11 ms·

Number of unemployed persons per job opening

146 points by Nicholas_C 4y ago

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Interesting. I must say, that doesn't look like we're currently in a recession. On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?)
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  It could also be that there is a mismatch in skills.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, you have to account for that. Everywhere there's a huge shortage of jobs paying at or below $20/hr. Likely caused by most of those people moving up to jobs in the 25-30/hr range.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
      Millinnials are growing out of their 20s, basically, and gen Z is tiiiiiny
  - hdaz 4y ago
    Or what the definition of "unemployed" means :) (( too many loopholes ))
    - okaram 4y ago
      How would you define it? What loopholes? Why isn't any of the other published measures not enough for your purposes?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  The reason why there's a debate is that by some measures, we're in a recession, but by other measures, we're not. Jobs is extremely strong. From a jobs perspective, we are not in a recession. And so cues the debate. Which measures _should_ we focus on? Etc. etc. The only thing with any certainty, is that I know we'll be retroactively be declared to have been in a recession for months. The NBER is 100% trusted on calling the recession, but they're also always late to the party by several months. NBER always calls the recession accurately, because they backdate their calls. Ex: in 2008, NBER declared that we've been a recession since 2007. -------- Because of this effect, everyone wants to be "correct faster than NBER", so you see a whole lot of talking-heads talking about recession way too early (ie: before all the economic indicators prove we're in a recession). Everyone wants to predict the future after all, so that they can feel smarter about the whole situation. EDIT: It should be noted that in the real world, it takes weeks, maybe months, to collect and process the statistics. That is to say, we won't know how good our economy in October 2022 is, until maybe January of 2023. That's why NBER is late, they need the time to collect statistics and analyze them. But its also why everyone who is trying to call the Recession "as it happens" (IE: call a January Recession in January) is inevitably going to be wrong, because they're baseless and without any actual data backing that sentiment. Data and statistics take time. Many months. Just sit tight and wait. Have patience. There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Getting the call correct is important. It takes many months to spin up employees and/or fire them anyway (good severance pay is multi-month affair after all)
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    > There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Isn't there a large financial benfit? Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks. Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks But the stock market doesn't always go down in a recession. And vice versa, a recession may happen, but the stock market may be fine. Ex: the recession of 1990 barely budged the stock market. While the Stock Market Crash of 1962 had nothing to do with the economy. > Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%. But that's speculation upon the Fed Rate, which isn't about recessions at all. For example, the Fed Rate increased in from 0% in 2015 to 2% in 2019. Or from 1% in 2004 through 5% in 2006.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  What is going on? Low unemployment. High inflation. High interest rates. These are the hallmarks of an industrialization. Labor is needed to be more productive. Business wants capital to do it. Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match. Stocks, looking for dividends, will do poorly because of high pay, labor costs will eat profits and eaten profits will kill stock values, leaving to the appearance of recession. Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay But a good investment that raises productivity will pay very very handsomely in the future. And those that don't? Will be inflated away to nothing. Order is being restored to the post 2008 insanity. Many tech companies won't survive the jump.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay Not if they are selling the type of labor that is experiencing increase in prices, because: >Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
      The only way for labor to come out on top is if productivity increases. With war, population shrinking, disruption around the world, I expect productivity (in total) to be somewhat stagnant. Which means the top dogs will be forced to make less while they figure out how to fix things through productivity going up once the disruptions are over. But also that the average Joe will get a larger slice of a smaller pie. Assuming I'm right. Who knows what will actually happen.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    If you break down the latest jobs report by industry. You’ll see jobs are declining in all sectors but hospitality and transportation.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?) Is it not the case in your area that every fast food joint and small business has a "hiring" sign up with a starting wage listed that a lot higher than it was ~3 years ago?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Employees have pricing power, which is why wage growth is running far ahead of what's consistent with 2% inflation. The labor market tends to be tightest before a recession because it forces the Fed to hike until it breaks. https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
- alexb_ 4y ago
  Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    Unemployment is a classic lagging indicator [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-are-leading-lagging-and-coincident-indicators/ https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-are-leading-la...
leet_thow 4y ago
I'm curious how this was measured in 2008 when the go-to places for job searching were Monster, Dice and Craigslist.
- cl0ckt0wer 4y ago
  Our tax dollars and a lot of phone calls.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I believe bls data is generally from surveys
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  As it happens, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does an exceedingly thorough job of documenting how it generates its numbers. It has a bunch of explanations on its website. A good starting point might be the general overview of their job openings survey: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/jlt/data.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/jlt/data.htm
peppertree 4y ago
It looks like fed should have started QT in 2015.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  They did. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS QT + higher interest rates clearly started in 2015.
