America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Childcare used to be cheap, but overregulation at the state and local level have made it extremely expensive. For example, extreme caregiver to child ratio regulations really drive up costs.
On top of that you need a lawyer and a pile of permits just to open up a daycare center in several states now. Childcare could be a good job for lots of low-skill people, and could free up parents to re-enter the workforce.
Instead I imagine we’ll take the easy way out like we always do: print money and give it to parents and caregivers, which will not solve the problem and will just drive up childcare costs further.
Take a sample of all the last few major economic crisis. For example the 2008 credit crisis.
Check if available jobs persisted open, 18+ months subsequent to crisis.
If they didnt, then something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis.
Take a look at confounding factors. What do you see?
-Huge subsidy of unemployment via federal checks and unemployment expansions.
Pay matters, but pay does not exist in a vaccum. Work pay is assessed relative to other pay, including pay to not work.
If we look solely at COVID transmission rate, that's a somewhat different picture: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...
NYTimes had a great writeup on the uneven recovery of the employment sector but I can't find it.
Back on topic, if you sort by Leasure/Travel or Economy/Labor, it is pretty clear that red states have the lead.
A lot of blue states - big & small seems recovered faster, except California. California recovered better than Florida. But all other reports shows California economy did better than most states in 2020.
In fact, overall it seems that higher vaccinated states recovered faster.
How about that, during this crisis, workers risked catching a deadly disease? Many have seen relatives and friends die.
The financial crisis didn’t make going to work potentially deadly. Covid-19 did.
Financial products and regulation changed. Cloud, gig apps, smartphone apps, social media all changed the work landscape right around 2008.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-that-cut-unemployment-be...
The fact that entire people end up unemployed and then need to be bailed out by the state is just grossly inefficient compared to e.g. firing 50% of their work hours. I say this because every human contributes a baseline of demand for things like housing and groceries. Firing workers also fires the consumer that demands housing and groceries which leads to a downward spiral that is much worse than just the inefficient production of goods and services that nobody wants.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Edit:
St. Louis Fed quote from article on unemployment
> For perspective, in June, we were short by about 7.1 million jobs compared with the pre-pandemic level. This analysis suggests that this gap will only close about half by June 2022.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2021/october/labor...
I'm skeptical that trying to minimize unemployment, let alone maximize labor force participation, is a good thing for the government to devote resources to do. Optimizers tend to take shortcuts that don't accomplish the real desired goal and have seriously undesirable side-effects, and we see that play out in the unemployment situation as well as others, like standardized tests in schooling, when the government tries to be one. However, even in basic fact-reporting, I think the unemployment statistic is a joke. It's been so overtuned to functioning as a means-testing mechanism for a welfare program that it doesn't actually give anyone not interested in that very useful information
- Almost million died due to Covid. - A lot of olders or those who can retire, left the workforce - Some took flexible jobs - like uber/lift or food delivery or groceries or amazon delivery - Legal immigration is closed for year and half. That is almost 2 million working individuals - Few people that I know who got covid, and are in 40s & 50s don't feel that they are recovered 100%. After 10 months, my manager can't smell as she used to. - People like my wife who don't need to work are staying home.
I am sure there are few other groups that I don't know about. That is a lot of people missing from the workforce and won't show up in unemployment data.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Readers: I hope you don't mind me momentarily intervening in the voting process, but I will post the comment below for others who may not have show-dead turned on to see.
EDIT: Even more curious, the majority of this accounts otherwise normal posts seem to be [dead] as well. Is this a result of HN shadowban, or is this outside influence by a very motivated dissenter? Curious what I've stumbled upon here, as there are quite a number of accounts like this I'm noticing lately.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=newaccount2021
https://imgur.com/1CUqXja.png 0 minutes, dead.
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newaccount2021 [dead] [–]
I think its more basic:
1. the restaurant they used to work at isn't there anymore
2. they moved back in with the parents and stopped giving a shit about the future
3. still living off their unemployment and stimulus...it will go to zero one day, but not today
4. even with a substantial raise, most jobs they qualify for will still leave them impoverished, so whats the point
America's unemployed need deflation more than they need a raise. A 50% drop in housing costs will serve them better than a 15% raise. The number of Americans who would benefit from a substantial deflation rises every day.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement...
[2] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007589/tired-of-running-in-p...
Except servicing existing debt would become nearly impossible as wages went down, but that pesky car payment stayed at $500/mo.
older Americans with high debt loads are DOA no matter what
Advertising companies, sales people, car dealers or realtors are all trying to convince you to spend more so they get their commission or more revenue but ultimately you can always refuse. You can always decide to live well within your means. The truth is that pretty much everything on the market that is free of coercion is getting cheaper.
