
Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay - weare138
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/01/08/low-unemployment-isnt-worth-much-if-the-jobs-barely-pay/
======
contingencies
_We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian
theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of
inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about
whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told
them they had to earn a living._ \- Buckminster Fuller

 _One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of
supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in
recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage._ \- Buckminster Fuller

... via
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

~~~
hacknat
Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably,
we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society
(caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the
dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately
inconvenienced, but little else).

Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to
work. Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and
technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week
and a strong affinity for story telling and art.

Honestly, if you followed evolutionary biology we all should be working quite
a bit less and producing way more art. The idea that people will fall into
dissipation without work is supported by very little science, and certainly no
biological science.

Human beings need missions, not labor, to be fulfilled. The market economy
seems capable of only supporting a very narrow slice of mission oriented work,
the rest does seem like drudgery to me.

~~~
carlmr
>if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but
little else

If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day,
or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be
low, but the cost altogether will be high.

This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs
are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is
visible.

~~~
hacknat
Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers
or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but
losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.

~~~
Double_Cast
Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The
question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one
particular teacher disappeared".

~~~
hacknat
Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this
case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is
horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.

~~~
Double_Cast
I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm
complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're
challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.

"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But
it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were
set _not_ by congress and _not_ by the market. According to your moral
calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Indeed. Oxygen is very valuable too, but it should not be expensive for this
reason alone. It's abundant, and therefore cheap, and that's a good thing.

Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable
profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a
teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with
vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.

Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an
oversupply of teachers.

Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to
do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many
teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.

------
supernova87a
I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that
politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to
work!").

Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out
of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe
they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by.

Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job
because he/she can't pay the bills?

~~~
orangecat
_Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job
because he /she can't pay the bills?_

A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later
end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment
rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor
force.

~~~
kaitai
The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know
many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial
instability.

Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when
you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds.
So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent
sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of
those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week
temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to
there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first
few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that
age, frankly.

~~~
orangecat
_The point is there are a lot of people in this position._

Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate
significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people
in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate
is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that
they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The
unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all
of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're
counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees
haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.

~~~
baddox
What is the mechanism to identify and count people who were voluntarily
retired but now wish they could find a job but can’t?

~~~
orangecat
If they're actively looking for work, then they're unemployed. If they're not
looking for work because they assume there are no opportunities, they're
"discouraged workers":
[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp).
Discouraged workers aren't counted in the primary unemployment rate, but are
counted in U4 and U6, which are also historically low; see
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE)
and
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE).

------
rayiner
> Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many,
> child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are
> woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many
> regions.

It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single
one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that
limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary
level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.

~~~
opportune
If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could
just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost +
state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies
for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley
comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California).

These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare,
child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with
improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is
evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being
shared with the majority of people.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when
public schools are effectively free?

This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of
public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce
property taxes accordingly.

~~~
nostromo
> public schools are effectively free

It's actually even worse than that because you pay for public education even
if you don't use it.

So in that regard, if you send your kids to private schools, you're paying for
their education twice.

This makes it very difficult to compete, and as a rayiner pointed out, isn't a
real market.

I think the best solution to this is vouchers, which is a nice blend of public
dollars but competitive schools.

~~~
MAGZine
Controversial opinion: I think everyone should have access to good education,
and I don't see why a public system is incapable of providing it.

Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a
public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the
private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep.

Elite schools are a different story because they have significantly more
resources.

The free market is good at some things, but the public wellbeing isn't one of
them.

~~~
knubie
A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store
could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price
as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.

Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but
growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably
more common) strategy.

This is the case because markets have competition, which the public sector
lacks. It’s why spending on public education continues to rise despite
decreasing quality of outcomes.

~~~
fzeroracer
A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store
could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price
as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.

This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a
very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for
them to simply do nothing.

The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and
business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is
by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility
etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are
also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than
you think.

~~~
tomp
This example actually show the fundamental value of separating infrastructure
from service.

Amazon's _infrastructure_ (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their
_service_ (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the
free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that
infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with
other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.

Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre
internet, rail, ...).

------
Ozzie_osman
Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and
not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for
most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and
irregular), education, and childcare.

If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people.

If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone
suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
I don’t think you’ll fix high housing costs.

There’s a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of
demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it _do_ pay it and are
competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New
York or Bay area housing ever go down?

Time for more people to admit they can’t afford to live in the best + most
popular places and instead move to “less desirable” places, like Iowa.

~~~
rini17
Actually, housing is easiest to fix, just allow building more densely and
provide public transportation.

------
rexreed
I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are
proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one
problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and
economic productivity.

I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner,
individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity.
However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide
subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave,
vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not
supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as
well.

For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such,
I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as
providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low
wage being UBI with required productivity.

In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered,
the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing
up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push
employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment
generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low
wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to
low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the
economic system.

This is just food for thought.

~~~
GavinMcG
The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone
else's labor, and to _only_ allow them to subsist.

UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough _time_ to find
more substantial opportunities.

And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space
for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on
the ambulance. UBI would make it so that I don't need _another_ job to support
a family, and could live healthily and with dignity on just those 48-72 hours
a week.

