
German Unemployment Declines as Economy Poised for More Growth - denzil_correa
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-31/german-unemployment-declines-as-economy-poised-for-more-growth
======
igl
Lies. Merkels government just changed how the number is calculated. They
created programs for unemployed (1 euro jobber, "Aufstocker") and removed them
from the statistic.

They still receive social support but are not "fully unemployed"

[http://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/arbeitslose-
statistik-100.htm...](http://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/arbeitslose-
statistik-100.html) (german)

The growing income inequality tells the real story.

~~~
waibelp
Long Story short translated:

1) Some people work to get paid lese than others that dont work

2) Those people need to go get help in form of money: Aufstocker

3) A lot of them need to get their food from Caritas and other organizations
like "die Tafel" because they dont have enough money to buy food

Yes, Germany is a wealthy country but most of its citizens are poor.

~~~
denzil_correa
> Yes, Germany is a wealthy country but most of its citizens are poor.

What do you mean by "most of the citizens" are poor? I can understand if you
say that Germany income gap is increasing but I can't understand this part.

~~~
kjdal2001
I think he is paraphrasing a quote from Kurt Vonnegut.

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor..."

[http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158414-america-is-the-
wealth...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158414-america-is-the-wealthiest-
nation-on-earth-but-its-people)

------
wand3r
Interested to hear anecdotal evidence from locals. On one hand there is a
large influx of immigration and "unemployment" is a dubiously defined thing.
On the other, widespread education and a diversified economy seem to signal
strong growth.

Contrast this with America's strong numbers which for me are anecdotally
bullshit. Under employment, people dropping out of the workforce who otherwise
wouldn't and stagnant wages in most industries

~~~
eleitl
They added over a million of migrants in a single year, almost none of them
are employed and are even long-term unemployable. Meanwhile, the official
unemployment figures have gone down.

If you apply the same unemployment metrics as Austria, Germany has pretty much
exactly the same unemployment rate as Austria.

~~~
davrosthedalek
Most of the migrants are not allowed to work, so calling them "not employed"
is misleading. They might want to work, and they might have work, but they
simply aren't allowed to.

~~~
zo1
Then what is the point of keeping them in the country? And why not take the
rest of the third-world? They're either official refugees and get asylum which
allows them to work, or they're illegal immigrants that aren't officially
allowed to work. And let's be honest, they're not really refugees, and they're
not really the neediest individuals in this world.

Give me a 1-million-person quota to import into Germany, and I guarantee you I
will help the _neediest_ in this horrible world. Starving, emaciated children,
elderly and abused minorities around the world. I would certainly _not_ import
what Germany seems to have imported en-masse the last few years. I.e. import
fit, working-age men from an incompatible culture, that don't know the
language, and are able to cross an entire continent on foot.

------
glasz
perspective: the richest 1% of germany owns 31% of all the country's wealth.
36 german billionairs own as much as half the other population.

source: [https://www.oxfam.de/ueber-
uns/aktuelles/2017-01-16-8-maenne...](https://www.oxfam.de/ueber-
uns/aktuelles/2017-01-16-8-maenner-besitzen-so-viel-aermere-haelfte-
weltbevoelkerung)

so, economy might be growing but who is to gain? either way you calculate,
certainly not the common men. which, for me, renders these statistics moot.

~~~
davrosthedalek
I never followed that logic. I'm not poor because the guy next to me has more.
If you want to look how poor or not poor the other 99% are, you should look at
those 99%, and what standard of living they can afford.

------
ryanmarsh
It's very difficult to believe these (and American) unemployment numbers for
various reasons.

At what point do legitimate gov't studies begin to suffer a loss of
credibility similar to the "fake news" epidemic?

~~~
maxerickson
Over here in run down small town America the low unemployment figures are
pretty easy to believe.

The local Walmart had to stop drug testing in order to find enough people to
hire and they are still miserably short staffed.

They might not be the "all the able bodied young people not working" numbers
you want them to be, but they say something about the state of the labor pool.

~~~
T-hawk
What it says is that Walmart's wages aren't high enough.

A so-called labor shortage is really just a failure of the employer to
recognize the market-clearing price for labor. Demand exceeding supply means
that the price should rise. If Walmart were to pay $20/hour, I bet they'd have
no problem finding as many workers as they need.

~~~
maxerickson
Sure, but needing to increase wages to hire is something you'd expect in a
"tight" labor environment, the environment pointed to by employment
statistics.

That the statistics don't measure other economic factors seems to be
incredibly frustrating to some people that are convinced that labor statistics
should measure things other than labor though.

