4 ms·

There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. Labor-force participation is better than the depths of Covid, but it's not full employment by any means

by t-3 3y ago

There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. Labor-force participation is better than the depths of Covid, but it's not full employment by any means. Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation, the absolute number only tricks octogenarians who remember when $0.50/hr was big money that could pay their way through college and these damn lazy kids!

voakbasda 3y ago
I agree completely. Any talk about higher wages is pure propaganda by the media and political establishments.
- boppo1 3y ago
  >pure propaganda I'm not sure if it's 'pure'. Lots of people who studied economics actually believe CPI and PCE are good measures.
  - stillwithit 3y ago
    Our feudal system demands we wrap ourselves in hallucinated expertise and LARP the validity of our professions outputs to earn food and shelter though Academia grooms students to propagate curriculum, not define new ideas
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
- Hammershaft 3y ago
  It sounds like you're starting from preconcieved beliefs and then working backwards to determine how you'll interpret the validity of new information based on how they conform to your beliefs.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> but it's not full employment by any means. I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment". The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.) Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand. The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages. Just a thought...
- spacemanspiff01 3y ago
  Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) it does not mean employers filling all their open job requests.
  - gruez 3y ago
    > Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct. >Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...] >For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788
gruez 3y ago
>There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. [...] Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation BLS data begs to differ: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  So what does their data say about the cost of a house in 2019 vs today? The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today? it could just be the BLS not fully capturing inflation
  - gruez 3y ago
    The CPI is composed of a basket of goods, and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average, so there's always going to be things you can cherry pick and complain about "the BLS not fully capturing inflation". >The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA >cost of a house in 2019 vs today Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      Health Insurance is another fun/annoying one, because it's not like you can reliably standardize 1 standard unit of insurance and it's difficult to compare across plans. (Perhaps by design, the Confusopoly at work.) That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0] [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cpi-health-insurance-index.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cp...
bdangubic 3y ago
My favorite type of comment on HN... "there is no evidence" start of the comment followed by thousand comments with evidence :)
- t-3 3y ago
  Right... thousands. I see one piece of "evidence", which is... government unemployment statistics, aka data from the very last people to trust on this, because they have every incentive to make the numbers look better than they are.
  - jibal 3y ago
    Actually, the very last people to trust on this are the ideologues in your mirrors.
    - t-3 3y ago
      Right. Don't trust your lying eyes and ears, only trust Uncle Sam. He knows what's best for you. Politicians never lie or pressure civil servants to lie or change the definitions to give them nice numbers for the soundbites or make the bad economy they inherited seem good. Only honest and virtuous people exist in the world, except for myself, because I'm an evil communist, and commies always lie.
      - bdangubic 3y ago
        Not sure anyone accused you of being an evil communist here - not being able to find ample evidence of something surely doesn't make you a communist, just incompetent :)
      - jibal 3y ago
        I specifically said not to trust people like you because you're an ideologue who responds with such inane strawmen. And I'm a socialist so you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're in the wrong forest.

by t-3 3y ago

voakbasda 3y ago

I agree completely. Any talk about higher wages is pure propaganda by the media and political establishments.

boppo1 3y ago
>pure propaganda I'm not sure if it's 'pure'. Lots of people who studied economics actually believe CPI and PCE are good measures.
- stillwithit 3y ago
  Our feudal system demands we wrap ourselves in hallucinated expertise and LARP the validity of our professions outputs to earn food and shelter though Academia grooms students to propagate curriculum, not define new ideas
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
Hammershaft 3y ago
It sounds like you're starting from preconcieved beliefs and then working backwards to determine how you'll interpret the validity of new information based on how they conform to your beliefs.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> but it's not full employment by any means. I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment". The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.) Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand. The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages. Just a thought...

spacemanspiff01 3y ago
Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) it does not mean employers filling all their open job requests.
- gruez 3y ago
  > Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct. >Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...] >For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788

gruez 3y ago

>There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. [...] Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation BLS data begs to differ: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.

pauldenton 3y ago
So what does their data say about the cost of a house in 2019 vs today? The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today? it could just be the BLS not fully capturing inflation
- gruez 3y ago
  The CPI is composed of a basket of goods, and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average, so there's always going to be things you can cherry pick and complain about "the BLS not fully capturing inflation". >The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA >cost of a house in 2019 vs today Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Health Insurance is another fun/annoying one, because it's not like you can reliably standardize 1 standard unit of insurance and it's difficult to compare across plans. (Perhaps by design, the Confusopoly at work.) That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0] [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cpi-health-insurance-index.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cp...

bdangubic 3y ago

My favorite type of comment on HN... "there is no evidence" start of the comment followed by thousand comments with evidence :)

t-3 3y ago
Right... thousands. I see one piece of "evidence", which is... government unemployment statistics, aka data from the very last people to trust on this, because they have every incentive to make the numbers look better than they are.
- jibal 3y ago
  Actually, the very last people to trust on this are the ideologues in your mirrors.
  - t-3 3y ago
    Right. Don't trust your lying eyes and ears, only trust Uncle Sam. He knows what's best for you. Politicians never lie or pressure civil servants to lie or change the definitions to give them nice numbers for the soundbites or make the bad economy they inherited seem good. Only honest and virtuous people exist in the world, except for myself, because I'm an evil communist, and commies always lie.
    - bdangubic 3y ago
      Not sure anyone accused you of being an evil communist here - not being able to find ample evidence of something surely doesn't make you a communist, just incompetent :)
    - jibal 3y ago
      I specifically said not to trust people like you because you're an ideologue who responds with such inane strawmen. And I'm a socialist so you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're in the wrong forest.