ago
          It's still a dead end job though. Even if it pays $100k/yr, if that's all it'll ever be, it's just not worth if the alternative is something with an actual career path.
          • giantrobot 5y ago
            If retail paid well, even if it was still a dead end unto itself, would allow people to save money. They would have options. Retail is a dead end job and barely pays above poverty level. They usually don't get any healthcare coverage either. Unless a retail worker is lucky or lives like a monk it's hard to make enough money to ever get ahead. One bad illness or injury can ruin them financially. Retail could be a starting point for someone. It doesn't have to be a career. But with low wages and no benefits it's usually just enough to keep someone barely living.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • kristjansson 5y ago
    The stimulus payments were just that - extra money to stimulate economic activity - not assistance to those directly impacted. There was an order of magnitude or so more money (per recipient) available through the unemployment supplement programs, and a huge amount (meditated by employers) available through the PPP program.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    Well you could also stop paying rent and not get evicted, so there's that.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    Those are the general stimulus payments, the upthread comment is referring to the temporary boost in unemployment to on-average full-replacement level instead of around 2/3, along with the temporary removal of job search requirements.
  • wrycoder 5y ago
    There were many people making the equivalent of $50K per year, between federal and state payments. That was more than many of them made when working. These are all expiring now, we'll see what happens next.
• ctrlp 5y ago
  Agree and would emphasize these options are temporary. The sustainability of this labor program is dubious. People are going to wake up to a very different labor market when these benefits end.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    What do you mean? The US labor force is on track to be constrained for decades. If we don't massively expand immigration or figure out how to have more babies, that's where we will be.
    • ctrlp 5y ago
      I mean there is this UBI experiment is going to have a crushing impact on small business who can't afford to compete against the government and their preferred business partners for labor. This will produce a cascade of unemployed competing with each other for crappy jobs in the service sector. Meanwhile, the border is wide open and people are most definitely coming. Are they high-skill laborers? Hardly. They'll also compete for the low-skill agriculture, construction, and service sector jobs. The net-net will be that the Precariat will be driven to penury and servitude. Don't worry, they'll be masked so the rest of us don't have to see the anguish on their faces.
    • droidist2 5y ago
      At the same time we're automating away millions of jobs, so maybe we shouldn't be so quick to take measures to flood the labor market.
  • MrStonedOne 5y ago
    the benefits have already ended. Places still can't get workers.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      Give it time.
• coffeefirst 5y ago
  We can also ask people why. When we do, we consistently hear a few things: 1. Reliable childcare still isn't a thing. 2. A lot of restaurant and retail workers had a full year to find something else to do. Many did. And why go back to working for tips if you found a junior marketing position that you can do remotely home and has a career path? 3. They moved! If you're a service job in an expensive city, many of the people you hoped to rehire relocated last summer and aren't necessarily itching to come back. And that doesn't even cover the fact that a lot of the managers complaining about this really don't appear to be trying very hard. They don't want to pay market rate, or train anyone on the job, or offer a modicum of respect. Instead, they just call their would-be candidates lazy. Calling people lazy is a great way to convince them to avoid you at all cost.
  • ianhawes 5y ago
    Your first point (childcare) is probably one of the more understated points. When families have 2 children under 5, the cost of childcare for both children encroaches the income of one parent alone. Many find it more convenient just to stay home with their kids for 3-4 years than work just so their kids have childcare. I don't know that there is much the government can do. Childcare facilities actually run on thin margins and turnover is high. State regulations are often aggressive towards child to caretaker ratios. I would also suggest a 4th point: 4. People that were on the verge of retirement (within 5-10 years) that were either laid off and never re-entered the workforce or opted for early retirement. Age discrimination probably sets in with folks 50 and over that want to either change careers or re-engage with their career path after time off due to the pandemic. Plus with the stock market seeing record gains, their retirement plans are probably looking very enticing.
    • hirako2000 5y ago
      The dogmatism of putting all women to work for the last 50 years. Here we are, women have gotten their "equal" pay (rightly so) and are nearly all employees or freelancers. After a long battle, so of course childcare like everything else needs paid. Most social workers are women. What's the way out, migrants from poorer countries? Just pushing the problem for later. We are waking up to the fact this model cannot work for the overall population. It has been promoted by those who would greatly benefit from having everyone at work, and echoed by those who would somewhat benefit, and echoed more times all the way down to those who had everything to loose. The problem of childcare cost is unsolvable with women at work, it's as simple as that. At best the average working woman will pay the same as she earns to afford full time child care. But if tax is taken into account, then it won't cover it. Or we squeeze more staff per child. I think it will take some more time for most of us to come around to the reality of a model doomed to fail.
