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Employment stats are very misleading. There are lots of people with full time jobs who can't even afford housing. Sure they have jobs, but they are still in a really bad situation.

neom 2924 days ago

That's an excellent point and one people should consider deeply, unemployment in the US is generally measured by % of population claiming unemployment benefits. It says nothing about people moving to retirement benefits, disability benefits, becoming opioid dependent and being hospitalized or jailed, or getting a job that is effectively continuing the cycle of holding them in very near destitution. Folks are right when they say automation isn't really the major problem. It is indeed just the icing on the cake.

ethn 2923 days ago

It's never been measured like this anywhere, ever. Don't make things up, especially some intuition that purposely makes another party seem foolish when it is actually quite the opposite. Even people who declare themselves as "job-seeking" are considered in the unemployment rate[1]. ------- 1. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

"Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact the 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about the labor force activities (jobholding and job seeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the survey reference week (usually the week that includes the 12th of the month). These are live interviews conducted either in person or over the phone. "

isoskeles 2923 days ago

Don’t “make things up” (omit important information) the other way either. People give up (lose hope) seeking a job and can end up not “unemployed” but jobless. They’re at least caught in the labor force participation rate, but grouped in with retirees and children and other people who don’t conceivably need jobs.

ethn 2923 days ago

In the USA, unemployed and abled are forced to be "job seeking" whether they give up hope or not to continue receiving benefits.

neom 2923 days ago

You're right, this report serves as an input to the total calculation.: https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf - and my point should simply have been made made directly about this input (original thoughts around this data point remain) and not the calculation as a whole. My bad.

ericd 2924 days ago

It's still relevant, though, as a rough measure of employee leverage vs employer leverage. Periods with low unemployment tend to see rising wages and benefits, high unemployment, stagnant or lowering.

TeMPOraL 2923 days ago

Isn't Labour Force Participation Rate a better indicator? Plenty of people opt-out of the job market by going on e.g. disability benefits, getting financial support from family and/or working extra "on the black" (without any trace for tax authorities).

isoskeles 2923 days ago

It provides no more accurate of a view IMO, as it lumps together both groups of (a) people who don’t have jobs and need them and (b) people who don’t have jobs and don’t need them. I prefer looking at that figure more than “unemployment” rate, but it overcorrects on the pessimistic side. Maybe that’s why some of us like it.

ericd 2923 days ago

Of employee leverage (and hence wage growth)? I don't think so, because those employees who opt out aren't competing for jobs with those other employees. I'm not an economist, though.

It might be a better indicator of "how well is the economy serving the needs of the people", depending on what you value.

asfasgasg 2924 days ago

I am not commenting on the well-being of people working in fast food. Just on the availability of work. Whether such individuals can afford housing is totally beside the point of my comment.

ende 2923 days ago

Unemployment numbers also aren’t low because the economy is producing tons of new jobs; notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets? It’s the labor participation rate. People are only counted towards unemployment stats while they are actively seeking employment; after awhile they give up and drop out of the labor force completely.

Of course much of that drop is also demographics; the baby boomers are starting to retire en masse.

Still, the illusion of job abundance does not hold.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000

adventured 2923 days ago

> Unemployment numbers also aren’t low because the economy is producing tons of new jobs

In fact the unemployment rate is low because the economy has produced an extraordinarily vast number of jobs. In May alone the US economy nearly produced a million new full-time jobs (solidly contracting the part-time count). The full-time job count is at an all-time record high. The US economy has produced 14 million full-time jobs in just the last six years. [1] And the median full-time income in the US is about $50,000, among the highest on earth.

> notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets?

The US homeless rate per capita has plunged dramatically and is at an all-time record low. [2] You're entirely fabricating your claims, both about jobs and homelessness.

The total homeless count has declined by roughly 27% in just 13 years. From ~760,000 in 2005, to less than 550,000 for 2018. The US added about 10% to its population over that time simultaneously.

How is that possible? Everyone knows the US sucks and has no safety net or support systems. Except, that's a lie. The US welfare state is now more generous than either the Canadian or Australian welfare states. [3]

[2] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-s...

woolvalley 2923 days ago

He may live in the bay area, where homeless has definitely increased, and the dynamic of jobs not paying enough to make rent is a real dynamic.

omon 2923 days ago

Don't bother, for some, no matter what is true they'd prefer to live with some adverse abstraction to overcome; it provides unity, purpose, and a sense of importance.

epalmer 2923 days ago

I'm a boomer at 64 and will work at least 3 more years. I have friends my age that are retiring and ones that are working. I don't even know what "retire en masse" means.

And I'm highlighting how that type of argument contributes to the misunderstanding that job availability and high employment rates are a good thing just by themselves. What good is for people to dedicate their lives to shitty jobs (which are the only ones they can get), just so they can scrape by and live on the streets?

albertgoeswoof 2923 days ago

The answer to that’s isn’t more shitty jobs though. It’s adjustments to our system of capital distribution and ultimately what the minimum standards of living we are prepared to accept is as a society.

ta1234567890 2923 days ago

You are right about shitty jobs not being the solution.