~~~
syshum
>>The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from
someone else's labor

That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle

Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good
income.

Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that
work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you
are out of a job.

Sometimes that cut off is more direct (i.e if you make widgets your per hour
the rate of manufacture can easily be factored into the cost of making the
widget) but if you some do something more nebulous like cleaning the floors,
or filing papers, that can be harder to calculate but every business does.

~~~
tehjoker
That's right, but we don't have a society unless people have incomes so maybe
this isn't a good model for funding a civil society?

~~~
rexreed
This is not the case - there's plenty of civil societies that have existed
over the millennia that are subsistence economies. They aren't wealthy, but
that isn't the point.

------
wufufufu
I hear agreement that the economy is good, but also that jobs are paying less
for more work and that income inequality is larger than ever. At the same
time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding. I feel like I'm
missing something about the real condition of the economy...

~~~
resfirestar
Everyone has an agenda but be especially careful of real estate as an economic
barometer. There’s so much speculation going on that the level of distortion
can often seem criminal in retrospect. A recent example: Manhattan developers
seem to be keeping thousands of new, unsold condos off the market. I don’t
think it’s difficult to imagine why.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan-
s-flood-of-new-condos-could-take-six-years-to-sell)

~~~
majos
Re: unsold condos, anyone want to try explaining how withholding stock makes
sense? I understand flooding the market would depress prices further, but I
don’t understand what market would buy up all this stock. If these units can’t
sell in what seems to be a nicely growing market, isn’t it going to be a long
time before they sell at all? Like, so long that just sitting on them and
paying taxes doesn’t make sense?

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
The calculation: Prices will skyrocket from lack of supply more quickly than
the taxes paid on the units.

Development and renting it out locks you into contracts where you can't flip
as quickly (low liquidity). So you don't develop or use the land, just wait
for your investment to accrue.

------
jeffdavis
It's worth discussing subgroups. An unemployment rate of 5% is probably fine
if it is uniformly distributed; but we know it's not.

Some subgroups, like minorities and young adults, have been plagued by much
higher numbers which _are_ a problem. Someone who can't get a foothold in the
job market will likely have lifelong challenges.

A rate of 3.5% almost certainly mean improvement for these subgroups.

------
jnordwick
This is based off of 2016 data and an self admitted overly expansive view of
what the proper cohort is.

(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because
things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).

All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers
comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much
justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly
if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.

edits:

strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still
include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-
employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds.
And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work,
but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.

And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as
"low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really
sure we care about that as much.

Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they
exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a
career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition
out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.

Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.

------
gnusty_gnurc
I tend to think work gives some sense of purpose to a person’s life. That’s
incalculably valuable.

~~~
pytester
This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a
UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring
for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling
them it wasn't "necessary" any more.

While it's theoretically possible that they might have _spontaneously_ started
doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any
example where this has happened.

~~~
retrac
Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the
market and so is not compensated.

Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who
sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.

There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but
which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage
attached to it.

~~~
opportune
Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth.

For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and
the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided
childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the
second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of
which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead
purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because
formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?

Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just
an example.

------
chadlavi
When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single
unskilled labor job, unemployment numbers meant something. Today they mean
nothing.

A measure of how many households live above the poverty line would be a step
in the right direction, but also frankly the poverty line in America is set
too low. People 10% above it are still too poor to live comfortably on their
income.

~~~
LorenPechtel
That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just
we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

~~~
ghastmaster
Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in
the united states are and have been white. The majority of government
assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs
were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was
rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed
every minority applicant at a small business. It is riskier to hire and fire
than it is to not hire.

The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of
1964.

~~~
jogjayr
> civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a
> small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the
> civil Rights Act of 1964.

That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark
legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what
you were talking about.

"Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allowed to
continue discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The
Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 changed the law to require all
businesses with 15 or more employees to adhere to Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964."[1]

I'm still shocked that discrimination is allowed for _any_ business at all.
But you weren't entirely correct.

Also, the Act's other benefits have to be weighed against allowing
discrimination in small businesses. Small businesses that were racist and
discriminatory before the Civil Rights Act could continue to be so after it,
but could only grow up to a certain size. That's still an improvement on what
existed previously, which was that they could be racist and discriminatory
forever and always.

If I was a minority in the 60s I'd consider federally guaranteed right to
vote, equal education, stay at any hotel, use any public water fountain or
bus, and be considered on an equal basis for federal jobs, private sector jobs
in 15/25+ employee firms, loans, assistance programs and the rest to be a
massive gain over the status quo. You're entitled to your opinion on the CRA
of 1964, but to most people it's going to sound bizarre. Sorry.

> The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

I don't know what "ta boot" means so the meaning of this statement is unclear.

1\. [https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act](https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act)

~~~
ghastmaster
Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate
discrimination. In the United States small businesses account for the most
employees. Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk
being sued when they fire them. There is less risk to not hire than there is
to hire due to the Civil Rights Act. This results in less minority hires.

If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities they have a
greater risk of being sued because it is easier for a person in majority race
to prove discrimnation.

