3 ms·

Yes to a stronger welfare state, including untying healthcare and employment, and a UBI (more specifically a negative income tax). But I think the nightmare yo

Yes to a stronger welfare state, including untying healthcare and employment, and a UBI (more specifically a negative income tax). But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.

genxy 2mo ago
We have seen the labor pool shrink for construction, restaurant, cleaning, farming, etc greatly in the last couple years.
- defrost 2mo ago
  To clarify, that's the demand for labour in farming has shrunk while crop yields per acre have increased. Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
- manlymuppet 2mo ago
  And yet, within the last couple years, the unemployment rate has remained stable within its usual 3-5% healthy band, and the total amount of people employed has increased overall. Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
  - ab5tract 2mo ago
    That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless population of the US is not counted as unemployed. That’s been baked into the metric for decades and they have only gotten more discriminatory as to who counts as unemployed since.
    - forgotmypasswor 2mo ago
      Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.
      - manlymuppet 2mo ago
        As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term. In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
    - manlymuppet 2mo ago
      There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for work (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force. I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic. And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help. Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
      - ab5tract 2mo ago
        Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports? It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.

genxy 2mo ago

We have seen the labor pool shrink for construction, restaurant, cleaning, farming, etc greatly in the last couple years.

defrost 2mo ago
To clarify, that's the demand for labour in farming has shrunk while crop yields per acre have increased. Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
manlymuppet 2mo ago
And yet, within the last couple years, the unemployment rate has remained stable within its usual 3-5% healthy band, and the total amount of people employed has increased overall. Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
- ab5tract 2mo ago
  That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless population of the US is not counted as unemployed. That’s been baked into the metric for decades and they have only gotten more discriminatory as to who counts as unemployed since.
  - forgotmypasswor 2mo ago
    Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.
    - manlymuppet 2mo ago
      As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term. In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
  - manlymuppet 2mo ago
    There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for work (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force. I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic. And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help. Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
    - ab5tract 2mo ago
      Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports? It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.