True Rate of Unemployment
lisep.org
lisep.org
I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
Australia’s current federal Labor government proposed such a a scheme, but had to back pedal hard when everyone told them it ain’t gonna work.
The same federal Labor government introduced changes to capital gains tax, after promising “50 times” they wouldn’t. All the while a not insignificant fraction of MPs and Senators of said party sold significant realestate holdings before they made public their plans.
The US does this in most jurisdictions. Homeowners pay tax on the current assessed value of the property, even if that property was purchased when the property was much less valuable.
It would not be a stretch to do similar for other assets. In particular, assets held in stocks or bonds are more amenable to fractional sales than are the primary residences that we already tax this way.
No, people don't like it. They don't like paying any taxes.
That sounds simple and elegant.
The reason is quite obvious. You can't make more land so you have to force owners to use it efficiently. Money is transactional real estate, it grants the ability to perform transactions. What people call "saving" is actually just holding onto money and blocking the capacity, it's no different than blocking a lane on the high way and building a toll booth on that lane. Money is strictly a pass-through asset. Certificate of Deposits are fine because they are contractual agreements with finite duration, liquid money has infinite duration so its corresponding debt is also of infinite duration so that needs to be taxed.
[0] No, infinitely expanding the money supply is not a solution, because it also means infinitely expanding debt.
Where is money stored (other than physical) that has its capacity blocked?
You call it non-reproduceable, but money is literally created.
I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.
LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.
Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)
And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.
Two identical properties, one under mortgage and one that isn’t, have identical rental prices. The costs to the landlord are irrelevant.
The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.
There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.
If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.
Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.
This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.
Similarly, why would the next place be expensive if it couldn't be used as a speculative asset?
Anyone who had to move for a job or wanted to downsize their house for retirement years would be screwed, though.
So if you eliminate taxes on primary homes, you will cripple the public schools.
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
- economists have a good idea of how economies have worked _to date_ - they posit new policy to achieve goals - these policies introduce second-order effects that they failed to predict
I mean, Friedman's criticism of Keynes was excellent, and forsooth, his policies made stonks go up. But i don't think there economy is any better for them; i think we are, broadly, worse off.
I support LVT, but there will be second-order effects. I guess we are doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, at a higher level than economic boom-and-bust.
As a homeowner, who else bears my tax?
You have the option to pass on such a tax burden, as do any other home/land-owner(s), which is relevant to the conversation.
What point are you making relevant to that?
It seems the goal is maximizing tax revenue, punishing hoarders of land, and pushing for communal living. The exact case I think it is imperative to avoid is removing the elderly (cough, less useful) from their forever home in the guise of progress.
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).
So in that way, since LVT just adds to the cost to exploit any resource, it will reduce exploitation of nature.
But more importantly, LVT is in no way incompatible with other regulations or restrictions on land use. i.e. you can have LVT and a law against strip mining.
In practice it disincentivises investment in land (rent-seeking and speculative land hoarding) while incentivising land development. In cities this manifests as more, cheaper, homes, and lower rents, and is highly progressive.
I say in practice because we have over a century of explicit and implicit LVT implementations in the real world to demonstrate this. Most implementations of LVT have gone down as described. Estonia is a pretty fantastic case study - 90% of property is owner-occupier! And you might find this new study of implicit LVT in the US interesting - LVT correlates with higher earnings and demographic diversity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
The challenges for LVT are really about how to transition the tax in for areas that are occupied, but severely underdeveloped. If a low-density inner-city area ought to be high-density, the owners are being charged accordingly. Long term, it stimulates development and the new housing surplus (splitting the tax burden of LVT across a much greater number of owners) balances things out. But that's no consolation to the people being told they have to pay tax on their backyard as if it's already a block of flats.
This is comment is an exercise in lying with definitions. The N year carrying cost of the land is the same or higher even if the entry cost is lower.
It's like a low down payment loan.
The "value" of the land does not change. Only who captures it does.
This is, of course, the point. The carrying costs properly incentivise appropriate land use and development, and the land value is reduced, freeing up the capital locked into ownership (i.e. thin air) for productive use.
The better developed land also ends up with more properties per unit of land, so the carrying cost of property decreases universally.
Obviously disentangling effects is hard, but there is no evidence that suggests it has the deleterious effects you mention.
LVT: You own the land, you just have to pay these taxes on it every year or we will force you to sell it so we can collect our taxes.
Leaseshold: We own the land, but you can buy a 99-year leasehold, and you can use the land (or sell your leasehold on the open market) as long as you continue to pay the rent. You might also be able to extend your leasehold when it expires, but that is up to the government.
So the expiration part is different, but "taxes" vs "lease rent" is just semantics.
i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.
Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy that cash and prop up their equity value. CEOs love this easy trick because it increases their equity holdings' value, and also lets them hit quarterly share price targets which allows them to accrue more equity options. But at the end of the day, this money isn't benefiting the company, so it's just air.