  - TinyRick 4y ago
    QT is not raising interest rates, it is reducing the balance sheet: https://www.investopedia.com/quantitative-tightening-6361478 https://www.investopedia.com/quantitative-tightening-6361478 QT quite clearly did not start in any meaningful way in 2015. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      That's not what people "mean" or "care about". The inflation doomers want to pretend that zero-interest rate policies extended too long in the 2010s decade. After the 3rd round of QE in 2014, the Fed began to undo that policy by raising interest rates above 0% in the 2015 to 2016 timeframe. They also were unwinding their balance sheet into 2019, before COVID19 interrupted plans.
      - SantalBlush 4y ago
        >zero-interest rate policies extended too long Not zero-interest rate policies, low-interest rate policies. You're intentionally misrepresenting the position here.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    And then they reversed in 2019 when the stock market started slowing down and Trump freaked out and pressured them to keep the unsustainable growth going, leaving us collectively in a weaker position to respond to the covid crisis.
boole1854 4y ago
This is helpful in putting the recent tech layoff announcements in perspective.
- sosodev 4y ago
  How so?
  - baobabKoodaa 4y ago
    By illustrating that the market is not saturated with unemployed people desperately competing for scarce jobs - not currently in absolute terms, and not when compared to historical perspective in relative terms.
pmoriarty 4y ago
Remember that the government doesn't count people who are not looking for work (perhaps because they've given up hope of ever finding a job, for example) as "unemployed". So the actual number of people who are not working is certainly higher.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  The government does count them, in the U-6 statistic. https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
  - bumby 4y ago
    What unemployment metric was used in the linked article? It wasn't immediately apparent to me.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      That is a good question, and it is not apparent to me either. The linked article is: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm and the technical note link is: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.tn.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.tn.htm which says >Employment estimates are benchmarked, or ratio adjusted, monthly to the strike-adjusted employment estimates of the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. A ratio of CES to JOLTS employment is used to adjust the levels for all other JOLTS data elements.
    - boole1854 4y ago
      If otherwise unspecified, the "unemployment rate" refers to U-3, which is also called "the official unemployment rate" by the BLS. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Always assume U-3 if otherwise not reported. U5 and U6 exist if you really need it. But historically speaking, everyone always has used U3 as the base discussion point. We all know U3 has its flaws, but I've never really found a situation where U5 or U6 would make a sizable difference in an argument. The only people who seem to play U3 vs U5 vs U6 games are those who are jumping statistics between arguments, to mislead and misdirect. IMO anyway. A good arguer always uses U3. When someone else runs out of things to say, they start criticizing U3 itself (ignoring the easily accessible U5 or U6 statistics). So its a good indicator for when a discussion has run its course.
vpfaulkner 4y ago
The labor force participation rate ("percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work") has been declining for 20 years and had a big drop at the beginning of the pandemic. Consequently, part of the low unemployment trend has been driven by people dropping out of the workforce/not looking for a job. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
- cheriot 4y ago
  That measure will reflect changing demographics and, specific to our current circumstances, an increase in retirements during covid. Prime age participation is more useful for projecting forward https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
- rmah 4y ago
  Many people think of the labor participation rate is just the % of working among the adults working age population who could be employed if good jobs were available to them. In reality, the divisor includes college students, the highly disabled, happy housewives/househusbands, trust fund brats and, most importantly, the elderly/retired. Essentially everyone age 16 and over. Not 19, not 21, 16. I.e. it includes juniors and seniors in HS and college students. The demographic shifts in the US means the labor force participation rate will, by necessity, decline.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And some states allow kids to start working as young as 14, so you can have part time jobs that just entirely disappear if the kid gets laid off / fired / quits, because they don't appear in the employable column.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    Are there any statistics on how many people actually are the beneficiaries of a trust fund of any sizable amount, and what percentage of those people are actually legitimate brats?
ughitsaaron 4y ago
It’s wild to me that July 2009 had a higher rate than April 2020.
alexb_ 4y ago
Posting this as its own top level comment for better visibility: Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  People may read causality into your comment that you didn't imply. That the number of unemployed persons per job opening is so low is a very strong "boom" signal. Busts inevitably follow booms, but booms don't cause busts. Something else is the trigger. Subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, the rate tightening caused by inflation in 2022, etc. I argue that the US fed rate is going to have to get a lot higher than 4% to cause this boom to bust in the US. That's an exercise in fed tea leaf reading. The last fed guidance was a lot more ambiguous than previous tightenings this year.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    Everyone mentions 2007, but 2006 was when lending tightened, making the subprime crisis inevitable given all the interest only ARM loans.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      And now is when we find out who didn't learn from the subprime lesson. The UK had the gilt crash, but so far no cascade crisis has appeared with the tightening interest rates in the US. Given that the rates today are about the same as what they were in 2019, I don't expect any cascade crisis unless rates rise significantly higher.
      - 4y ago
finneganscat 4y ago
mrweasel 4y ago