• MrStonedOne 5y ago
  > Economics doesn't care about your feelings or your dreams. This is an example of business thinking gone wrong. Economics prescribes behaviors to humans using logical and historical arguments, and tries work out how this scales up. You can't use it to pretend humanity doesn't exist. > If you need money to pay your bills and the only way to get that money is to work a shit job, you will work the shit job. I think you'll find the rising homeless problem in every major city in america proves this wrong. Sometimes you just get anxious and depressed until you fall into an addiction fueled rut and you end up homeless and clueless.
  • femiagbabiaka 5y ago
    yep, and funny enough, both your reply and OPs comment show the limits of economics as any sort of explanatory science for the behaviors of people at scale. It’s at some level basically reading tea leaves.
  • oliv__ 5y ago
    I think you'll find the rising homeless problem in every major city in america proves this wrong. How many millions of subsidies are being payed to handle these homeless people? LA alone dedicated a BILLION dollars to help fix this. Yet here we are.
    • mbrodersen 5y ago
      How many houses were built for those BILLION dollars to house homeless? My guess is zero.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    And ironically enough the economics world has known that this naive perspective of microeconomic market rationality trumps all human behavior hasn't been true for quite some time. It's not like Kahneman and Tversky won the Nobel as some sort of fluke. It's a deflection by people who don't want to look at and address the problems of what's actually going on. And if you look at who makes these arguments, it's overwhelmingly one demographic category. Conclude what you want from that imo.
• Frost1x 5y ago
  >2) people got used to living much more cheaply than they had before due everything being closed Not just more cheaply,the lockdowns forced many to become more self-sufficient and in many cases, they either needed or wanted to do some services they typically paid for. For example, if there's a type of food you were craving you'd normally just order, you probably tried to cook it. In many cases people learned it's not that hard, they too could do it, and it was portion of the cost. That's just eating out. People probably also tried all sorts of stuff like basic car maintenance, simple housework, etc. because they not only had incentives to save money, they also lacked access to services and had free time to give things a try themselves.
• jiocrag 5y ago
  Don’t forget almost perpetual swelling of normally uncorrelated assets across almost every class. More wealth in assets = less need to work for a segment of the population.
• HPsquared 5y ago
  Economics is fundamentally about peoples' feelings: their subjective valuation of various things, and the resulting decisions made in allocation of scarce resources to the most "preferred" ends. It begins and ends with value judgements.
• breadbreadbread 5y ago
  Economics actually does care about your feelings and dreams. Its the study of how people spend money. People's individual values effects their spending habits, what they are willing to work for, and what businesses they start. Its literally a social science. That said I also dont really agree with this video. I think it enforces a bootstraps-like view on how people should adapt. Frankly I think we need a more empathetic economic system that rewards but does not demand entrepreneurship, and that values worker autonomy above all else.
• deleted 5y ago
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• Ericson2314 5y ago
  Fuck entrepreneurship. A tighter labor market, as you say, will be much better to spur more investment into automation — and thus us — than whatever wantrepreneurship trend the video is trying to hype up.
• gscott 5y ago
  4) Returning illegal immigrants has hurt the number of people available to work 5) People who used to be able to work multiple jobs work fewer jobs maybe due to higher pay or unavailability of the other jobs they had before, 6) a lot of people died who also worked.
• pempem 5y ago
  While I agree with your three points I simply do not understand why this narrative rarely, if ever, seems to take into account the fact that: children cannot yet be vaccinated rules are based on a local level and changing all the time women are making a decision between work and managing their home and their children a 2 income home is very common but also often enabled by external help, even if its babysitters or after school programs or kids hanging out at the park
• taurath 5y ago
  From talking to people, most people have realized how disposable they are to their employer, and the mythology around the dignity of work is broken - nurses, grocery workers, anyone in a restaurant, all considered “essential” got a little cheer on from society for a month, then turned to their management who told them to pound rocks if they think they deserve to not live in poverty for sacrificing their health and well being. People are trying different stuff because everyone got a big jolt and woke up to what they were actually doing. Time having to be spent at home, with whomever they happened to be living with, and all external entertainment and distractions having gone away, lots of people saw how fundamentally unhappy their lives were, and want to do something about it.