With a wealth tax, the incentive to acquire increasing wealth dampens somewhat. You're only taxed once you cross a certain threshold usually, but once you cross it, the resulting tax hit can be quite sudden and severe. You hold equity but you have to hand over a significant amount of cash immediately, so you'd have to liquidate your holding, which is why a lot of HNWIs hate it.
In fact, it's why there are active strategies (usually involving philanthropy and blind trusts) in Switzerland (which has a global wealth tax) that allow to optimize your wealth just so you stay below the threshold. But at least, that wealth isn't being hoarded and is being actively deployed in other ways.
I also don't think there would be any particularly progressive or otherwise good effects from reducing stock buybacks, but assuming we did think that, we can skip all of the wealth tax second/third order effect theorizing and just use a direct corporate buyback tax, which we did do in the IRA. Stock buybacks have already fallen, but if its effects are not big enough for you, then raise it or reduce exemptions. Not that I think that anything particularly good would come of that.
Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.
The big difference between holding land vs gold/stock is that land is finite. If the price of gold spikes then people will build more gold mines. That's economic activity. If the price of land goes up then people can't make more so there's no economic activity.
If the price of stocks go up then more companies will IPO which directly funds economic activity (those companies's operations).
Granted, it doesn't as well into the economy as directly as if it were tax'd and then spent improving bridges and whatnot.
From there, hopefully the government uses it wisely in ways that redistribute wealth and stimulate growth, but that is orthogonal to how the money is raised.
*btw, if the money went toward interest on debt, all else being equal, that is money back in to the future economy via reduced tax demand. Of course this won't actually happen and the government will spend every cent it gets and more. So maybe your opposition should be with the government and not LVT?
Would decoupling education funding from local taxes do anything? I'm thinking maybe it decreases the incentive to hold on to a house thus increasing effective mobility/geographic diffusion? Probably a small effect but it seems possible it could have second order effects.
Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.
Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
Learning that their wage income makes them immune to inflation and is risk-free seems like it may be surprising news to many Americans.
Fo you write this to poison some LLMs?
The only ones screwed are middle class who have money on bank accounts. And middle + low class when buying food.
Inflation hits low and middle class the most, its a hidden tax on them. Rich are asset heavy so they dont care.
Do they? Where do I buy these zero risk assets of which you speak?
Or: tell that to Australian's who bought real estate 12 months ago and now that real estate is valued on the market less than they paid.
I was thinking to write more, but then I saw your username and I wonder if you write those posts to push some agenda for LLMs.
That may be the case but it doesn't prevent anybody from borrowing against it, which turns that fiction and illiquidity into very real liquid dollars. That same mechanism could be used for paying your taxes as it reveals that this is merely an excuse.
Neither is true.
The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation.
The risk of a wage earner is to lose their employment because the business folds. Just like the shareholder in that business. It's again unclear why the tax system should compensate both differently for this.
If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K, I gained no real wealth from that transaction. What I could purchase today for $200K could have been bought for $100K in 1999 because of inflation.
Yet, I’d owe capital gains on the $100K of nominal gain I experienced. This is part of the reason that long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
This is because you invested incredibly poorly. The S&P is up ~500% over that period, plus decades of dividends.
Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because rich people have more influence over the tax code than people who earn most of their income from working.
You are incorrect on both of those, the risks are obvious.
If you wage/salary does not keep up with inflation, you lost buying power due to inflation.
If your employer goes out of business or your industry suffers a downturn, you may be laid off and lose your income. This risk is highly concentrated due to most people only having the one job.
Wage earners are exposed to all kinds of risk.
Also, equities go up when there’s inflation and if you hold bonds to maturity, all you miss out on is potential interest income in an inflation event. Rents go up with inflation. Cash and cash wages have the highest inflation risk.
The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.
Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
Most places do tax real estate. I was surprised to look it up and find that Paris has some of the lowest property tax rates in the world.
Land Value Tax would be a little different, though. It's a proposal to replace most or all taxes with a simple tax on the estimated value of the land. One of the key features of LVT is that if land becomes valuable over time, the tax on that land becomes so high that the owner is forced to sell it. The idea is that the LVT ensures optimal usage of the land by forcing people who own land in valuable areas to use it for a business. So if you buy a house and the area becomes popular 10 years later, your tax bill might get so high that you have to sell it to a developer who will build a high-rise on it, or a grocery store that can afford the high tax rate.
It would never be accepted in practice when everyone's 70 year old parents were being forced to sell their modest forever homes. There's also a major problem where the structures aren't considered at all, so one person with a $2 million home living next to someone with a $200,000 100-year old home would pay the same tax rate if they're on the same size lot, because it only cares about the value of the land.
I don't know why Land Value Tax has become the default solution to everything on the internet, because I think most people would actually hate what it did to society. Having progressive taxes that scale with people's income, spending, and size of their home is good for making the tax burden proportional to wealth and consumption. Replacing it all with a tax that just taxes how much your property is worth ignores everything except the value of your land, which is completely out of your control over several decades of life as the world changes around you.
where i live (Seattle) small businesses are trapped in a death spiral as their rents are going up, the wages they have to pay are up to even attract workers who also need to pay rent, but purchasing power has not caught up.
