The rich world is enjoying an unprecedented jobs boom | Hacker News Reader

The rich world is enjoying an unprecedented jobs boom

economist.com

57 pointspseudolus23 comments

Unfortunately the unemployment statistics that they base this on are a bit wonky. You are now classified as employed if you work 1 hour a month. You are not classified as unemployed if you are not actively looking for work. Many unemployed give up after a while.

BLS considers 6 levels of unemployment, U1-U6, which covers all of this. We commonly report U3 to match historical definitions and how other countries report their numbers.

And nothing in the way it's measured has changed.

Also U1-U6 move pretty much in lockstep, so there is no real need to report the various flavors except for academic checking.

> Many unemployed give up after a while.

The labor force participation rate has been ticking up, so those who once left are now returning.

And unemployment is decreasing.

And median wages are increasing.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Thank you for the informative comment. Through the years I've seen various far fetched explainers about U1...U6 supposedly obscuring the real state of the economy. You made it clear for me, as practical & pragmatic measures.

Yeah, unemployment numbers, like inflation numbers, draws a whole host of crazy ideas, but all can be debunked with a little careful research on the why of things, and by checking some external consequences if these numbers are a lie.

If you want to see something neat, here is a graph from FRED of U1-U6, showing how well correlated they are. You can download the datasets (I have) and fiddle with them.

At the end of the day, U3 is a really good number because it's used internationally and historically, allowing comparisons. The others are nice too, if for nothing else than to counter the people that dislike the definition of U3 and think it's a scam. It's all tracked for all to see.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/05/the-many-flavors-of-...

Just as the experts predicted self driving cars and super human AI being right around the corner, the elimination of jobs was greatly exaggerated. The free market never stops inventing new products, new businesses, and new jobs. The left describes the poor as living in a soul-sucking hellscape yet the place that most resembles such a situation is on the streets of SF.

Tbf self driving cars are at a point where there's still 99%+ of the job loss remaining. Only toy cars are doing any real self driving at this point. After taxis are automated and then commercial trucking is when we can say how much displacement there will be. Similar for AI - at this point it's still novelty as far as where it will go.

Trucking will probably be first, no?

I would expect so, as there's big money behind it.

Sorry, but who is the left in this scenario? I'm finding it harder and harder to distinguish who is for the free and global economy and who is against it in the US.

The 'left' in these scenarios tends to be no one in particular, just the strawman required to make the argument.

somehow sf create its poor homeless? Perhaps by being a very expensive place they made it happen more likely to happen to marginalized people.

Did they make the ones in boston, nyc, atlanta, seattle, salt lake city? It's a nationwide problem. it's bad in lot of places.

> Across the rich world, wages below two-thirds of the national median are becoming rarer, not more common.

So... the median worker is making something closer to minimum wage than before?

Also, the article doesn’t talk about the fully employed rate:

What percentage of the jobs are full time with benefits?

What percentage of those leverage the education of the employee?

> So... the median worker is making something closer to minimum wage than before?

I believe they're expressing that wages are increasing and the inequality in the lower half is decreasing. As is spelled out in the line previous, increasing minimum wage are but one factor.

As for your other questions, there are a couple of points. First, the notion of "benefits" doesn't translate easily across national borders. What employer-dericed benefits are common, their costs, and so on can all vary wildly. This makes comparisons very difficult.

Your second question, about education, is an excellent one! It sounds like a great subject to do follow-up work on. I confess I have no idea how to go about calculating such a thing data from N different countries, but I'm sure someone has a good way of figuring this out.

Interesting to compare this 'unprecedented jobs boom' with forecasts made in 2011: https://buzzmachine.com/2011/08/05/the-jobless-future/

Jeff Jarvis said, "We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future."

Alfons wrote: "This is an unprecedented time in history, been a long time coming, but never the less, a not if but when phenomenon. I have been thinking, writing and talking about this for over 40 years, and was roundly ridiculed every step of the way. I told you so! Nice to see many people finally catching on. Socialism is the only way to mitigate the situation, there is no solution as far as I can see."

Roland wrote: "today, global labor arbitrage moves meaningful work to India/China... increases in computational power, robotics, etc, reduce the amount of white collar and blue collar work in total...all western nations, esp ones which don't export raw materials, will have major declines in living standards. How to stop it? ... In ten years, it'll be virtually unstoppable"

I wonder how these people feel about their past statements.

Percent earning income is just one relevant metric. Income stability, income per hour, location of stable and higher income work, upward mobility in income class, ratio of income to quality of life goods such as homes, healthcare, and education.

These are all metrics that also need to be considered to have any meaningful discussion about the state of society, and I wouldn’t say they’re rosy for many in the US.

>Thanks to the jobs boom, unemployment, once the central issue of political economy, has all but disappeared from the political landscape in many countries. It has been replaced by a series of complaints about the quality and direction of work. These are less tangible and harder to judge than employment statistics. The most important are that automation is destroying opportunities and that work, though plentiful, is low-quality and precarious. “Our jobs market is being turned into a sea of insecurity,” says Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party.

From the article.

They do spend some time engaging this. However their rebuttal is insufficient to assuage, at least in this article.

Underemployment is currently very strong, so something must be wrong with this belief.

Any one else note that there's no listed author of this article? Or am I just blind?

That is normal for The Economist.

> The right should acknowledge that jobs have boomed without the bonfire of regulations that typically forms its labour-market policy

At least in the U.S. Trump has aggressively deregulated the economy. Naturally, deregulation is great for business since regulations prevent companies from offloading negative externalities into the environment and onto their customers and employees, rather than paying the costs to minimize them. What happens when new leadership comes along and decides to pass laws that reduce the amount of mining waste that can be legally dumped into the waterways?

Is this exclusive content of the economist or is there a non-paywalled mirror?

Full text available here: https://outline.com/CECGyk

I thought we all knew the logical unemployment rate is a lie.

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