~~~
jogjayr
> Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate
> discrimination.

It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and
businesses respond to incentives.

> small businesses account for the most employees.

That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find
data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt
from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of
employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in
2019.[1]

And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still
outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations
of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses,
housing, and other opportunities.

> If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities

A small business (< 15 employees) that only wants to hire minorities would
also be exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act wouldn't they? I'm
not a lawyer, I still can't believe this is actually legal, and maybe there's
some other law elsewhere that makes this illegal. Discrimination is wrong, no
matter who does it. But what you're saying wouldn't happen either.

1\.
[https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt](https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt)

~~~
ghastmaster
> It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and
> businesses respond to incentives.

The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I am
trying to illustrate above and below.

> That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find
> data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt
> from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of
> employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in
> 2019.[1]

It is not about the mandates in law. It is about reality and risk. If I want
to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in
court(or EEOC has to prove) using company statistics(unless explicit evidence
exists) that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do
against larger employers with more employees. For me to sue a small employer,
whether they employ 100(52% of jobs are attributed to 100 employee or less
businesses according to Texas Law Now;2012) or 19 employees the statistics are
harder to prove because of the small sample size. Employers know this. That
establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows
small businesses to discriminate.

Combine that with the fact that if an applicant does not get hired, it is
incredibly difficult to even begin a suit without internal knowledge of the
company, ergo it is less risky for employers to not hire minorities to begin
with.

> And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still
> outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations
> of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses,
> housing, and other opportunities.

I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school, etc if it results
in poor opportunities to be gainfully employed. As I stated before, prior to
the CRA wealth(power to influence vote/education/business/etc) of the largest
minority group in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

~~~
jogjayr
> The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I
> am trying to illustrate above and below.

And as I showed, small businesses make up a minority of employment
opportunities. The CRA increased employment opportunities literally everywhere
else such as in government jobs. To go from "100% of businesses discriminate"
to "50% of businesses discriminate" is an improvement in absolute terms. It
didn't take away job opportunities that existed. If a small business was
racist before, it would continue to be racist afterward. Do you have proof
that small businesses began discriminating more after the CRA than they did
before?

> This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees.

Citation needed.

> For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100...or 19 employees
> the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size.

Citation needed. In a business that small, everyone knows everyone else. It
should be way easier to gather data.

> That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses

Whereas before the CRA the option to sue didn't exist at all and all
businesses, of every size, could discriminate with impunity.

> I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school

Fortunately most people disagree with you.

> As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth...of the largest minority group
> in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

That would appear to coincide with the post-WW2 economic boom. I imagine
_every_ group in the US got wealthier in that period. I'm not well-versed with
all the factors and history after the CRA, but correlation ain't causation.

~~~
ghastmaster
I was trying to logically explain the reality of the situation. I would have a
hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to discriminating
publicly. I cannot imagine that survey exists. I'm done.

~~~
jogjayr
> I was trying to logically explain the reality

So was I. My logic is simple to explain:

Pre-CRA - 100% of employers (small businesses, large businesses, medium
business, non-profits, governments) could discriminate, and many did.

Post-CRA - < 100% of employers could discriminate

Therefore, the number of jobs available to _everyone_ (minorities and non-
minorities alike) went up. It's simple math.

I don't understand what your logic is. Because you've said both:

"Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued
when they fire them."

and

"If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to
prove in court that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to
do against larger employers [than]...a small employer. That establishes a
difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small
businesses to discriminate."

So minorities find it harder to sue small businesses, but, also, small
business owners don't hire minorities because they risk being sued. What? And
small businesses only worry about lawsuits by fired employees, but not ones by
candidates who feel illegal bias was a factor in their rejection. Why?

> I would have a hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to
> discriminating publicly

Don't necessarily need that. Economists have all sorts of ingenious ways to
tease out this information from other labor and employment data, EEO surveys
that many employees and candidates fill out, and other things. If there's any
evidence of what you're suggesting, there would be clues in that data.

> I'm done.

Me too, friend. Take care and a (slightly belated) happy new year. :-)

------
wheelerwj
Yeah, so here's the problem. We now, more than ever, have a key metric for
measuring the economy that doesn't really measure the right thing. Just like
in every other situation, businesses and startups included, this leads to
gamification and optimization for that metric.

"Oh, you want more jobs, great! here you go! We'll cut the hours by 1/2 and
employee twice as many people!"

Unemployment goes to 0% but so does quality of life. So the real question
remains, what are the metrics we really value as a society and what do we need
to do in order to optimize for them?

~~~
weberc2
You’re right that this one metric doesn’t tell the whole story, but no metric
does and they aren’t meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics
besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.

~~~
wheelerwj
Right, but the point is that not only does this metric not tell the whole
story, but that it tells the WRONG story.

