There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. Labor-force participation is better than the depths of Covid, but it's not full employment by any means. Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation, the absolute number only tricks octogenarians who remember when $0.50/hr was big money that could pay their way through college and these damn lazy kids!
It sounds like you're starting from preconcieved beliefs and then working backwards to determine how you'll interpret the validity of new information based on how they conform to your beliefs.
I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment".
The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.)
Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand.
The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages.
> Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate)
If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct.
>Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...]
>For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6]
Doesn't "full employment" mean there are more jobs than there are workers? That seems like a good thing for workers because it leads to employers competing for workers (similar to what you said).
Your statement that "the fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages" confuses me.
> Doesn't "full employment" mean there are more jobs than there are workers?
I don't see how that's unusual or problematic: There will always be more jobs than workers, because "jobs" are really just wishes unless they get filled, and there's no limit on wishes or their unreasonableness.
I mean, I can confidently promise a job, right now, for anyone to do an in-person walking survey of the surface of Pluto for 1 cent per day--employee is responsible for their own transportation. Even in a "full employment" economy, that 1-more-job-than-workers can linger indefinitely, unfulfilled.
If we modify it to "more fair jobs than workers", that doesn't help much because it's a pretty subjective evaluation and some would say "fair" is itself dependent on the supply and demand.
Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.
So what does their data say about the cost of a house in 2019 vs today? The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today? it could just be the BLS not fully capturing inflation
The CPI is composed of a basket of goods, and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average, so there's always going to be things you can cherry pick and complain about "the BLS not fully capturing inflation".
>The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today
BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right?
Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
Health Insurance is another fun/annoying one, because it's not like you can reliably standardize 1 standard unit of insurance and it's difficult to compare across plans. (Perhaps by design, the Confusopoly at work.)
That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0]
My understanding, as someone who bought health insurance on the healthcare.gov marketplace, is that the ACA did in fact standardize health insurance into “bronze,” “silver,” and “gold” tiers. The tiers are defined by actuarial math that I don’t recall at the moment.
> and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average
This argument is so weak. Housing is unlike those other items in that it's both by far most households' largest expense, and difficult or impossible to substitute a cheaper version: you can move to a cheap area, but there are no decent-paying jobs there, leaving you in the same or worse boat.
And there are precious few cheaper areas left: even Vegas, long known for low cost of living, is approaching $500k for a just-ok home. At today's interest rates, that's like $3300-4100 per month all-in. Almost no one can reasonably afford that; even software development jobs barely crack $100k here.
>This argument is so weak. Housing is unlike those other items in that it's both by far most households' largest expense
that's reflected in the CPI basket construction. "Rent of shelter" which includes rent and OER makes up 34.8% of the CPI basket.
> and difficult or impossible to substitute a cheaper version: you can move to a cheap area, but there are no decent-paying jobs there, leaving you in the same or worse boat.
that's also factored in because they sample prices according to where people actually are. They're not taking prices across 50 states and doing a simple average.
OER also does not capture the cost of buying a house today, but of renting an already owned home. Rents do not seem to have gone up nearly as much as prices + interest rates.
Right... thousands. I see one piece of "evidence", which is... government unemployment statistics, aka data from the very last people to trust on this, because they have every incentive to make the numbers look better than they are.
Right. Don't trust your lying eyes and ears, only trust Uncle Sam. He knows what's best for you. Politicians never lie or pressure civil servants to lie or change the definitions to give them nice numbers for the soundbites or make the bad economy they inherited seem good. Only honest and virtuous people exist in the world, except for myself, because I'm an evil communist, and commies always lie.
Not sure anyone accused you of being an evil communist here - not being able to find ample evidence of something surely doesn't make you a communist, just incompetent :)
I specifically said not to trust people like you because you're an ideologue who responds with such inane strawmen. And I'm a socialist so you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're in the wrong forest.
I blame my eyes for seeing hundreds of homeless people everyday who are let down by the consequences of a society lacking comprehensive, effective, integrated social services resulting in something of a socioeconomic-dignity apartheid.
