German Unemployment Declines as Economy Poised for More Growth | Hacker News Reader

German Unemployment Declines as Economy Poised for More Growth

bloomberg.com

49 pointsdenzil_correa38 comments

Lies. Merkels government just changed how the number is calculated. They created programs for unemployed (1 euro jobber, "Aufstocker") and removed them from the statistic.

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

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

The growing income inequality tells the real story.

If I understand this correctly, currently there are 7.3M "mini jobs" in Germany - 733,600 (2.4%) lesser than last year. 2.6M (approx. 36%) of these mini jobs are side jobs i.e. jobs taken to earn additional money (may include students as well).

https://statistik.arbeitsagentur.de/Navigation/Statistik/Sta...

There was a study [1][2] which showed most of the job growth in recent years in the US has been via 'temporary' or part-time jobs. So the recovery that Obama took credit for using the blanket statistics such as 'unemployment rate' is heavily skewed towards people who compromised with jobs that were worse than the one they held before the crisis.

As the study mentions, this was heavily influenced by the effects of the 'gig economy' via tech companies which created a larger percentage of contractor jobs.

Instead of pretending the gig economy will go away because we don't like it, maybe we should strengthen the safety net to protect these types of contract workers. Such as expanding unemployment to contract workers who are employed for a certain timeframe. Which would also help provide protections to the large number of web developers, designers, and other tech jobs which are a growing in number in recent years who don't fit into the typical 9-to-5 framework.

[1] Source: https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all... (note: this trend started before Obama, within the last years of Bush's administration, but that would be less newsworthy headline)

[2] the actual study https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/f...

Long Story short translated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly because it's bullshit.

I think he is paraphrasing a quote from Kurt Vonnegut.

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

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158414-america-is-the-wealth...

Yeah, we're constantly organising charity drives for the Heidelberg tent cities in the EU.

Get a grip. It's a prosperous country with a decent social safety net and an extremely large middle class.

And a record of electing sensible moderates, but I'm sure that's a complete coincidence.

No one needs to get donated food. These leftovers are given away for free instead of throwing them away. Some people are using this for propaganda, and to many are falling for it.

Sure? Even retired people who worked their whole life don't have enough money to buy food: http://www.mdr.de/sachsen-anhalt/ansturm-tafel-sachsen-anhal...

Even in stronger regions like "Baden Württemberg" everybody can see a lot of people with the same problem but it's easier to look away and talk about propaganda.

While your statement is indeed true, the German way of calculating unemployment is actually more conservative than the US way. There the ones who stop looking for work are dropped from the statistics...

That is nothing new though. So in the boundaries of what this statistic actually measures, the number improved.

The "real" statistic isn't a secret either and published at the same time by the same agency for everyone to see.

http://m.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/a-1133354.html

But that article says the numbers improved considerably.

Using the same method (and tricks) to calculate unemployment, the numbers went down from 7 million in 2005 to 4 million today.

That's a very good article with a very fair description of the situation.

There is no growing inequality. There are more one person househols and immigrants with lower wages.

I think a citation is needed, because I see a lot of cites of the opposite. One from a long list on a quick Google search: http://www.pulse.ng/world/angela-merkel-germany-wealth-inequ... http://www.france24.com/en/20170323-germany-wealth-inequalit... http://www.dw.com/en/study-income-inequality-reaches-new-hig... https://www.google.com/search?q=german+wealth+inequality&tbs...

Your cited sites don't care for the reason. But Germany had a lot of immigration of people which make more money in Germany than they could at home, but less than the more native population.

Singles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/11/19/the-bi...

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

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

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

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

Makes sense. I'm of the mind the immigration allowance will prob be net good; but short term it has to negatively impact honest unemployment numbers

What "net good" do you conceive exactly? Of importing 1 million unskilled, probably uneducated individuals that wouldn't be able to speak the local language without months/years of language learning?

If you have unemployment in your country then, by definition, you don't have enough jobs for the individuals already in your country. That is the whole point of the unemployment metric. To determine how well in-sync your economy is with the rate of population growth. If anything, unemployment should be a signal to kick people out, not let them in. However, neither up/down fixes it, because it's not a fixed pie. But your ratio is most certainly not going to be "net good" long-term or short-term by importing individuals that are unable to contribute.

As long as people are free to choose what kind of job they want to do, the optimal (from an economic sense) number for unemployment is not zero. Germany is very close to that optimal point, and it's debatable if the unemployment rate isn't actually too small.

America is pretty great and I criticise it because it is my home and I wish it to become better. It became great by allowing immigrants in; not just the smartest defectors from China, Russia and Germany but regular people.

> 1 Million uneducated people

If they offer education and are successful; someone like Elon Musk is 1/1 Million. Many will contribute; and some might return home in large enough numbers to bring some German culture back with them

A newborn baby is also an unskilled, uneducated individual that wouldn't be able to speak the local language without months/years of language learning. Presumably there is a net benefit in this case.

I think there is a net good to some unskilled immigration - say 1% of the population each year. But I'm willing to be proven wrong. Is there some objective measure we can agree on which approximates 'net benefit'? For example, if total tax paid by these migrants over their lifetime is more than total welfare payments, would that indicate a net benefit?

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

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

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

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

source: https://www.oxfam.de/ueber-uns/aktuelles/2017-01-16-8-maenne...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it says is that Walmart's wages aren't high enough.

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

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

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

What would these "various reasons" be? At what point do unsubstantiated criticisms help fuel the fake news epidemic?

I don't know but it's here and it is an epidemic. That's why I asked my question.

I think in 2017 participation rate is a way better number to follow in Western countries.

It's well known that the unemployment figure widely cited doesn't include discouraged workers and underemployed workers. In fact, the BLS says that when they publish the number. They also publish all of the other data you would need to get a great picture of discouraged workers and underemployment.

The fact that you find it difficult to believe but have made no effort to enlighten yourself further is telling.

This isn't about me. My comment was about a perspective shared by many people that unemployment numbers are fudged because they are a political football and how this further undermines reporting.

Project less, empathize more.

I totally agree with you. And I do empathize completely with people who do not understand what is being put in front of them but are still asked to make a value judgment. I'm in that position myself sometimes and it's awful.

I think it's furthermore definitely a problem that politicians tout one number. But it's unfortunate that folks blame the number in that case. There's nothing wrong with the number - and all numbers are fudged, by definition!

So I think we have a massive failure to teach critical thinking in our education system. We can't continue to, on the one hand have a political system predicated on informed citizenry and on the other do everything possible to prevent those citizens from enlightening themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com