without any dog in this fight at all, it'd be interesting to see either this data overlaid with total estimated population, or this data scaled to percentage of the population. The shape of the trend won't change; the relative amplitudes of the peaks might.
This gives me a chance to make my favorite prediction, because it’s always right.
There will be a recession. Soon. I mean, I can’t say for sure. I’m not a fortune teller. But I can give you a lot of reasons why. Let’s just say, it’s coming. It might be a little later than “soon”, but I’m betting it’s sooner than later. (Not with actual retirement money.)
We've been in a recession since February 2020, as defined by the NBER. FYI, the NBER is the definitive authority that has the official duty of tracking recessions.
also why the hell was jimmytucson's comment here downvoted to dead and flagged? are people really that ignorant about the inevitability of a recession? business cycles are called cycles for a reason folks.
I wonder how much of this is just people no longer able to claim unemployment. Maybe things are different with the current downturn, but I don't remember states extending unemployment benefits for the 08 crash. Also wonder what the quality of the job is compared to before being unemployed.
> Workers in most states are eligible for up to 26 weeks of benefits from the regular state-funded unemployment compensation program, although seven states provide fewer weeks and one provides more.
It would incentivize them to get jobs, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean that they’d be able to. They might even become less likely to find work as they’re less able to meet their basic needs.
I thought these numbers were unemployment claims, but looking into it a bit more seems like this is a survey. I was confused by if you can only claim unemployment for on average 26 weeks, then the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or over would not include those people. But a survey would probably account for these people.
Just a quick reminder that this is because of the pandemic, and not because of intrinsic factors in the economy or natural business cycle or any of that sort of thing.
How are pandemics not “intrinsic factors in the economy”? We’ve lived through a dozen documented pandemics and can find records of ports and seaside trading hubs dealing with them. The etymology of the word quarantine is related to the amount of time a foreign vessel was isolated at a port before it was allowed to enter the city.
Implying that such spikes in unemployment or any other economic metrics aren’t representative of business as usual is a grave underestimate of how usual the business of pandemics and natural disasters is.
I kind of think of it as the economy gets kicked in the crotch every ~10 +/- a few years by something, but it’s usually a different something every time.
I should have said "endogenous." The difference between 2020, 2008, and 2001 is that in 2001 there was a substantial overinvestment in an unproven field, in 2008 there was a widespread underpricing of risk, and in 2020 a virus hit. 2020 doesn't say anything* about the broader economy - there's nothing "wrong" in the 2019 economy to inform 2020 or 2021 or beyond.
The difference is worth noting because an awful lot of the punditry's model for recessions is to assume there needs to be a structural adjustment that involves some amount of turmoil and there's nothing that should be done to prevent that. In this case, there's no reason to assume that, and no reason to assume that economic turmoil is either necessary or beneficial. A disaster happened, and we should view it like a structure fire, not a bankruptcy.
*except of course that a huge portion of the country has a precarious living situation, our health care system is a disaster, and our political system was wholly unprepared for any actual challenge. There's all kinds of deep foundational ills in the economy, but none of those would have caused a sudden severe spike in unemployment absent the pandemic.
Pretty surprising how long it takes to recover from recessions. It took almost 10 years for the numbers to recover from after 2008, way longer than I would have assumed.
I’m one of them. Got laid off from a VC-funded startup early in the pandemic, and never quite figured out how to adjust to this new work environment. I spend my time coding for fun and doing the occasional very awkward job interview over Zoom.
If it goes well for the first few moments it's all good, I had a semi-interview that basically turned into a 4hr chat about programming, foreign policy etc (I suspect the boredom contributes).
If it goes badly, not only am I being watched and inspected by potentially more than one person, I can also see myself. I hate the sound of my own voice, I really hate the look of my own mouth let alone face.
I imagine that Youtubers would be the winners in this new interviewing world, since they’ve spent so much time getting comfortable with their on-camera appearance.
In my case, I’ve always been good at in-person interviews. I’ll be nervous at first, but over the course of the interview, I can read the body language of everyone in the room and quickly get comfortable, and by the end of a successful interview everyone shakes hands and comes away feeling like I’m nearly part of the team.
