
Unemployment is low only because 'involuntary' part-time work is high - joeyespo
https://www.businessinsider.com/unemployment-vs-involuntary-part-time-work-underemployment-2019-1
======
esotericn
Unemployment is essentially meaningless as a metric because deciding the
nature of "unemployment" is gameable.

What would be more interesting, is something like the percentage of adult
individuals with an income lower than some amount (e.g. in the UK, 14.5K would
approximate to a full time job at minimum wage, so you could use 12-13K or
something).

Still not perfect (stay at home partners would be problematic, for one
example, and you can game the line, though it'd be more transparent) but it'd
be far more in line with what I'd call "unemployed".

I don't believe that "voluntary unemployment" is really a thing that cannot be
accounted for numerically. If someone has significant unearned investment
income, or are obviously attempting to start a business, sure, exclude them. A
poor person who's given up looking for a job is just unemployed.

------
thatoneuser
Companies have found another way to break capitalism. Make employment so fluid
and low commitment on their part that they always have the upper hand in
negotiation. Never have to pay a fair wage and you can always tweak your
payment "algorithm" to squeeze extra pennies out of your paycheck until you
barely have enough people willing to work. Then create bullshit "incentives"
that sound good on paper but which practically no one uses to squeeze a few
more pennies.

I really don't care for this model. Hope something comes about to intervene.

~~~
endofcapital
Our tooling has improved rapidly in the past few years, and we're now at a
point where a handful of all powerful executives can aggregate vast swaths of
human activity into a single number that they then get to sit there and start
fiddling with to see what happens.

What we're currently legally doing isn't even within the scope of capitalism,
it's more like free form social experimentation. And the ones with their
fingers on the dials doing the experiments have never taken a history class or
a sociology class or a civics class.

The laws aren't just out of date, our terminology can't even keep up. It's not
a free market, it's not capitalism, it's something else entirely new and
different.

~~~
8675309t
How is this different from other times in history?

What makes you think today's executives haven't taken enough humanities
courses?

I think I need more context or background to understand what you are trying to
get at.

~~~
shard972
Ancient Romans? They never had such labor saving devices and thus relied
heavily on slavery for most manual labor. I imagine if they had the combustion
engine things would have turned out very differently.

> What makes you think today's executives haven't taken enough humanities
> courses?

Not OP but i would have to guess something along the lines of a revolution of
the non-ascended. IE: when you have a country where the 0.1% live a life of
luxury and extravagance while the rest are left to fight over the scraps.

It was arrogance combined with a metaphysical shift away from rulers as the
divine that lead to their downfall. The difference now is nobody even pretends
to believe our elites are divine in any sense of the word.

~~~
candiodari
As the MASSIVE aquaducts in France and Italy clearly illustrate, as well as
things like the Thermae, the Romans were keenly aware that there are things
that can't be done with any amount of slave labour, and did in fact use labor
saving devices.

Hell, they had the same problem we have: "automation" (massive infrastructure
projects) putting people out of jobs. The solution was also similar: first,
massive infrastructure projects soaking up more than all available labor for
decades, followed by making the problem worse, then austerity and mass-
corruption on all levels, then (let's say "todo" in our current case)
revolution, followed by large scale Rome-initiated expansion wars. On the plus
side: those wars resulted in the longest period of prosperity in history.