Unemployment isn't a useful metric anymore.

~~~
weberc2
Perhaps, but your rationale (“it’s not meaningful if jobs pay half of what
they used to”) supports my interpretation (“not the whole story”), not your
thesis (“WRONG story”). Correct me if I missed something; haven’t had my
coffee yet.

------
ThomPete
While true it's important to point out that salaries are rising and most for
the lowest income.

[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-
for-...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-second-
quarter-2019-accelerated-to-4-percent-over-the-year-300890012.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-
wage-increases-fueling-faster-wage-growth-those-bottom/)

------
doe88
In these cases I somehow always have the Goodhart's law immediately coming to
my mind: _When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
Merrill
>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44%
of all workers—earn barely enough to live on.

>The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree,

So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are
only able to earn "barely enough to live on".

Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal
convictions, disabling disease or injury after college? Long term career
success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well
as a large helping of luck.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
Are you assuming that everybody who is able-bodied and has a scale degree
should be able to find employment?

Did over 12 million people in this country really get worthless degrees or
become incapacitated?

Getting a "good" degree might not matter so much, if so many other people also
got those degrees. One could say that degree is therefore no longer so good,
but there is not an endless train of "even better" degrees for people to move
on towards.

------
chiefalchemist
How true. But even pay is misleading. Ultimately, it's about cost of living /
affordability. For example, if hourly rate increases but housing - sensing the
market can bear more - soon follows then the pay increase is a wash, or worse.

------
playing_colours
I see the future as grim anti-utopia:

Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs
obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and
fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of
businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good
solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic
income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to
tax them in order to pay for social policies.

I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries
with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation
actually can make that move fast and not expensive.

In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both
countries.

Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?

~~~
ernst_klim
> Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs
> obsolete.

In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these
jobs are obsolete.

In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these
jobs are obsolete.

In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these
jobs are obsolete.

In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science
departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in
1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating
wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer.

People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs,
making more services available, more possibilities open.

Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg
peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more
people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up.

Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some
jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we
couldn't even fancy yet.

~~~
jlawson
The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs
increasingly do.

In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to
another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a
cow when told to.

These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python
programming - regardless of education.

So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ
people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at _any_ job.
It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably
noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is
too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered
construction equipment.

Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian
worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care,
seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

~~~
ernst_klim
> So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising

I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php.

> The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up
> simply unemployable at any job

Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that
don't require you to be smart.

You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web
programmer or a politician. I would dare say that the amount of stupid work is
growing.

And avg person is not dumb at all, never was. The dumbest few always would
find some way of doing some service job, especially when service field is
growing. All kind of grooming does not require you to be especially smart,
even chimps can do that.

~~~
quaquaqua1
>agriculture is way harder than php

an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

~~~
ernst_klim
> an illiterate man can pull potatoes

You need to put it there first, and do so avoiding the eruption of soil.
Agriculture is very hard and requires much knowledge. Without knowledge you'll
destroy both the crop and the land.

~~~
quaquaqua1
The potato puller is not fulfilling the role of agricultural designer. He or
she is literally visually identifying a potato and using physics to pull it
out of the ground.

It's like the difference between programming (fulfilling tasks), and system
architecture, which is something I can't do because I don't have experienxe
with huge enterprise stacks.

~~~
jlawson
Yes.

For a visual example, look at John Malkovich's character in the film version
of Of Mice and Men. He's mentally retarded. But people tell him - "carry these
bags over there". And he does it, and he's useful. There is no job like this
now. He's too dumb to be a barista or a gas station attendant or a line cook.

~~~
quaquaqua1
Agree wholeheartedly. As corporations grow into the trillions of dollars range
of valuations and work becomes even more complex due to automation, we soon
will live in a world where it will be difficult to find a way to purchase the
things needed to live.

But x% of us will live really well.

------
dplgk
Does a person working part time who can't afford their own place to rent (i.e.
Live with their parents) count as "employed"? If so, then the sharing economy
surely boosts this metric significantly when not actually significantly
improving lives.

~~~
sdinsn
People are counted as employed if they did any work at all for pay, even if it
was just 1 hour a week.

------
esotericn
Aren't all of these metrics that try to capture the bottom end inherently
flawed because we don't know what an acceptable "minimum standard" for a long
term job is?

For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire
with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at
>30% or so.

It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think
affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a
family should be possible.

------
mxschumacher
In reference to those low-paying retail jobs: I have done some research on
large US retailers like J.C. Penney, Gamestop, Macy's, Sears and Tailored
Brands. It's quite scary to see how dire the situation is for these firms.
Shrinking revenues, plenty of debt, hardly any profit in sight.

The most shocking to is the number of people they employ (more than 90k in the
case of J.C. Penney), many of whom can be sure to be laid off in the next few
years.

~~~
hellllllllooo
Walmart, Amazon and Target are doing fine and still pay low wages. I don't
understand your point or choice of companies to list.

~~~
scarface74
Amazon retail is not “doing fine”. It’s a low margin business with high fixed
costs.

