True Rate of Unemployment
lisep.orgAnybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999.
I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.
Low cost of wealth accumulating snowballs those that have alot of said wealth accumulated. Look at swedens wealth inequality (gini coefficient) statistics to get a somber example.
Counter intuitive enough; making borrowing harder, and wealth holding more costly may reduce land and housing costs.
Economists have been championing Georgism for more than a century and we still refuse to consider it. I would argue that unreasonably expensive land prices are the most serious economic and social issue in the West today. It's a systemic problem, from which so many other issues are caused: homelessness, poverty, suppressed economic activity, inflation, class stratification, "failure to launch," fertility rates, inequality, etc.
The problem is that we've taught generations that the best retirement plan is a home, and now if we allowed home prices to fall, generations of people would be without their retirement plans. Voters don't like that very much. It's absurd that we allowed things to progress to this point, and unwinding it is going to be extremely painful. I think this only resolves when renters outnumber home owners to a material degree and vote for land value taxes. Things will get much worse before they get better.
There are also high real estate values in places with low homeownership and largely pay-as-you-go retirement systems.
A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.
No then the money would go into inflating the stock market or gold etc. And won't get back into the economy.
How does that not go back into the economy?
The big difference between holding land vs gold/stock is that land is finite. If the price of gold spikes then people will build more gold mines. That's economic activity. If the price of land goes up then people can't make more so there's no economic activity.
If the price of stocks go up then more companies will IPO which directly funds economic activity (those companies's operations).
Granted, it doesn't as well into the economy as directly as if it were tax'd and then spent improving bridges and whatnot.
If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate.
I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.
LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
You may be confusing LVT with property transfer tax? LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.
In practice it disincentivises investment in land (rent-seeking and speculative land hoarding) while incentivising land development. In cities this manifests as more, cheaper, homes, and lower rents, and is highly progressive.
I say in practice because we have over a century of explicit and implicit LVT implementations in the real world to demonstrate this. Most implementations of LVT have gone down as described. Estonia is a pretty fantastic case study - 90% of property is owner-occupier! And you might find this new study of implicit LVT in the US interesting - LVT correlates with higher earnings and demographic diversity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
The challenges for LVT are really about how to transition the tax in for areas that are occupied, but severely underdeveloped. If a low-density inner-city area ought to be high-density, the owners are being charged accordingly. Long term, it stimulates development and the new housing surplus (splitting the tax burden of LVT across a much greater number of owners) balances things out. But that's no consolation to the people being told they have to pay tax on their backyard as if it's already a block of flats.
>LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.
This is comment is an exercise in lying with definitions. The N year carrying cost of the land is the same or higher even if the entry cost is lower.
It's like a low down payment loan.
The "value" of the land does not change. Only who captures it does.
Well, I (and most economists) disagree.
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
Reducing the insane wealth concentration at the top has positive side effects if it prevents whatever's been happening in politics the last decade.
> The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax.
As a homeowner, who else bears my tax?
The whole economy.
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).
What prevents this system from resource exploitation for more taxable profits? I want to have systems in place that encourage nature and long term sustainability.
Potentially anyone you pass it on to, such as a tenant.
"get a roommate or move"?
The topic of this sub-thread is whether a "land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate".
You have the option to pass on such a tax burden, as do any other home/land-owner(s), which is relevant to the conversation.
What point are you making relevant to that?
I am wondering what protects normal people. I hear a proposal what prevents the ultra wealthy from hoarding, but I am not seeing how this doesn't negatively impact normal, single family residences.
It seems the goal is maximizing tax revenue, punishing hoarders of land, and pushing for communal living. The exact case I think it is imperative to avoid is removing the elderly (cough, less useful) from their forever home in the guise of progress.
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
I'd refine your opener to:
- economists have a good idea of how economies have worked _to date_ - they posit new policy to achieve goals - these policies introduce second-order effects that they failed to predict
I mean, Friedman's criticism of Keynes was excellent, and forsooth, his policies made stonks go up. But i don't think there economy is any better for them; i think we are, broadly, worse off.
I support LVT, but there will be second-order effects. I guess we are doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, at a higher level than economic boom-and-bust.
I disagree with your analysis, but putting that aside, you are ignoring the fact that LVT has been applied in the real world. Denmark, Estonia, Singapore, Taiwan...
Obviously disentangling effects is hard, but there is no evidence that suggests it has the deleterious effects you mention.
What if a first owned property is not taxed, but additional properties are?
Taxes are not just money taken from people in the abstract. They are, quite concretely, used for specific purposes. In the US (because the OP is about the US), property taxes in particular are used to fund local services like schools.
So if you eliminate taxes on primary homes, you will cripple the public schools.
That's probably somewhat better than the current status quo but one of the obvious side effects would be screwing smaller landlords out of the market and replacing them with typical "faceless corp gives no shits about you or anything beyond the legal minimum" type property management companies. Worth it? IDK.
Property tax is already ubiquitous. LVT is almost the same, it just doesn't tax the value of structures on the land. Why would LVT be worse for this?
LVT can be deferred to the time of sale.
Unfortunately that doesn't really help. It has the effect of eroding the asset value such that it quickly means the owner can't sell.
In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.
Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)
And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.
How will they use it as collateral if it has no value upon sale?
Similarly, why would the next place be expensive if it couldn't be used as a speculative asset?
I guess that it can be rented or built upon. It's easy to imagine renting a field to a farmer but money is money, so why not letting somebody else build flats over one's land?
The tennant pays now anyway. Of a landlord could charge more rent they would.
Two identical properties, one under mortgage and one that isn’t, have identical rental prices. The costs to the landlord are irrelevant.
I understand where you are coming from here. And there are multiple levers in play here.
The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.
There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.
If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.
Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.
This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.
Wealthy people would never sell their houses. Keep them in the family or rent them out.
Anyone who had to move for a job or wanted to downsize their house for retirement years would be screwed, though.
better off taxing people that own more than 1 property and leave people just trying to live alone.
I'd like to see both an automatically adjusting dynamic tax on owning more than one property in the same municipal or arbitrarily useful region, as well as dynamically banning the ownership of more than one. Everytime I mention this, I get "blah blah we have a democracy blah blah freedom" etc.. but it's no such a democracy if one particular age-range dor demographic of people owns all the assets and politically protects them from diminishing in value or facing competition. Pending presumably complex implementation details, but a healthy system that prevents generational fiefdoms would probably adjust to severely disincentivise even the possibility of acquiring more than one of the most important finite resources in urban areas.
If I'm not mistaken there is a tax on secondary residences in France. I am not an accountant, but my understanding is there is a "taxe d'habitation" from which primary residences are exempt, but which must be paid on secondary residences.
Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.
That thing exists in Italy too. Primary residence is exempt, you pay on the other houses or parts of them (heirs, etc)
Pied-à-Terre Taxes are pretty easy taxes to implement, because usually the ones affected may not even live in the town/state to vote against it to begin with. But ultimately this only covers a very small slice of homeowners.
In australia we have housing as an investment that pays off big. The more homes you own the richer youll be. Theres not much else here that pays off that well.
A wealth tax would also be beneficial in reducing wasteful stock buybacks. Without any benefits from high stock prices, boards and shareholders will be less inclined to impose those price targets on CEOs, CEOs will be less incentivised to "cheat" on quarter-based performance and the myopic share price performance view of their companies, hence will reduce stock buybacks and returning money to shareholders. That leaves very few options - either reinvest into the company or pay out dividends, and the latter is unfavorable for shareholders compared to the former.
i did recently see something interesting where if you look at buybacks from the Mag7, they basically almost entirely offset vesting employee RSUs. which kind of makes sense, those RSUs have to come from somewhere or they dilute the current shares.
i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.