Graphs like this is pretty much useless. Governments around the world, not just the US, will use numbers like this to "prove" that there's plenty of work. It just don't work like that. What good is it that there a two jobs out there, just for you, except one is as an engineer and one is as a neuro surgeon and so far you only ever worked at a sandwich shop. The majority of unemployed people are nowhere near qualified, or even able to hold the jobs that are available. Some simply don't have the IQ for it, some have mental issues or other health problems, unable to afford to relocate and some simply aren't cut out for the job market. I have an acquaintance who is basically dependent on unemployment being 0%. He's a nice, interesting and somewhat smart guy, but he don't understand jobs and is unable to hold a job for more than a few months. It doesn't matter if there are plenty of work, because the pool of people able to fill those positions are way more limited than governments and companies are willing to admit.
rossdavidh 4y ago
Because, we have a supply recession, not a demand recession. We haven't had one in living memory (except, kind of, the oil supply shocks in the 70's), so we don't seem to recognize it. Some people think it obviously feels like a recession is happening, but others point to things like this graph to say that it sure doesn't look like it. But that's because this measures demand for labor, not supply. We are seeing a broad-based depression of economic activity, caused by supply problems, and the supply of labor is one of those problems. We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels, and even that was low by 21st century standards: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... Ominously, most of what world governments have been doing to try to help the economy, has been about goosing demand. In a supply recession, that's like giving an electric blanket and a hot drink to somebody with a dangerously high fever...
- mjburgess 4y ago
  The central banks, harassed by the fed, are however, pouring a cold bath.
- mapmap 4y ago
  >We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels And more than a million Americans have died from Covid.
  - Ancapistani 4y ago
    True, but relatively few of those million were in the workforce.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  Stimulus packages may have goosed demand but low interest rates should in theory* increase supply, since capital must be applied to useful purposes rather than sitting in a bank collecting interest. *unfortunately, subsidizing ride shares is probably not a "useful purpose"
logicallee 4y ago
I think the reciprocal is more meaningful: number of job openings per person, employed or unemployed. A healthy number is between a hundred and a thousand, the number of jobs someone can potentially do (lots of opportunities). Likewise, at a 10-person company there should be hundreds of jobs that person number 11 could end up doing, corresponding to hundreds of job openings. Anything less than a hundred job openings per person means employers aren't hiring enough. Imagine meal choices per person: if there are only 2 then it is famine, a hundred to a thousand is healthy. "There are two meal choices per person" is not a bustling metropolis full of restaurants and grocery stores. It sounds more like a food desert. There are two job openings per person is similar: in a healthy bustling evonomy it should be a hundred.
phaedrus 4y ago
I started my career right at the peak of this graph in 2008.
jklinger410 4y ago
Job openings != actual available jobs.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Hey, I have 10 job openings if you want to work at 1/4th market price. Um, good luck affording rent!
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    Hey Government, we did interview 100 people for our 20 job listings, but we didn't like any of them. The listings are still open though. Jobs numbers are still strong! Teehee!
matrix_overload 4y ago
I think, with the rise of the gig economy, the number of unemployed persons is not a very good metric anymore, because it doesn't make a distinction between a full-time employee, a shift worker getting 20 hours per week, and an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation. A better metric could be the number of billable work hours within the last month, or the payroll distribution curve. The latter can be easily computed from the monthly payroll taxes and should show if people are being massively shifted to part-time or laid off and not immediately finding another job.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Does the US keeps statistics of full-time employed vs. part-timers?
  - malfist 4y ago
    Yes, the U6 I believe counts "underemployeed". https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate > U6 adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons
- filesystem 4y ago
  > an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation I hate to nitpick but I see this sentiment word-for-word on HN way too much. Uber drivers don't actually operate at a loss unless they only Uber for a short amount of time and they total their car during that stint. They just tend to earn less profit (often way less) than they think they are earning due to the car depreciation and other factors. But a working class person cannot afford to operate "at a loss" without noticing immediately, and a $25,000 car cannot depreciate infinitely.
lysecret 4y ago
One thing to always remember is that companies (especially startups) have strong incentives to always have a lot of job openings on their websites. Because it looks like the company is doing great. Also, there is no legal obligation to actually hire someone. So it is almost a zero risk move.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Lots of job openings could also mean high turnover, so I don’t think it is as much of a slam dunk.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Did those incentives plummet during 2008, then slowly increase until now, with a brief spike during they pandemic where they briefly plummeted again? Because otherwise, that explains nothing about the chart.
CompleteWalker 4y ago
I found a state unemployment map: https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment/state-unemployment-rates-map.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment... But, would love to see the equivalent of this chart broken down by state and job sector. I've noticed an uptick in holiday seasonal jobs in my area... wonder how this affects the data
grammers 4y ago
So we're all good and recession it not going to hit?
jonahhorowitz 4y ago
The far better number to look at is the "Quit Rate"[0][1] - the number of people leaving their jobs for other jobs. It's more reflective of what's actually happening because job openings is often an inflated number that doesn't reflect the number of jobs actually available. [0] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm [1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-of-people-quitting-their-jobs-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-of-people-quitti...
blurbleblurble 4y ago
But how many of these job openings are actually going to pan out? I've seen zombie job postings open for almost a year now.

