7 ms·

Long-term unemployment is becoming 'a status quo' in today's job market

83 points by rustoo 8mo ago

SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
It seems increasingly likely the U.S. is running full hog into one of the worst economic disasters we’ve ever seen with no contingency plan or strategy for resolution. [1] [1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20we%20in%20an%20economic,%2C%20Instagram%2C%20Facebook%2C%20Newsletter. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- OhioMan2943 8mo ago
  Especially when you realise that our tolerance for AI propping up the rest of the economy has stifled the "natural selection" that weeds out poor performers and poor business choices and rewards innovation and success. An imprecise economy is a worrying thing.
  - AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
    Your comment assumes that there is a healthy, competitive situation in US markets, with a dozen players actively competing This is not the case. Virtually every segment of the US economy is dominated by cartels or monopolies with little desire to innovate.
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  Seems?
- teeray 8mo ago
  I guess the real question is: is there anywhere for the layperson to hide? Whose acorns will survive?
  - tencentshill 8mo ago
    Just be ready to make practical quality of life adjustments. Learn about self sustenance, even if you can't practice it yet. It's not going to be Mad Max all of a sudden, but a lot of little things we've come to expect someone else to do will degrade or disappear.
dyauspitr 8mo ago
I can’t think of a single angle this administration isn’t destroying America from.
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
- defrost 8mo ago
  Gilding, albeit more toilets than lilies, is on the up and up. If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players. The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. ~ https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2026 https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2026 is just the latest in an extraordinary personal achievement by just one of the current crop of players.
  - coliveira 8mo ago
    He's taking Venezuela's oil money into accounts that he controls. Who knows what this money will be used for.
    - pengaru 8mo ago
      citation? here's mine: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-chris-wright-trump.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-ch...
      - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
        “We walked back this specific grift.” Democrats Push for Transparency on Venezuelan Oil Money Controlled by U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-democrats-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-de... | https://archive.today/pWvLH https://archive.today/pWvLH - February 11th, 2026 Trump’s Claim to Venezuelan Oil Money Draws Scrutiny in Congress - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-to-venezuelan-oil-money-draws-scrutiny-in-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-... | https://archive.today/xhNT9 https://archive.today/xhNT9 - January 7th, 2026 (“President Trump’s declaration that he would personally control the proceeds from oil produced in Venezuela drew instant condemnation on Wednesday from Democrats in Congress who noted that the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking.”)
jimbob45 8mo ago
- Contract role, seemed to have run its full course. Didn’t plan ahead? - Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead. - H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face - Contract work again, ran its full course - Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  > Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they’ve also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person’s previous income. The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
csomar 8mo ago
> Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people. This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading. Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it. This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do. tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.
- macintux 8mo ago
  The Trump administration feels that accountability is only for the people who report accurate data. They get fired.
piloto_ciego 8mo ago
People are going to flame me for this, but it's the end of the line because of a confluence of AI, bad planning, offshoring, and a few other things. But this is the end of capitalism as we know it because the value of labor is plummeting globally, it's not going to happen overnight, but this is kind of the logical end of things. Education no longer implies employment - I did my masters a few years ago and promptly got scooped up, but the undergrads that graduated around the same time did not - and I was different, I had prior relevant work history. Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it. What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean. Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.
- anon291 8mo ago
  Wow, you're the first person I've ever heard of to buy land in the woods to prepare for the imminent economic disaster.
  - piloto_ciego 8mo ago
    I mean, I also wanted land in this particular area of the woods, because I like it. But also, it seemed pretty synergistic given how things are going. I guess it definitely made the sale a little easier to stomach.
    - anon291 8mo ago
      It's funny how everytime the economic system is going to collapse, the response is often to complain about capitalism while purchasing more private property under the very same institutions that are about ready to fall over. It's easier to understand violent warlords honestly. At least they're being serious.
29athrowaway 8mo ago
The main reasons it's much harder to get a job are: - higher interest rates - section 174
- silisili 8mo ago
  As I understand it, OBB reverted section 174. Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect. I used to agree with your statement, but it's feeling more and more it's not true.
  - Swizec 8mo ago
    > Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect. Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew? This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.
  - otherme123 8mo ago
    Interest rates are normal or even low. The situation of interest around 0% for years was an extreme anomaly never seen before. Since 1973 interest rates were almost always above 5%, and the only moments they fell under 3% they created the 2008 boom and bust.
  - 29athrowaway 8mo ago
    The impact is not instantly reverted and is still ongoing.
- AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