------
rasengan
Unemployment only measures persons in the workforce, not those who never had a
job. Thus, the stats are further less rosy.

~~~
mrep
That is why we also track the labor force participation rate [0].

[0]:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART)

~~~
qeternity
I can’t tell from your comment but I’m not sure this is what you expect. This
is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated)
estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.

~~~
datashow
I have never heard of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics being politically
motivated. This is a very new accusation. Do you have any reference?

~~~
dredmorbius
The notion that unemployment (or other economic) statistics are manipulated is
neither novel _nor_ confined to the US specifically.

Whether it's generally _accurate_ is another question.

But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up
multiple discussions:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=unemployment+statistics+%28manipulated%7Cmanipulation%7Cmanipulating%29&btnG=)

I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the
frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is _so_ common as
to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either.

My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons
expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or
compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs
really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.

~~~
wolf550e
There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that
disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are
a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get
disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they
don't get disability, for same medical issue.

People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment,
making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.

------
howmayiannoyyou
Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that
contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx)

Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and
entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up
dislocated.

I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the
time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just
accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.

~~~
rexreed
Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that
low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to
support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that
UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that
individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage
labor, the tighter the employment market for such service, which motivates
employers to seek higher productivity and automation rather than increase
wages, which furthers the cycle above.

~~~
GrinningFool
These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on
top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone.
Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.

~~~
rexreed
In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be
"subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income
on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that
all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered
subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.

------
DoreenMichele
_Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped
by policies, investments, and institutions._

This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing.
It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic
unemployment.

I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also
wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless.

Due to so-called _identity politics_ , if I give my opinion about various
things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't
me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately
protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.

I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of
what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor
people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this
is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to
make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that
help keep my financial problems alive.

But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to
work _at all._

I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of
years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible
because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part
because I don't work that much.

I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are
quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero
effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part
of the problem.

Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many
meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent
of Americans were _poor_ by the standards of less developed countries like
India.

Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh
impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large
part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay.
It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible
to articulate.

I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand
current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm
currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free
membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games,
serves as my personal library and more.

When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our
living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from
software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.

I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed
hundreds of books and physical storage for software

It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't
work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons.

I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved
from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes
of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my
mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books,
software and more.

Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that
fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.

I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems.
These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh
especially heavily on the lower classes who have less money.

But I am less convinced that the trend of low paid work, whether from jobs or
gig work, is really some kind of evil, malicious, abusive trend where rich
people are being intentionally awful to line their pockets at the expense of
everyone else. I think it's far more complicated than that and I don't think
it gets acknowledged at all. I don't think we are even discussing that angle,
in part because no one wants to suggest that poverty isn't really a problem or
be accused of implying such by wondering out loud about some of this stuff.

I can afford to occasionally comment on it because I'm already a social
outcast that everyone thinks is crazy. I'm not risking that much.

But anyone with any kind of "nice life" and decent reputation either has zero
idea how the other half lives or has no real choice but to keep such thoughts
private lest they be accused of being up to something nefarious.

~~~
esotericn
A lot of what you're saying rings true to me.

There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life.

Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and
cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to
wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that
sort of thing.

I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly American problem.

But housing - that's literally an issue across the spectrum. It feels like
every 'class' of person has basically taken a step down or two if you compare
generation to generation. The upper-middle are looking at just about being
able to afford starter properties in major cities. The middle class who would
30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in
pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.

Below that you have stuff like crappy flat shares, unofficial bunking up, or
homelessness - to be honest looking at what graduates are doing I can't even
imagine what say, a supermarket worker does if they don't have family.

~~~
kgwgk
> But housing - [...] The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down
> in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses
> with other professionals.

Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more
expensive in 2012 than in 1990.

~~~
DoreenMichele
In the US, we've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely
zoned out of existence the creation of new Missing Middle Housing. This trend
likely was worse in 2012 than in 1990.

We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our
housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class
nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved
away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single
adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default
to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get
roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.

It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments
that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me
that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind
that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.

------
seibelj
People need to get that first job. That first job leads to skills, experience,
knowledge of how to interact with coworkers, and so on. Few people start at
minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid.

This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to
get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the
employment market.

I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own
minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local
differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black
market and the wages paid in cash.

~~~
sdinsn
> Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the
> poor are fluid.

This is false. The US ranks very poorly for economic mobility- in fact, even
3rd world countries like Pakistan rank higher.

------
coldtea
Relevant, from the UK side:

"Jobs of the future may not have stable hours, holiday pay, sick pay, or
pensions, DWP secretary says"

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-
econo...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-economy-
damian-green-speech-holiday-minimum-wage-sick-pay-hours-a7421071.html)

------
jariel
Low wages for basic labour are I think the biggest driver of inequality in the
US. It's not taxes, or education or anything else.

Break your back, barely make it - that's not the American dream.

A lift in Minimum wage would make a big difference, the rest of us would have
to pay for it in higher prices, we can afford it though.

Get medical coverage to the remaining few that don't have it and the US would
make great gains.

------
ikeboy
>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44%
of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22
per hour, and about $18,000 per year.

Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the
real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that
means only half of them make less than that.

They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.

