Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

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I think at the point where it is 5%/95% it will become apparent enough that there is a problem that a solution will have to be proposed.

Though you could end up with an interesting sort of inverse slavery where the unemployed masses resort to coercion to force the highly educated/intelligent minority into doing the work for them.

What I think is scarier though is thinking about what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% and starts moving towards 30%. The majority of people will still be in work, so those who are unemployed will still have a stigma attached and you will have the usual arguments about "why should I have to work to pay somebody to stay at home?". These arguments will become louder as the amount of money that will have to be collected through tax from those who are working to support those who are not will become a huge sum.

At that point a far right wing party who campaigns on the basis of removing all government support from those who do not work could gain considerable traction and possibly be elected.

At that point you have a huge section of the population without any means at all, this will naturally lead to massive crime and civil unrest. At which point the government will have no choice but to respond with strong force against a large section of the population.

    What I think is scarier though is thinking about 
    what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% 
    and starts moving towards 30%.

That is already the case in some countries (even some western ones, like Spain: 26.1% as of December 2012).

There's another official rate rate you can check out. The "real" unemployment rate, which measures everybody considered unemployed plus a lot of others who are falling through the cracks. It's called the U-6 unemployment. The government publishes this data in the same monthly report as all the other official employment numbers, and anybody can find it on the Internet. In the US the U-6 unemployment is [b]16.2%[/b] and counting. You could also just count the "Americans-on-Food-Stamps"number. It's 46 Million.

The national monthly [1] and state annual average [2] "alternative measures of labor underutilisation" stats are easy to find, but do you know where to get monthly or quarterly data by state, or better, by county?

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

[2]: http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

Well the footstamps number isn't showing unemployed though. It will also show people who are employed by extremely shitty companies like Walmart.

People still do have work, though. They just work "black" and eventually receive unemployment benefits at the same time. The official numbers just don't reflect reality. That said, the economic situation in Spain is not great at the moment, but still not as bad as reported by the media sometimes.

Inverse slavery won't happen because the minority will simply leave. This is what happened in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, and what currently happens in places like Cuba and Venezuela. This is even happening to Western Europe right now; I've personally met several intelligent, ambitious 20-something French expats who indicated that they have no intention of returning to France due to excessive taxation and lack of opportunity.

Leave and go where?

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