146 points by Nicholas_C 4y ago

Interesting. I must say, that doesn't look like we're currently in a recession. On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?)

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
It could also be that there is a mismatch in skills.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah, you have to account for that. Everywhere there's a huge shortage of jobs paying at or below $20/hr. Likely caused by most of those people moving up to jobs in the 25-30/hr range.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Millinnials are growing out of their 20s, basically, and gen Z is tiiiiiny
- hdaz 4y ago
  Or what the definition of "unemployed" means :) (( too many loopholes ))
  - okaram 4y ago
    How would you define it? What loopholes? Why isn't any of the other published measures not enough for your purposes?
dragontamer 4y ago
The reason why there's a debate is that by some measures, we're in a recession, but by other measures, we're not. Jobs is extremely strong. From a jobs perspective, we are not in a recession. And so cues the debate. Which measures _should_ we focus on? Etc. etc. The only thing with any certainty, is that I know we'll be retroactively be declared to have been in a recession for months. The NBER is 100% trusted on calling the recession, but they're also always late to the party by several months. NBER always calls the recession accurately, because they backdate their calls. Ex: in 2008, NBER declared that we've been a recession since 2007. -------- Because of this effect, everyone wants to be "correct faster than NBER", so you see a whole lot of talking-heads talking about recession way too early (ie: before all the economic indicators prove we're in a recession). Everyone wants to predict the future after all, so that they can feel smarter about the whole situation. EDIT: It should be noted that in the real world, it takes weeks, maybe months, to collect and process the statistics. That is to say, we won't know how good our economy in October 2022 is, until maybe January of 2023. That's why NBER is late, they need the time to collect statistics and analyze them. But its also why everyone who is trying to call the Recession "as it happens" (IE: call a January Recession in January) is inevitably going to be wrong, because they're baseless and without any actual data backing that sentiment. Data and statistics take time. Many months. Just sit tight and wait. Have patience. There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Getting the call correct is important. It takes many months to spin up employees and/or fire them anyway (good severance pay is multi-month affair after all)
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Isn't there a large financial benfit? Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks. Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks But the stock market doesn't always go down in a recession. And vice versa, a recession may happen, but the stock market may be fine. Ex: the recession of 1990 barely budged the stock market. While the Stock Market Crash of 1962 had nothing to do with the economy. > Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%. But that's speculation upon the Fed Rate, which isn't about recessions at all. For example, the Fed Rate increased in from 0% in 2015 to 2% in 2019. Or from 1% in 2004 through 5% in 2006.
bioemerl 4y ago
What is going on? Low unemployment. High inflation. High interest rates. These are the hallmarks of an industrialization. Labor is needed to be more productive. Business wants capital to do it. Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match. Stocks, looking for dividends, will do poorly because of high pay, labor costs will eat profits and eaten profits will kill stock values, leaving to the appearance of recession. Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay But a good investment that raises productivity will pay very very handsomely in the future. And those that don't? Will be inflated away to nothing. Order is being restored to the post 2008 insanity. Many tech companies won't survive the jump.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay Not if they are selling the type of labor that is experiencing increase in prices, because: >Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    The only way for labor to come out on top is if productivity increases. With war, population shrinking, disruption around the world, I expect productivity (in total) to be somewhat stagnant. Which means the top dogs will be forced to make less while they figure out how to fix things through productivity going up once the disruptions are over. But also that the average Joe will get a larger slice of a smaller pie. Assuming I'm right. Who knows what will actually happen.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  If you break down the latest jobs report by industry. You’ll see jobs are declining in all sectors but hospitality and transportation.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
yamtaddle 4y ago
> On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?) Is it not the case in your area that every fast food joint and small business has a "hiring" sign up with a starting wage listed that a lot higher than it was ~3 years ago?
adam_arthur 4y ago
Employees have pricing power, which is why wage growth is running far ahead of what's consistent with 2% inflation. The labor market tends to be tightest before a recession because it forces the Fed to hike until it breaks. https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
alexb_ 4y ago
Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Unemployment is a classic lagging indicator [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-are-leading-lagging-and-coincident-indicators/ https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-are-leading-la...