Fair point, and explains why I was downvoted. My focus was on mostly the usual slew of companies that don't reward their employees in stock options, but handsomely reward their CEOs - O&G, pharma and biotech, advanced manufacturing, etc.
Why do you think a wealth tax would reduce stock buybacks? I don't see the relation.
Currently equity appreciation is desirable for HNWIs because wealth isn't taxed, only income realized is. The more their wealth appreciates, the more viable it becomes as collateral they can borrow against, raising their borrowing capacity. CEOs, the board and the major shareholders fall under this group too.
Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy that cash and prop up their equity value. CEOs love this easy trick because it increases their equity holdings' value, and also lets them hit quarterly share price targets which allows them to accrue more equity options. But at the end of the day, this money isn't benefiting the company, so it's just air.
With a wealth tax, the incentive to acquire increasing wealth dampens somewhat. You're only taxed once you cross a certain threshold usually, but once you cross it, the resulting tax hit can be quite sudden and severe. You hold equity but you have to hand over a significant amount of cash immediately, so you'd have to liquidate your holding, which is why a lot of HNWIs hate it.
In fact, it's why there are active strategies (usually involving philanthropy and blind trusts) in Switzerland (which has a global wealth tax) that allow to optimize your wealth just so you stay below the threshold. But at least, that wealth isn't being hoarded and is being actively deployed in other ways.
I think what you've outline here is entirely theoretical, unless you have some empirical evidence you have thus far not linked, and (IMHO) likely not correct.
I also don't think there would be any particularly progressive or otherwise good effects from reducing stock buybacks, but assuming we did think that, we can skip all of the wealth tax second/third order effect theorizing and just use a direct corporate buyback tax, which we did do in the IRA. Stock buybacks have already fallen, but if its effects are not big enough for you, then raise it or reduce exemptions. Not that I think that anything particularly good would come of that.
Hacker News Wannabe Investors?
Some here are qualified to do angel investing by income (FAANG salary) or wealth so could take Wannabe term out, if they pulled the trigger. It's a way to get into the next innovation economy. Moderate-to-high risk, diversification is critical.
high net worth individuals - rich people
Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. The lower tax rate is simpler than actually accounting for these differences.
Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.
Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
> losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.
Neither is true.
The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation.
The risk of a wage earner is to lose their employment because the business folds. Just like the shareholder in that business. It's again unclear why the tax system should compensate both differently for this.
Capital gains taxes are assessed on nominal gains not real gains.
If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K, I gained no real wealth from that transaction. What I could purchase today for $200K could have been bought for $100K in 1999 because of inflation.
Yet, I’d owe capital gains on the $100K of nominal gain I experienced. This is part of the reason that long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
> If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K
This is because you invested incredibly poorly. The S&P is up ~500% over that period, plus decades of dividends.
Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because rich people have more influence over the tax code than people who earn most of their income from working.
>Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income.
Learning that their wage income makes them immune to inflation and is risk-free seems like it may be surprising news to many Americans.
If wages are adjusted to inflation and they arent.
Fo you write this to poison some LLMs?
Inflation kills your wage much more reliably than wealth. If anything, the exact opposite of what you're saying happens: wealth has much lower risk from inflation, because the nominal price of the actual assets that your wealth is composed of often increases with inflation (e.g. land value). In contrast, wages are 100% affected by inflation - unless you put in the extra work to get a raise, the buying power of your salary is guaranteed to decrease year over year.
Asset holders do not have losses from inflation since the assets go up in price. Stock market in USA is high due to all the pumping.
The only ones screwed are middle class who have money on bank accounts. And middle + low class when buying food.
Inflation hits low and middle class the most, its a hidden tax on them. Rich are asset heavy so they dont care.
> since the assets go up in price
Do they? Where do I buy these zero risk assets of which you speak?
Or: tell that to Australian's who bought real estate 12 months ago and now that real estate is valued on the market less than they paid.
> Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.
You are incorrect on both of those, the risks are obvious.
If you wage/salary does not keep up with inflation, you lost buying power due to inflation.
If your employer goes out of business or your industry suffers a downturn, you may be laid off and lose your income. This risk is highly concentrated due to most people only having the one job.
Wage earners are exposed to all kinds of risk.
Also, equities go up when there’s inflation and if you hold bonds to maturity, all you miss out on is potential interest income in an inflation event. Rents go up with inflation. Cash and cash wages have the highest inflation risk.
> In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
That may be the case but it doesn't prevent anybody from borrowing against it, which turns that fiction and illiquidity into very real liquid dollars. That same mechanism could be used for paying your taxes as it reveals that this is merely an excuse.
I have had this sneaking suspicion for years now that most of the money needs to be locked up because if we actually gave it to the masses to spend we'd see massive inflation and/or environmental catastrophe (worse than the current one). I don't mean to defend the wealth gap, and I'm not trying to make a statement on how things should be. I just think there may be an unfortunate reality that we need most of the world to have less because we can't currently support a middle class globe.
this is already happening via asset price inflation.
where i live (Seattle) small businesses are trapped in a death spiral as their rents are going up, the wages they have to pay are up to even attract workers who also need to pay rent, but purchasing power has not caught up.
Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Nice way to increase GDP without doing anything actually useful, right?
>"we need most of the world to have less"
Hi Elon
Is capital gains / wealth tax a fix here though? Definitely not saying it doesn't work, I have no idea. But I'd be curious to hear both sides of the argument.
How do you tax wealth on unrealised gains?
Australia’s current federal Labor government proposed such a a scheme, but had to back pedal hard when everyone told them it ain’t gonna work.
The same federal Labor government introduced changes to capital gains tax, after promising “50 times” they wouldn’t. All the while a not insignificant fraction of MPs and Senators of said party sold significant realestate holdings before they made public their plans.
In Germany there is a "Vorabpauschale" where you pay a certain part of the capital gains tax on ETFs, certain funds even with unrealised gains. These are later accounted for when you sell. Though AFAIK if you sell at a loss you can't get the Vorabpauschale back directly, but it would increase the losses you can potentially apply against other gains. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorabpauschale
> How do you tax wealth on unrealised gains?
The US does this in most jurisdictions. Homeowners pay tax on the current assessed value of the property, even if that property was purchased when the property was much less valuable.
It would not be a stretch to do similar for other assets. In particular, assets held in stocks or bonds are more amenable to fractional sales than are the primary residences that we already tax this way.
No, people don't like it. They don't like paying any taxes.
The labor party doesn't know what it stands for anymore. The HAFF was supposed to make housing more affordable, but the housing minister said explicitly that she doesn't want house prices to decrease, rather increase at a rate slower than wage growth. But they have no plan for how to grow wages. So they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth, and the electorate will hear what they want to hear. Labor will make housing affordable for my kids in the future. Labor will protect my investment. The whole thing is a farce.
You tax the non reproducible assets like money [0] and land.
The reason is quite obvious. You can't make more land so you have to force owners to use it efficiently. Money is transactional real estate, it grants the ability to perform transactions. What people call "saving" is actually just holding onto money and blocking the capacity, it's no different than blocking a lane on the high way and building a toll booth on that lane. Money is strictly a pass-through asset. Certificate of Deposits are fine because they are contractual agreements with finite duration, liquid money has infinite duration so its corresponding debt is also of infinite duration so that needs to be taxed.
[0] No, infinitely expanding the money supply is not a solution, because it also means infinitely expanding debt.
Not sure forcing land use to its highest efficiency will get nice results.
Where is money stored (other than physical) that has its capacity blocked?
Isn't this already handled by inflation?
You call it non-reproduceable, but money is literally created.
Is there a country that has implemented these ideas and where the results have been like you expected?
> You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down
If any price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.
