Low unemployment isn't worth much if the jobs barely pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/01/08/low-unemployment-isnt-worth-much-if-the-jobs-barely-pay/ <comment><USER3> _We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living._ \- Buckminster Fuller

 _One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage._ \- Buckminster Fuller

... via [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

<comment><USER4> Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we've actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else).

Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work. Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.

Honestly, if you followed evolutionary biology we all should be working quite a bit less and producing way more art. The idea that people will fall into dissipation without work is supported by very little science, and certainly no biological science.

Human beings need missions, not labor, to be fulfilled. The market economy seems capable of only supporting a very narrow slice of mission oriented work, the rest does seem like drudgery to me.

<comment><USER5> >if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else

If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high.

This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is visible.

<comment><USER4> Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.

<comment><USER6> Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".

<comment><USER4> Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.

<comment><USER6> I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.

"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set _not_ by congress and _not_ by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Oxygen is very valuable too, but it should not be expensive for this reason alone. It's abundant, and therefore cheap, and that's a good thing.

Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.

Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an oversupply of teachers.

Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!").

Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by.

Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?

<comment><USER9> _Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he /she can't pay the bills?_

A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.

<comment><USER10> The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability.

Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.

<comment><USER9> _The point is there are a lot of people in this position._

Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.

<comment><USER11> What is the mechanism to identify and count people who were voluntarily retired but now wish they could find a job but can't?

<comment><USER9> If they're actively looking for work, then they're unemployed. If they're not looking for work because they assume there are no opportunities, they're "discouraged workers": [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp). Discouraged workers aren't counted in the primary unemployment rate, but are counted in U4 and U6, which are also historically low; see [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE) and [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, > child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are > woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many > regions.

It's utterly ridiculous to call these things "market failures." Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.

<comment><USER13> If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost + state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California).

These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.

<comment><USER14> How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free?

This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.

<comment><USER15> > public schools are effectively free

It's actually even worse than that because you pay for public education even if you don't use it.

So in that regard, if you send your kids to private schools, you're paying for their education twice.

This makes it very difficult to compete, and as a rayiner pointed out, isn't a real market.

I think the best solution to this is vouchers, which is a nice blend of public dollars but competitive schools.

<comment><USER16> Controversial opinion: I think everyone should have access to good education, and I don't see why a public system is incapable of providing it.

Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep.

Elite schools are a different story because they have significantly more resources.

The free market is good at some things, but the public wellbeing isn't one of them.

<comment><USER17> A profit oriented system doesn't make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.

Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy.

This is the case because markets have competition, which the public sector lacks. It's why spending on public education continues to rise despite decreasing quality of outcomes.

<comment><USER18> A profit oriented system doesn't make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.

This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing.

The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than you think.

<comment><USER19> This example actually show the fundamental value of separating infrastructure from service.

Amazon's _infrastructure_ (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their _service_ (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.

Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre internet, rail, ...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and irregular), education, and childcare.

If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people.

If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.

<comment><USER21> I don't think you'll fix high housing costs.

There's a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it _do_ pay it and are competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New York or Bay area housing ever go down?

Time for more people to admit they can't afford to live in the best + most popular places and instead move to "less desirable" places, like Iowa.

<comment><USER22> Actually, housing is easiest to fix, just allow building more densely and provide public transportation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity.

I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well.

For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity.

In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system.

This is just food for thought.

<comment><USER24> The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor, and to _only_ allow them to subsist.

UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough _time_ to find more substantial opportunities.

And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on the ambulance. UBI would make it so that I don't need _another_ job to support a family, and could live healthily and with dignity on just those 48-72 hours a week.

<comment><USER25> >>The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor

That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle

Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good income.

Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you are out of a job.

Sometimes that cut off is more direct (i.e if you make widgets your per hour the rate of manufacture can easily be factored into the cost of making the widget) but if you some do something more nebulous like cleaning the floors, or filing papers, that can be harder to calculate but every business does.

<comment><USER26> That's right, but we don't have a society unless people have incomes so maybe this isn't a good model for funding a civil society?

<comment><USER23> This is not the case - there's plenty of civil societies that have existed over the millennia that are subsistence economies. They aren't wealthy, but that isn't the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hear agreement that the economy is good, but also that jobs are paying less for more work and that income inequality is larger than ever. At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding. I feel like I'm missing something about the real condition of the economy...