I clicked through to [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-
avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-
avenue/2019/11/21/low-wage-work-is-more-pervasive-than-you-think-and-there-
arent-enough-good-jobs-to-go-around/), which linked me to
[https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-
workfor...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workforce/),
which says the definition is on page 5 of [https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/11/201911_...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/11/201911_Brookings-Metro_low-wage-workforce_Ross-
Bateman.pdf#page=5). It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the
definition:

> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the
> often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year
> workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we
> consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn
> more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the
> benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our
> definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the
> first to do so.

...

> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016
> real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in
> Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.

They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3
different links to track it out, but whatever.

Moving on:

>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one.
The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need
nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would
need child care workers, and so on.

If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they
had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense
under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in
other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol
effect.

>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined
in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as
health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.

For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:

>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than
they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.

Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with
measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source
is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those
at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"

The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are
part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for
inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than
before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the
inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same
basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.

~~~
jiofih
> then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay
> for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.

Laughing hard here. You just invented “trickle-down pay raises”!

If everybody has a degree, the degree doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Being a
bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer. Plus the
effect only hold due to a few sectors like IT paying disproportionately -
overall, productivity increases over the last 70 years have not been reflected
in purchasing power or work hours. The gains disappear into the upper deck.

We need to stop this bullshit mentality that people need to ‘educate
themselves more’ to earn a decent living. The shit jobs will always exist,
_and they should pay well just for being shit jobs_ , which is what happens in
northern Europe where minimum wages are more than enough to live comfortably
as a bartender. There should be absolutely no shame in working for McDonalds
(except about the food itself).

~~~
Rerarom
Of course degrees matter. Knowledge creates productivity, which creates
wealth.

~~~
jiofih
You’re taking that sentence as an absolute, not in the context of low-wage
jobs. And it it is a liberal fantasy, right next to meritocracy. That wealth
stays put exactly where it is, at the top of the chain. All studies on labor
show productivity gains far outpacing salaries in the past century. A well-
paid knowledge worker today can barely meet the lifestyle of his factory
worker grandparents.

~~~
ikeboy
[https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07...](https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf)

This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on
wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely,
although it only goes back a quarter century.

~~~
deiznof
This is only because America has incredibly bloated healthcare costs - that
"compensation" mostly isn't all that valuable.

A $1000 slice of pizza is still only 1 slice of pizza.

~~~
ikeboy
This is inflation adjusted, which means it accounts for all that.

~~~
deiznof
This also only goes until 2006, Obamacare didn't even exist yet.

------
dvduval
In this global economy, much depends on the quality of education/training our
workers are getting compared with other countries. In many cases, there are
better educated workers elsewhere. It is not clear to me what the US is doing
to stay competitive. Sure, we have top tier universities, but below this
level, I think we are getting beat.

------
corporate_shi11
If - in America - we stopped bringing in millions of poor and uneducated young
working age people every year - legally and illegally - wages would rise. This
is common sense and supported by research [0].

[0]: [https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration](https://cis.org/Report/Wages-
Immigration)

------
taurath
We could achieve 100% unemployment by putting anyone without a job in work
camps. Living with a bunch of friends who are still struggling, everyone is
aware that opportunity isn’t easy even in this “ideal” conditions. And frankly
the number of employers who will abuse the hell out of you is somewhere around
30-60%.

------
macinjosh
If we really wanted to put more money in people's pockets and have a more
progressive tax code we should, at the very least, start chipping away at
taxing incomes. A good start would be to make any cost of necessities
(shelter, food, healthcare, transportation) should be tax deductible.

~~~
someguydave
Why not just get rid of the income tax and only have sales tax? We could make
exceptions for basic food and shelter.

------
finphil
Agreed. "Job quality" / Wages versus cost of living should also be taken into
account.

------
ilaksh
I'm really glad that we have a presidential candidate (Yang) sophisticated
enough to run on UBI. I've never voted before but I finally have hope that the
government might make structural adjustments to the changing realities of our
world.

------
api
Maybe aggregate salary would be a much better measure than unemployment

------
eucryphia
"Unemployment" is the result of a lack of entrepreneurs, don't drive them out
of your neighbourhood.

------
stopads
I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about
tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something,
anything that was an actual real new product or service.

We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and
progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more
ads on the page.

~~~
mlurp
I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real
cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the
research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a
huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that...
bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human
effort is going into that.

~~~
stopads
I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum
computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find
a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting
brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful.

Not so exciting after all.

------
foogazi
> Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve
> workers’ economic security.

Amazed how all these articles gloss over or totally ignore what workers
themselves can do to better their situation

> These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American
> adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low
> wages.

>What should be done?

By who?

------
jokoon
Fighting against unemployment means you are creating unnecessary jobs. It's
creating an army of disposable, obedient, consenting slaves.

Think about fast food and the damage it's doing. All this money, metals and
resources and all those people could be paid to deliver better healthcare,
educate people, etc while people could just prepare their own food instead.