leet_thow 4y ago

I'm curious how this was measured in 2008 when the go-to places for job searching were Monster, Dice and Craigslist.

cl0ckt0wer 4y ago
Our tax dollars and a lot of phone calls.
colinmhayes 4y ago
I believe bls data is generally from surveys
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
As it happens, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does an exceedingly thorough job of documenting how it generates its numbers. It has a bunch of explanations on its website. A good starting point might be the general overview of their job openings survey: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/jlt/data.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/jlt/data.htm

peppertree 4y ago

It looks like fed should have started QT in 2015.

dragontamer 4y ago
They did. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS QT + higher interest rates clearly started in 2015.
- TinyRick 4y ago
  QT is not raising interest rates, it is reducing the balance sheet: https://www.investopedia.com/quantitative-tightening-6361478 https://www.investopedia.com/quantitative-tightening-6361478 QT quite clearly did not start in any meaningful way in 2015. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    That's not what people "mean" or "care about". The inflation doomers want to pretend that zero-interest rate policies extended too long in the 2010s decade. After the 3rd round of QE in 2014, the Fed began to undo that policy by raising interest rates above 0% in the 2015 to 2016 timeframe. They also were unwinding their balance sheet into 2019, before COVID19 interrupted plans.
    - SantalBlush 4y ago
      >zero-interest rate policies extended too long Not zero-interest rate policies, low-interest rate policies. You're intentionally misrepresenting the position here.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  And then they reversed in 2019 when the stock market started slowing down and Trump freaked out and pressured them to keep the unsustainable growth going, leaving us collectively in a weaker position to respond to the covid crisis.

boole1854 4y ago

This is helpful in putting the recent tech layoff announcements in perspective.