For-profit media corporations are incentivized to publish outrage, unpopular, and contrarian headlines over substance and truth to snipe engagement. Along those lines, Vox seems like the perfect employer for George Santos. ;@]
I just visited a part of the city I used to live in and two things were shocking: The number of luxury condos being built, and, the nearby homeless encampment under an overpass. There didn't used to be either, it was just overall average part of town before.
Media can thrive on negativity and the economy can be in rough shape with young people not being able to buy a home or start a family. Just look at American fertility, it's more dramatic if you exclude first and second generation immigrants out of the number and see how large the delta is between the number of kids people want to have and the number they actually do
My current (purchased in 2015) home, with a view like Jackson Hole, cost a bit more than I paid for the first home in 1982 or so. Both in California. We were in our 30's so only one child, but that was location-independent. Both homes are/were three bedroom. WFH is pretty liberating for many.
People raise families and work here, and the kids get lots and lots of outdoor activity. At 74, I hike tails I cut out of brush daily, with some 100ft. (10 flights of stairs) elevation gain or loss. Ignore the negative things I had to say on a different HN post. For better or worse, Walmart and such are 50 miles away. Many people like that.
My thoughts is based on the number of annoying recruiters who ping me (daily) on linkedin starting with "I hope this finds you well... I have a great.. ...at a hourly rate that is previous X-40%"
There's a major resurgence in US manufacturing jobs now and for the foreseeable future. These are mostly in rural or small town areas, with low COL. Pay is anywhere from $18 - $40 an hour for high school graduates. Lots of investment is pouring into previously impoverished areas.
If you are not a professional in a large city, life is pretty comfy right now.
The average economy might look good by some metrics, but there are a lot of changes creating various groups of winners and losers, and depending on the people you know you might be in a group of people feeling hammered by the waves right now.
K-shaped recovery applies to individuals. The media hypes their insular bubble near wealth and power while the reality is inflation is impoverishing the lower classes. The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed.
"The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed" is basically a tautology. If you compare the very rich and the near destitute, yea, it's a pretty big gulf, and it's always going to be that way, by the definition of the words.
But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. O'Henry stories have a vivid portrayal of NYC in 1900, and all the retail workers there were young, single women living in shared housing. Before that the unskilled work was factory work, and before that the closest comparison I can think of was apprentices. All of the stories I've read that include those people describe a standard of living no better than minimum wage work, and sometimes worse.
(Note that the farther back you go, shopkeepers tended to be owners, not employees, which is obviously very different than modern minimum wage retail work. Some, but not all, of them are described as wealthy.)
> But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive.
The thing is that survival part has become a larger problem now even for people who have a full time jobs or two. Many live in their cars. When has that been the case historically to have such high housing costs? Has life been so hard for so many excluding during the great depression? Are we under one at the moment? It certainly looks like for more and more and I not only not see anything improving, I see things getting worse. Of course the winners don’t see it the same way and like to tell eachother stories
The media criticism podcast Citations Needed did an interesting show[0] recently on the phrase 'the economy' that is frequently used by the media.
Basically when the media is talking about 'the economy' they aren't looking at metrics that actually affect the majority of people. Rising wages only matter if corporations aren't turning around and charging higher prices for the same or worse goods/services. Plentiful jobs only matter if they are good jobs that can pay for a good quality of life. Good healthcare/housing are impossible to get in the most parts of the US unless you make an enormous amount of money.
The metrics we hear about don't take into account the experiences of the majority of people. This Vox article seems to be falling into the same trap of citing metrics that don't matter but at least does address that "health care, child care, higher education, housing." are prohibitively expensive in the US' broken economic system.
I'm not observing any of the allegations people are making about our economy doing well.
I don't care how many jobs are out there if they're all garbage that you can't build a life on.
Our country is scrambling to become solvent and they're afraid we're going to wake up and, rightfully, consider them as the cause of this economic fuckery.
The PPP money should've been given to citizens as stimulus. Businesses just pocketed it.
This article reads to me like, "people are angry about the economy, but have run out of ways to explain their anger with numbers." In other words, when unemployment is good, and inflation-adjusted wages are good, and spending is good, and investments are good ... what else is there?
Maybe there is some hidden variable we're missing in our economic models which can account for the discontent. But this article has not presented what exactly that's supposed to be.