  When you simply have cartels and monopolies across all sectors of the economy, there is no incentives to hire more people to pursue and compete, and and no avenues for new companies to enter the market and compete. Instead, these companies simply optimize their costs. Which ultimately will be labor. And then rent extract as much as possible from the economy. And then rent extract as much as possible from the economy All of that rent extraction goes to the super rich
somenameforme 8mo ago
Them starting their graph at 2021 made me look up the actual data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
- 1123581321 8mo ago
  I was about to post the same thing. It is cyclical, and over the last several decades, the percentage of long-term unemployed during low unemployment periods seems to have steadily increased more than the rate during high unemployment periods, covid excepting.
- sxyuan 8mo ago
  What looks unusual in this graph is that the line usually spikes rapidly during and after a recession. It's not clear what we're in right now, since recessions are declared after the fact, but the slow trend upwards without a declared recession does look like a break from past decades.
  - pllbnk 8mo ago
    It's different this time because the build-up since the last recession (excluding pandemic which didn't cause real recession but instead added more coal to the fire) has been the longest in history by far. Unless economists learned to prevent recessions, which is very unlikely, long build-up may mean spectacular crash. On the other hand, it may indicate that we are in a recession, hence the graph's similarities to 2007-2009 period, but it's just going to take a long time and then crash spectacularly, too. I am just speculating but it "feels" that way.
  - AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
    We've been in an economic recovery for 20 years now
- zwaps 8mo ago
OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
[dead]
Animats 8mo ago
The classic phrase for this is the "reserve army of the unemployed".[1] That goes back to Engels and Marx, around 1845. That's surprisingly early for industrial unemployment. The Industrial Revolution was still starting up. Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  Good point. In a controlled economy when it is dialed down and or slips out-of-control and dips downward, that's what you get. >Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs. That's quite a bit like a macro element of nature. Too many people for too few remaining resources either way.
anon291 8mo ago
I've seen this with several friends. One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).
- jandrewrogers 8mo ago
  People with lumpy incomes get absolutely brutalized by the tax code. It sucks but also not easy to remedy. The calculations and exemptions change every year, so it isn’t as simple as looking back five years and averaging it.
  - anon291 8mo ago
    All I'm saying is that their should be a way to recapture the taxes if you've suddenly gone from tons of income to no income. Even the figures I'm citing are not a lot of money in some places like the CA bay area, unfortunately.
- spockz 8mo ago
  Here in the Netherlands you can actually request your income for taxes to be averaged every 5 years. Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.
- _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
  Best we can do is loss recognition for the capital class. But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.
siliconc0w 8mo ago
* Tariffs are hurting most real-world jobs - you don't know what your inputs will cost in 6-12 months and so can't plan * Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person * Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else * Cheap globally accessible labor * Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services. * Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans * Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.
- stinkbeetle 8mo ago
  Not to be rude, but is this just a list of your feelings on the matter or is there real data and consensus behind them? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
  - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    >Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse. It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully. I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts. Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet. And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time. Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor. Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP. Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand
gravypod 8mo ago
> He’s also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get “more picky,” he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn’t get the role. No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc. Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all. I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  > I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now? It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing. Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface. Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature. As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire. Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization. You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process. You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge. Edit: can't reply > There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast. That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination > There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin > economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products. A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment. Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee. But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire. --- Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.
jandrewrogers 8mo ago
This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen. I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it. The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
- moneycantbuy 8mo ago
  Hostility to labor has been accelerating throughout my 25 years in the workforce. Graduated into dotcom bust then global financial crisis then another massive transfer of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy in response to covid. If you don't already have yours good luck getting it.
  - AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
    Which coincides with the rich and elite commanding a greater and greater share of productivity, gains and wealth.
- zwaps 8mo ago
  The average non cyclical component of longterm unemployment has been rising steadily since the 50s tho
lifestyleguru 8mo ago
On a bright side it feels that for once the situation is quite uniform from America, through Europe, to Oceania. Official unemployment numbers are artificially low, people are without healthcare, no one is getting hired, and pointing out any of these publicly one hears "you're lying because you are supporting the other political party".