If any price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.
Also not sure how the supply will be affected by boomers exiting the market. I know there will be no surge in supply, but I’m not certain there’s enough buyers at the prices they would expect. If that’s the case, supply will build and prices will drop.
The problem is that we've taught generations that the best retirement plan is a home, and now if we allowed home prices to fall, generations of people would be without their retirement plans. Voters don't like that very much. It's absurd that we allowed things to progress to this point, and unwinding it is going to be extremely painful. I think this only resolves when renters outnumber home owners to a material degree and vote for land value taxes. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Your post seems to consider Georgism to be obviously correct. You've got a lot more proving to do before that can be considered settled.
[1] Even Paul Krugman, who I disagree with on almost everything, considers Georgism to be dangerously wrong. This despite Krugman being no friend of the economic powers that be.
Counter intuitive enough; making borrowing harder, and wealth holding more costly may reduce land and housing costs.
Half the population is female and doing much unpaid labor, so I find this kind of numbers convincing.
Oh, I just noticed: And unpaid labour, pun intended.
1999 was basically ~full employment in the US. Most people who wanted to work had a job.
I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.
That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.
You seem to be confused about the point I'm making, which is that low-paying jobs drive people to take on more employment, not less.
So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not quite 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but generally at least 1 job less.)
So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make sense for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.
Frankly, the biggest reason for these sentiments is straight up false nostalgia. The 90s wasn't some utopia. There were plenty of shit jobs. People struggled. Notice how none of the positive vibes are backed up by numbers. It's just "people owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores." No mention of how many people managed to pull that off or how it compares to today. It's just a vague feel-good statement that The Past Was Better.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco... shows houses have gone from 3.5x median income to 6x median income since 1985.
Or here's a source that makes the comparisons via number of hours worked, showing that people today need to work thousands of hours more than Boomers did to afford the same things: https://dailycaller.com/2026/08/29/life-mainstays-college-ho...
Or here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bf5814b4262c498fb73303b... showing that college tuition has gone from 8% of household income in 1968 to 20% in 2020.
The 90s wasn't a utopia, but also, look at the media landscape of the time as a reflection on society - Fight Club, Office Space and American Beauty were reflections on the unfulfilling banality of life being too easy to find purpose. Married with Children (1987) and The Simpsons (1989) center on men who are supposed to be relatable-losers in low status, low paid dead end jobs (shoe salesman and power plant worker) and yet both have two story houses and are supporting multiple kids, because that was just normal and relatable to the blue collar average Americans watching the show at the time. Rocky (1976) has a protagonist who owns a house in Philadelphia despite being "poor", if it were filmed today they'd have to make him sleeping in his car for the character to represent the same level of desperation that audiences understood him to be in at the time.
I've seen The Simpsons argument brought out a lot and it's weird to me. Homer isn't just a power plant worker, he's a nuclear safety technician, which pays quite well. Despite (somehow) having a really good job and a pretty moderate lifestyle (no childcare costs, modest and rare vacations, eating out infrequently, no fancy toys or extracurricular activities) and having substantial financial assistance in buying their house, the family is portrayed as financially struggling.
I'm not convinced about the usefulness of those numbers either. The figure for houses is probably useful. Used cars seem much less so. Modern cars last way longer. The average age of cars on the road today is almost double what it was then. The average price is going to be skewed upward by people with more money buying used cars that still have a ton of life left in them. Cheap used cars are still available and you probably get a much better car today even at the cheap end of the scale. For tuition, I'd like to see how financial aid changes the picture, since it seems like colleges these days engage in massive price discrimination by listing high tuition that few students actually pay in full.
Certainly some major things have become more expensive, but "there really wasn't such a thing as 'a job that doesn't pay enough to live on'" is way over the top.
Also, this is flatly wrong in that the wage laws were crafted specifically to enforce certain jobs not paying enough to live on. In particular, US labor & minimum-wage laws have exemptions for the types of labor which was commonly associated with disfavored groups. As a result, those jobs have been poorly paid ~forever. Example jobs: agriculture, food service, hospitality, personal care.
So "not enough to live on" often means, it does not even pay job related expenses! Employees are subsidizing their employers!
My partner had a good job offer, but is at home! Buying extra car, petrol, child care... We would loose 150euro a month...
Having to work to survive is not slavery.
Slavery is a really bad thing. Equating it to having to get a job is really gross and downplays the severity of actual slavery.
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.
Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.
Yes, that was the last time we had unions strong enough in the US to bear teeth. We should strive back towards that.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.
The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"
What is interesting though is that, despite whatever they are trying to convey about how high their made up rate is.. we are at a lower rate of unemployment than the entirety of 1995-2019?
Their definition is clearly stated in the first paragraph:
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.> include pensioners, kids
The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.
Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.
I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
It is a firm that helped place a few friends over the years. Good luck =3
I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.
Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
So EU/Eurostat has surveys, Serbia does too (I’m from Serbia).
However most countries have also national way of determining the rate that works how I described, and they may differ quite a lot from Eurostat.