On Zoom, it starts off the same way, but never gets better. I can’t really tell if anyone is really satisfied by my answers, and I’ll either ramble on, or end with “I’m not really sure I answered your question...”
At the end of the interview, they’ll invite me to ask some questions of my own, and I try to go in depth into understanding how they approach collaborating remotely. I feel like the answers are sometimes evasive and I come away wondering if my questions are too intrusive. Maybe a lot of teams have disagreements about this, and I shouldn’t ask them openly?
I find everything about Zoom awkward. Plus it's caused meetings to explode. "Let's hop on Zoom" vs. finding and booking a conference room and physically going there. Barriers like that tend to reduce low-value meetings at least a little.
Almost the same experience here. It's been almost a full year at this point, my savings isn't going to last much longer. There have been many close-ish interviews, but so far nothing successful. Having adhd is a hell of time if literally the only thing you have to do is walk from your bed to work for a daily scrum. Not a blessing for productivity.
There are people coming "online" so to speak who weren't consciously making memories until years after the recession hit. I am now the ripe old age of 20, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever. I know some people significantly younger than me who could write well enough you wouldn't know it.
It's the percent of working age (25-54) adults in the labor force. The unemployment rate has lots of oddities that can make the economy seem better (or worse) than it often is. Note for example the long, slow, decline from 2008 to 2015, long after the recession was officially over -- and how we've currently erased almost all gains since that nadir.
I wonder what the statistics are on 50+ year olds losing their jobs and/or experiencing a reduction in income. Either for cost cutting reasons (old employees are costlier to employ) or due to injuries and health issues.
I would assume the probability of loss or reduction in income is significant for many people once they reach 50+.
Isn't some of this due to demographic/societal changes? For example, it used to be quite rare to go to graduate school. Now, something like 10-15% of the US population has an advanced degree, and I bet many of those people were in school after age 25.
Labor force participation rate is (number unemployed + number employed)/population, so it's more of a measure of how many people want to be working than of how many people actually are working.
Employment rate is better for seeing how many people are and aren't working.
Was down about 8 points from the peak in the 60s in 2019, then dropped another 5 points in 2020. Still slightly more likely to be employed than women in the same age range.
I assumed you already saw the chart. The period of increase starts right at the start of Trump's term and it seems fairly simple to make a descriptive claim like I did.
In the same chart, there was a huge decline during Trump’s tenure also, but I wouldn’t say he had something to do with it just because he was President.
If you are saying that a sitting President have no effect on unemployment rate and the economy, I think it’s fair for the burden of proof to be on the detractors.
The wording of my original statement was careful to avoid this whole boring “correlation does not imply causation” conversation. The negative of that statement would be one to claim Trump has no effect whatsoever on the unemployment.
The burden of proof is squarely on whoever says the president caused the good times.
I could as well say that Mike Pence did it, since his term was the same. Or Pelosi as the leader of the House.
There's no way around it, claiming the president has something to do with causing a good economy requires a statistical argument along the lines of "it must be him because this line informs that one and these plausible alternatives don't". That's my one liner summary but of course there are books about causality.
My guess is that there's not much you can do as president to improve the economy, or someone would have done it. There are lots of things you can do to derail it, which people from time to time because they're naive about how it works.
Considering the graph started going up in Sep 2015, Trump didn’t even become president until Jan 2017, and didn’t pass the tax cuts until Dec 2017, I don’t think there is any burden of proof for the detractors.
That is the absolutely classic correlation-causation mistake and that level of overly simplistic interpretation is why the politicians get away with implementing stupid economic policies.
Trump was president 2016-2020. The participation rate went up 2016-2020. That does not mean Trump had anything to do with it. It is entirely plausible that it has nothing to do with politics at all, the economy is very complicated.
There are arguments to be made that Trump helped, but those have to be made. Blanket "the line went up at the same time!" observations are meaningless. It isn't even suggestive that Trump was involved.
My favorite entirety ad-hoc local economic status indicator in the US is this: Pick a fast food place at random, order a numbered meal.
Were you served promptly with hot food in a very clean establishment with professional staff whose average age is about 35? The local economy is fucked.
Did you get a totally halfassed food like object that is ostensibly warm handed to you by someone 25 or younger who clearly doesn’t give a shit? Local economy is doing just fine.
