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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Unemployment is even less useful then GDP. At least GDP is some sort of proxy for how well-off a country is.

You can have 0% unemployment (I hear North Korea is currently there), with mostly poverty-line wages with everyone making a meager third-world living, or you can have 30% unemployment with everyone being relatively better off, with fewer people working more productive jobs, and paying for an overall social safety net/others to go to school/raise children/retire. I'd far rather live in the second society, then the first.

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While it's true you can't have 0% unemployment in a free market, going from, say, 8% to 5% is a big deal that helps in a lot of ways.

30% unemployment, the way it's normally defined, means 30% of your population are looking for jobs and unable to find them. Which is an unmitigated disaster.

There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

They are not represented in unemployment numbers (Because as it turns out 'I need to earn $25/hour to be able to afford daycare for the kids, but I could never get a job like that, and I've stopped looking') does not get counted in UE stats.

Putting those people to work would not actually make any of us better off... Yet it would reduce unemployment.

The point of my post was that jobs are not created equal. 0% unemployment because everyone is working jobs that pay very little is an unmitigated economic disaster. 30% unemployment because a smaller group of people are only working productive, highly remunerative jobs is an incredible economic success.

It does, however, raise the hackles on a few people.

>There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

>They are not represented in unemployment numbers ...

Depends on the set of numbers you're looking at. DoL produces different numbers that encompass different assumptions. Normally these people are not considered unemployed, so putting them to work wouldn't change the unemployment statistics.

And I don't believe having 30% of the population carrying the other 70% is at all an economic success. That's an unstable situation that can't continue.

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