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IG_Semmelweiss

I have another thesis.

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.

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This is a bizarre take. The recovery from 2008 was the slowest recovery in US history (marketed as the longest period of growth in US history), and it probably permanently damaged the size of the workforce. Prime age employment was down IIRC 10% for years.

I think expecting to get back to 2008 as recovery is misguided. The bubble of 2008 wasn't real growth, it was a bubble.

I never understood the expectation that the upswing from every debt cycle can be equally fast compared to the last wave. Doesn’t this assume that all economic conditions pre/post 2008 are the same?

Financial products and regulation changed. Cloud, gig apps, smartphone apps, social media all changed the work landscape right around 2008.

then the states that cut off the extra unemployment early would have seen greater job growth then the states that kept it up. they didn't.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-that-cut-unemployment-be...

People love talking about how government spending causes an artificial boom. In my opinion it just increases flexibility in the debt market by giving unemployed people access to government debt via unemployment benefits. Of course, it's still a band aid and we should figure out other ways like sharing work by making the hours per week one can work flexible according to what happens in the economy.

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.

We are not past the crisis. Unlike most financial crises, the underlying crisis is still ongoing 18+ months pasts the start

> “something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis”

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.

The unemployment expansion ended July 31. Yes, it’s relevant, but the article is about this month, not two months ago.

There was a series of stimulus from 2008-2011.

Isn't COVID unemployment all over now, though?

It depends on state. Red States happen to have recovered better.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-covid-recovery/90947

To be clear: this site defines "recovery" by combining COVID and economic factors - equally weighted.

If we look solely at COVID transmission rate, that's a somewhat different picture: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...

Good catch. Actually, we were talking only about economic recovery.

NYTimes had a great writeup on the uneven recovery of the employment sector but I can't find it.

Fair. I was mildly triggered when scanning this thread, so thought I'd make the metric clear to anyone else.

Back on topic, if you sort by Leasure/Travel or Economy/Labor, it is pretty clear that red states have the lead.

It seems like red state like Texas, Atlanta are doing worse. Small/low population red states recovered faster.

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.

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