83 points by rustoo 8mo ago

It seems increasingly likely the U.S. is running full hog into one of the worst economic disasters we’ve ever seen with no contingency plan or strategy for resolution. [1] [1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20we%20in%20an%20economic,%2C%20Instagram%2C%20Facebook%2C%20Newsletter. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
OhioMan2943 8mo ago
Especially when you realise that our tolerance for AI propping up the rest of the economy has stifled the "natural selection" that weeds out poor performers and poor business choices and rewards innovation and success. An imprecise economy is a worrying thing.
- AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
  Your comment assumes that there is a healthy, competitive situation in US markets, with a dozen players actively competing This is not the case. Virtually every segment of the US economy is dominated by cartels or monopolies with little desire to innovate.
fuzzfactor 8mo ago
Seems?
teeray 8mo ago
I guess the real question is: is there anywhere for the layperson to hide? Whose acorns will survive?
- tencentshill 8mo ago
  Just be ready to make practical quality of life adjustments. Learn about self sustenance, even if you can't practice it yet. It's not going to be Mad Max all of a sudden, but a lot of little things we've come to expect someone else to do will degrade or disappear.

dyauspitr 8mo ago

I can’t think of a single angle this administration isn’t destroying America from.

cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]
defrost 8mo ago
Gilding, albeit more toilets than lilies, is on the up and up. If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players. The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. ~ https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2026 https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2026 is just the latest in an extraordinary personal achievement by just one of the current crop of players.
- coliveira 8mo ago
  He's taking Venezuela's oil money into accounts that he controls. Who knows what this money will be used for.
  - pengaru 8mo ago
    citation? here's mine: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-chris-wright-trump.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-ch...
    - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      “We walked back this specific grift.” Democrats Push for Transparency on Venezuelan Oil Money Controlled by U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-democrats-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-de... | https://archive.today/pWvLH https://archive.today/pWvLH - February 11th, 2026 Trump’s Claim to Venezuelan Oil Money Draws Scrutiny in Congress - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-to-venezuelan-oil-money-draws-scrutiny-in-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-... | https://archive.today/xhNT9 https://archive.today/xhNT9 - January 7th, 2026 (“President Trump’s declaration that he would personally control the proceeds from oil produced in Venezuela drew instant condemnation on Wednesday from Democrats in Congress who noted that the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking.”)

jimbob45 8mo ago

- Contract role, seemed to have run its full course. Didn’t plan ahead? - Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead. - H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face - Contract work again, ran its full course - Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.

toomuchtodo 8mo ago
> Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they’ve also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person’s previous income. The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

csomar 8mo ago

> Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people. This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading. Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it. This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do. tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.

macintux 8mo ago
The Trump administration feels that accountability is only for the people who report accurate data. They get fired.

piloto_ciego 8mo ago

People are going to flame me for this, but it's the end of the line because of a confluence of AI, bad planning, offshoring, and a few other things. But this is the end of capitalism as we know it because the value of labor is plummeting globally, it's not going to happen overnight, but this is kind of the logical end of things. Education no longer implies employment - I did my masters a few years ago and promptly got scooped up, but the undergrads that graduated around the same time did not - and I was different, I had prior relevant work history. Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it. What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean. Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.

anon291 8mo ago
Wow, you're the first person I've ever heard of to buy land in the woods to prepare for the imminent economic disaster.
- piloto_ciego 8mo ago
  I mean, I also wanted land in this particular area of the woods, because I like it. But also, it seemed pretty synergistic given how things are going. I guess it definitely made the sale a little easier to stomach.
  - anon291 8mo ago
    It's funny how everytime the economic system is going to collapse, the response is often to complain about capitalism while purchasing more private property under the very same institutions that are about ready to fall over. It's easier to understand violent warlords honestly. At least they're being serious.

29athrowaway 8mo ago

The main reasons it's much harder to get a job are: - higher interest rates - section 174

silisili 8mo ago
As I understand it, OBB reverted section 174. Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect. I used to agree with your statement, but it's feeling more and more it's not true.
- Swizec 8mo ago
  > Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect. Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew? This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.
- otherme123 8mo ago
  Interest rates are normal or even low. The situation of interest around 0% for years was an extreme anomaly never seen before. Since 1973 interest rates were almost always above 5%, and the only moments they fell under 3% they created the 2008 boom and bust.
- 29athrowaway 8mo ago
  The impact is not instantly reverted and is still ongoing.
AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
When you simply have cartels and monopolies across all sectors of the economy, there is no incentives to hire more people to pursue and compete, and and no avenues for new companies to enter the market and compete. Instead, these companies simply optimize their costs. Which ultimately will be labor. And then rent extract as much as possible from the economy. And then rent extract as much as possible from the economy All of that rent extraction goes to the super rich

somenameforme 8mo ago

Them starting their graph at 2021 made me look up the actual data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.