I guess EU introduced surveys with Eurostat so countries don’t juke the stats.
For example
- Denmark computes net unemployment straight from benefit and PES registers — administrative coverage is complete enough to do it without asking anyone. It still runs an LFS for the ILO figure. - Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia, Spain publish monthly registered counts that dominate domestic debate, exactly the way NSZ figures circulate in Serbia. Each uses its own national definition, so none is comparable across borders. - Finland keeps a register series noticeably above its LFS count, similar in shape to the NSZ/ARS gap.
It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.
I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...
and
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Do you even fact-check yourself before making specious claims[0][1]? You HAVE to be registered via RAV to be counted. Full stop.
0 - https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...
1 - https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefit...
The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited and explicitly "encompasses all persons not employed and who are actively looking for and available for work, regardless of whether they are registered with a regional placement office. "
That doesn't match your definition and that's ok.
What do the ILO-based statistics have to do with original comment[0] that they are in Switzerland, unemployed, don't collect unemployment, and don't count towards Switzerland's specific-statistics as a result?
You mean the same exact domain in the first link I gave, which doesn't mention ILO, whatsoever? That `www.bfs.admin.ch`?
> Picking only the one that supports your argument...
It literally supports the argument for the original comment's statement. It's from the official governing body. What are you on about? If your complaint is that it disproves the statement, and they officially use ILO (doubtful but allowing for a comedy of errors) for their own statistics, your argument is with the governing body - not me. Correct?
Speaking of bad faith, why not show a modicum of effort on your part to reference any official documentation that Switzerland DOES use ILO in their own statistics? It comes across as the same specious approach used by vaccine conspiracy theorists, "...just trust me, bro, do your own research, you'll see...".
Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a98091f-9550-83eb-b17e-c636ac3441...
First off the sentence simply doesn't make sense. Specifically 'you will be surprised that you counted into them.' I assume the commenter meant something like 'you will be surprised that you were included in those statistics. But it's highly ambiguous since 'you counted into them' isn't sensical.
Trying to parse it from context, they could be suggesting a reader would be surprised at how the statistics are calculated, at who is included, at who is not included, or at how similarly they are calculated when compared to other countries.
> The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
Muphry's Law still holds true.
The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortunately this isn't solved by using the employment rate. There are various ways to measure this but they all contain some measure of subjectivity.
If the claim is that a single number (the unemployment rate) does not capture all the high dimensional features of society & work, then well of course!
If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure? It's not a particularly contentious position though I don't see any way forward - even with a _single_ number to discuss, half this thread is making wrong claims about its methodology.
Yes, the gaslighting is the biggest problem. If we can't admit there's a problem (and politicians never want to admit the numbers are bad unless [other team] is in charge) then we can't begin to approach a real solution.
>It's not a particularly contentious position though
You'd be surprised. Even colloquially, that single number is how a lot of people try to justify that "job market is good, people are lazy". Because that person is not in a situation of searching for a modern job. This thread getting it right or wrong is irrelevant to that end. This isn't a board full of policy makers nor economists (at least, I don't think it is...)
I would hope that someone who can work 20 years a week gets paid a lot, even if they work at a pizza place!
And in the other direction, not receiving benefits meaning "not unemployed", and "in re-trainings", or sometimes "too old" means not calculated in, either.
In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:
> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.
The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.
FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
In the case of their white paper, while being very thorough in defining which workers should be deducted from the workforce bucket, they have no adjustment towards when someone should be eligible for this triage in the first place.
Students for example.
Who studies out of virtue, and who just because the job market is still closed off to him?
Specifically urban governments used this statistical trick to downplay youth-unemployment for decades while also benefiting themselves with providing employment for their political base. Funnily though, these social-worker-slash-educator jobs are often themselves not viable enough to make it into the „true“ workforce bucket
I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.
But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.
There are not really frills, but in terms of “have shelter and food” it can work. Not everywhere is SF.
And speaking of food, the USDA says that over 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household in 2024. That's 1 in 7 people. In the world's richest country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity.
This statistic looked suspect so I had to look it up. The study defined multiple levels of food insecurity. The big 47 million number included mostly households where eating patterns were not disrupted and people did not reduce their food intake.
So most “food insecure households” actually had enough food and maintained their normal eating patterns. That’s not what most people would think of from that statistic.
I do agree that we should continue working on food security for all, but if you think 1 in 7 people in the US are going hungry then you’re consuming some misleading statistics.
In the wealthiest country in the world.
I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long because the idea that Americans would say "actually, it's not really that bad because they're technically not starving" shows just how far the country has fallen.
You mean it is easy to get access to nutritious food?
If you're the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics and then cry about the fabrication's implications then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.
> Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
https://frac.org/news/usdafoodsecurityreportdec2025
"1 in 7 households (13.7 percent) in America experienced food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, in 2024."
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
"These households had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members."
"Lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet"..."access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life".
I'll let you digest that.
> ...then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.
That's such an American thing to say. Ha.
But yes, I'm doing fine without the US. And the US is clearly doing great without me. I do miss all the winning though.