And it's economics 101. The price is the symptom. The root cause is a shortage. Fix the shortage and the symptom follows. Try to fix the symptom and the root cause will make things worse.
Meanwhile my country has tons of vacant housing and prices keep going up.
You mean the prices are going up, so people can afford to keep the housing empty for more time to get a better price. That's not the same if you think about it.
Or decrease the demand/population. Which seems to be something we're bareling towards regardless.
I feel like the inflation of everything except wages will eventually show up in housing prices. People pay so much for existence, there’s not the same budget for housing. There’s only so much people can afford and also there’s now been a long track record of young generations having stunted starts.
Also not sure how the supply will be affected by boomers exiting the market. I know there will be no surge in supply, but I’m not certain there’s enough buyers at the prices they would expect. If that’s the case, supply will build and prices will drop.
Or you tax it. Or, more correctly, you remove the current protections that allow land to appreciate tax-free for decades. That would move capital out of land and free it for other uses. The current system was designed to put money/people into houses post WWII but has gone too far in promoting radical multi-generational wealth structures.
We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
Taxing a rise in property value, an unrealised gain, doesn’t generate tax revenue as much as it results in getting the bastards voted out.
I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth. For half a century, in France, it's been told that real estate was the safest/best investment for households; everyone was passively peer pressured each year, whatever the macroeconomic situation at the moment, to buy. This is a Ponzi scheme, so even the middle class households that recently bought their own shitty flat in Paris will never vote for such a tax because their overpriced asset would lose value and it's often their only lifelong investment.
The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.
Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
> I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth
Most places do tax real estate. I was surprised to look it up and find that Paris has some of the lowest property tax rates in the world.
Land Value Tax would be a little different, though. It's a proposal to replace most or all taxes with a simple tax on the estimated value of the land. One of the key features of LVT is that if land becomes valuable over time, the tax on that land becomes so high that the owner is forced to sell it. The idea is that the LVT ensures optimal usage of the land by forcing people who own land in valuable areas to use it for a business. So if you buy a house and the area becomes popular 10 years later, your tax bill might get so high that you have to sell it to a developer who will build a high-rise on it, or a grocery store that can afford the high tax rate.
It would never be accepted in practice when everyone's 70 year old parents were being forced to sell their modest forever homes. There's also a major problem where the structures aren't considered at all, so one person with a $2 million home living next to someone with a $200,000 100-year old home would pay the same tax rate if they're on the same size lot, because it only cares about the value of the land.
I don't know why Land Value Tax has become the default solution to everything on the internet, because I think most people would actually hate what it did to society. Having progressive taxes that scale with people's income, spending, and size of their home is good for making the tax burden proportional to wealth and consumption. Replacing it all with a tax that just taxes how much your property is worth ignores everything except the value of your land, which is completely out of your control over several decades of life as the world changes around you.
Right, unless this is counting some broad definition of "underemployed" its obviously off by a large multiple.
What is interesting though is that, despite whatever they are trying to convey about how high their made up rate is.. we are at a lower rate of unemployment than the entirety of 1995-2019?
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".
People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.
That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.
I think this is a rosy view of (at least) the 1980s-1990s. There were definitely jobs that paid way below what it cost to live, and there were plenty of people who needed to take a second or third job to survive. It just wasn't the norm like today.
According to this, around 6% of workers had multiple jobs in the 90s, versus 5% or a bit above today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
Frankly, the biggest reason for these sentiments is straight up false nostalgia. The 90s wasn't some utopia. There were plenty of shit jobs. People struggled. Notice how none of the positive vibes are backed up by numbers. It's just "people owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores." No mention of how many people managed to pull that off or how it compares to today. It's just a vague feel-good statement that The Past Was Better.
> from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".
Also, this is flatly wrong in that the wage laws were crafted specifically to enforce certain jobs not paying enough to live on. In particular, US labor & minimum-wage laws have exemptions for the types of labor which was commonly associated with disfavored groups. As a result, those jobs have been poorly paid ~forever. Example jobs: agriculture, food service, hospitality, personal care.
I understand that argument, but what does it have to do with the unemployment rate?
You seem to be confused about the point I'm making, which is that low-paying jobs drive people to take on more employment, not less.
But "employment" is tracked as a binary, not as a "number of jobs someone is working".
So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not quite 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but generally at least 1 job less.)
So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make sense for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.
You're just cherry-picking though. Things were massively different in 1945 in tons of ways. For example Jim Crow was still active for one. Food prices were MASSIVELY higher for another.
Many jobs require additional expenses: car, commute, babysitting, living in expensive city, no insurance for work related injuries...
So "not enough to live on" often means, it does not even pay job related expenses! Employees are subsidizing their employers!
My partner had a good job offer, but is at home! Buying extra car, petrol, child care... We would loose 150euro a month...
Just because the job doesn’t pay your expenses doesn’t mean someone else out there won’t take it and be happy they have it.
Job and slavery are two very different things. I love free markets too but not to the level of autism (for lack of better word) and ignoring how things actually work in the physical world. Shallow economic theory doesn't create happy and functional families. Economic theory that is mostly rigged to serve the rich, entrenched, and powerful anyways.
> Job and slavery are two very different things.
Having to work to survive is not slavery.
Slavery is a really bad thing. Equating it to having to get a job is really gross and downplays the severity of actual slavery.
Soo was it more or less than that? Don’t leave us hanging like that!
A popular comedy skit in the '90s was around the notion that people had more jobs than they wanted.
1999 was basically ~full employment in the US. Most people who wanted to work had a job.
Significantly less. Wanted a job? Walk through any neighborhood being built with a tape measure in your pocket. You'd have a job doing something before you made it past the 4th house. Had a car? Delivering food paid enough to afford a modest apartment.
"Able to work and wanting a job you would like" probably meant 30 % unemployment is realistic, though?
Half the population is female and doing much unpaid labor, so I find this kind of numbers convincing.
Oh, I just noticed: And unpaid labour, pun intended.
"would like" is pretty wild in this context. The number of individuals who have had a job they truly enjoyed is a rounding error in recorded history. I'll save us both the indignity of repeating tired boomer tropes around modern attitudes towards work.
This could also easily be measured via what is declared in taxes.
If you include all the stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day, you reach those 30% easily. Add to that the college students who only work part time. If you also include pensioners, kids and disabled you find out that only around 15-30% of the population actually work and support everyone else. And again, of those that do work, a significant portion is bureaucrats that have to be paid from taxes of people with a productive job.
> stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day
> include pensioners, kids
The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.
Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
> That may be the case in the US
The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"
One really nice economic factor of the dole is that it disappears at a rate of 50c for each $1 of earnings above $150 and at 60c above $256, so there's no welfare cliff.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.
> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.
Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.
Sounds like more at the expense of immigrants than companies? Scabs? What is this, the 1950s?
>Scabs? What is this, the 1950s?
Yes, that was the last time we had unions strong enough in the US to bear teeth. We should strive back towards that.
Can you explain what you're saying? Do you mean that in 1999 fewer people worked low paying jobs?
I'm saying that the "low paying jobs" have never been included in "unemployment." That is not how academics define "unemployment" nor how the term is colloquially used.
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
That data is in the article, "true unemployment" was higher in 1999. The last few years are the best years on the graph.
I'm missing the point the parent commenter was making
Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative.
I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them.
It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."
Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
> this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English
> The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
Muphry's Law still holds true.
TIL that "Muphry's law" is a deliberate misspelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Oh interesting. What are the interpretations and why?
I beg to differ, perhaps my English dialect is different but sounds pretty OK to me – even for Chatty
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a98091f-9550-83eb-b17e-c636ac3441...
