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Comment by ok123456 | Hacker News Reader

The laid-off email job corporate worker isn't going to take a job for $15/hr at the Flying J unclogging toilets. You can't use the total national average unemployment rate, which has issues of its own, to say the economy is healthy. In the same way, the stock market indices aren't helpful either beyond catastrophic values.

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I don't claim that it can be used to say the economy is healthy. I take issue with OP's claim that large layoffs necessarily imply recession. Unless you know that the laid off workers aren't rehired by a competitor, you don't know if the layoff isn't just an outcome of competition. The national unemployment rate is a proxy for it. At least at the first order, if a large number of people are being laid off (and this isn't the first layoff in the sector, Wells Fargo has cut over 40k jobs from their peak) then so far they are being rehired. And I agree with you, desk workers aren't going to take a $15/hr job at the Flying J, which is why I believe they were likely to be hired either by competition or at least in occupations consistent with their skill set and aspirations, else we'd see them show up in unemployment stats. Check sector stats too - very low for finance https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04032216#

Fun fact. If I'm laid off from my corporate job and after weeks of searching start driving for Uber or delivering pizzas, I am considered employed in the U3 (the unemployment rate most often reported). I would be excluded in U5 rate (they are referred to as "marginally employed") which is about 1% higher.

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

Another fun fact. If I work 2 jobs at 2 different employers I'm counted as 2 employed people.

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesfaq.htm

There's some much noise in "unemployment rate" that I would argue it's essentially useless for most purposes.

Median real wages are rising, too.

And personally, I’d rather be a delivery driver than be unemployed.

I think there is a correction in sectors that had been inflated by cheap money. The rest of the economy is doing pretty well.

Median real wages going up is people moving to new jobs with inflation-adjusted salaries and rates.

Right, unemployment staying low through the layoffs show that the laid off have been able to find acceptable jobs.

Not to nitpick, but I wonder if we can better define "acceptable." For a good layoff outcome, I'd expect the employee to find a new gig within a few months, that's +/- X% of their previous comp. Open question: has anyone seen this data?

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