That's interesting, I saw that first hand in January staying the night in twin falls-idaho. It must be doing really well. Seattle where I live, not so much. Is this something you have read about before? Or just an observation?
I've read variations on it a few times. The idea is that older people who get laid off in a recession still need to get a paycheck, are willing to work for less to get something, and so end up beating out the younger people who'd normally be in these jobs just entering the workforce / doing it part-time.
Arlington, VA is the richest county in the state. Every fast food place will feature an immigrant staff which is hard working and punctual.
Prince Williams County is rural, think forests and trailer parks, but the fast food joints are all staffed by bored teenagers and high college students.
Checking who is the lowest on the income totem pole just seems to show if the economic situation for all adults is stable or not. Now it could be unstable due to a bad economy leading to older adults getting fired from better jobs. But it could also be due to other reasons like immigrants moving to a new area; or retirees becoming bored with their empty nests.
Where I live, fast food places are almost all fully staffed by ESL adults. I can't remember the last time I was served at a restaurant by a teen.
It's actually kind of weird because I feel like we are creating an immigrant underclass to staff our fast food places, works as janitors, etc. I'm not sure that is the goal of Canada's immigration policies, but it does seem to be one outcome at least.
FWIW, in Germany, this increase has been masked by offering companies to pay a significant part of their staff salaries. So, the same authority that pays the unemployed pays the employed with the same ratio, e.g. 67% of the net if companies apply for a full pause, means the employee doesn't have to work at all.
In the peak of covid this authority paid 8M of 34M employed people next to 3
M unemployed people, so round about one third of all workers were "unemployed" for a period of time.
One of the nice things about the german system is that when the crisis is over, the companies can ramp their workforce back up near instantaneously without hiring and training.
Compare that to the US where they lay people off in a down turn, only to then have to rehire and retrain once the economy picks up again.
What they do is highly debatable, while it gives some stability, people now complain that they have to work again for a little more money + there is some potential to abuse the system, e.g. companies get money and their staff is still working full-time. The market might backfire at some point and we should not assume that there will be a post-covid.
92 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadClick 'Edit Graph'
Select the series 'Population' (Thousands, Not Seasonally Adjusted). Click 'Add'
Modify the formula to be 'a/b'. Click 'Apply'.
There will be a recession. Soon. I mean, I can’t say for sure. I’m not a fortune teller. But I can give you a lot of reasons why. Let’s just say, it’s coming. It might be a little later than “soon”, but I’m betting it’s sooner than later. (Not with actual retirement money.)
https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansi...
> Workers in most states are eligible for up to 26 weeks of benefits from the regular state-funded unemployment compensation program, although seven states provide fewer weeks and one provides more.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/how-many-weeks-of-unem...
Can you elaborate on this? If people are unable to claim unemployment, shouldn't that incentivize them to get a job, causing the figure to go down?
After my benefit ran out, more opportunities didn't magically appear. I was still just as incentivized and still just as jobless.
Your memory is faulty, then. States extended to 99 weeks during the 08-09 recession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Population_Survey#Empl...
There are issues with furlough, though, especially back in April.
Implying that such spikes in unemployment or any other economic metrics aren’t representative of business as usual is a grave underestimate of how usual the business of pandemics and natural disasters is.
The difference is worth noting because an awful lot of the punditry's model for recessions is to assume there needs to be a structural adjustment that involves some amount of turmoil and there's nothing that should be done to prevent that. In this case, there's no reason to assume that, and no reason to assume that economic turmoil is either necessary or beneficial. A disaster happened, and we should view it like a structure fire, not a bankruptcy.
*except of course that a huge portion of the country has a precarious living situation, our health care system is a disaster, and our political system was wholly unprepared for any actual challenge. There's all kinds of deep foundational ills in the economy, but none of those would have caused a sudden severe spike in unemployment absent the pandemic.
If it goes well for the first few moments it's all good, I had a semi-interview that basically turned into a 4hr chat about programming, foreign policy etc (I suspect the boredom contributes).
If it goes badly, not only am I being watched and inspected by potentially more than one person, I can also see myself. I hate the sound of my own voice, I really hate the look of my own mouth let alone face.