sosodev 4y ago
How so?
- baobabKoodaa 4y ago
  By illustrating that the market is not saturated with unemployed people desperately competing for scarce jobs - not currently in absolute terms, and not when compared to historical perspective in relative terms.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Remember that the government doesn't count people who are not looking for work (perhaps because they've given up hope of ever finding a job, for example) as "unemployed". So the actual number of people who are not working is certainly higher.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
The government does count them, in the U-6 statistic. https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
- bumby 4y ago
  What unemployment metric was used in the linked article? It wasn't immediately apparent to me.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    That is a good question, and it is not apparent to me either. The linked article is: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm and the technical note link is: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.tn.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.tn.htm which says >Employment estimates are benchmarked, or ratio adjusted, monthly to the strike-adjusted employment estimates of the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. A ratio of CES to JOLTS employment is used to adjust the levels for all other JOLTS data elements.
  - boole1854 4y ago
    If otherwise unspecified, the "unemployment rate" refers to U-3, which is also called "the official unemployment rate" by the BLS. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    Always assume U-3 if otherwise not reported. U5 and U6 exist if you really need it. But historically speaking, everyone always has used U3 as the base discussion point. We all know U3 has its flaws, but I've never really found a situation where U5 or U6 would make a sizable difference in an argument. The only people who seem to play U3 vs U5 vs U6 games are those who are jumping statistics between arguments, to mislead and misdirect. IMO anyway. A good arguer always uses U3. When someone else runs out of things to say, they start criticizing U3 itself (ignoring the easily accessible U5 or U6 statistics). So its a good indicator for when a discussion has run its course.

vpfaulkner 4y ago

The labor force participation rate ("percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work") has been declining for 20 years and had a big drop at the beginning of the pandemic. Consequently, part of the low unemployment trend has been driven by people dropping out of the workforce/not looking for a job. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

cheriot 4y ago
That measure will reflect changing demographics and, specific to our current circumstances, an increase in retirements during covid. Prime age participation is more useful for projecting forward https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
rmah 4y ago
Many people think of the labor participation rate is just the % of working among the adults working age population who could be employed if good jobs were available to them. In reality, the divisor includes college students, the highly disabled, happy housewives/househusbands, trust fund brats and, most importantly, the elderly/retired. Essentially everyone age 16 and over. Not 19, not 21, 16. I.e. it includes juniors and seniors in HS and college students. The demographic shifts in the US means the labor force participation rate will, by necessity, decline.
- bombcar 4y ago
  And some states allow kids to start working as young as 14, so you can have part time jobs that just entirely disappear if the kid gets laid off / fired / quits, because they don't appear in the employable column.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Are there any statistics on how many people actually are the beneficiaries of a trust fund of any sizable amount, and what percentage of those people are actually legitimate brats?

ughitsaaron 4y ago

It’s wild to me that July 2009 had a higher rate than April 2020.

alexb_ 4y ago

Posting this as its own top level comment for better visibility: Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
People may read causality into your comment that you didn't imply. That the number of unemployed persons per job opening is so low is a very strong "boom" signal. Busts inevitably follow booms, but booms don't cause busts. Something else is the trigger. Subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, the rate tightening caused by inflation in 2022, etc. I argue that the US fed rate is going to have to get a lot higher than 4% to cause this boom to bust in the US. That's an exercise in fed tea leaf reading. The last fed guidance was a lot more ambiguous than previous tightenings this year.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  Everyone mentions 2007, but 2006 was when lending tightened, making the subprime crisis inevitable given all the interest only ARM loans.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    And now is when we find out who didn't learn from the subprime lesson. The UK had the gilt crash, but so far no cascade crisis has appeared with the tightening interest rates in the US. Given that the rates today are about the same as what they were in 2019, I don't expect any cascade crisis unless rates rise significantly higher.
    - 4y ago

finneganscat 4y ago

mrweasel 4y ago

Graphs like this is pretty much useless. Governments around the world, not just the US, will use numbers like this to "prove" that there's plenty of work. It just don't work like that. What good is it that there a two jobs out there, just for you, except one is as an engineer and one is as a neuro surgeon and so far you only ever worked at a sandwich shop. The majority of unemployed people are nowhere near qualified, or even able to hold the jobs that are available. Some simply don't have the IQ for it, some have mental issues or other health problems, unable to afford to relocate and some simply aren't cut out for the job market. I have an acquaintance who is basically dependent on unemployment being 0%. He's a nice, interesting and somewhat smart guy, but he don't understand jobs and is unable to hold a job for more than a few months. It doesn't matter if there are plenty of work, because the pool of people able to fill those positions are way more limited than governments and companies are willing to admit.