<comment><USER28> Everyone has an agenda but be especially careful of real estate as an economic barometer. There's so much speculation going on that the level of distortion can often seem criminal in retrospect. A recent example: Manhattan developers seem to be keeping thousands of new, unsold condos off the market. I don't think it's difficult to imagine why. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan- s-flood-of-new-condos-could-take-six-years-to-sell)

<comment><USER29> Re: unsold condos, anyone want to try explaining how withholding stock makes sense? I understand flooding the market would depress prices further, but I don't understand what market would buy up all this stock. If these units can't sell in what seems to be a nicely growing market, isn't it going to be a long time before they sell at all? Like, so long that just sitting on them and paying taxes doesn't make sense?

<comment> swagasaurus-rex The calculation: Prices will skyrocket from lack of supply more quickly than the taxes paid on the units.

Development and renting it out locks you into contracts where you can't flip as quickly (low liquidity). So you don't develop or use the land, just wait for your investment to accrue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's worth discussing subgroups. An unemployment rate of 5% is probably fine if it is uniformly distributed; but we know it's not.

Some subgroups, like minorities and young adults, have been plagued by much higher numbers which _are_ a problem. Someone who can't get a foothold in the job market will likely have lifelong challenges.

A rate of 3.5% almost certainly mean improvement for these subgroups.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is based off of 2016 data and an self admitted overly expansive view of what the proper cohort is.

(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).

All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.

edits:

strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self- employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.

And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much.

Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.

Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.

</comment><comment><USER32> I tend to think work gives some sense of purpose to a person's life. That's incalculably valuable.

<comment><USER33> This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more.

While it's theoretically possible that they might have _spontaneously_ started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.

<comment><USER34> Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the market and so is not compensated.

Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.

There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.

<comment><USER13> Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth.

For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?

Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single unskilled labor job, unemployment numbers meant something. Today they mean nothing.

A measure of how many households live above the poverty line would be a step in the right direction, but also frankly the poverty line in America is set too low. People 10% above it are still too poor to live comfortably on their income.

<comment><USER36> That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

<comment><USER37> Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business. It is riskier to hire and fire than it is to not hire.

The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

<comment><USER38> > civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a > small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the > civil Rights Act of 1964.

That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what you were talking about.

"Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allowed to continue discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 changed the law to require all businesses with 15 or more employees to adhere to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."[1]

I'm still shocked that discrimination is allowed for _any_ business at all. But you weren't entirely correct.

Also, the Act's other benefits have to be weighed against allowing discrimination in small businesses. Small businesses that were racist and discriminatory before the Civil Rights Act could continue to be so after it, but could only grow up to a certain size. That's still an improvement on what existed previously, which was that they could be racist and discriminatory forever and always.

If I was a minority in the 60s I'd consider federally guaranteed right to vote, equal education, stay at any hotel, use any public water fountain or bus, and be considered on an equal basis for federal jobs, private sector jobs in 15/25+ employee firms, loans, assistance programs and the rest to be a massive gain over the status quo. You're entitled to your opinion on the CRA of 1964, but to most people it's going to sound bizarre. Sorry.

> The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

I don't know what "ta boot" means so the meaning of this statement is unclear.

1\. [https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act](https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act)

<comment><USER37> Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination. In the United States small businesses account for the most employees. Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them. There is less risk to not hire than there is to hire due to the Civil Rights Act. This results in less minority hires.

If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities they have a greater risk of being sued because it is easier for a person in majority race to prove discrimnation.

<comment><USER38> > Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate > discrimination.

It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and businesses respond to incentives.

> small businesses account for the most employees.

That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in 2019.[1]

And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, housing, and other opportunities.

> If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities

A small business (< 15 employees) that only wants to hire minorities would also be exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act wouldn't they? I'm not a lawyer, I still can't believe this is actually legal, and maybe there's some other law elsewhere that makes this illegal. Discrimination is wrong, no matter who does it. But what you're saying wouldn't happen either.

1\. [https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt](https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt)

<comment><USER37> > It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and > businesses respond to incentives.

The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I am trying to illustrate above and below.

> That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find > data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt > from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of > employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in > 2019.[1]

It is not about the mandates in law. It is about reality and risk. If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in court(or EEOC has to prove) using company statistics(unless explicit evidence exists) that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees. For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100(52% of jobs are attributed to 100 employee or less businesses according to Texas Law Now;2012) or 19 employees the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size. Employers know this. That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small businesses to discriminate.