Housing doesn't work like that because location is a natural monopoly. It's a basic human need that cannot be produced and jobs unnecessarily cluster in cities forcing people to move there bidding up prices endlessly. The rule of thumb has become "If you can afford the house, you can afford everything that fits inside it." Wanna build a machine shop with $100k worth of tools? Cheap compared to the $600k to $2 million house. That's the thing. Strangely enough, literally everything is getting cheap except real estate. The story that inflation has been ruining the working class for the last 10 years just doesn't add up. There is no reason why housing shouldn't obey the same trend other than artificial scarcity of either housing near jobs or jobs near vacant housing.
Also, do you happen to know why this person's seemingly normal comments appear to be [dead] within 0 minutes of their post?
I ask because I find 2 or 3 of these accounts each week and have been wondering why they aren't allowed to participate, and by what mechanic.
Housing and public transportation. The two things cities don't want to fix, because city boards are fascists that know only the wealthy of the city control it.
IMO we are facing costs and painful trade offs:
* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action was shutting the economy down during Covid to minimize deaths. Well, OK, there is a price for that in terms of destroying businesses and livelihoods, of loneliness and isolation. A lot of people are now stressed out, out of work - and those jobs are gone. Yes, new jobs will take their place, but not necessarily the same jobs in the same place.
* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action is to suspend evictions when people lose their jobs during covid. It was unfair to lose your apartment if you lost your job. Well, OK, but that means that rental prices are now out of whack from what people are earning and the new job situation. That inventory is held back from the market and from (downward) price pressure.
* Many also insisted that the "moral" course of action is to not have professional versus trade tracking in schools, that every high school should be "college prep", and everyone should go to to college. Well, OK, there is a cost for that in terms of not having a trade school infrastructure and a lot of people with no marketable skills even if they attended college or a college prep high school.
The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. By pretending we'll all just be professionals, we have a huge mass of people who have no careers and no opportunity to engage in truly skilled work, together with acute shortages of things like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, general contractors, etc.
So yeah, life for a lot of people is very bleak. The take away is not to "warn" employers that they should manufacture lots of non-existent jobs for workers, but to fix our educational system so that it produces the kinds of people our economy needs, rather than the kinds of workers we think we want to be. Then rely on church attendance and government income insurance to take care of our moral concerns.
That is the most silk glove way of saying "humans should serve the economy not the other way around". Which to be honest is no world I want to live in.
It does not matter whether you like it or don't like it, it's reality, and denying reality is foolish. Foolishness is what causes most of the bad outcomes we see in the world, including the bleak lives of so many who were victims of good intentions which I gave examples of in my post.
When people convince themselves that it's unfair to make unemployed people leave their apartments and are then shocked, shocked, that rental rates go up, that is foolishness. When people convince themselves that everyone should go to college, and are shocked, shocked that we have an army of unskilled workers, it is again foolishness. When people decide that advanced placement is unfair because the rich benefit and are then shocked, shocked that the rich end up benefiting even more as only private schools have advanced placement, then this is even more foolishness.
But some people insist on living a world where society makes foolish choices rather than wise choices. Fortunately societies with too many such people don't last very long.
You may be familiar with the metaphor of growing and dividing the pie. The hard thing is to make the pie large. It's much easier to divide the pie. If the pie is huge, even an 'unequal' distribution of pieces is an improvement over no pie.
When people obsess about dividing the pie equally, they always ignore how the pie is grown in the first place. This is what happened to us in the USSR - we were all equal but nobody had anything.
If large countries like the US had done a proper shutdown, the Delta variant might not be spreading around right now claiming huge numbers of lives. For example, if you want to avoid having covid cripple your economy, one useful measure would be to ensure your front-line workers (food service, caregivers, etc) have protected leave so they can recuperate at home if they get covid or go get vaccinated, then return to work full-time. Instead the US tells everyone to suck it up and come to work while they're miserable and infectious. Is it any surprise our death count is enormous and the economy is in tatters?
Rental prices were already a nightmare before the pandemic, if anything rental prices tanked for a while in some areas during it. I don't think the eviction suspension is connected to that - it had bad impacts but I don't know that you can convincingly argue that one of those impacts was price.
1. the restaurant they used to work at isn't there anymore
2. they moved back in with the parents and stopped giving a shit about the future
3. still living off their unemployment and stimulus...it will go to zero one day, but not today
4. even with a substantial raise, most jobs they qualify for will still leave them impoverished, so whats the point
America's unemployed need deflation more than they need a raise. A 50% drop in housing costs will serve them better than a 15% raise. The number of Americans who would benefit from a substantial deflation rises every day.