Number Unemployed for 27 Weeks and Over

The site refers to it as the ‘prime working age’ and breaks down the other age categories elsewhere. Check it out at https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/08/the-composition-effe...

It's a vestige of the old manufacturing days.

Women at home I guess.

In places with a large immigrant population, you can replace it with English-speaking ability.

Fluent: economy is fucked.

Poor: economy is doing well.

I've read variations on it a few times. The idea is that older people who get laid off in a recession still need to get a paycheck, are willing to work for less to get something, and so end up beating out the younger people who'd normally be in these jobs just entering the workforce / doing it part-time.

I find everything about Zoom awkward. Plus it's caused meetings to explode. "Let's hop on Zoom" vs. finding and booking a conference room and physically going there. Barriers like that tend to reduce low-value meetings at least a little.

My perspective:

If it goes well for the first few moments it's all good, I had a semi-interview that basically turned into a 4hr chat about programming, foreign policy etc (I suspect the boredom contributes).

If it goes badly, not only am I being watched and inspected by potentially more than one person, I can also see myself. I hate the sound of my own voice, I really hate the look of my own mouth let alone face.

Good question.

In my case, I’ve always been good at in-person interviews. I’ll be nervous at first, but over the course of the interview, I can read the body language of everyone in the room and quickly get comfortable, and by the end of a successful interview everyone shakes hands and comes away feeling like I’m nearly part of the team.

On Zoom, it starts off the same way, but never gets better. I can’t really tell if anyone is really satisfied by my answers, and I’ll either ramble on, or end with “I’m not really sure I answered your question...”

At the end of the interview, they’ll invite me to ask some questions of my own, and I try to go in depth into understanding how they approach collaborating remotely. I feel like the answers are sometimes evasive and I come away wondering if my questions are too intrusive. Maybe a lot of teams have disagreements about this, and I shouldn’t ask them openly?

It would incentivize them to get jobs, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean that they’d be able to. They might even become less likely to find work as they’re less able to meet their basic needs.

In my state I had to provide a log of my attempts to get employed, so Unemployment Benefits never disincentivized me in the first place.

After my benefit ran out, more opportunities didn't magically appear. I was still just as incentivized and still just as jobless.

I thought these numbers were unemployment claims, but looking into it a bit more seems like this is a survey. I was confused by if you can only claim unemployment for on average 26 weeks, then the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or over would not include those people. But a survey would probably account for these people.

What they do is highly debatable, while it gives some stability, people now complain that they have to work again for a little more money + there is some potential to abuse the system, e.g. companies get money and their staff is still working full-time. The market might backfire at some point and we should not assume that there will be a post-covid.

Being laid off means the company could hire you back if conditions improve.

I’ve seen laid off people rehired.

huh. 1983 looks slightly worse, but that's really about it.

The chart picked up sharply starting in 2016. Lowest point was in July 2015.

No one here likes Trump. But if any of you have a good explanation, I’d love to hear it, rather than whatever point it is you are trying to make.

> idk if you remember it

There are people coming "online" so to speak who weren't consciously making memories until years after the recession hit. I am now the ripe old age of 20, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever. I know some people significantly younger than me who could write well enough you wouldn't know it.

Great recession? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession

I should have said "endogenous." The difference between 2020, 2008, and 2001 is that in 2001 there was a substantial overinvestment in an unproven field, in 2008 there was a widespread underpricing of risk, and in 2020 a virus hit. 2020 doesn't say anything* about the broader economy - there's nothing "wrong" in the 2019 economy to inform 2020 or 2021 or beyond.

The difference is worth noting because an awful lot of the punditry's model for recessions is to assume there needs to be a structural adjustment that involves some amount of turmoil and there's nothing that should be done to prevent that. In this case, there's no reason to assume that, and no reason to assume that economic turmoil is either necessary or beneficial. A disaster happened, and we should view it like a structure fire, not a bankruptcy.

*except of course that a huge portion of the country has a precarious living situation, our health care system is a disaster, and our political system was wholly unprepared for any actual challenge. There's all kinds of deep foundational ills in the economy, but none of those would have caused a sudden severe spike in unemployment absent the pandemic.

I kind of think of it as the economy gets kicked in the crotch every ~10 +/- a few years by something, but it’s usually a different something every time.

We haven't had a pandemic remotely approaching 2020/21 in at least 100 years. It's clearly a black swan event, not an intrinsic factor in the economy.