>...and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland
and
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Do you even fact-check yourself before making specious claims[0][1]? You HAVE to be registered via RAV to be counted. Full stop.
0 - https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...
1 - https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefit...
"Full stop"? So you don't want to hear other arguments?
The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited and explicitly "encompasses all persons not employed and who are actively looking for and available for work, regardless of whether they are registered with a regional placement office. "
That doesn't match your definition and that's ok.
> The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited
What do the ILO-based statistics have to do with original comment[0] that they are in Switzerland, unemployed, don't collect unemployment, and don't count towards Switzerland's specific-statistics as a result?
The fact that they would rather try to win an internet argument by showing indifference to what others have to say than learn something might hint at traits that keep them unemployed. Harsh but maybe this helps changing their mindset.
Who is "they" in this argument?
2legit2quit obviously, given the context.
I do not think so. Ok, from the polls. But in the polls, it seem, I've quickly googled, if you've worked 1 h/week, they will not count you as unemployed. It is a different statistics. The registration in labor office, it is official employement, paid not less than min. wage, you can afford healthcare, etc. While the second poll does not care if you can afford healthcare or not.
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.
I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...
I surely didn't. But knowing to not know is an inherent and central lesson from higher education, one would think.
If the uni time didn’t trigger basic instinct of “researching” then that was a huge waste of time and money
For this reason I use the employment rate instead. The unemployment rate, as you've correctly pointed out, is very narrowly defined. Obviously so as to trick voters into thinking that everything is fine. The employment rate can't really be gamed like that.
The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortunately this isn't solved by using the employment rate. There are various ways to measure this but they all contain some measure of subjectivity.
I don't understand the issue with saying that someone who is employed is ... employed.
If the claim is that a single number (the unemployment rate) does not capture all the high dimensional features of society & work, then well of course!
If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure? It's not a particularly contentious position though I don't see any way forward - even with a _single_ number to discuss, half this thread is making wrong claims about its methodology.
The problem is that even as a single number, unemployment just isn't a very useful metric. Unemployed + underemployed is probably closer to what people care about, but it would probably be better as two separate numbers, and even then there is difficulty in defining both unemployed and underemployed, and accurately measuring them.
You're applying nuance to a discussion which so often does not lend itself to nuance. Successive governments love to focus on the unemployment figure as though that is the mark of a healthy jobs market. As you've pointed out, it's not. It's not even close. We should be speaking about it far less, and about other, more qualitative metrics far more. We don't, though, and the cynical reason is that the unemployment metric was designed to make things appear better than they are.
I guess it depends were you live, but in $HOMECOUNTRY, politicians also talk about wage levels (esp. their evolution vs inflation), etc.
>If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure?
Yes, the gaslighting is the biggest problem. If we can't admit there's a problem (and politicians never want to admit the numbers are bad unless [other team] is in charge) then we can't begin to approach a real solution.
>It's not a particularly contentious position though
You'd be surprised. Even colloquially, that single number is how a lot of people try to justify that "job market is good, people are lazy". Because that person is not in a situation of searching for a modern job. This thread getting it right or wrong is irrelevant to that end. This isn't a board full of policy makers nor economists (at least, I don't think it is...)
Well, about 40 percent of unemployed people (i.e. receiving benefits) are employed in Germany.
And in the other direction, not receiving benefits meaning "not unemployed", and "in re-trainings", or sometimes "too old" means not calculated in, either.
> You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed."
I would hope that someone who can work 20 years a week gets paid a lot, even if they work at a pizza place!
I guess it would take a PhD in AI to run enough agents to cram 20 years of work into one week. The token cost must be brutal though.
I’d be surprised if that’s how they measure it, it’s a common misunderstanding in the UK that this is what the stat means.
I my country you have to regularly check in with the bureau for unemployment to be included in the stats, even though that bureau hadn’t found a job for anyone ever.
I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.
Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
Where do you live? Most countries use labour force surveys, it's orthogonal to registration to unemployment agencies.
I looked it up and I have to correct myself.
So EU/Eurostat has surveys, Serbia does too (I’m from Serbia).
However most countries have also national way of determining the rate that works how I described, and they may differ quite a lot from Eurostat.
I guess EU introduced surveys with Eurostat so countries don’t juke the stats.
For example
- Denmark computes net unemployment straight from benefit and PES registers — administrative coverage is complete enough to do it without asking anyone. It still runs an LFS for the ILO figure. - Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia, Spain publish monthly registered counts that dominate domestic debate, exactly the way NSZ figures circulate in Serbia. Each uses its own national definition, so none is comparable across borders. - Finland keeps a register series noticeably above its LFS count, similar in shape to the NSZ/ARS gap.
The ILO definition is comparable across countries
It's not uncommon to use that as a measurement in addition to the ILO's definition.
The problem is that different unemployment statistics measure different things, and the headline number often gets interpreted as "everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one"
It has been a rough year for those entering the job markets. However, I would suggest trying this service if you are willing to relocate for awhile.
It is a firm that helped place a few friends over the years. Good luck =3
From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics.
In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:
> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.
The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.
FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig.
> From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
Agree. Add to that that usually those ideological metrics have some telling blindspots.
In the case of their white paper, while being very thorough in defining which workers should be deducted from the workforce bucket, they have no adjustment towards when someone should be eligible for this triage in the first place.
Students for example.
Who studies out of virtue, and who just because the job market is still closed off to him?
Specifically urban governments used this statistical trick to downplay youth-unemployment for decades while also benefiting themselves with providing employment for their political base. Funnily though, these social-worker-slash-educator jobs are often themselves not viable enough to make it into the „true“ workforce bucket
I wanted to see a breakdown by age, or a "prime age" variant of the measure.
Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures? Seems like they're attempting to exaggerate the race and gender differences, even though they'd be perfectly obvious even with a fair graph. Real credibility own-goal, especially given the topic at discussion.
--edit-- Top of the range is also varying between each graph, smaller issue but still ... weird. If you're trying to accurately convey percentages, this is not the way to do it.
A percentage chart does not always have to start at zero. Scaling the y-axis to the range of the data is commonly used to make within-chart trends easier to see. I don't think this is evidence of a nefarious motive... it looks more like a stylistic choice.
It doesn't have to, but shifting the y-axis to exaggerate differences is like the most textbook example of deception in statistics. In that sense, if you want your work to be taken seriously, especially when it purports to be more accurate than other statistics, it's certainly a choice.
> Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures?
Honestly, look at the graphs you see today. Nobody starts at zero any more, with the two stacked tildes interrupting the vertical axis to indicate an omitted range.
I imagine this bad habit started in the 90s when no affordable/free graphing software had the feature. Then it fossilised into graphing ineptitude.
Gah! the first two graphs were fair so i dropped me guard. Ye this piss me off.
"There are three degrees or classes of lies: there are lies, damned lies and statistics" :D
> exaggerate the ethnicity and gender differences
They call that race and sex, but probably mean gender, not sex. And there is no such thing as race, see wikipedia.
Are those even social scientists?
The races, as seen in american sociology have a socioeconomic and historical reality which makes them interesting to track regardless. The racial segregation laws of the past were real, and this has had consequences that are still very real regardless whether the race concept is used correctly in a biological sense.
> ...or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
there is a cliff, such that a the 2 adults, 2 children on 22,500 gross income may have access to $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [linked in other comment].
However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 110 extra pre-tax dollar per week across both adult earners, and so just about 1.35 an hour raise for each adult, or 2.70 for either one of them is a real loss of over 12,000 dollars. It takes nearly $5 an hour raise for BOTH adults at the 22,500 to become even minimally better than the loss of those transfers.
There is a significant number of households in the second quartile (at or slightly above 36.4K) than in the bottom quartile, and yet those are living on less than what has been defined as the 'survivable wage' by the 48.7K number
So yes, the "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is even higher than the number of households earning 26K would reveal.