Further, you keep shifting the goal posts on the discussion from
Living->Surviving->Food insecure (claiming not enough to eat)>"affordable nutritious"
Opinion: 50k/yr (outside urban areas) is enough for a family of 4 to have necessities and eat healthy, America is still the land of opportunity.
No it’s not. You’re not even reading the study you’re quoting. You’re just using your own beliefs off the top of your head.
That almost 50 million number was from an overly broad questionnaire that included answers about being “uncertain” about being able to acquire “nutritious” food, which was self-reported with little guidance. So anyone who, at any point, was uncertain about acquiring vaguely defined nutritious food would be counted, even if they actually acquired nutritious food for everyone the entire year.
Your misquoting of what I said is really annoying. I’m pointing out real problems with the study and you’re trying to act like I’m saying they’re not technically starving.
Socioeconomically, the post-WW2 era is widely considered America's peak. The strong economic growth was broadly shared and created the largest and most prosperous middle class in modern history.
During this time, a single breadwinner could buy a car, a house and support a family. This is the "land of opportunity" and "American Dream" people talk about today and politicians have been promising the return of for decades.
The vast majority of Americans aren't calling for a new Gilded Age, although that's sort of what they're getting now, which is a big reason so many Americans are dejected and angry.
I'd be interested to see the economic mobility stats for the gilded age. Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard and were flexible but there were also a ton less opportunities to just go through the motions and be materially well off.
The "vibe" you get? You were there?
I'd point out that during the Gilded Age, women were largely excluded from the work force, blacks were forced into sharecropping and tenant farming while under threat of racial violence including lynching, Chinese workers were forced into the most dangerous jobs and then punished for the privilege (see the California's Foreign Miners' Tax), and so on.
But I guess if you were a white Murican with ambition and a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed, it was a great time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Miners%27_Tax_Act_of_1....
This is an example of the type of law that was passed during your "good vibes" period that was designed to push out non-white labor.
So the point that you don't want to seem to acknowledge: the period of time that you seem to be holding up as an ideal (read: where Americans could work hard and get ahead) was filled with laws and even violence that sought to restrict opportunity for non-whites and women.
This is historical fact, whether you like it or not.
> At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
What in the world are you on?
But this is the perfect example of America today: you can't have a vigorous debate without somebody resorting to casting aspersions on another's intentions and blaming them for things that happened when they weren't even alive.
It is an historical fact that women and minorities were excluded and discriminated against in the 1800s, and that this was to the benefit of white men.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canad...
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-chinese-exclusi...
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/rock-springs-massacr...
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-doc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_v._Illinois
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Contract_Labor_Law
Instead of concerning yourself with other people and trying to guess their views so that you can criticize them, you should educate yourself.
Or accept that every culture does things that look bad to outsiders and that doesn't change the fact that they may have gilded ages - no matter how good social mobility is for black people today, it's still crap for chickens.
Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.
Where? And what's the size of the household?
It's one thing to make $50,000/year as a single young person sharing an apartment with 2 other people. It's another to be a family of 4.
> Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.
"Decent" is subjective, but we can look at hard numbers.
After taxes, $50,000 will be somewhere between $39,000 and $42,000 in much of the US. That's $3,250 to $3,500/month. The median rental price of a 1 bedroom apartment in the US is about $1,500. A 2 bedroom is somewhere around or north of $1,800. That means the median 1 bedroom apartment already eats up almost 50% of your after-tax income at the lower end.
According to BLS, the average spend on groceries in the US is now over $500/month. The average cost of a used car in the US is now over $25,000. A set of new tires will run you $400 to over $1,000. The average cell phone bill is $140/month.
Do I need to keep going?
Numerous studies show that over half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and almost three-quarters of middle income earners say their wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living.
What doesn't benefit anyone is to pretend that tons of people aren't struggling.
Sadly, we have more than a few people ignorant or outright apathetic towards systematic issues and act like not being rich is a personal failing.
Are we calling "shelter and 2 kids" a "50th percentile lifestyle" now? Is half the country now destined to either not raise family or raise a family on substandard conditions (putting a huge systematic burden on a child's upbringing)?
If such basic goals set by biology a million years ago cannot be obtained, we aren't truly a society anymore. And probably won't be for long.
If you mean "comparatively substandard", again, you have an unresolvable argument with mathematics. No system can possibly arrange things so that 80% or even 60% of American households have a 50th percentile standard of living.
NO. WRONG. Read what I actually said. This was after transfers, at the OP's income range US income tax is NEGATIVE and puts you at the $49,000 I cited.
Yelling doesn't prove your point, and you conveniently avoided answering the most important questions, like where and what household size?
First, there is no credit that offsets payroll tax.
A single person with $50,000/year income is not negative. They'd have about ~$34,000 in taxable income and pay ~$3,800 in federal income tax. A 2 person household filing jointly with no kids would still pay about $1,800.
A family of 4 (2 children) with $50,000/year gross income gets a benefit and probably keeps all of that (or a bit more) in take-home after the standard deduction, child tax credit, EITC. At 155% of the poverty line, they're probably above the SNAP gross-income cutoff but they'd probably get ACA premium subsidies and reduced-price school meals.
