Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I’m personally skeptical of unemployment stats as a useful singular metric to judge the economy on since around 2010 when independent contracting exploded in accessibility (if you’re an Uber driver you do not count as unemployed).

It’s no surprise unemployment has been low since then. Coincidence? You can decide.

I’m more curious what the ratio is between the median monthly “necessary” expenditure is, adjusted for locale to median salary. My hypothesis is that it’s drastically going up - that is, the median person working the median job requires an increasing high percentage of their salary to afford the “median lifestyle”. And in some cases this could be over 100%, meaning the median lifestyle is sustainable only through debt or other compromises like roommates, below median quality of life etc.

People have tried to get around this with brutal commutes, but we are seeing the limits of that as living far away no longer yields much savings but still results in a long commute.

There are different measures of unemployment. Typically, U3 is used, but you can use U6, which is "all unemployed, marginally attached and part-time for economic reasons individuals as a percent of the civillian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."

How much has independent contracting "exploded"? Can you provide numbers?

I didn’t look for anything more current because I was more interested in the GP’s claim that said explosion occurred in 2010.

> 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.

Vibenomics.

The metric you are looking for is underemployed, and if you know of a good way to measure it, please share.

Polling / interviews? Same as the rest?

Not as objective as unemployment definitions though. I am sure lots of people think they could be more productively used than actually could be.

Nevertheless, BLS does have a half decent measure.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/number-of-people-employed-...

Edit: up to date graph

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194

2008 was quite the thing!

In theory there is quite a bit of subtlety in the data collected. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm (Must say, I have no idea where gig work fits. There is some easy to find data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/918285/gig-economy-numbe... )

Gig work would fall under U6 unemployment if the person believes they are underemployed and would prefer a full time position with benefits or otherwise only marginally attached to the labor market and would prefer better employment.

Someone working gig jobs (even multiple) and satisfied with hours worked/pay and benefits would just count as employed.

Number of people dependent on EBT/SNAP benefits seems like a reasonable proxy, though even that won't capture the folks who can't/won't navigate access or reside in states more aggressively disqualifying them...

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