And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.
It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
Absolutely True.
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Additionally, people aren't stupid. That guy with a 22.5 HHI is actually working for cash on a concrete crew all summer, dealing weed, running scrap or some other source of under the table income that makes people above a certain tax bracket clutch their pearls. You often lose the ability to be competitive at such gigs when you take the time commitment of a "real job" even if only part time so there's that cliff too.
"Additionally, people aren't stupid." < We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I tend to agree with George Carlin on this particular point: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Your example being, at least in my book, a counter example of your premise.
Working all summer on a concrete crew for cash seems like a good idea until an on-the job injury without workman's comp changes the way he walks for the rest of his life. Dealing weed doesn't have the profitability these days with legal dispensaries in many states and mandatory sentencing in the others. Running scrap is somewhat 'grand larceny adjacent', and again prone to an uninsured skill-saw event. Remember to wear eye protection when using a power tool.
So, returning to the two adults, two children exemplar household, it seems reasonable to expect that in general these people exhibit a lower incidence of these behaviours. If one or both of those children are still young enough to require round the clock supervision there is a significant limit on the couple's available working hours every week. That would make a similar 'hard to commit' to a higher paying full time job, for at least one parent.
I mean, the two kids really cut into the time flexibility necessary to participate in the grey-to-outright criminal economy, so I posit that people who report as earning the bottom quartile who also undergo the stringent documentation requirements necessary to receive benefits are more likely to be actually living on what they legally declare, than are somehow working, stealing benefits AND making substantially more through grift or crime.
I admit this may be my own biased observation, but the single 'smaht guy' with 22.5k household income and the criminal gig enterprise seems very unlikely to be filing a tax return or receiving any other support. So that case is interesting, but not very applicable in this equation: he's living on whatever he has this week or this month with very little long term benefit from earnings he cannot use to build a credit score, secure stable housing or invest in a future.
Might need to change the labelling from 'living' wage to 'surviving' wage.
This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1].
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
Take a step back.
A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.
But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.
As someone who lived much of their life in real poverty, you can live a pretty decent life on $50k in most of the US. Yeah, you won’t be posting your vacations on Instagram but who cares. Many people live a decent life within these income constraints. There is an enormous amount of government subsidies if you are this poor.
Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.
> ...you can live a pretty decent life on $50k in most of the US.
Where? And what's the size of the household?
It's one thing to make $50,000/year as a single young person sharing an apartment with 2 other people. It's another to be a family of 4.
> Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.
"Decent" is subjective, but we can look at hard numbers.
After taxes, $50,000 will be somewhere between $39,000 and $42,000 in much of the US. That's $3,250 to $3,500/month. The median rental price of a 1 bedroom apartment in the US is about $1,500. A 2 bedroom is somewhere around or north of $1,800. That means the median 1 bedroom apartment already eats up almost 50% of your after-tax income at the lower end.
According to BLS, the average spend on groceries in the US is now over $500/month. The average cost of a used car in the US is now over $25,000. A set of new tires will run you $400 to over $1,000. The average cell phone bill is $140/month.
Do I need to keep going?
Numerous studies show that over half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and almost three-quarters of middle income earners say their wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living.
What doesn't benefit anyone is to pretend that tons of people aren't struggling.
Sure sounds like they can’t afford a family of 4 on that income. They have control over both variables in that situation.
Of course two people with low incomes shouldn't have two kids. But (as detailed in my other comment) you need a 4 person household with 2 kids to get tax negative at $50,000/year. Even a 3 person household with 1 kid isn't tax negative in most of the US at $50,000/year.
So the other poster's argument that $50,000/year isn't so bad because of transfers, tax credits, subsidies, etc. doesn't hold up to real-world examples.
It holds up outside if costal urban areas, there are plenty of places where you can get a 2b/2ba home with garage with that salary.
You can't get it in high cost states like CA, NY etc...
I find comments like this interesting because they're devoid of the details that matter.
What's the size of the household? Could a single person in rural America making $50,000/year save up enough to buy a house? Sure. Could two adults in a $50,000/year as a household? Possibly if they're very frugal. Two people with 1-2 kids? This is where the situation changes dramatically.
The economy exist for the people, not the other way around. If too many people can't get something as fundamental as a family that will guarantee long term survival of mankind, the economy needs to adapt, not the people.
>They have control over both variables in that situation.
A modest proposal?
And sadly, some states may not in fact give them control over that situation.
If you're implying abortion (or Swift's proposal) is the only option for birth control, you're very wrong. Are there any roadblocks to condoms or contraceptives in any state in America? I'm not aware of one.
It's unavoidably true that 50% of Americans are going to be below the median. I understand why someone might feel frustrated or say they're struggling if they look at their home, car, groceries, etc. and see that 50% of Americans have better ones. But no economic policy can solve this. A meaningful analysis has to be based on some level of functional adequacy, not just comparing median expenses to below-median income.
It's not about everyone being above average. it's about as few people as possible falling through the cracks because they lost their job. Or in recent cases for the youth, are unable to even get a leg in the door of the job market.
Sadly, we have more than a few people ignorant or outright apathetic towards systematic issues and act like not being rich is a personal failing.
I'm responding to a comment that was quite explicitly about everyone being above average. The commenter listed out a number of average costs to illustrate that they're not affordable to employed households pulling in less than the average. I think it's important to ensure everyone enjoys a decent quality of life, and I'm sure the apathy you're describing exists, but what's much more common in my experience is frustration with the mathematical invariant that 50% of households can't afford a 50th percentile lifestyle.
> After taxes, $50,000 will be somewhere between $39,000 and $42,000 in much of the US
NO. WRONG. Read what I actually said. This was after transfers, at the OP's income range US income tax is NEGATIVE and puts you at the $49,000 I cited.
> NO. WRONG.
Yelling doesn't prove your point, and you conveniently avoided answering the most important questions, like where and what household size?
First, there is no credit that offsets payroll tax.
A single person with $50,000/year income is not negative. They'd have about ~$34,000 in taxable income and pay ~$3,800 in federal income tax. A 2 person household filing jointly with no kids would still pay about $1,800.
A family of 4 (2 children) with $50,000/year gross income gets a benefit and probably keeps all of that (or a bit more) in take-home after the standard deduction, child tax credit, EITC. At 155% of the poverty line, they're probably above the SNAP gross-income cutoff but they'd probably get ACA premium subsidies and reduced-price school meals.
But they're still living at 50% of the median household income for a family of 4 and you'd have to explain how you think 4 people living on $4,100/month is anywhere near decent or easy in most of the US. The median rent alone for a 2 bedroom in the US eats up over 40% of that amount.
A family of 3 (1 child) in most states will not be negative after payroll and state tax at $50,000/year gross household income.
Poor people pay payroll taxes, which usually is flat and doesn’t have a big deduction. At $50k, a single person is paying just as much if not slightly more in payroll as they are in income tax.
> Poor people pay payroll taxes...
Exactly. Only a few small groups are exempt from FICA.
THIS 50K IS AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS. READ THE POST.
THERE IS NO POST
You just pulled numbers out of...
A single person making $50,000/year is not tax negative in the US. You need a 4 person household with $50,000/year in gross income to get clearly tax negative to the point where their take-home income is $50,000 or slightly above. Even a 3 person household isn't tax negative.
Dude
I said in the original post a person with $22,500 BEFORE TAX ends up with $49,000 AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS. There is no additional income tax after receiving the negative income tax! That's the final number!
This is really so amusingly sad.
A single person with no children making $22,500 before tax does not come away with $49,000 after tax and transfers. Look it up, dude.