In my case, I’ve always been good at in-person interviews. I’ll be nervous at first, but over the course of the interview, I can read the body language of everyone in the room and quickly get comfortable, and by the end of a successful interview everyone shakes hands and comes away feeling like I’m nearly part of the team.
On Zoom, it starts off the same way, but never gets better. I can’t really tell if anyone is really satisfied by my answers, and I’ll either ramble on, or end with “I’m not really sure I answered your question...”
At the end of the interview, they’ll invite me to ask some questions of my own, and I try to go in depth into understanding how they approach collaborating remotely. I feel like the answers are sometimes evasive and I come away wondering if my questions are too intrusive. Maybe a lot of teams have disagreements about this, and I shouldn’t ask them openly?
There are people coming "online" so to speak who weren't consciously making memories until years after the recession hit. I am now the ripe old age of 20, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever. I know some people significantly younger than me who could write well enough you wouldn't know it.
IDK, I just think it's funny is all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Barack_...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
It's the percent of working age (25-54) adults in the labor force. The unemployment rate has lots of oddities that can make the economy seem better (or worse) than it often is. Note for example the long, slow, decline from 2008 to 2015, long after the recession was officially over -- and how we've currently erased almost all gains since that nadir.
I would assume the probability of loss or reduction in income is significant for many people once they reach 50+.
It is not a pretty picture
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230
55+ is at 38%
20+ is at 69%
18% of the pop is 65 and older
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOP65UPTOZSUSA
Employment rate is better for seeing how many people are and aren't working.
Adults 25-54: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
Was near an all-time high until last February mainly due to women joining the workforce, though with a sharp drop in the past year.
Males 25-54: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
Was down about 8 points from the peak in the 60s in 2019, then dropped another 5 points in 2020. Still slightly more likely to be employed than women in the same age range.
No one here likes Trump. But if any of you have a good explanation, I’d love to hear it, rather than whatever point it is you are trying to make.
In the same chart, there was a huge decline during Trump’s tenure also, but I wouldn’t say he had something to do with it just because he was President.
The wording of my original statement was careful to avoid this whole boring “correlation does not imply causation” conversation. The negative of that statement would be one to claim Trump has no effect whatsoever on the unemployment.
I could as well say that Mike Pence did it, since his term was the same. Or Pelosi as the leader of the House.
There's no way around it, claiming the president has something to do with causing a good economy requires a statistical argument along the lines of "it must be him because this line informs that one and these plausible alternatives don't". That's my one liner summary but of course there are books about causality.
My guess is that there's not much you can do as president to improve the economy, or someone would have done it. There are lots of things you can do to derail it, which people from time to time because they're naive about how it works.
Trump was president 2016-2020. The participation rate went up 2016-2020. That does not mean Trump had anything to do with it. It is entirely plausible that it has nothing to do with politics at all, the economy is very complicated.
There are arguments to be made that Trump helped, but those have to be made. Blanket "the line went up at the same time!" observations are meaningless. It isn't even suggestive that Trump was involved.
Were you served promptly with hot food in a very clean establishment with professional staff whose average age is about 35? The local economy is fucked.
Did you get a totally halfassed food like object that is ostensibly warm handed to you by someone 25 or younger who clearly doesn’t give a shit? Local economy is doing just fine.
Arlington, VA is the richest county in the state. Every fast food place will feature an immigrant staff which is hard working and punctual.
Prince Williams County is rural, think forests and trailer parks, but the fast food joints are all staffed by bored teenagers and high college students.
Checking who is the lowest on the income totem pole just seems to show if the economic situation for all adults is stable or not. Now it could be unstable due to a bad economy leading to older adults getting fired from better jobs. But it could also be due to other reasons like immigrants moving to a new area; or retirees becoming bored with their empty nests.
Fluent: economy is fucked.
Poor: economy is doing well.
It's actually kind of weird because I feel like we are creating an immigrant underclass to staff our fast food places, works as janitors, etc. I'm not sure that is the goal of Canada's immigration policies, but it does seem to be one outcome at least.
In the peak of covid this authority paid 8M of 34M employed people next to 3 M unemployed people, so round about one third of all workers were "unemployed" for a period of time.
Compare that to the US where they lay people off in a down turn, only to then have to rehire and retrain once the economy picks up again.
I’ve seen laid off people rehired.