Combine that with the fact that if an applicant does not get hired, it is incredibly difficult to even begin a suit without internal knowledge of the company, ergo it is less risky for employers to not hire minorities to begin with.

> And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still > outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations > of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, > housing, and other opportunities.

I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school, etc if it results in poor opportunities to be gainfully employed. As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth(power to influence vote/education/business/etc) of the largest minority group in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

<comment><USER38> > The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I > am trying to illustrate above and below.

And as I showed, small businesses make up a minority of employment opportunities. The CRA increased employment opportunities literally everywhere else such as in government jobs. To go from "100% of businesses discriminate" to "50% of businesses discriminate" is an improvement in absolute terms. It didn't take away job opportunities that existed. If a small business was racist before, it would continue to be racist afterward. Do you have proof that small businesses began discriminating more after the CRA than they did before?

> This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees.

Citation needed.

> For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100...or 19 employees > the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size.

Citation needed. In a business that small, everyone knows everyone else. It should be way easier to gather data.

> That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses

Whereas before the CRA the option to sue didn't exist at all and all businesses, of every size, could discriminate with impunity.

> I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school

Fortunately most people disagree with you.

> As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth...of the largest minority group > in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

That would appear to coincide with the post-WW2 economic boom. I imagine _every_ group in the US got wealthier in that period. I'm not well-versed with all the factors and history after the CRA, but correlation ain't causation.

<comment><USER37> I was trying to logically explain the reality of the situation. I would have a hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to discriminating publicly. I cannot imagine that survey exists. I'm done.

<comment><USER38> > I was trying to logically explain the reality

So was I. My logic is simple to explain:

Pre-CRA - 100% of employers (small businesses, large businesses, medium business, non-profits, governments) could discriminate, and many did.

Post-CRA - < 100% of employers could discriminate

Therefore, the number of jobs available to _everyone_ (minorities and non- minorities alike) went up. It's simple math.

I don't understand what your logic is. Because you've said both:

"Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them."

and

"If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in court that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do against larger employers [than]...a small employer. That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small businesses to discriminate."

So minorities find it harder to sue small businesses, but, also, small business owners don't hire minorities because they risk being sued. What? And small businesses only worry about lawsuits by fired employees, but not ones by candidates who feel illegal bias was a factor in their rejection. Why?

> I would have a hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to > discriminating publicly

Don't necessarily need that. Economists have all sorts of ingenious ways to tease out this information from other labor and employment data, EEO surveys that many employees and candidates fill out, and other things. If there's any evidence of what you're suggesting, there would be clues in that data.

> I'm done.

Me too, friend. Take care and a (slightly belated) happy new year. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yeah, so here's the problem. We now, more than ever, have a key metric for measuring the economy that doesn't really measure the right thing. Just like in every other situation, businesses and startups included, this leads to gamification and optimization for that metric.

"Oh, you want more jobs, great! here you go! We'll cut the hours by 1/2 and employee twice as many people!"

Unemployment goes to 0% but so does quality of life. So the real question remains, what are the metrics we really value as a society and what do we need to do in order to optimize for them?

<comment><USER40> You're right that this one metric doesn't tell the whole story, but no metric does and they aren't meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.

<comment><USER39> Right, but the point is that not only does this metric not tell the whole story, but that it tells the WRONG story.

Unemployment isn't a useful metric anymore.

<comment><USER40> Perhaps, but your rationale ("it's not meaningful if jobs pay half of what they used to") supports my interpretation ("not the whole story"), not your thesis ("WRONG story"). Correct me if I missed something; haven't had my coffee yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> While true it's important to point out that salaries are rising and most for the lowest income.

[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth- for-...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-second- quarter-2019-accelerated-to-4-percent-over-the-year-300890012.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum- wage-increases-fueling-faster-wage-growth-those-bottom/)

</comment><comment><USER42> In these cases I somehow always have the Goodhart's law immediately coming to my mind: _When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER43> >In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on.

>The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree,

So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are only able to earn "barely enough to live on".

Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal convictions, disabling disease or injury after college? Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

<comment><USER14> Are you assuming that everybody who is able-bodied and has a scale degree should be able to find employment?

Did over 12 million people in this country really get worthless degrees or become incapacitated?

