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The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413 https://fred.
by rayiner 8mo ago
The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413.
Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic. It also never recovered from a major drop after the 2008 recession.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8mo agoAs the population continues to age, and more people are 62+, this is expected...
- idiotsecant 8mo agoLook at that trajectory one more time and tell me how 'expected' it is. The first stages of a worldwide recession is what it looks like to me.
- gilbetron 8mo agohttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1T9dv&height=490 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1T9dv&heig... There are way more retired people as a percentage.
- idiotsecant 8mo agoI need you to very carefully consider the x axis of those 2 plots. Think about it real hard.
- gilbetron 8mo agoOk, and?
- djohnston 8mo agoI don’t think that’s telling the whole story. Immigration has always been used as leverage against the native workers, and now it’s more efficiently corrupt than ever.
- 46493168 8mo agoUsed by whom?
- influx 8mo agoThe capital class?
- GOD_Over_Djinn 8mo agoIt’s crazy how the same people that are pro-labor union are also pro-immigration. How do they not realize that immigration is used as a weapon against labor organization? Workers movements of the 20th century were well aware of this obvious fact. But I guess in this hyper polarized culture, people are scared of being labeled a bigot for having a stance on immigration that divergent from the liberal orthodoxy
- djohnston 8mo agoBecause they see the world thru skin color not economic class.
- rafaelmn 8mo agoIs this working age population or all ages ?
- throwawaysleep 8mo agoIt is a historical range of working age, so it includes people who are 16 and over and everyone until the die of old age.
- Knufferlbert 8mo agoThat seems to be everyone above 16 years of age. It excludes inmates, that is penal and mental institutions (which in the land of the free is surprisingly sizeable chunk). Also excludes active military personnel. Notably it includes people who are disabled but are unable to work.
- nobodyandproud 8mo agoI’m naturalized—very, very long term—but I couldn’t find any stats that track by US citizens. I suppose that makes me a second-class citizen?
- bicx 8mo agoIt means that if we cut off or discourage immigration, we can’t count on non-native citizens to continue boosting our numbers. So, we have to look at the native-born stats to get an idea of our future.
- 46493168 8mo agoThe future is a labor shortage. Good for wages, bad for inflation.
- nobodyandproud 8mo agoYes, but why not have both? Why only native? I can’t help but think talks of denaturalization are more than just fringe. Or perhaps the numbers are starkly different, and for the best?
- 46493168 8mo ago[flagged]
- bojan 8mo agoYou have one right fewer than natively born Americans - you can't become the President. Make of that what you will.
- tialaramex 8mo agoThis is another one of the weird American-isms that many Americans don't realise isn't normal everywhere else. Boris Johnson was born in New York. "He wasn't born in this country" probably wasn't even on anybody's top-100 problems with Boris as Prime Minister.
- 8mo ago
- hypeatei 8mo ago> The ungameable statistic How are the normal unemployment rates (U-3, U-6, etc.) "gamed" exactly? Or, put another way: what would you do differently?
- kitten_mittens_ 8mo agoU-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like. https://www.lisep.org https://www.lisep.org has alternate measures that try accounting for take home wages as well as seasonal variability (construction is noted as being volatile but relatively well paying).
- hypeatei 8mo agoThe graph ("vs. Headline Rate")[0] follows the same trend lines as the BLS numbers just with a higher percentage. I don't see how the "poverty wage" methodology (which is arbitrary) is helpful here, it doesn't take into account caregivers or disabled people who may be keeping their wage low on purpose due to benefits cliffs. Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant. 0: https://www.lisep.org/tru https://www.lisep.org/tru
- gruez 8mo ago>U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like. That seems fine? It's the unemployment rate, after all, not "likes how much money they're making" rate. Moreover if you compare these alternate measures, they more or less match the same trend as U-3. For instance: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-measures-of-labor-underutilization.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-... So if the alternate measures mostly follow the same trend as U-3, and the numbers are only higher because they use a looser criteria, what's the point of bringing them up, other than as a cheap rhetorical device? Suppose we had some way of objectively determining happiness on a 1-10 scale. The government puts out a metric called the "sad rate", which is people who are 2 or less on the scale. What's the point in coming along and declaring "the real sad rate is not actually 5%. If we change the cutoff to 3, it's actually 10%!"? Heck, why stop at 3? Why not declare everyone under 5 sad? Then the sad rate would be even bigger, great for doomposting!
- kilroy123 8mo ago[flagged]
- game_the0ry 8mo agoThe iphone + fb/instagram = kids spending more time on the screen than irl Since, youth suicide, depression, anxiety, etc have hit record levels. Coincides with the smart phone adoption and negative emotion graphs.
- s_dev 8mo agoI love how Covid lockdowns clearly show up in so many graphs going across the past few decades. It's going to be a real gem for researchers in general going forward.
- manwe150 8mo agoThat is an impressive number of graphs and very cool! I wonder if the author would consider repeating with KDE plots instead of splines, so the pretty shape of the curves has some statistical meaning also
- BoiledCabbage 8mo ago90% of those charts have no notable change or inflection point around 2012.
