Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfdydx | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the issue with saying that someone who is employed is ... employed.

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.

View on HN

You're applying nuance to a discussion which so often does not lend itself to nuance. Successive governments love to focus on the unemployment figure as though that is the mark of a healthy jobs market. As you've pointed out, it's not. It's not even close. We should be speaking about it far less, and about other, more qualitative metrics far more. We don't, though, and the cynical reason is that the unemployment metric was designed to make things appear better than they are.

I guess it depends were you live, but in $HOMECOUNTRY, politicians also talk about wage levels (esp. their evolution vs inflation), etc.

The problem is that even as a single number, unemployment just isn't a very useful metric. Unemployed + underemployed is probably closer to what people care about, but it would probably be better as two separate numbers, and even then there is difficulty in defining both unemployed and underemployed, and accurately measuring them.

>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?

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...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com