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Comment by aschearer | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: They're students, retired boomers, or sick middle agers.

This comment is overly reductionist -- 'disabled' is a code word for long-term un-employable.

Just eyball the proportion of working adults in the 50 to 60 year range. It is only ~5x the number of disabled. In other words, that is a huge %--maybe 20%--of potential workers in that age bracket.

Any employment process that disables 20% of its workforce would be normally considered a problem.

But instead we call the un-employable 'diabled', to sweep the data under the rug.

It almost certainly helps keep other people in their jobs, tho (like burecrats and academics).

>'disabled' is a code word for long-term un-employable.

Correct. This is the legacy of the Clinton era 'welfare to work' program: we moved people from welfare to disability.

This will grow as automation takes hold of ever more industries. "Disability" is the U.S.'s first step toward guaranteed minimum income or a negative income tax. We will never have enough jobs for everyone in America, so we need to figure out what we're going to do to keep the economy going.

It really has nothing to do with "keeping the economy going". The purpose of "disability" insurance is just like that of Social Security originally--keeping people from destitution and poorhouses. It's not a good thing, but an unavoidable thing.

>It really has nothing to do with "keeping the economy going".

Not sure what you mean. When we give poor people money, they spend it. That's good for the economy. Welfare and disability are definitely good things.

Right. I also wonder how many people are only in school because a decent job is out of reach. If you're older and can't find a job, you go on disability. If you're young, you take out loans and go to school. It's a huge generalization, but I think there's some truth to it.

You're leaving out the really large "taking care of family" block.

That includes "taking care of elderly" as well as "taking care of kids". Especially the "taking care of elderly" is putting a very large drain on resources that is simply going to get worse and worse as the boomers age.

It's especially difficult with how non-existent the possibility of "professional but part-time" is. I know my wife would love to begin putting her engineering degree back to use 15-20 hours a week, but the only real option is to go full time and enroll our daughter in full time daycare, which we really would prefer not to do.

Yep, although it is slightly worrying that there are 2.6 million people who want a job but aren’t looking. If I had to guess, probably a lot of that is due to a lack of marketable skills.

Or lack of demand for services in their area.

I wonder how they are clustered geographically.

Except for the 2 million who "want a job but aren't looking"

2 million out of 318 doesn't seem especially newsworthy.

It's an insidious problem. Those two million people are not doing any particular thing on any particular day, but en masse, they are taxing the social safety net in ways it is not meant for. Services become limited as resources dry up, healthcare costs go through the roof as the industry soaks up every dollar the government is willing to spend, quality of education plummets as people determine there is no sense in striving for the American dream, prison system costs skyrocket as crime increases, and the list goes on.

So it's not newsworthy when taken as a statistic, but you can find that the problem and its societal and human costs definitely are. If your bubble is big enough to keep you insulated from all this, then good for you.

To put it in perspective: there are more people who want a job but aren't looking for a job than there are people in the entire US prison system (2.6 million vs 2.4 million).

It would not surprise me if the two are related. Google says there are approximately 20 million felons in the US. It's not difficult to imagine many of them are unable secure employment.

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