My take is that people want security. It doesn't matter if today you're earning what might be considered a good salary if you can't own a home by the time you're in your thirties. Usually that's the time when people stop feeling invincible, notice slightly degrading health and realize that they might lose everything if something serious happens with hardly any time to catch up later in life. Maslow's pyramid is the key.
One of the issues I observe is that few Americans really have an understanding of the economy. Too often their feelings are dictated by gas prices, by their own personal income, or the stock market, IE: indicators, but not a holistic perspective.
I know it is just a movie, but so often I have reflected on the end scene in Fight Club, where the Tyler Durden character is talking about the dichotomy of believing we'd all grow up to be rich and then discovering it's not reality. The American system is unforgiving. The past roughly 100 years saw us short rapidly from an agrarian economy to our current services-driven economy, where along the way we were told a college education was the path to wealth but the reality wasn't so simple. I don't have time to type a thesis here, but I can't blame people for feeling the way they feel even when the economic indicators are generally positive.
While we're talking about it - a few days ago there was a thread about rural HNers. I would bet if you were to ask urban dwellers, especially in coastal cities, their perspective on the economy it might be very different than those of us in fly over country.
Basically what you're getting at is that it doesn't matter if "The Economy" is booming if you as an individual are struggling.
In theory "The Economy" being booming means it should be easier for individuals to find good work so they aren't struggling, but that's not really the reality we're seeing right now outside of some bubbles.
I look to my grandparents' generation and what they could do.
My grandfather was an engineer for NASA from the 60's-80's. They were able to have a primary residence in Houston and 2 holiday homes around Texas and put 3 kids through college on a modest single income.
Could I do the same today on a modest engineering salary from a government agency? No way.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadAcademia grooms students to propagate curriculum, not define new ideas
I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment".
The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.)
Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand.
The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages.
Just a thought...
it does not mean employers filling all their open job requests.
If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct.
>Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...]
>For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
Your statement that "the fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages" confuses me.
I don't see how that's unusual or problematic: There will always be more jobs than workers, because "jobs" are really just wishes unless they get filled, and there's no limit on wishes or their unreasonableness.
I mean, I can confidently promise a job, right now, for anyone to do an in-person walking survey of the surface of Pluto for 1 cent per day--employee is responsible for their own transportation. Even in a "full employment" economy, that 1-more-job-than-workers can linger indefinitely, unfulfilled.
If we modify it to "more fair jobs than workers", that doesn't help much because it's a pretty subjective evaluation and some would say "fair" is itself dependent on the supply and demand.
I think you have that backwards.
3% unemployment, more people taking up the fixed amount of job openings, less job openings, employers less desperate to hire
Am I missing something?
I think so. Your causality is wrong.
Strong economy -> More demand for employees -> Low unemployment Weak economy -> Less demand for employees -> Higher unemployment
Maybe I am thinking in the wrong terms?
What would you define what we had in COVID?
High demand for employees... was that because of low or high unemployment in your mind?
BLS data begs to differ: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.
>The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today
BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA
>cost of a house in 2019 vs today
Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0]
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cp...
This argument is so weak. Housing is unlike those other items in that it's both by far most households' largest expense, and difficult or impossible to substitute a cheaper version: you can move to a cheap area, but there are no decent-paying jobs there, leaving you in the same or worse boat.
And there are precious few cheaper areas left: even Vegas, long known for low cost of living, is approaching $500k for a just-ok home. At today's interest rates, that's like $3300-4100 per month all-in. Almost no one can reasonably afford that; even software development jobs barely crack $100k here.
that's reflected in the CPI basket construction. "Rent of shelter" which includes rent and OER makes up 34.8% of the CPI basket.
> and difficult or impossible to substitute a cheaper version: you can move to a cheap area, but there are no decent-paying jobs there, leaving you in the same or worse boat.
that's also factored in because they sample prices according to where people actually are. They're not taking prices across 50 states and doing a simple average.
This easier to interpret. Wages have not grown for almost 40 years since 1980.
Total compensation has gone up a lot, most of it is to insurance premiums.
Meanwhile inflation has been skyrocketing.
Maybe wages "slowly creeping up" is not remotely enough when the price of basic necessities is wildly out of control.
That's factored in.
>Units: 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted
And there's the issue. CPI is arguably doctored to downplay inflation.