I assume you saw the CBO distribution-of-income report and didn't actually read it. The distribution-of-income figures look at HOUSEHOLD averages. So you're talking about families with children, retirees, etc. who are getting EITC, the child tax credit, SNAP and Medicaid.
Single people without children get virtually none of those and are actually in the worst position of all because so little is available to them.
According to CBO, the lowest fifth of HOUSEHOLDS (making $20,000–$25,000) get about $45,000–50,000 in "income after transfers and taxes."
A large chunk of that ~$25,000 in average HOUSEHOLD transfers is Medicare and Medicaid, which CBO counts at the government's cost. It's not cash that the individuals actually receive. You can't take $10,000 in "value" you're receiving under Medicaid (where "value" is the government's cost) and spend it on rent or groceries.
Even worse, they've done studies on Medicaid and it turns out that the value of the transfer is skewed because the average recipient would only spend 20–50 cents per dollar of program cost on healthcare if they didn't get the transfer and purchased healthcare themselves. So that means that if you receive $10,000 in Medicaid transfers (again the value based on the government's cost), you'd really only "feel" $2,000-$5,000 in benefit in terms of your actual wellbeing.
Bottom line: single people making $22,500 before tax ARE NOT getting $49,000 "AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS". Some families, retirees, people on disability are but the vast majority of those transfers are not cash-based, can't be spent freely, and their value is based on government cost, not the actual cost of what the recipient might spend without the transfer.
That’s not a decent quality of life. I know you may feel differently and find it hard to think about it objectively because you lived it, but you had a poor quality of life. It’s great that you’re doing well and you made it through, but don’t romanticize it.
Compared to 99.9% of people in history, it's a king's life, and even today $50k is a top decile income. Of course, the US is more expensive than most countries, so you can move it down a bit, but it's tough to argue that you're not in at least the top 25% of people living today at least.
As someone who grew up below the poverty line for much of my life — 2x the poverty line seemed like wealth to me. There are absolutely people getting by on “feels like” 50k a year.
There are not really frills, but in terms of “have shelter and food” it can work. Not everywhere is SF.
"Have shelter and food" is surviving. That's the point.
And speaking of food, the USDA says that over 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household in 2024. That's 1 in 7 people. In the world's richest country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity.
> 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household
This statistic looked suspect so I had to look it up. The study defined multiple levels of food insecurity. The big 47 million number included mostly households where eating patterns were not disrupted and people did not reduce their food intake.
So most “food insecure households” actually had enough food and maintained their normal eating patterns. That’s not what most people would think of from that statistic.
I do agree that we should continue working on food security for all, but if you think 1 in 7 people in the US are going hungry then you’re consuming some misleading statistics.
Food insecure is defined as "lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet".
In the wealthiest country in the world.
I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long because the idea that Americans would say "actually, it's not really that bad because they're technically not starving" shows just how far the country has fallen.
> Food insecure is defined as "lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet".
No it’s not. You’re not even reading the study you’re quoting. You’re just using your own beliefs off the top of your head.
That almost 50 million number was from an overly broad questionnaire that included answers about being “uncertain” about being able to acquire “nutritious” food, which was self-reported with little guidance. So anyone who, at any point, was uncertain about acquiring vaguely defined nutritious food would be counted, even if they actually acquired nutritious food for everyone the entire year.
Your misquoting of what I said is really annoying. I’m pointing out real problems with the study and you’re trying to act like I’m saying they’re not technically starving.
You have a very negative biased tone in your wording that makes it difficult to refute your claims.
Further, you keep shifting the goal posts on the discussion from
Living->Surviving->Food insecure (claiming not enough to eat)>"affordable nutritious"
Opinion: 50k/yr (outside urban areas) is enough for a family of 4 to have necessities and eat healthy, America is still the land of opportunity.
> I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long
If you're the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics and then cry about the fabrication's implications then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.
> Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
> ...the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics...
https://frac.org/news/usdafoodsecurityreportdec2025
"1 in 7 households (13.7 percent) in America experienced food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, in 2024."
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
"These households had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members."
"Lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet"..."access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life".
I'll let you digest that.
> ...then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.
That's such an American thing to say. Ha.
But yes, I'm doing fine without the US. And the US is clearly doing great without me. I do miss all the winning though.
The people in that statistic mostly don't want to shop for fresh vegetables at Whole Foods while you (as a demographic, not you personally) side eye them. They want to put some frozen nuggets in the oven because that's what's easy even if it's not optimally healthy.
No, I think the person you're responding to is just saying that they really just are not starving or having trouble getting access to food at all. It's difficult in the US to really not have access to nutritious food.
"It's difficult in the US to really not have access to nutritious food."
You mean it is easy to get access to nutritious food?
Doesn't the term "land of opportunity" imply to you that it's also the "land of risk"? That's certainly how I've always seen lands of opportunity - places where you can fight it out on you own and have a chance to succeed - or fail. Not a comfortable safe zone to relax in.
That's not what "land of opportunity" means in the US. It means upward social mobility, plentiful job opportunities across a wide range of inudstries, decent work for decent pay, ample rewards for hard work.
Socioeconomically, the post-WW2 era is widely considered America's peak. The strong economic growth was broadly shared and created the largest and most prosperous middle class in modern history.
During this time, a single breadwinner could buy a car, a house and support a family. This is the "land of opportunity" and "American Dream" people talk about today and politicians have been promising the return of for decades.
The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.
>The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.
I'd be interested to see the economic mobility stats for the gilded age. Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard and were flexible but there were also a ton less opportunities to just go through the motions and be materially well off.
> Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard...
The "vibe" you get? You were there?
I'd point out that during the Gilded Age, women were largely excluded from the work force, blacks were forced into sharecropping and tenant farming while under threat of racial violence including lynching, Chinese workers were forced into the most dangerous jobs and then punished for the privilege (see the California's Foreign Miners' Tax), and so on.
But I guess if you were a white Murican with ambition and a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed, it was a great time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.
A lot of smaller companies over-hire part-time labor to minimize cost of overtime, medical benefit support, and mandatory wage increases. In general, employee-at-will and dependent-contractor status is only popular in the USA, and often is outright illegal for good reason in most other countries.
Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
Or simply people who have 2 part-time jobs totally 40 hours.
I'm pretty confused here. The graph implies unemployment is among the lowest it's been in decades? Is that right?
Also where does the discrepancy come from? That's a huge difference (5x!) with the official stat!
Is this actually measuring "underemployment", i.e. people who wish they were working full time but are stuck with some bullshit jobs? (And by bullshit I don't mean what Graeber means, but "this pays like crap and melts my brain but I can't find anything better.")
> Is this actually measuring "underemployment"
Sort of. It's "all of the above". So basically low demand for labor.
* Looking for a job.
* People who don't work full time but want to.
* Poverty wages. (below $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes)
Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?
I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.
I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.
The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.
And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.
So what do people actually do?
[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.
I am so annoyed by that fact.
And this is why I'm irritated whenever a comment just thoughtlessly answer "Just raise your offer bro". There might be some transaction barriers that make paying a service no longer worth it, one of them is the amount of fraud like you mentioned, another is societal problem that reduces people's competency as a whole so competent people becomes too few to search.
Let's not forget that PE demands cheaper labor costs for higher returns.
I think people have mentioned this, but I haven't seen an answer: why not ask friends and neighbours? That's what I do, and I've had success with it (though I'm more frequently the person that neighbours and friends ask for professional contacts). When no one knows of anyone, you search and call people and evaluate/assess. It's not _easy_, but it doesn't seem like such a big problem.
Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
Well yes. I for one won't sign up for an odd one-off job for a stranger because it more often than not ends up in a quagmire of unfulfilled miscommunicated expectations. It's not fraud per se, it's just.. a wrong approach.
