US unemployment has been under 4% for the longest streak since the Vietnam War

> We find that the number of workers in the gig economy grew between 8.8 and 14.4 percent from 2002 to 2014. For comparison, overall employment increased by 7.2 percent over the same period. Independent contractors constitute a significant portion of gig workers, and grew by 2.1 million workers from 2010 to 2014, accounting for 28.8 percent of all jobs added during the recovery. The online gig economy has experienced significant growth as well. Faster growth in taxis and boarding rooms since the arrival of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb indicates that online gig jobs are transforming the labor force. In particular, the data suggest that the ride sharing industry has helped bring in an additional $519 million in economic activity from 2009 to 2013, and created 22,000 jobs in the sector.

(2015): https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/independent-con...

This study also appears to use 1099 filings to gauge growth (2015 also): https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/evaluating-g...

Here’s a more recent study that gives a balanced take and uses BLS data (2018)

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/independent-workers-and-t...

I’m unqualified to endorse any of these studies, I just figured that I’d share them. Trying to parse the formal distinctions between “gig workers”, independent contractors, and other “nonstandard workers” is a lot of work.

GenX had cushy youths and young adult lives, the “start a family” time, the opportunity to afford a house or 3 by now.

GenX is the cohort leading the decline in allegiance to church and American civic life pageantry. The original “eh capitalism is just old guys selling high minded memes about human future just like religion” generation. The let’s forget “stuff” for experience.

They did not have the same pressure to sell widgets Boomers raised by a Silent Generation of post world war shellshocked Cold War paranoids huffing leaded gas fumes.

The only way I see them “shining” is by laying low like they do and let the next generation get started living a life decoupled from the olds demands we serve their vacuous decrees.

Therefore, if the demand for goods/services doesn't really drop (aka, that retirement money getting spent), but productivity does, it would point to inflation.

I’m not trying to refute you. I understand why a publication would prefer not to link to other sites (and I commend MSNBC or choosing to do so according to my observations).

I’m more so intrigued by NPR not linking to anything, anywhere. Especially not a source. The numbers come directly from “the Labor Department” and the rest of the article is sentiment.

I wanted to facetiously parrot Elon Musk’s “NPR is state-run media” claims, but if the attempt at humor were to fall flat I’d hate for the more serious observation to not be considered.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/business/taylor-swift-new-yor...

Second one as well:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/weather/winter-storms-snow-no...

First one on MSNBC, too:

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ahead-se...

Love your confidence though!

In the long term, everyone pays market rate.

I'm tired of the crowd that for whatever reason needs to downplay and attack any positive fact or stat about the US.

From your own sources:

> overall employee contributions continued to hold steady for the first half of the year, and a greater share of participants upped their contribution rate than decreased it.

> “The data from our report tells two stories — one of balance growth, optimism from younger employees and maintaining contributions, contrasted with a trend of increased plan withdrawals,”

U6 is 7%[0] for the month of December 2023.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

For example, I haven't had a job for almost 6 months but I've put 'self-employed' on LinkedIn and have been working on my startup during this time (and already have a fully working product which is easier to use, more scalable and more effective than the competition) but I don't think I'm going to be able to find users in the current environment due to existing media/tech monopoly and insurmountable trust barriers as well as a discriminatory ESG/DEI environment which makes it impossible for me (a straight white male) to raise funding to pay for advertising.

I know other people in similar situations. Apparently in Australia, half of the working age population is on welfare and at the same time there are shortages of many essential services like daycare which prevent people who have children from working as one parent has to stay home. Apparently the government is making it hard for daycare businesses to expand which is driving the shortage.

Also, tax brackets in Australia are based on individual income, not household income and therefore, taxes are very high if only one partner is working (which is often the case due to the shortage of daycare centers as mentioned above).

Property prices are also very high and rent is very high. The government is also ramping up immigration to prop up property prices + rents and foreigners end up taking many of the jobs which increases competition, drives down wages and makes paying rent even harder.

It's like everything is broken and the brokenness compounds. Even the incentives are broken so it's not even fixable with the current political system.

The media and funding environment just doesn't allow new tech ventures to launch and find their first users unless the founders are in some special in-group.

I don't even want to get into the details of what happened to me up until that point in my career. It's been an epic tale about the struggle for survival... Not in some remote forest in the Amazon or lost on some remote island like Robinson Crusoe, but merely survival in a profoundly dysfunctional socio-economic system.

It was like WTF. Obviously the entire economy has turned into some insane scheme. There's no way these sudden market changes are natural.

What sickens me about modern society is that whenever they cheat you, they always accompany it with gaslighting... Which is exactly what this 'record low unemployment' rhetoric is.

Just like ESG/DEI/wokeness it's pure media gaslighting designed to cover up the fact that they had started discriminating against straight white people. Now whenever a young white person tells their parents "I can't get a job because they're discriminating against me," they give a weird look and respond with something like "Uhhhh, no, no, no, it's everyone else who is being discriminated against, that's what the media said. Sounds like you're just lazy, too lazy to even come up with your own excuses."

Thankfully I'm good at explaining things and my parents are intelligent so I think they understand what's happening now but there was a moment of tension. Reminded me of the COVID vaccine mandate + media hysteria breaking families apart.

I try not to take anything seriously and just focus on survival. It's like everything is fucked in the most optimal way imaginable. Optimized for fuckery, not efficiency...

We can be sure it is objectively relevant because it is what people are experiencing, which is of course reality. If you can demonstrate that there is some other non-employment related reason people feel this way, does that mean they don't feel it? Or are somehow wrong to? Where does that even get you?

Maybe there is something else! There are probably lots of things going on. People keep saying this is affecting them though, and we have to believe them that it is.

Participation rate is much more meaningful IMO

Example, the participation rate is currently ~67%, so its inverse is 33%.

This means that 33% of the working age population are currently not employed

"The data reveal that as of late 2023, most workers are earning more, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they were one year prior, and the fraction of workers receiving real wage increases is about the same as it was in the years before the pandemic. The data also suggest that most individual workers are earning more today than they were before the pandemic; every prime-age worker cohort has higher inflation-adjusted median wages than before the pandemic. "

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/chart-wage-growth-beating-i...

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-a...

>>> the normal people are faring compared to other/previous years.

The economic disparity is gross, you can't argue excess.

Comparing to the past is isn't going to play out the way you think. What time period do you want to compare to? Is that a period where "better off" was for a narrow segment of the population, where "better off" was robbing tomorrow?

The problem is that life looks a lot like the classic game design dilemma of "power creep".

I'm not sure that this is 100% accurate, but its close enough to convey the point: https://compasscaliforniablog.com/have-american-homes-change...

If it was 1950, no cell phone (1 house phone bill), no internet, no cable, no streaming, no Spotify, no computer... You might have a tv (one, singular), radio, those are one time costs. Power, water, phone, food, house/transport (and likely 1 car for many family's). My neighborhood grocery story is a gym... so we traded a close by place to shop for more travel for food, and a place you pay to go exercise.

People ate canned and frozen veg, not fresh trucked in from everywhere items. And before you make the argument for health, go look at the nutrient content of a flash frozen green bean vs one that sat in a box for a week to get to your plate, the frozen wins.

Guess what, all of what we have, unsustainable. 8 billion people can't live like middle class Americans! As more of the globe wants in on the action things are only going to get HARDER for people, unless we make some drastic lifestyle changes.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1dLeQ

Is a start but you'll want to fiddle with the units.