I can't count the times I was called either a communist, a moocher, a
parasite, an euro-something, etc I'm so jaded from this subject. Sometimes I'm
scared that the government might try and find new tricks or excuse to not give
me welfare, because I'm certain the public opinion would not have any trouble
in seeing me homeless.

Misguided economic policies stem from some form of cultural, subjective
ideology. I still have to be convinced why it's the government's role to push
people to go back to work, instead of just giving them the bare minimum so
they can eat and find shelter. The amount of money you need for welfare is
ridiculously low compared to the advantage it allows. We're just scared of
moochers and people having free time.

And even if I'm wrong, it's not like governments will force people to work or
continue to let large-scale homelessness happen. The idea of everyone-for-
himself is completely the opposite of our species: we're a social society, and
civilization needs to help everyone because it's in the interest of all
countries. Until we're able to question the "we need workers for civilization
to function" meme, nothing will improve.

I cannot count how many times I rant about this. I can already hear the
pedantic, rational people explaining how I'm stealing their taxes.

------
fredgrott
we have a problem world wide

When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year
period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of
high costs of rent or homeownership.

Its not going away and its going to get worse.

------
rayiner
The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.

~~~
contingencies
Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due
to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the
world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for
all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that
would likely result in a population boom, however.

~~~
rayiner
I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work
force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

~~~
ngold
The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

~~~
harryh
LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

[https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504](https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504)

"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty
rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

~~~
sokoloff
That's the beauty (to some) and problem (to others) with the definition of
poverty: we keep moving the goalposts/standards.

------
jkoudys
America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers
vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're
one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete
financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is
a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of
not having a job.

~~~
dcolkitt
Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada
experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the
United States:

> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the
> employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States,
> by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard
> deviations in Germany.[1]

Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more
tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect
that for the average jobseeker.

Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US
is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit
a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western
European economies surveyed.

[1]
[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408-eng.htm)

~~~
endothrowho333
> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data.

Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in
different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't
need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison,
but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a
recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other
surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance)
and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the
USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and
this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.

Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the
unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and
unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment,
unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).

Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data
without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue
deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's
agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really
mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!

~~~
DubiousPusher
Not to mention that people's personal moods do not necessarily reflect the
quality of their material position.

------
JetBen
Automation takes a toll, and the market decides the cost of things (e.g. how
much an employer is willing to pay an employee for a specific task). One facet
of that toll is that employers are much less willing to pay a premium for
tasks they believe can be handled by automation.

------
kornakiewicz
I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even
inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a
job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system.

In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively
making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when
we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.

~~~
Frost1x
Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast
financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation
process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you?

This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.

~~~
kornakiewicz
Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret
for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe?
Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all
rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

~~~
sokoloff
There’s a difference between having the right to the _concept of an axe_ and
having the right to _my specific axe_. I think GP was speaking more towards
the latter.

~~~
sneak
It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific
iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of
Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.

~~~
sokoloff
You also didn’t make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain
arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s
phones should be theirs because _reasons_.

------
subject117
This is insane. The rise in wages for the bottom half are higher than they
have ever been and it is solely because of low unemployment. How in the world
do some people become economists and not understand supply and demand?

~~~
henrysarabia
There are factors at play other than supply and demand

------
subject117
Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for
those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and
died for us to have the right to.

~~~
majos
I’m skeptical that America’s forefathers envisioned a future where a
reasonable degree of financial security is exclusively for business-owners.

~~~
AdrianB1
At that time, financial security did not exist at all (or almost). There was
no social safety net, no food stamps, no tax to redistribute. There was no
reason to envision there will ever be different.

------
tu7001
People who lived in socialism know that, there was even 0% unemployment :-)

------
dfilppi
Since employment is tied to not starving, I'd say its worth a fair amount.

~~~
wavefunction
Very tenuously tied to not starving. There are plenty of working-class people
who have to avail themselves of community food pantries and at least in my
large city the homeless have access to three meals a day.

And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed
country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly
low standard.

------
aldoushuxley001
Similarly, minimum wage isn’t worth much if there’s high unemployment

~~~
throw0x1away
minimum wage isn’t worth much. period.

These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from
socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with
the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We
know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries.

Minimum wage should be abolished.

~~~
jfk13
"The market" is not some all-powerful, benevolent force that will always
achieve the best outcome for humanity or society as a whole. Markets are
disproportionately controlled by the current holders of wealth (and therefore
power), who will naturally tend to seek their own advantage at the expense of
others. And so some kinds of regulation are often appropriate to protect the
less powerful participants.

~~~
throw0x1away
free market IS all-powerful. times change, technological progress moves
forward, financial powers rise and fall, it's natural, it's evolution, a chaos
controlled by the market (and not by the billionaires, it's not Russia). If
you interfere, you are making things worse, delaying the inevitable, promoting
dependence, killing individuality (or even progress).

~~~
SeanBoocock
The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to
facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the “free
market” and I don’t understand reactions to market failures that amount to
“Well we can’t do anything about that”. Of course we can, it exists for us,
not the other way around.

------
boyadjian
I do not agree with that, having a job is always a good thing for mental
health. It is always better than staying at home doing nothing.