About the last part of your statement though: society has already implicitly accepted the crappy minimum living standards (at least in the US) that it's willing to accept. That doesn't make it right for the people stuck having to live according to that minimum.

firstplacelast 2923 days ago

If you're giving the majority of your time (that you are awake) to someone else and can't afford housing you're not "working", you're being enslaved.

Like c'mon. Working for less than a livable wage is just called making America worse. It would be much more productive to kill yourself and reduce the leverage employers have over the proletariat.

baddox 2924 days ago

I doubt a burger robot is replacing very many jobs that pay much above minimum wage.

Angostura 2923 days ago

.... those jobs may not seem very valuable to you, but they are valuable to the people doing them, and possibly more broadly, to society.

Amygaz 2924 days ago

Hey! Sometime I think about taking a 6 months leave to go flip burgers a the local gourmet burger place. Blacksmithing would be a close second. As for peat I wouldn't do it, because I do not see the point. Peats are very important ecosystems that we're wasting. Golf-quality front-yard aren't useful or important. And people should compost.

asfasgasg 2924 days ago

That is a very privileged point of view. You want to think the grass is at least more interesting on the other side, but I've done a stint in fast food. It is hard, smelly, nasty, poorly compensated labor. It is not at all like home cooking, which I love. I've never worked harder than the summer I did at Wendy's in high school, and I've never been paid less.

As for blacksmithing, yeah, the artisanship side of that would be cool. However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If that seems like fun to you, well, you still probably couldn't get that work, because there's just not very much demand for blacksmiths these days. :)

toomanybeersies 2924 days ago

They are more likely to spend 6 months shovelling coal into a fire and sweeping the floor at a blacksmiths.

Blacksmiths don't make horseshoes either, that's a farrier's job (who still buy them off the shelf and finish them by hand). Being a farrier is also not an easy job, take a 3 or 4 apprenticeship to become one. There seems to be this viewpoint I see a lot on Hacker News that blue collar jobs are unskilled jobs. Most skilled trades require a 3 or 4 year apprenticeship, you can't just learn how to be a fitter and turner, or a carpenter, or a blacksmith/farrier in a couple of weekends. It's this kind of arrogant attitude that causes the tradies to have no respect for the book-learned engineers straight out of university that think because they have a degree they know how to build a road.

jimmywanger 2924 days ago

> That is a very privileged point of view. What's privileged about it? He said he wanted to do something different, and these were things that interested him.

> ...I've done a stint in fast food. He specifically mentioned a gourmet burger place.

> However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If you're doing blacksmithing for a living, most likely you're a farrier. Demand for custom ironwork is very low.

HeyLaughingBoy 2923 days ago

Oddly enough...

The only farrier I know isn't a blacksmith. Actually I don't remember what her full time job is.

And the only person I've ever known who did custom ironwork was a software tester.

Go figure!

toomanybeersies 2924 days ago

> Sometime I think about taking a 6 months leave to go flip burgers a the local gourmet burger place

If working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sounds like fun to you, then I'd totally recommend it.

You'd probably spend most of your day cutting potatoes and washing dishes though, rather than actually cooking burgers. And even if you did get to cooking, you'd be making the same half a dozen menu items day in, day out. You won't have any creative control, you're a production line worker.

dragonwriter 2923 days ago

> burger flipping is just about the least desirable type of work available.

It's not even close, which is why it is easy to keep burger flipping jobs find without high wages even when unemployment is relatively low.

> This has been said countless times, but it's worth noting that although there are very few blacksmiths or peat cutters today, somehow we are still pretty close to full employment.

Because “full employment” is a decreasing-over-time share of the population that is actually working (and an even smaller decreasing share actually self-sufficient from work, as a large portion of the working population is dependent on public aid.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a problem that people point to “near full employment” with advancing automation as an excuse to argue against the continued advance of social support structures necessary to make the declining share of the population working (and also the declining share self-sufficient from work) both nearly “full employment” and anywhere close to tolerate conditions.

wavefunction 2924 days ago

>full employment

We have folks living in tent cities.

12.8% is "on disability"

Yeah we're at full employment as long as you consider U6 rather than the old standard of U5.

verylittlemeat 2924 days ago

How many of those people in tent cities would even take a job if you offered them one? How many are drug addicted or mentally ill to the point of being unemployable?

Society shouldn't pretend these people don't exist but they're rightfully a different class of unemployed.

A lot of those people are actually employed but can't afford housing. This is a problem with no good solution in sight so far and it's going to get exacerbated with job automation.

briandear 2924 days ago

Were we not making these same vapid arguments in the 1800s regarding automation and machines? The Luddites were an entire movement opposed to machines for exactly the same reasons, yet living standards are vastly higher than in those times — even the poor have air conditioners, TV and refrigerators. If we would have listened to the Luddites, we’d still be riding horses and using outhouses with a life expectancy of 45.

Sure, maybe 200 years from now everyone in the world "on average" might be doing better. That still doesn't mean people whose jobs get automated today wont suffer, or that the Luddites didn't suffer when their jobs got taken away back in the day.