Join a community first, ask for help after that.
It feels we're saying the same thing. "Friends and neighbours" would qualify as a community, for me, at least.
Certainly.
Most of the time, I don't hire for one off little jobs proactively.
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
The short answer is probably to find people making online content about the thing you want done, and contacting them.
I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.
Personally though I live in a city where there are a few electronic repair shops, so I’d just take it there.
Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want.
I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.
FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way
Search optimisation is deterministic. The algorithms are quite sophisticated but even an older LLM can easily work around them right now. There will be some kind of AI arms race but I think the net effect of that will destroy search as a platform. What arises from the ashes? I can only speculate. Possibly distributed search. Possibly something like torrent swarms. uTorrent's distributed search has been available for decades and it's surprisingly resilient. Possibly something like I2P or Tor. Possibly AI agents creating amorphous and transient search tasks/communities. Even in these early days it's possible to cobble together hobby search engines using various sources for cheap/free.
I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.
Generative engine optimisation is a separate field. Websites that are SEO aren't necessarily GEO, they're having to be reoptimized for that. One strategy is to post fake conversations onto Reddit, where one bot how to do something, and another bot says the best way is with the product being optimised.
LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
> LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
I think this sounds much worse than it is. LLMs reason. They don't have an "opinion" about the truth. Meaning that the harness/prompt/tooling/data, determines the quality of the output. Using an LLM to navigate the truth is surprisingly effective right now with the right inputs and constraints.
For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
I think the thing is it’s no easier to hire someone to do a job you need done outside of work (at least the first time you need that job done) than it is to hire someone for a job at your workplace.
Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.
Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.
Competence is chain of trust. Chain of trust is adversarial to current market forces.
Maybe social forces as well. I don't have the same 'local trust networks' that my parents did for finding someone nearby to do something--probably because I spend most of my time online. And I had more confidence in what I found in the paper Yellow Pages that got delivered to my door than I do in what is presented in an online search, say, for local contractors.
A chain of trust - aka a local village, is not always just the historic medieval village. Often it is just a experience value: I know that guy, i trust his/her judgement when it comes to "topic". So when s/he recommends me a plumber, i know i can trust that guy..
So a chain of trust naturally accumulates over a lifespan- and by the time you will be as old as your dad was at point of reference, you actually would have a chain. Depending of course on the quality of acquaintances. As kid, all you have is your parents and relatives. Some with wild swings. We all had that story telling grandpa whose tall tales we proudly propagated.
Sorry, local village- what was i thinking. Its a chain of entitys (mostly persons) who using there expertise, chain other entities to the chain and thus extend thrust to that entity. A village can hold many chains, but the trust regarding a topic, may only be given to certain parts of those chain networks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
Related issue
Not really because it works if candidates are trustworthy and you can evaluate the candidate without "hidden issues".
Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.
The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.
Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
For real. I'd pay good money for a concierge service to find me the right person.
had any luck with college students? That's where i would start. interviewing is time consuming tho.
That's a very complex result of the collapsing employment and skills market in the US of late, as viewed in miniature. My own situation being not much different, without the 'disposable income' factor. I was starting at a position with the potential to establish an investments portfolio layer for myself right when 2020 hit and hollowed out the global travel component that was the core of the new job. Being in that 'red flag' age has kept my household running on fumes ever since. But that's not an answer to the point.
I think for specific specialty work the focus might need to shift to a 'craftsmanship' approach, finding someone who doesn't actually advertise or propose to perform the work for hire, but who is similarly semi to fully retired and does the tasks you are needing as a hobby or one project at a time casual contractor.
There's not likely to be a shop 'fixing gadgets' in the retail mall anymore that has the actual skills necessary to satisfy your requirements, nor is there likely to be a 'mail us a gadget' and we'll fix it service that you can count on. But for the case of some gadgets, there might be a STEM club or class at one of your local schools with an instructor who is: 1 underpaid and underappreciated, 2 more likely to have some individual competency with a soldering iron AND flashing firmware, 3 in a proven position of trustworthiness having the public facing position of a classroom instructor ~ less likely to just rip you off and disappear.
Once upon a time I was a local PC repair store - there was me, a returns clerk and a series of part-time student interns - for about half of the Big Island, Hawai'i. I fielded gadget repair for a great number of strange things from digital projectors to hydrophones. The most satisfying of which was when a customer who was a retired biochemistry researcher asked me: "You don't happen to know how to repair the control circuitry for an electric kiln?" and my immediate response was, "If it's a Kress then sure." The look on her face, the smile as she practically hopped because it was a Kress was just a real kick. I guess the point im getting at is somehow find a way to make connections with people who are skilled in a variety of related and unrelated fields, and then ask what they can do that no-one might guess that they know. I have traded PC and other gadget repair for training towards a Coast Guard certification, for a sizeable amount of raw honey and later for beehive nucleus, and for a coolers full of fresh caught icy tuna. Sometimes the best work you might ever get could come in a trade for something that's more important and less impersonal than plain old cash.
As for how to find both ethical and effective niche skilled services in the continental US, today? Wow. I don't think that is in plentiful supply anymore.
> So what do people actually do?
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
I had a female friend who moved to San Francisco and lived alone without a vehicle. So if she needed some handyman work, she would summon a Taskrabbit from the app. I found Thumbtack to be a decent equivalent of this, and I tried it once.
All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.
So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.
Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.
So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.
My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.
You're quite literally asking a billion dollar question. And a deeply-rooted reason on why the larger job market was so easy to break. Feed into that distrust, and no one gets hired, at all. Though the difference is that a reasonable company can bear a bad hire for a few months (or years) and not be in the red. You probably cannot.
So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.
After that:
- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).
- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).
- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).
- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).
None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
In context of your problem there are three groups of people:
1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.
2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.
3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.
2 and 3 are the same in my own lived experience.
If you can/want to do a lot of things, you have a lot of projects going on at any time. Those that can’t do any, won’t have any either.
Isn’t the hard drive of the average software engineer full of half finished projects?
1.5, not enough skill for 2 or 3 and not enough money for 1 so they own nothing and convince themselves to like it.
2.5, somewhere between 2 and 3.
Similar statistics for Australia: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemploy...
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Thanks, this is interesting.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
> We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all
Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.
> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
To your point, the argument about the 20% Gas Export tax has been interesting. Fossil fuel lobbyists employed by foreign companies clearly and openly buying politicians to try and fend it off, when it's obviously in Australia's interests to implement it.
Looking at the "True Rate" vs "Headline Rate" graph.... The "Headline Rate" seems to be a good proxy for the "True Rate".
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
an unemployment rate of about 3-4% is considered "full employment" aka "we're good".
If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
A huge demonstration of why we need to move from a 5 day working week.
Some of the gains that have gone to the top need to be paid to spread the work over more people, a 4 day week would be a start.
In basic economic theory, high wages mean that there's insufficient supply. So I wonder why don't the "truly unemployed" people learn whatever the market rewards and compete with the highly paid workers.
If it is because they can't for whatever reason, 4 day working week doesn't solve anything.
(Genuine question, I'm not making some kind of a right-wing point.)
Because learning involves being effectively unemployed for multiple years, and is only available to those who did well in school. Then, on the other side, you're still not guaranteed a job. Add to all of that the fact that you'll probably have to move and effectively restart your life elsewhere.
My fiancée is currently in the middle of this. I don't know if she would've been able to go through it alone.
Yeah, makes sense that this would be part of the reason. But the question is whether a 4 day week is the right solution.
People could use the fifth day to go to school.
Yeah go ask a homeless person why don’t they become a hedge fund manager or neurosurgeon. Are they stupid?