Turns out that if you don't trust the government data and want to fudge it, you can come up to whatever conclusion you want!
For-profit media corporations are incentivized to publish outrage, unpopular, and contrarian headlines over substance and truth to snipe engagement. Along those lines, Vox seems like the perfect employer for George Santos. ;@]
Posted here recently: “All news is bad news” because “People like bad news”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336339. (Zero comments)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity
When people are “Mad as Hell,” ratings surge.
Network
People raise families and work here, and the kids get lots and lots of outdoor activity. At 74, I hike tails I cut out of brush daily, with some 100ft. (10 flights of stairs) elevation gain or loss. Ignore the negative things I had to say on a different HN post. For better or worse, Walmart and such are 50 miles away. Many people like that.
At the moment it's a ghost town.
If you are not a professional in a large city, life is pretty comfy right now.
"Wages are up — even accounting for inflation over the past several months..."
Yeah, just disregard the past years and blame it on "Partisanship and negative media bias..."
But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. O'Henry stories have a vivid portrayal of NYC in 1900, and all the retail workers there were young, single women living in shared housing. Before that the unskilled work was factory work, and before that the closest comparison I can think of was apprentices. All of the stories I've read that include those people describe a standard of living no better than minimum wage work, and sometimes worse.
(Note that the farther back you go, shopkeepers tended to be owners, not employees, which is obviously very different than modern minimum wage retail work. Some, but not all, of them are described as wealthy.)
The thing is that survival part has become a larger problem now even for people who have a full time jobs or two. Many live in their cars. When has that been the case historically to have such high housing costs? Has life been so hard for so many excluding during the great depression? Are we under one at the moment? It certainly looks like for more and more and I not only not see anything improving, I see things getting worse. Of course the winners don’t see it the same way and like to tell eachother stories
Everything but food -- downhill.
How affordable is a house today vs 5 years ago vs now? How about rent?
How affordable is college 5 years ago vs now?
How affordable is healthcare? Daycare?
Basically when the media is talking about 'the economy' they aren't looking at metrics that actually affect the majority of people. Rising wages only matter if corporations aren't turning around and charging higher prices for the same or worse goods/services. Plentiful jobs only matter if they are good jobs that can pay for a good quality of life. Good healthcare/housing are impossible to get in the most parts of the US unless you make an enormous amount of money.
The metrics we hear about don't take into account the experiences of the majority of people. This Vox article seems to be falling into the same trap of citing metrics that don't matter but at least does address that "health care, child care, higher education, housing." are prohibitively expensive in the US' broken economic system.
0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-191-how-medias-use-of-...
I don't care how many jobs are out there if they're all garbage that you can't build a life on.
Our country is scrambling to become solvent and they're afraid we're going to wake up and, rightfully, consider them as the cause of this economic fuckery.
The PPP money should've been given to citizens as stimulus. Businesses just pocketed it.
Maybe there is some hidden variable we're missing in our economic models which can account for the discontent. But this article has not presented what exactly that's supposed to be.
I know it is just a movie, but so often I have reflected on the end scene in Fight Club, where the Tyler Durden character is talking about the dichotomy of believing we'd all grow up to be rich and then discovering it's not reality. The American system is unforgiving. The past roughly 100 years saw us short rapidly from an agrarian economy to our current services-driven economy, where along the way we were told a college education was the path to wealth but the reality wasn't so simple. I don't have time to type a thesis here, but I can't blame people for feeling the way they feel even when the economic indicators are generally positive.
While we're talking about it - a few days ago there was a thread about rural HNers. I would bet if you were to ask urban dwellers, especially in coastal cities, their perspective on the economy it might be very different than those of us in fly over country.
In theory "The Economy" being booming means it should be easier for individuals to find good work so they aren't struggling, but that's not really the reality we're seeing right now outside of some bubbles.
My grandfather was an engineer for NASA from the 60's-80's. They were able to have a primary residence in Houston and 2 holiday homes around Texas and put 3 kids through college on a modest single income.
Could I do the same today on a modest engineering salary from a government agency? No way.
Yes the Rich are definitely getting richer, anyone who owns a profit producing entity.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=202...
Doesn’t matter if you make a wee bit more, if everything you need to survive has shot up faster in price.