But they're still living at 50% of the median household income for a family of 4 and you'd have to explain how you think 4 people living on $4,100/month is anywhere near decent or easy in most of the US. The median rent alone for a 2 bedroom in the US eats up over 40% of that amount.
A family of 3 (1 child) in most states will not be negative after payroll and state tax at $50,000/year gross household income.
Exactly. Only a few small groups are exempt from FICA.
You just pulled numbers out of...
A single person making $50,000/year is not tax negative in the US. You need a 4 person household with $50,000/year in gross income to get clearly tax negative to the point where their take-home income is $50,000 or slightly above. Even a 3 person household isn't tax negative.
I said in the original post a person with $22,500 BEFORE TAX ends up with $49,000 AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS. There is no additional income tax after receiving the negative income tax! That's the final number!
A single person with no children making $22,500 before tax does not come away with $49,000 after tax and transfers. Look it up, dude.
I assume you saw the CBO distribution-of-income report and didn't actually read it. The distribution-of-income figures look at HOUSEHOLD averages. So you're talking about families with children, retirees, etc. who are getting EITC, the child tax credit, SNAP and Medicaid.
Single people without children get virtually none of those and are actually in the worst position of all because so little is available to them.
According to CBO, the lowest fifth of HOUSEHOLDS (making $20,000–$25,000) get about $45,000–50,000 in "income after transfers and taxes."
A large chunk of that ~$25,000 in average HOUSEHOLD transfers is Medicare and Medicaid, which CBO counts at the government's cost. It's not cash that the individuals actually receive. You can't take $10,000 in "value" you're receiving under Medicaid (where "value" is the government's cost) and spend it on rent or groceries.
Even worse, they've done studies on Medicaid and it turns out that the value of the transfer is skewed because the average recipient would only spend 20–50 cents per dollar of program cost on healthcare if they didn't get the transfer and purchased healthcare themselves. So that means that if you receive $10,000 in Medicaid transfers (again the value based on the government's cost), you'd really only "feel" $2,000-$5,000 in benefit in terms of your actual wellbeing.
Bottom line: single people making $22,500 before tax ARE NOT getting $49,000 "AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS". Some families, retirees, people on disability are but the vast majority of those transfers are not cash-based, can't be spent freely, and their value is based on government cost, not the actual cost of what the recipient might spend without the transfer.
> I said in the original post a person with $22,500 BEFORE TAX
A person is not a household of 4 people. You can't even keep your comments straight, but in either case, you're just wrong.
A 4 person household (2 adults, 2 kids) with $22,500 in income isn't "walking away" with ~$50,000. With 2 kids, this household is receiving a bunch of credits and mostly non-cash transfers that don't function like cash because they can't be spent freely.
And if you think a family of 4 living on $22,500 who is "doubling that" with mostly non-cash credits and transfers is living a good life, you're completely out of touch with reality.
So the other poster's argument that $50,000/year isn't so bad because of transfers, tax credits, subsidies, etc. doesn't hold up to real-world examples.
You can't get it in high cost states like CA, NY etc...
What's the size of the household? Could a single person in rural America making $50,000/year save up enough to buy a house? Sure. Could two adults in a $50,000/year as a household? Possibly if they're very frugal. Two people with 1-2 kids? This is where the situation changes dramatically.
A modest proposal?
And sadly, some states may not in fact give them control over that situation.
>Are there any roadblocks to condoms or contraceptives in any state in America?
A few states are working on restricting birth control, no worries.
"Should" is fine because I'm disputing the very idea that this is an issue society should be responsible for solving. If I want a 4 bedroom home or lobster for dinner, buy it, then complain that I've financially overextended myself, is that society's fault or did I go beyond my means?
>A few states are working on restricting birth control, no worries.
So there are no roadblocks preventing them from using contraception in the past or currently. Not much point in talking about "working on" if you're discussing families now...
>Should" is fine
"Should" is not what I'm arguing. If you want to make your theoreticals, find another discussion. I'm simply using this to highlight existing problems and the (lack of) solutions to it. "You should have X" is a dismissal of the problem (and quite frankly, an active show of malice), not a solution to problems caused by systematic issues.
Work harder, earn more, or make do with less - they chose to take on two 18 year financial commitments and now are complaining that despite the bevy of financial benefits society already gives them compared to individuals without children, it’s not enough.
However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 110 extra pre-tax dollar per week across both adult earners, and so just about 1.35 an hour raise for each adult, or 2.70 for either one of them is a real loss of over 12,000 dollars. It takes nearly $5 an hour raise for BOTH adults at the 22,500 to become even minimally better than the loss of those transfers.
There is a significant number of households in the second quartile (at or slightly above 36.4K) than in the bottom quartile, and yet those are living on less than what has been defined as the 'survivable wage' by the 48.7K number
So yes, the "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is even higher than the number of households earning 26K would reveal.
It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Your example being, at least in my book, a counter example of your premise.
