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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the author has ever taken a stroll around downtown Baltimore on a weekday afternoon and seen all the people milling about who are "fully employed."

You need to carry that "employment to population ratio" graph out earlier than 1998: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300001.

The employment ratio for men is down from 80%+ in the 1950s to ~65% today. Many of those men are of course in school, etc., but that merely reflects the weakness of the economy. You wouldn't expect a larger fraction of people to voluntarily go to school than in 1950 unless economic pressures compelled them to. Indeed, given that school is far more expensive today, you'd expect exactly the opposite.

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The phrase is loaded... with academic context and usually refers to "structural" unemployment and is used in the context of the Phillips Curve, which correlates it with the inflation rate. Because of rule changes made in the Reagan and Bush Sr years and finalized during Clinton, both CPI (Inflation), and U3-U6 (different Unemployment measures) were altered so that they "look better" for the "misery index".

What you can really say is that economists now believe that we are near the top of the cycle where the FED will have to raise rates to prevent inflation. If you are willing to accept higher (or accelerating) inflation, then you can have a lower unemployment rate.

Of course if you have a different types of employment (manufacturing/retail), different export/import ratios (trade deficit), or credit situations (Debt vs GDP) then the structural and "Full Employment" rates (which produce rising inflation) are different. Since we live in a more global economy now even relative to the 1990s, it's harder for any one nation to change those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment

When you go back before 1998 the biggest two reasons for the reduction you see have nothing to do with the economy. They are, in fact:

1) Women entering the workforce

2) An aging population

I think it makes more sense to look at this graph:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Which shoes that the % of prime age people in the work force is up significantly since the 50s/60s/70s.

I'm not talking about the economy so much as the idea that everyone who wants a job has one (vis-a-vis full employment). Presumably men want jobs at a similar rate as they did in the 1960s (modulo the aging aspect which I had forgotten to account for).

That's not what full employment means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment

Why did you downvote this? Care to explain?

I can imagine that women entering the labor force had a negative impact on men wanting jobs. I know that stay at home dads aren't exactly common but they aren't unheard of either. Could have a couple points of impact.

> I'm not talking about the economy so much as the idea that everyone who wants a job has one (vis-a-vis full employment).

Full employment is the absence of cyclical unemployment, not “everyone who wants a job has one”.

Particularly, it's compatible with an arbitrarily high level of structural unemployment. The “rovots eat jobs” argument, for instance, is one of ever-escalating structural unemployment.

> I think it makes more sense to look at this graph:

That depends entirely on what you want to know. If you want to know the outcome on individual happiness and economic power, then no, it doesn't.

Whatever the reason, or whatever is reasonable (I do agree it's unreasonable to expect old people to work) the fact of the matter is that what 1 working individual in the 60s was producing was divided between 1.3 individuals. Today, it's > 2 (and that's in America, EU is worse). That's bound to have an impact on those individuals, the working ones, and the ones needing support.

Also another way of saying the same is that the generating coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s refused to have sufficient numbers of children. That is the reason the working age population now is stagnant (in practice shrinking).

But of course, the generation coming of age now is much worse when it comes to children. I understand why : it's harder. Even just having a bedroom for your child, just that expense, is ridiculous. It's so ridiculous that people making $100k+ in Silicon Valley have trouble doing so.

Still, the reason doesn't matter, and of course the net result will be a further shrinking working population in 20 years.

Poor kids. In this case, literally.

The 1950s or 1960s is anything but a reasonable comparison point.

The sole reason those decades are plumped up so dramatically, is that the US took over 55% of all global manufacturing temporarily, due to the rest of the planet's dominate economies having been either destroyed or substantially set-back in WW2. It was an almost perfect storm of young men coming home and others coming of age from the post WW2 era baby boom (1960s, early 70s), and the US inheriting manufacturing dominance which was ideal for employing blue-collar men.

Is a part of that because women weren't expected to have jobs in the 50s, though?

Srsly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300002

Men employment rate is down from 80% to 65%, but women's employment rate is up from 30% to 55% from the 50's to now. In total the average employment rate for everyone has increased over 50 years from 55% to 60% in the US.

And there's no reason to think that we need a larger labor force than we had in the 50's - the opposite in fact.