- stego-tech 8mo agoHot take, but I don’t think it should recover. If anything, I think a combination of low unemployment, higher wages, and a labor force participation rate of ~45-55% would be a sweet spot to aim for: * It would indicate more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives * It would suggest more stay-at-home parents to rear children, which is only possible in a safe and stable economic environment * It’d also suggest a higher amount of community engagement, rather than mere working and resting. * A rise in successful single-income households would also suggest improvements in cost of living affordability In our current world, where we expect both parents to work full-time jobs to survive (because the cost of everything assumes a married couple employed full-time, especially in cities), this number is bad; in a healthier society, it might be a good thing. I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
- chrisweekly 8mo agoI love this vision. What do you think might be required to make it real?
- snypher 8mo agoThe return of the proceeds of labor to the people who performed the labor. Edit: my CEO owns ~125 houses.
- gruez 8mo ago>The return of the proceeds of labor to the people who performed the labor. It's funny you bring that up, given the statistics on this shows that it's been trending down, but nowhere close to the amount you'd expect from the popular discourse. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
- stego-tech 8mo agoA lot, because no system or crisis has an "easy solution". That said, a few highlights I've chewed on: * From the social angle, we have got to address this notion of gender roles being a prerequisite for such a societal outcome. It's not a "women are homemakers and men are breadwinners" type bullshit, and it's not penalizing the homemaker by robbing them of personal growth. It's acknowledging that some of us - for whatever reason at all - may prefer contributing to the success of the home and community rather than the success of a business, and that's a perfectly valid path to follow in life with its own societal rewards and benefits that cannot be directly captured in terms of GDP or wealth. If a woman wants to have a high-growth career while the husband stays at home to raise the kids, we shouldn't be shaming or humiliating either participant for their decisions since both are valid not just to themselves, but to society as a whole. * From a business perspective, we also need to figure out the right balance of regulations and reforms that prohibit (and meaningfully punish) discrimination based on these sorts of choices. Women shouldn't be penalized for having kids, men shouldn't be penalized for choosing to be a homemaker (full or part-time), and vice versa. It's acknowledging that gaps are normal because life is chaos, and rebuilding work around the flexibility to adapt to life rather than jamming everything into fixed blocks of time or location. COVID showed us this is possible, but the whiplash after shows that those in power refuse to change willingly; changes must come from external actors and forces because power refuses to acquiesce otherwise. * From a government point of view, it's a lot of social safety nets and reforms. It's fixing healthcare, it's making childcare affordable, it's raising minimum wages; it's also raising taxes on multi-income households proportionate to earned income (higher taxes on higher incomes), expanding affordability programs into higher income tiers (such that unorthodox households aren't punished - this mainly targets immigrant and queer multi-family households), prioritizing "right-size" homeownership (taxing 2nd+ homes at higher rates, or large homes/land plots in dense urban areas at higher rates than multi-family or smaller-plot homes), expanding transit options to reduce costs of vehicle ownership and improve job opportunities, the list goes on for miles. The overarching goal is one of intentional vision rather than piecemeal band-aids: building the legal structures and safety nets needed to not merely "promote" this outcome, but all but mandate it via incentives and punishments. It's as much about reassuring people that their choice is valid and will result in a long and prosperous life as much as it is handcuffing Capital from squeezing blood from stones for shareholder value. * EDIT: One thing Government could be doing to improve things now, that seems incredibly counter-intuitive on its face, is to stop means-testing benefits. We need to stop caring who is acceptable enough to get social benefits, and instead focus on ensuring benefits are used effectively regardless of who gets them - directly paying landlords instead of handing out vouchers, for instance, or curtailing SNAP/EBT uses away from ultra-processed foods, or just extending Medicare to everybody. Yes, there's a lot of questions around sustainability of these programs, but that's all the more reason to maximize their pool of users, cut out middlemen, and raise taxes to specifically cover costs of services instead of printing money to cover deficits. Patrick Boyle's latest video actually touches on this in the UK, where even high earners aren't motivated to do more work or earn more pay because losing means-tested benefits will cost them more than they would earn. And that's just the high-level stuff. It's a lot to think about because it requires us to collectively fight for an intended future instead of just one-offing problems individually. That's a lot of work that not a lot of folks have ever had to do outside of minority spaces, and those muscles are going to need to be trained back into use over time. It's not impossible, but it is incredibly hard.
- api 8mo agoIsn’t that a proxy for aging and lower birth rates?
- gruez 8mo ago>The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413. It's pretty obvious the declining native born rate is just mirroring the overall decline in labor participation, probably from demographic changes. Old people retire and stop working, after all. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART If you look at prime age labor force participation rate, it tells a completely different story: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 It's ironic that you talk of "ungameable statistics", implying that others are misleading people with the statistics, when you're seemingly trying to do the same thing by selectively presenting that statistic to imply that immigrants are stealing native-born's jobs.
- rayiner 8mo agoLooking at native born employment doesn’t “imply” anything. It just excludes confounding factors that come into play when looking at trends because immigration changes the composition of the people you’re looking at over time.
- donkeybeer 8mo agoWhat? How on earth does that make any sense at all? Do jobs record for recently immigrated vs immigrated n years ago? Is the job market or salary offers different for either group? Then how does it make sense to arbitrarily exclude one set of people and falsely claim it makes the stats more "accurate"?
- coldtea 8mo ago>The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate Why would it be "ungameable"?
- foxyv 8mo agoOnly thing I can think of is that if you pick a statistic with fewer confounding variables you have less of a chance to cherrypick?