rossdavidh 4y ago

Because, we have a supply recession, not a demand recession. We haven't had one in living memory (except, kind of, the oil supply shocks in the 70's), so we don't seem to recognize it. Some people think it obviously feels like a recession is happening, but others point to things like this graph to say that it sure doesn't look like it. But that's because this measures demand for labor, not supply. We are seeing a broad-based depression of economic activity, caused by supply problems, and the supply of labor is one of those problems. We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels, and even that was low by 21st century standards: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... Ominously, most of what world governments have been doing to try to help the economy, has been about goosing demand. In a supply recession, that's like giving an electric blanket and a hot drink to somebody with a dangerously high fever...

mjburgess 4y ago
The central banks, harassed by the fed, are however, pouring a cold bath.
mapmap 4y ago
>We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels And more than a million Americans have died from Covid.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  True, but relatively few of those million were in the workforce.
bagacrap 4y ago
Stimulus packages may have goosed demand but low interest rates should in theory* increase supply, since capital must be applied to useful purposes rather than sitting in a bank collecting interest. *unfortunately, subsidizing ride shares is probably not a "useful purpose"

logicallee 4y ago

I think the reciprocal is more meaningful: number of job openings per person, employed or unemployed. A healthy number is between a hundred and a thousand, the number of jobs someone can potentially do (lots of opportunities). Likewise, at a 10-person company there should be hundreds of jobs that person number 11 could end up doing, corresponding to hundreds of job openings. Anything less than a hundred job openings per person means employers aren't hiring enough. Imagine meal choices per person: if there are only 2 then it is famine, a hundred to a thousand is healthy. "There are two meal choices per person" is not a bustling metropolis full of restaurants and grocery stores. It sounds more like a food desert. There are two job openings per person is similar: in a healthy bustling evonomy it should be a hundred.

phaedrus 4y ago

I started my career right at the peak of this graph in 2008.

jklinger410 4y ago

Job openings != actual available jobs.

pixl97 4y ago
Hey, I have 10 job openings if you want to work at 1/4th market price. Um, good luck affording rent!
- jklinger410 4y ago
  Hey Government, we did interview 100 people for our 20 job listings, but we didn't like any of them. The listings are still open though. Jobs numbers are still strong! Teehee!

matrix_overload 4y ago

I think, with the rise of the gig economy, the number of unemployed persons is not a very good metric anymore, because it doesn't make a distinction between a full-time employee, a shift worker getting 20 hours per week, and an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation. A better metric could be the number of billable work hours within the last month, or the payroll distribution curve. The latter can be easily computed from the monthly payroll taxes and should show if people are being massively shifted to part-time or laid off and not immediately finding another job.

miohtama 4y ago
Does the US keeps statistics of full-time employed vs. part-timers?
- malfist 4y ago
  Yes, the U6 I believe counts "underemployeed". https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate > U6 adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons
filesystem 4y ago
> an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation I hate to nitpick but I see this sentiment word-for-word on HN way too much. Uber drivers don't actually operate at a loss unless they only Uber for a short amount of time and they total their car during that stint. They just tend to earn less profit (often way less) than they think they are earning due to the car depreciation and other factors. But a working class person cannot afford to operate "at a loss" without noticing immediately, and a $25,000 car cannot depreciate infinitely.

lysecret 4y ago

One thing to always remember is that companies (especially startups) have strong incentives to always have a lot of job openings on their websites. Because it looks like the company is doing great. Also, there is no legal obligation to actually hire someone. So it is almost a zero risk move.

Joeri 4y ago
Lots of job openings could also mean high turnover, so I don’t think it is as much of a slam dunk.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
Did those incentives plummet during 2008, then slowly increase until now, with a brief spike during they pandemic where they briefly plummeted again? Because otherwise, that explains nothing about the chart.

CompleteWalker 4y ago

I found a state unemployment map: https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment/state-unemployment-rates-map.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment... But, would love to see the equivalent of this chart broken down by state and job sector. I've noticed an uptick in holiday seasonal jobs in my area... wonder how this affects the data

grammers 4y ago

So we're all good and recession it not going to hit?

jonahhorowitz 4y ago

The far better number to look at is the "Quit Rate"[0][1] - the number of people leaving their jobs for other jobs. It's more reflective of what's actually happening because job openings is often an inflated number that doesn't reflect the number of jobs actually available. [0] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm [1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-of-people-quitting-their-jobs-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-of-people-quitti...

blurbleblurble 4y ago

But how many of these job openings are actually going to pan out? I've seen zombie job postings open for almost a year now.