"Need" is a strange way to think of it. The country doesn't need any particular amount of labor; it's instead individuals that need money, derived from working, to live. We don't need to have everyone employed; we just need whatever employment rate is required to ensure that everyone has money in their pockets.

The problem, I expect, simply comes down to the size of family units (by which I mean "clusters of people willing to internally redistribute income.") The fewer of those you have, the more individuals need to either be employed for themselves, or get income transfers from the government, to be able to eat/live. And I have the sense that there are far more people living on their own than there were in the 50s.

As a point of fact the way the Nazis[+] "eliminated unemployment" was by getting women out of the labor force (,,Kinder, Küche, Kirche'').

[+] Legit historical reference so should not shut down the discussion...no godwinning here.

Of course, a lot of that decline is because there are so many retirees and college students these days (a lot more than in the '50s[1]). If you look at the prime-age (25-64) ratio, it's still down substantially [0]

[0]http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-r...

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/236093/higher-education-...

Not the angle of the article but I'll mention this anyway - the jobs are there.

With some exceptions, pretty much anyone who doesn't have a job - doesn't want one. There are situations where someone is truly "between jobs" as in something happened and now they are looking for another job with the same pay and skillset demands but this typically doesn't apply to the "downtown Baltimore" type crowd.

pretty much anyone who doesn't have a job - doesn't want one

Doesn't want a job, or doesn't want to downgrade their job? I.e., The laid off factory worker would rather go on disability than pump gas or wash dishes. So he is both choosing to be unemployed, but also doesn't have good job options.

This is really quite offensive. i'll tell the people who are desperate to get jobs that the problem is they really don't want them.

There are a lot of factors that have gone into that drop (women entering the workforce, aging population, the 50's number being inflated, etc) but you're right. I think trying to isolate an answer to that question is fascinating and if I were an economist it is all I would be spending my time on.

"There are a lot of factors that have gone into that drop"

Exactly. Complex systems are complex.

"trying to isolate an answer"

Wait, did you just contradict yourself? If there are a lot of factors, and they all contribute, why would you even try to isolate one? It's all of them.

I wasn't suggesting isolating one factor, I was suggesting that isolating what is actually a cause/effect of this drop, to what degree, vs what isn't is critical. I am 100% sure it's not one thing.

Economists, good ones at least, as supposed to come up with a theory that unifies the facts into a coherent story, testable so that when a factor they didn't consider is introduced, the story still holds true. This is the same of any science (to the extent that economics is a science). That's what I want to see and more of. It's part of why I didn't like Piketty but also part of why I found it a compelling effort at least.

Things like unemployment rate I feel should only be used as a relative metric, not absolute. Defining what is employed vs unemployed isn't as easy as it seems, and phrases like "fully employed" sound like they imply everyone has a job, which isn't the case.

> You wouldn't expect a larger fraction of people to voluntarily go to school than in 1950 unless economic pressures compelled them to.

I would if a larger fraction than usual is of the ages at which schooling is most common. I have no idea whether that's the case or not (or the opposite, entirely).

? Downtown Baltimore is stuffed with people who are busy working, and it's gotten pretty expensive. Most of the urban core of Baltimore is nice, it's the areas outside of the "white cross" that are structurally fucked.

Er... while for definitions of "downtown" and "stuffed" and "most of" I could agree with you, I don't think I agree with the thrust of your argument as opposed to rayiner.

Spent... 7? 8? years in baltimore, reading the police twitter and betting on how many triple homicides would occur today became a rather morbid drinking game. Certain areas, some even 2-3 blocks off Charles st are such that many of my friends didn't want to walk back to their houses alone, at least one was mugged off his bike on Charles itself, another had his house broken into, another peer was the "samurai sword" kid, if you remember that story. Even my breakdancing crew would joke about risks of going to certain venues on north ave, and we had a bunch of people who grew up in the center city there.

In short, I'd assert that "the areas out of the white cross" make up _much_ of Baltimore, even if it's not the much most tourists visit (e.g. anything outside inner harbor) and EVEN within the "white cross" we were VERY aware of the city we were in.

Are you talking about the mentally ill homeless folks? Are you talking about the people who are scamming tourists into giving them money with convincing stories every day?

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