In any case, very few technologies (relative to everything that's created) actually make living standards better, mostly just things in healthcare. Almost everything else is pretty much a rats race fueled by business and profit, not by intentions of improving people's lives.

Seems like this comment struck a cord.

To make it a bit clearer...

Currently, humanity as a whole has the resources (materials, technology, etc), to provide good housing, education, food and healthcare for everyone on this planet. However, everyday we choose not to do that and do whatever else it is we do instead.

This is just an observation, not a moral judgement on anyone in particular. By the way, I'm personally not doing anything to change the current state of affairs, so I can't really point any fingers.

Hopefully the situation will change at some point.

jaggederest 2924 days ago

Those folks don't deserve to have meaningful work, if they want it?

Which percentage of society should be permanently alienated from ownership and engagement, and who decides?

throwawayjava 2924 days ago

I think the point was that people who currently choose not to work are not harmed by automation of low-barrier-to-entry jobs that they are already choosing not to take.

And it's a valid point! If people really are choosing not to take jobs that are readily available, then automating those jobs is a net benefit.

Now, we should not ignore the fact that this is stated as a hypothetical! Are there a mass of unemployed who are choosing not to work? And would all of the people who lose their jobs due to burger flipping automation be able to find new jobs or be happy with no job?

Those seem like the more relevant questions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/business/economy/social-s...

adventured 2924 days ago

Fortunately, disability applications are declining soundly.

June, 2018: "Disability Applications Plunge as the Economy Strengthens"

"The number of Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits is plunging, a startling reversal of a decades-old trend that threatened the program’s solvency. It is the latest evidence of a stronger economy pulling people back into the job market or preventing workers from being sidelined in the first place."

>Yeah we're at full employment as long as you consider U6 rather than the old standard of U5.

U5 is at 4.6%... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

It is also, by definition, lower than U6.

asfasgasg 2924 days ago

Anyone with a pulse can have a job flipping burgers TODAY if they want it. Same with various other categories of work (farm labor, etc.). The folks living in tent cities who are not flipping burgers are choosing not to do that work. A reasonable choice, I'd say, depending on your circumstances, but it's a choice.

i_made_a_booboo 2923 days ago

I remember thinking this until McDonald's turned me down for a job. True story.

ranci 2924 days ago

More than 37% of the country does not have a job according to labor participation rate. The unemployment rate has been massaged and manipulated to the point where you need to stop citing it as a serious measurement of anything other than the scope to which otherwise intelligent people can be deluded.

[0] https://twitter.com/stevekingia/status/967477703011119104

You're spouting a conspiracy theory. U6 unemployment is at historic lows and has at no point diverged from the trend in U3.

Unless you plan on conscripting children, students, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, and the elderly into jobs (like Steve King[0]), we're at the long run full employment rate.

odbol 2923 days ago

The problem is underemployment, not unemployment. People work but can't get enough money from their work—even when they are working 2-3 jobs to try to support their family.

ranci 2924 days ago

What I said is backed up by facts. How is it a conspiracy? The labor participation rate is 62.x. That means that 37% of the US is not employed. Fact, not a conspiracy.

The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number. Again, fact, not a conspiracy.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

rndmize 2924 days ago

Your statement is worthless without context. The US has never had more than a 68% labor participation rate. To say that 37% of the US is unemployed, without qualifying that that percentage includes anyone over 16 (students, retirees, stay at home parents - in short massive numbers of people that are not seeking work) is to be deceptive.

A reasonable statement would note that the labor participation rate was at about 59% from 1950 to 1965, rose over several decades and peaked around 67% in the 90s as women entered the workforce in droves, fell 1% in the 00s and 3% following the recession. It would further be worth noting that the recent fall could be a result of a variety of factors - poor wage growth (might change the calculus of stay-at-home parenting), increasing numbers of young men that prefer to live with their parents and absorb themselves in entertainment rather than "getting ahead" (possibly also affected by the prior wage issue), or baby boomers retiring in increasing numbers, causing a bump in people moving out of the work force.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

>How is it a conspiracy?

>The unemployment rate has been massaged and manipulated to the point where you need to stop citing it as a serious measurement of anything other than the scope to which otherwise intelligent people can be deluded.

>The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number.

Uh huh.

In any case, you might want to take a look at the 25-54 LFP. It currently sits at 82%, the same as the rate during the 2000s and two points shy of the all-time high during the height of the dot-com bubble. Prior to 1986 it had never reached this level.

ranci 2924 days ago

"Uh huh"? It would be a conspiracy to say that the unemployment rate does not have basically arbitrary rules built into it to discount people who are actually looking for work.

Which "people who are actually looking for work" are not included in U6 unemployment?

hueving 2924 days ago

Elderly people are included in the ~35% you are talking about and most are not "actually looking for work".

dragonwriter 2924 days ago

There are a variety of alternative unemployment measures besides the headline rate and the are uses for which way of them is more appropriate than the headline rate, but using the LFPP as if it were (1 - unemployment) is silly, unless your ideal is that everyone should be working at wage labor from 16 to death.