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Comment by reggieband | Hacker News Reader

> They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic.

In a thread on HN someone commented that the 3m unemployment figure was only 1% of the population. I had to take a moment to let that sink in.

It makes me worried about a future dominated by technocrats.

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I think that's an extreme position, not a common one. I've also heard similar from a few on the right. "Only 1% of the population would die. That's not worth risking the economy over." And another gem: "People die every year, but what we are going to do about people losing their jobs?"

There's nothing uniquely non-empathetic about technocrats.

a better percentage to use would be the delta in unemployment rate, e.g. 3M / (# of people who want to work).

This would be approximately 3M / 158M [0], or a 1.8% rise in the unemployment rate.

In the 2008 recession, we saw a total unemployment rate of almost 10%, so we'd have to lose an additional 7-8M jobs to get to that level.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm

Considering the fed is warning about the possibility of 30% unemployment [0], an additional 7M could come next week.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-23/fed-...

yes - I didn't mention it explicitly in my comment - but this much unemployment, coming this fast, is unprecedented in US history.

let's be clear - it's a 1.8% percentage point increase, relative to the entire US population. but data from the U.S. Dept of Labor (graphed in The Guardian [0]) shows weekly unemployment claims just shot up from around 250k to around 3.25 million, which is a 1300% increase

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemploy...

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