[anoncoward111]

I appreciate your statistics but I'm not quite sure how they are related to our discussion.

Most of the kids in NY state are living under the care and support of their parents and aren't working, therefore they shouldn't even be a factor in population/labor force participation metric.

Additionally, many of the old people who aren't working shouldn't be factored in either because they are receiving quite high pensions to live from, as well as social security.

When you factor this in, my initial ratios still stand. Out of the 325m people living in the USA, 45% are working (145m). When subtracting the 30% of Americans who are retired or under the care of parents, you are removing 100m people.

Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65% (145m/225m).

Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast. The other 25m either used to be laborers or are protected financially by laborers.

We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend where cost of living is cheap and wages are still high.

This denies the existence of an extremely large block of humans, who are struggling despite earning decent money.

[bzbarsky]

The original context, as far as I can tell, was "what fraction of workers live in the high-cost metro areas?", right?

We're trying to estimate this in all sorts of indirect ways, when the real questions, which I am sure we should be able to find answers for, are:

1) How many workers are there total?

2) How many workers are there in high-cost metro areas?

What we can't easily do is derive the answer for #2 from the total population of said metro areas; it's heavily dependent on the age structure of said metro areas and the specific workforce participation rates for those areas by age.

> Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65%

On average across the US, plausible.

> Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast

Yes, but even in the northeast not everything is in an expensive metro area, fwiw.

> We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend

On its own, sure. But there are a lot more areas like that (by count; how the population totals look is not obvious to me) than there are big expensive metro areas.

That is, you might be right in your original claim that "half the country" are in the high-cost situation, but your data is not showing that very conclusively.

That said, I would be shocked if less than 1/4 of the country is in that situation. And yes, we should be aware that these tens of millions of people exist and of their situation.

[anoncoward111]

Thank you so much for your well-reasoned response :) I think we've found middle-ground in trying to estimate these numbers too.

It sounds like we could ball-park the number at 33% of Americans being in high cost of living areas.

Additionally, it sounds like we agree that that percentage might change based on if you're looking at urban, suburban, or rural areas, and if you are factoring in dependents or retirees.

I think the question we ask from here is, "how do we increase the number of people who are able to have a large chunk of discretionary income coming in?"

For this the answer is probably political, contentious, and complex. Not everyone can be a programmer, as there's only 4 million computer professionals in the US right now. Not everyone can be a licensed employee either, who tend to make more money (health care, law), because labor supply is strictly regulated for these professions.

I think if we were to somehow reduce rent-seeking behavior in the economy (real estate and health insurance prices are pretty good indicators of state-enforced supply restrictions), then prices and salaries would begin to approach the mean again, which is around 50k per person.

I guess what I'm saying here is I think the roofer who makes 37k a year in Newark NJ is being underpaid, and the physician's assistant who makes 100k a year in Scottsdale AZ is being overpaid. I would wager their labor is of equal value, but is being artificially disrupted.