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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

As long as there are social distancing and shut downs you are gonna get a suppression of workers that is thrown out of the job because of it. And most of them will be low income, hence a “K shape”. Plus a lot of the low income work are not remote-able jobs.

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Additionally, much of the interim unemployment benefits were explicitly designed to keep people from wanting to go back to work -- if my choices were back to work at a job without adequate social distancing or design of safety screens and blocking for workers or making 150% of my former salary staying on unemployment, guess which one I'd choose?

I strongly expect to see the lower income unemployment rate drop pretty hard in the nearer future, given that not all states are using the FEMA assistance for their unemployment systems, and even with the number that are, that money will run out and benefits will go back to pre-COVID levels of lower-than-your-original salary. Once that really starts setting in, and with the high job posting rate, employment will jump up.

This ignores the group of people who have pre-existing conditions and really can't go back to work without possibly even excessive social distancing, but I'm unsure the magnitude of impact that will have on the labor force...

> This ignores the group of people who have pre-existing conditions and really can't go back to work.

...and the group of people who have pre-existing conditions, but can’t afford to miss work, get sick and go bankrupt, become disabled or die.

I swear I'm not trolling but I keep seeing this "K-shaped recovery" term and I still don't understand how I'm supposed to see a K in these plots. Am I supposed to ignore the bottom-left leg of the K? Or was COVID initially benefitting low-income people somehow?

I hate to say "benefitting", but on a purely financial basis it was - average household income rose 10% in April due to stimulus checks and increased unemployment benefits.

I've heard that too, but the effect doesn't seem to have been large enough to show up in any of these plots I've seen (including in the linked post). Did I miss one where it's more clear?

There's not a good word for this shape: -<

So "they" seem to have settled on "K" for it.

Thanks for confirming that. I assumed that the downturn was supposed to be part of the shape too, by analogy with earlier(?) terms like "V-shaped recovery", but I guess not.

If I can suggest an alternative, what about "Y-shape" where you tilt your head a little bit so that the bottom of the Y points slightly to the right? (Edit: after googling this it seems I'm not the first to propose this.)

Forked recovery. As in 'we are forked'.

Unicode to the rescue: 𝈄 or ≺

>As long as there are social distancing and shut downs

The economic problems started playing out before the shutdowns.

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