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by downrightmike
258 days ago
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Basically, with all the job cuts in the last few years, there hasn't been as much unemployment. We are currently heading to the point where even small job cuts have a much larger impact on unemployment. We saw similar during the great depression, in that people couldn't find full time work, so they did gig jobs, quickly undercutting other laborers until wages cratered and it was a full blown depression. I suspect that gig work, even 1 hour/week is enough to get you out of the unemployed group, but it isn't sufficient and is masking the true labor market and unemployment. And then there is the Federal government firing the statisticians because the numbers coming out don't look good and now we can't trust the numbers. At this point any number you must assume to be majorly inflated from reality. Those made up numbers aren't even good. |
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What are you talking about? Unemployment numbers have been gamed for years. Those job cuts from years ago didn't reflect in unemployment because the stats are fake.
>We saw similar during the great depression, in that people couldn't find full time work, so they did gig jobs, quickly undercutting other laborers until wages cratered and it was a full blown depression.
That is the wrong way to look at it. The depression did not result from low wages. Low wages were downstream of other calamities in the economy back then, chiefly a credit bubble and stock market bubble bursting as well as drought conditions and crop failures. Remember the Dust Bowl?
When the economy is suffering, money is (and should be) in short supply. There were naive efforts from the US government to try to set wages high. They even tried destroying food to drive prices up, until the many hungry people in the country became outraged about it. In the end they decided to debase the currency, thus stealing from everyone who had anything under the pretense of solving a problem. They made the problems worse, and probably prolonged the economic misery by years.