~~~
missingpint
Having work one finds valuable is.

Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.

Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create
servile, ignorant humans.

IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and
learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.

You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him?
Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t
also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.

Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and
makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from
doing a variety of types of work.

~~~
stanferder
> Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his
younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order
line cook during the breakfast shift".

I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.

I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but
rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set
to even out wear.

~~~
samatman
There might be someone who can rotate one tire and not four.

I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.

------
htk
I see this as a new tactic from the left. Since they can’t complain about
unemployment in the record lows since forever, they complain about the jobs
themselves.

~~~
williamDafoe
See the trump difference? There is NONE:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060)

------
ralmidani
Regarding health benefits, can I float a crazy idea?

Let part-time and gig economy workers pick their own insurance plans, and in
exchange for every hour in their contract (or hours driven, etc. in the case
of gig economy workers), require the employer (yes, we should close the
loophole nationwide like California is trying to do) to contribute around 1.5%
toward the monthly premium, until the employee/worker has, say, 60% of the
premium paid for. This would work well for people juggling 2-3 part-time jobs
or gigs and, at least in terms of health benefits, put them on par with FTEs.

------
RickJWagner
Taco Bell has just started experimenting with $100k salaries for their store
managers (a raise from about $70k) because low unemployment has tightened the
pool of workers available.

We're headed in the right direction. With low unemployment, rising blue collar
wages, and strong equity markets it would be absolute foolishness to make a
big change in any direction.

------
ausjke
Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least
helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times
better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the
society.

~~~
funklute
Eventually you approach (modern) slavery though, and the transition is not
black to white, but a continuous one. So your argument, without any
qualifications, actually implies that (modern) slavery is not a problem. I
hope it is obvious to you why that is a highly unreasonable argument.

~~~
dfilppi
No. Slavery isnt voluntary by definition, and that is it's most essential
feature.

~~~
funklute
I don't quite see your point. I agree that both traditional and modern slavery
is not voluntary. But if there are no other options, other than taking an
extremely low-paying job, then modern slavery is exactly what you get.

None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary,
and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves
unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I
replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.

------
ghastmaster
"...we need to rethink the fundamentals of our economic and social policies"

They suggest fixes in the next paragraph that are not fundamental, have
already been implemented, and have directly contributed to the problem:

"Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve
workers’ economic security. Boosting wages through tax credits, a higher
minimum wage, or supporting sectoral bargaining; supporting families with
high-quality child care; and giving workers more control over their time via
stable scheduling are just a few options."

A fundamental shift occurred in 1776 and has been slowly bastardized since.
Read Thomas Sowell, Peter Schiff, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mesis, Ron Paul,
etc.

The central planners are the problem.

~~~
petermcneeley
Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation
of 1863?

~~~
shijie
It seems a bit disingenuous to assume that the parent commenter laments the
emancipation proclamation just because he/she has a differing view on fiscal
policy. This is ad hominem by definition. Not very contributory to the
conversation. What parts of his/her points do you disagree with?

~~~
scarejunba
Oh this one is easy. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504)
for the statement:

> The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of
> 1964.

If you think I’m quoting out of context, entertain yourself with the rest of
the comment. It’s on this very story. No digging necessary.

~~~
petermcneeley
+1 nice find.

------
williamDafoe
Unemployment is NOT very low. The government publicizes a fake unemployment
number which includes a HUGE imaginary subtraction called "discouraged
workers", which was originally imagined during the Clinton administration. To
get a real idea about EMPLOYMENT, including those pesky minorities that
Clinton excluded, see the employment population ratio, ages 25-54:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060)

When Obama left office we were STILL in an economy destroyed by Bush, STILL at
employment levels BELOW the bottom of the past 2 recessions!

Now that Trump has been in office employment has grown NO DIFFERENTLY THAN
UNDER OBAMA, for the past 3 years the Trump difference is INVISIBLE.

~~~
cheriot
So from the FRED series you link to, the current market is the second best for
employment in history. How is that "NOT very low"? It's better than any point
in history other than a couple years when the dot com bubble was inflating.

BLS labor statistics are phenomenal. It's some of the most trustworthy data
available. Please don't call them "fake" just because you want to use a
different time series than someone else.

------
toohotatopic
>53 million people earn low wages, with a median of just $10.22 per hour.
That’s nearly half of the 18 to 64 workforce.

10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour
because costs would double, too.

It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents
could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices
low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped
spending it all.

Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor
people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.

*edit:

To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in
the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on
the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started
paying less.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity)

~~~
MH15
Doubling the minimum wage does not cause costs to double. This is a very
flawed analysis- the minimum wage doesn't affect the entire population (less
than half!) so raising that wage only raises the costs of things a small,
proportional factor, if at all.

I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far
too often.

~~~
toohotatopic
You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower
half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for
the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply
cost more because they are able to spend the money.

This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation
where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers
will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.

Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have
a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are
you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay
taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.

Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't
matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a
huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost
and you increase the prices of those goods.

I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If
it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article
says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a
small, proportional factor, if at all.