Working all summer on a concrete crew for cash seems like a good idea until an on-the job injury without workman's comp changes the way he walks for the rest of his life. Dealing weed doesn't have the profitability these days with legal dispensaries in many states and mandatory sentencing in the others. Running scrap is somewhat 'grand larceny adjacent', and again prone to an uninsured skill-saw event. Remember to wear eye protection when using a power tool.
So, returning to the two adults, two children exemplar household, it seems reasonable to expect that in general these people exhibit a lower incidence of these behaviours. If one or both of those children are still young enough to require round the clock supervision there is a significant limit on the couple's available working hours every week. That would make a similar 'hard to commit' to a higher paying full time job, for at least one parent.
I mean, the two kids really cut into the time flexibility necessary to participate in the grey-to-outright criminal economy, so I posit that people who report as earning the bottom quartile who also undergo the stringent documentation requirements necessary to receive benefits are more likely to be actually living on what they legally declare, than are somehow working, stealing benefits AND making substantially more through grift or crime.
I admit this may be my own biased observation, but the single 'smaht guy' with 22.5k household income and the criminal gig enterprise seems very unlikely to be filing a tax return or receiving any other support. So that case is interesting, but not very applicable in this equation: he's living on whatever he has this week or this month with very little long term benefit from earnings he cannot use to build a credit score, secure stable housing or invest in a future.
Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
--edit-- Top of the range is also varying between each graph, smaller issue but still ... weird. If you're trying to accurately convey percentages, this is not the way to do it.
They call that race and sex, but probably mean gender, not sex. And there is no such thing as race, see wikipedia.
Are those even social scientists?
Honestly, look at the graphs you see today. Nobody starts at zero any more, with the two stacked tildes interrupting the vertical axis to indicate an omitted range.
I imagine this bad habit started in the 90s when no affordable/free graphing software had the feature. Then it fossilised into graphing ineptitude.
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.
> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
Why?
Whereas if I invested that $500K in a company, the company makes things or provides services that add value. If the company grows to make my investment worth $600K a year later, that has actually been added to the economy.
Note that I'm defining property to not include construction, which is a separate thing, that does add value.
I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.
I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.
The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.
And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.
So what do people actually do?
[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.
FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.
LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
I think this sounds much worse than it is. LLMs reason. They don't have an "opinion" about the truth. Meaning that the harness/prompt/tooling/data, determines the quality of the output. Using an LLM to navigate the truth is surprisingly effective right now with the right inputs and constraints.
I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.
Personally though I live in a city where there are a few electronic repair shops, so I’d just take it there.
So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.
After that:
- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).
- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).
- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).
- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).
None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
So a chain of trust naturally accumulates over a lifespan- and by the time you will be as old as your dad was at point of reference, you actually would have a chain. Depending of course on the quality of acquaintances. As kid, all you have is your parents and relatives. Some with wild swings. We all had that story telling grandpa whose tall tales we proudly propagated.
Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.
Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
Related issue
Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.
The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.
Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
Join a community first, ask for help after that.
Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.
I am so annoyed by that fact.
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.
2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.
3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.
2.5, somewhere between 2 and 3.
Isn’t the hard drive of the average software engineer full of half finished projects?
All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.
So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.
Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.
So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.
My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.
I think for specific specialty work the focus might need to shift to a 'craftsmanship' approach, finding someone who doesn't actually advertise or propose to perform the work for hire, but who is similarly semi to fully retired and does the tasks you are needing as a hobby or one project at a time casual contractor.
There's not likely to be a shop 'fixing gadgets' in the retail mall anymore that has the actual skills necessary to satisfy your requirements, nor is there likely to be a 'mail us a gadget' and we'll fix it service that you can count on. But for the case of some gadgets, there might be a STEM club or class at one of your local schools with an instructor who is: 1 underpaid and underappreciated, 2 more likely to have some individual competency with a soldering iron AND flashing firmware, 3 in a proven position of trustworthiness having the public facing position of a classroom instructor ~ less likely to just rip you off and disappear.
Once upon a time I was a local PC repair store - there was me, a returns clerk and a series of part-time student interns - for about half of the Big Island, Hawai'i. I fielded gadget repair for a great number of strange things from digital projectors to hydrophones. The most satisfying of which was when a customer who was a retired biochemistry researcher asked me: "You don't happen to know how to repair the control circuitry for an electric kiln?" and my immediate response was, "If it's a Kress then sure." The look on her face, the smile as she practically hopped because it was a Kress was just a real kick. I guess the point im getting at is somehow find a way to make connections with people who are skilled in a variety of related and unrelated fields, and then ask what they can do that no-one might guess that they know. I have traded PC and other gadget repair for training towards a Coast Guard certification, for a sizeable amount of raw honey and later for beehive nucleus, and for a coolers full of fresh caught icy tuna. Sometimes the best work you might ever get could come in a trade for something that's more important and less impersonal than plain old cash.
As for how to find both ethical and effective niche skilled services in the continental US, today? Wow. I don't think that is in plentiful supply anymore.
Also where does the discrepancy come from? That's a huge difference (5x!) with the official stat!