A homeless person usually isn't able to learn what is needed to become a neurosurgeon. So the issue isn't that we don't have enough highly paid jobs - it's that we don't have enough people able to do those jobs. Which makes sense, if everybody could easily become a neurosurgeon, it wouldn't be a highly paid job.
> True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
I find it odd to use both an hourly specification (>35+ hours) and a minimum $ amount. What about those who are following Tim Ferris dream and are pulling in $100Ks in a 5-hour week?
This is just unfortunate ambiguous phrasing -- Tim Ferris (and anybody else happy on part time hours rather than taking a part time job because they can't find a full time job) doesn't get counted because they don't match the "and wants one" qualifier.
The white paper states the definition more precisely:
"LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually."
> the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
Always feels like the official numbers miss all the folks piecing together contract work just to get by. U6 is better, but still feels low.
While I struggle to see the value here, I dont trust the official numbers and applaud their efforts to come up with alternatives.
However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.
Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
> the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job ...
What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
It is typically who is able to be part of the labour force.
remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable.
So it is an age group, with caveats.
You have to be looking for a job or employed to be part of the labor force count. Stay at home moms arent in the labor force, neither are students that dont want to work.
I agree moms who would not be able to work while raising babies/toddlers, or simply prefer not to, shouldn't count as members of the labor force.
However. It is very difficult to determine what makes a mom employed vs not employed. Is that by choice/preference? or lack of opportunity. Or lack of qualification, or a combination. Coming up with statistics that distinguish the two is nearly impossible.
The official rate does not only exclude moms who happen to be jobless. It excludes anyone hasn't been actively looking any more.
I see some odd effects. I wonder how these would be explained?
According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.
When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.
By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.
Just a guess but gig work might be picking up some of that slack?
State level minimum wages were much less common in 1995, so it was easier for workers to be below their poverty threshold. Even though the federal wage got stuck, in many states today, the minimum wage is high enough that it's not possible for a full time worker to make less than $26,000 in a year.
for me the most interesting aspect is that a bachelor degree makes you have a double chance of being employed vs having a high school/college degree and again double the chance vs having no high school degree.
also it's interesting that these institutes still dont know how to do well understandable and intuitively readable graphs by not starting at a real reference point all thew time (not starting at 0, but sometimes at 20)!
Yes, and that’s one of the things on this subject that has made me generally concerned about circulated social media opinions touting how college “isn’t worth it anymore,” not to mention right-wing education demonization.
In reality, university education is still the best thing you can do for your lifetime earnings, even if you accumulate 6 figures of debt. You have to pick a horrendous major to make it a net negative (and even if you do that, you can probably just pivot to a job that is fine with “any bachelors degree.”
It’s interesting how positive these graphs seem to be. The gender and race gaps in unemployment are narrowing. The overall underemployment/functional unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 1995.
Maybe it’s a reminder not to listen to a small handful of loud voices (or maybe even voices of psyop campaigns) trying to tell you that the economy is terrible and that a massive recession is imminent. Sure, there are some products that are getting more expensive. That’s life. Get your raise. Stop doomscrolling.
On that note, university education hasn’t gotten more expensive in a couple of decades, as universities are desperate to maintain enrollment figures.
Time series also show a slanted worldview that real unemployment was worse in 90s. Have they not adjusted for dollar inflation? 1999 is really suspicious: Normally at 30-40% unemployment you fear for public unrest and uprising, did I miss an important piece of world history there?
I am a software engineer and lost my job a week ago.
but are you a good software engineer?
Probably is. Unless you're the top 20% you're probably on the chopping block via RNG and sometimes just whole departments are getting sacked for 'automations'.
Know a few folks still looking for months after layoffs. The official numbers definitely feel rosier than the ground truth.
How do they get data on people who work part time but want a full time job, and how do they calculate a living wage?
Next add in under employment to get a good picture of the state of the US.
Something looks fishy when it’s just the other graph +20.
168M employees / 340M people in the US.
Means 51% unemployed people.
Raw figures
> Raw figures
sure, for an upper bound.
how many of those 340M people are actually employable? how many are children? how many are retired? permanently unable to work?
subtract those out, it’s a better upper bound but still a swag
then add in all the self-employed, your swag is a little better, still a swag
your throwaway name is apt and funny
That’s the point of raw figures.
You are asking for not raw figures.
But if you do the math and subtract out another 75-100M it’s still very bad
Only if you count my eight year old as “unemployed.”
> But if you do the math and subtract out another 75-100M it’s still very bad
Did you skip this part, jackass?
Yes you did. Whether intentional or not, you are literally ignorant.
I hope you don’t have an eight year old, and never plan to reproduce.
> Means 51% unemployed people.
I replied to what I replied to. You made a statement. Your statement is only true if my eight year old counts as unemployed. Where's the problem?
This definition sounds like U-6 unemployment (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE) with an additional term for people making below a living wage. That's better constructed than most of these "real stats" I see, so I hate to be too critical. But they don't really engage with the important question of whether this metric is sufficiently robust for policymakers to use. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be quite a bit more volatile than the headline rate; if the Fed tried to target it, for example, would they end up doing a bunch of unnecessary rate cuts to stave off unemployment spikes that aren't real?
I am curious as to why the TRU is not adopted as a standard metric.
1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it.
2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase).
3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality.
It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie. If you apply their stat methodologies to other G-7, you get similar results.
The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.
There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides.
"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
I'm asking how come is that not a revelation, your answer is primarily that it's fallacious numbers for the headline.
You may be right, but reality is the majority of people take the official unemployment rate without even understanding what qualifies as unemployed.
Even commenters on hackernews, that I would say are far from being the least educated in the U.S are asking, despite the article explaining it, what counts as unemployed.
The article is educational, and revealing. What we make of it is up to us, if you deem the less than 10% employment rate more accurate, you are free to believe that. Even when it defies the common sense of many.
It’s not revealing at all because unemployment numbers are directional and only useful in terms of comparison to prior years. The actual headline number is arbitrary and pretty much any metric you want to track already exists but is less popular. The only thing that matters is the methodology stays the same over the long term.
It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.
Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.
For comparative tracking we do need to stick to the same criteria, I'm with you.
I also agree some political factions, in particular those not in control, favour higher numbers. Those in place would rather minimise it.
The stance to use criteria that exclude people who would gladly work, if decent opportunities were available to them, to me is dishonest.
I don't know if the numbers this article proposes, based on a very inclusive criteria is more honest, but at least it tells us what the ratio looks like if we included more segments. Nobody would argue against the fact a good part is effectively not working, thus technically "unemployed".
> If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.
Just because the economic system we have has always been shitty for a high percentage of our neighbors doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Other top economic countries being similar doesn’t excuse it.
If you do this with PPP with every other country on earth, which ones look the best?
> Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
The fact that "does not have a full-time job" is accompanied by "but wants one", but "has no job" isn't shows how unserious this statistic is.
So my 90 years old retired grandma is functionally unemployed? Same for my multimillionaire retired 50 years old uncle? Nonsense.
This stuff drives me nuts. Everybody’s like “omg did you know that the unemployment rate doesn’t count people who stopped looking for work?!” Yes, I did know that, from the ten thousand times people said the same thing before you did. I also know it because I can read and BLS is completely up front about how their numbers are calculated. There isn’t even a single official rate. They put out six different numbers that mean different things.
I totally get it if people decide that one of those six numbers are the measure they want, and come up with something they think is better. But why does it always have to be framed as, they’re lying to you? Can you not advocate for your technique without turning it into another stupid conspiracy theory?
Every time one of these unemployment posts comes up a bunch of rich spoiled kids in comments desperately try to convince everyone the economy is flawless.
I can’t wait to see these dorks thrown out of their homes. It’ll happen