1123581321 8mo ago
I was about to post the same thing. It is cyclical, and over the last several decades, the percentage of long-term unemployed during low unemployment periods seems to have steadily increased more than the rate during high unemployment periods, covid excepting.
sxyuan 8mo ago
What looks unusual in this graph is that the line usually spikes rapidly during and after a recession. It's not clear what we're in right now, since recessions are declared after the fact, but the slow trend upwards without a declared recession does look like a break from past decades.
- pllbnk 8mo ago
  It's different this time because the build-up since the last recession (excluding pandemic which didn't cause real recession but instead added more coal to the fire) has been the longest in history by far. Unless economists learned to prevent recessions, which is very unlikely, long build-up may mean spectacular crash. On the other hand, it may indicate that we are in a recession, hence the graph's similarities to 2007-2009 period, but it's just going to take a long time and then crash spectacularly, too. I am just speculating but it "feels" that way.
- AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
  We've been in an economic recovery for 20 years now
zwaps 8mo ago

OGEnthusiast 8mo ago

[dead]

Animats 8mo ago

The classic phrase for this is the "reserve army of the unemployed".[1] That goes back to Engels and Marx, around 1845. That's surprisingly early for industrial unemployment. The Industrial Revolution was still starting up. Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

fuzzfactor 8mo ago
Good point. In a controlled economy when it is dialed down and or slips out-of-control and dips downward, that's what you get. >Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs. That's quite a bit like a macro element of nature. Too many people for too few remaining resources either way.

anon291 8mo ago

I've seen this with several friends. One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).

jandrewrogers 8mo ago
People with lumpy incomes get absolutely brutalized by the tax code. It sucks but also not easy to remedy. The calculations and exemptions change every year, so it isn’t as simple as looking back five years and averaging it.
- anon291 8mo ago
  All I'm saying is that their should be a way to recapture the taxes if you've suddenly gone from tons of income to no income. Even the figures I'm citing are not a lot of money in some places like the CA bay area, unfortunately.
spockz 8mo ago
Here in the Netherlands you can actually request your income for taxes to be averaged every 5 years. Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.
_DeadFred_ 8mo ago
Best we can do is loss recognition for the capital class. But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.

siliconc0w 8mo ago

* Tariffs are hurting most real-world jobs - you don't know what your inputs will cost in 6-12 months and so can't plan * Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person * Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else * Cheap globally accessible labor * Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services. * Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans * Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.

stinkbeetle 8mo ago
Not to be rude, but is this just a list of your feelings on the matter or is there real data and consensus behind them? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703 The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  >Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse. It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully. I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts. Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet. And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time. Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor. Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP. Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand

gravypod 8mo ago

> He’s also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get “more picky,” he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn’t get the role. No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc. Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all. I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

alephnerd 8mo ago
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now? It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing. Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface. Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature. As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire. Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization. You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process. You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge. Edit: can't reply > There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast. That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination > There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin > economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products. A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment. Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee. But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire. --- Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.

jandrewrogers 8mo ago

This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen. I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it. The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.

moneycantbuy 8mo ago
Hostility to labor has been accelerating throughout my 25 years in the workforce. Graduated into dotcom bust then global financial crisis then another massive transfer of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy in response to covid. If you don't already have yours good luck getting it.
- AtlasBarfed 8mo ago
  Which coincides with the rich and elite commanding a greater and greater share of productivity, gains and wealth.
zwaps 8mo ago
The average non cyclical component of longterm unemployment has been rising steadily since the 50s tho

lifestyleguru 8mo ago

On a bright side it feels that for once the situation is quite uniform from America, through Europe, to Oceania. Official unemployment numbers are artificially low, people are without healthcare, no one is getting hired, and pointing out any of these publicly one hears "you're lying because you are supporting the other political party".