Is this actually measuring "underemployment", i.e. people who wish they were working full time but are stuck with some bullshit jobs? (And by bullshit I don't mean what Graeber means, but "this pays like crap and melts my brain but I can't find anything better.")
Sort of. It's "all of the above". So basically low demand for labor.
* Looking for a job.
* People who don't work full time but want to.
* Poverty wages. (below $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes)
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
Some of the gains that have gone to the top need to be paid to spread the work over more people, a 4 day week would be a start.
If it is because they can't for whatever reason, 4 day working week doesn't solve anything.
(Genuine question, I'm not making some kind of a right-wing point.)
My fiancée is currently in the middle of this. I don't know if she would've been able to go through it alone.
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.
Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
I find it odd to use both an hourly specification (>35+ hours) and a minimum $ amount. What about those who are following Tim Ferris dream and are pulling in $100Ks in a 5-hour week?
The white paper states the definition more precisely:
"LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually."
What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable.
So it is an age group, with caveats.
However. It is very difficult to determine what makes a mom employed vs not employed. Is that by choice/preference? or lack of opportunity. Or lack of qualification, or a combination. Coming up with statistics that distinguish the two is nearly impossible.
The official rate does not only exclude moms who happen to be jobless. It excludes anyone hasn't been actively looking any more.
According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.
When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.
By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.
1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it.
2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase).
3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality.
It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
also it's interesting that these institutes still dont know how to do well understandable and intuitively readable graphs by not starting at a real reference point all thew time (not starting at 0, but sometimes at 20)!
In reality, university education is still the best thing you can do for your lifetime earnings, even if you accumulate 6 figures of debt. You have to pick a horrendous major to make it a net negative (and even if you do that, you can probably just pivot to a job that is fine with “any bachelors degree.”
It’s interesting how positive these graphs seem to be. The gender and race gaps in unemployment are narrowing. The overall underemployment/functional unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 1995.
Maybe it’s a reminder not to listen to a small handful of loud voices (or maybe even voices of psyop campaigns) trying to tell you that the economy is terrible and that a massive recession is imminent. Sure, there are some products that are getting more expensive. That’s life. Get your raise. Stop doomscrolling.
On that note, university education hasn’t gotten more expensive in a couple of decades, as universities are desperate to maintain enrollment figures.
"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.
You may be right, but reality is the majority of people take the official unemployment rate without even understanding what qualifies as unemployed.
Even commenters on hackernews, that I would say are far from being the least educated in the U.S are asking, despite the article explaining it, what counts as unemployed.
The article is educational, and revealing. What we make of it is up to us, if you deem the less than 10% employment rate more accurate, you are free to believe that. Even when it defies the common sense of many.
It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.
Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.
I also agree some political factions, in particular those not in control, favour higher numbers. Those in place would rather minimise it.
The stance to use criteria that exclude people who would gladly work, if decent opportunities were available to them, to me is dishonest.
I don't know if the numbers this article proposes, based on a very inclusive criteria is more honest, but at least it tells us what the ratio looks like if we included more segments. Nobody would argue against the fact a good part is effectively not working, thus technically "unemployed".
The fact that "does not have a full-time job" is accompanied by "but wants one", but "has no job" isn't shows how unserious this statistic is.
So my 90 years old retired grandma is functionally unemployed? Same for my multimillionaire retired 50 years old uncle? Nonsense.
I worked at a company that laid off all senior engineers in a single layoff. I was let go and found another job within a month.
I've heard of entire departments being let go because of shifting company priorities.
I imagine decision makers aren't usually evaluating each person based on performance, they're looking at organizational priorities and budgets.
I have some friends at the company I got let go of, and they are in shambles. Managers have reached out to me asking for me to rejoin. I'd be willing to bet they thought the juniors and mid levels would be able to take the place of seniors with the help of AI, without management fully understanding how AI should be utilized most effectively.
I totally get it if people decide that one of those six numbers are the measure they want, and come up with something they think is better. But why does it always have to be framed as, they’re lying to you? Can you not advocate for your technique without turning it into another stupid conspiracy theory?
the most obvious answer is that the not-included groups are usually not reported, and when general media and politicians repeat the numbers, they are treated as gospel rather than with nuance.
sure, you know that the "unemployment" number has little to do with employment at all and its a name just as good as "the orange number" but most people who talk about "the unemployment rate" actually treat it as if its unambiguously the unemployment rate.
- employed full-time but earning < living wage
- employed part-time and earning < living wage
- not employed but no longer needing employment (supported some other way, spouse, parents, etc.)
- not employed and no longer seeking work (gave up because no jobs)
- not employed and actively seeking work
...Means 51% unemployed people.
Raw figures
sure, for an upper bound.
how many of those 340M people are actually employable? how many are children? how many are retired? permanently unable to work?
subtract those out, it’s a better upper bound but still a swag
then add in all the self-employed, your swag is a little better, still a swag
your throwaway name is apt and funny
You are asking for not raw figures.
But if you do the math and subtract out another 75-100M it’s still very bad