Getting a "good" degree might not matter so much, if so many other people also got those degrees. One could say that degree is therefore no longer so good, but there is not an endless train of "even better" degrees for people to move on towards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How true. But even pay is misleading. Ultimately, it's about cost of living / affordability. For example, if hourly rate increases but housing - sensing the market can bear more - soon follows then the pay increase is a wash, or worse.

</comment><comment><USER45> I see the future as grim anti-utopia:

Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to tax them in order to pay for social policies.

I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation actually can make that move fast and not expensive.

In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both countries.

Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?

<comment><USER46> > Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs > obsolete.

In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in 1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer.

People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs, making more services available, more possibilities open.

Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up.

Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we couldn't even fancy yet.

<comment><USER47> The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs increasingly do.

In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a cow when told to.

These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python programming - regardless of education.

So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at _any_ job. It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered construction equipment.

Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

<comment><USER46> > So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising

I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php.

> The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up > simply unemployable at any job

Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that don't require you to be smart.

You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web programmer or a politician. I would dare say that the amount of stupid work is growing.

And avg person is not dumb at all, never was. The dumbest few always would find some way of doing some service job, especially when service field is growing. All kind of grooming does not require you to be especially smart, even chimps can do that.

<comment><USER48> >agriculture is way harder than php

an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

<comment><USER46> > an illiterate man can pull potatoes

You need to put it there first, and do so avoiding the eruption of soil. Agriculture is very hard and requires much knowledge. Without knowledge you'll destroy both the crop and the land.

<comment><USER48> The potato puller is not fulfilling the role of agricultural designer. He or she is literally visually identifying a potato and using physics to pull it out of the ground.

It's like the difference between programming (fulfilling tasks), and system architecture, which is something I can't do because I don't have experienxe with huge enterprise stacks.

<comment><USER47> Yes.

For a visual example, look at John Malkovich's character in the film version of Of Mice and Men. He's mentally retarded. But people tell him - "carry these bags over there". And he does it, and he's useful. There is no job like this now. He's too dumb to be a barista or a gas station attendant or a line cook.

<comment><USER48> Agree wholeheartedly. As corporations grow into the trillions of dollars range of valuations and work becomes even more complex due to automation, we soon will live in a world where it will be difficult to find a way to purchase the things needed to live.

But x% of us will live really well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does a person working part time who can't afford their own place to rent (i.e. Live with their parents) count as "employed"? If so, then the sharing economy surely boosts this metric significantly when not actually significantly improving lives.

<comment><USER50> People are counted as employed if they did any work at all for pay, even if it was just 1 hour a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Aren't all of these metrics that try to capture the bottom end inherently flawed because we don't know what an acceptable "minimum standard" for a long term job is?

For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at >30% or so.

It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a family should be possible.

</comment><comment><USER52> In reference to those low-paying retail jobs: I have done some research on large US retailers like J.C. Penney, Gamestop, Macy's, Sears and Tailored Brands. It's quite scary to see how dire the situation is for these firms. Shrinking revenues, plenty of debt, hardly any profit in sight.

The most shocking to is the number of people they employ (more than 90k in the case of J.C. Penney), many of whom can be sure to be laid off in the next few years.

<comment><USER53> Walmart, Amazon and Target are doing fine and still pay low wages. I don't understand your point or choice of companies to list.

<comment><USER54> Amazon retail is not "doing fine". It's a low margin business with high fixed costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Unemployment only measures persons in the workforce, not those who never had a job. Thus, the stats are further less rosy.

<comment><USER56> That is why we also track the labor force participation rate [0].

[0]: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART)

<comment><USER57> I can't tell from your comment but I'm not sure this is what you expect. This is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated) estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.

<comment><USER58> I have never heard of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics being politically motivated. This is a very new accusation. Do you have any reference?

<comment><USER59> The notion that unemployment (or other economic) statistics are manipulated is neither novel _nor_ confined to the US specifically.

Whether it's generally _accurate_ is another question.

But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up multiple discussions:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=unemployment+statistics+%28manipulated%7Cmanipulation%7Cmanipulating%29&btnG=)

I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is _so_ common as to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either.

My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.

<comment><USER60> There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they don't get disability, for same medical issue.

People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx)

Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated.

I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.

<comment><USER23> Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment market for such service, which motivates employers to seek higher productivity and automation rather than increase wages, which furthers the cycle above.

<comment><USER62> These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.

<comment><USER23> In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be "subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> _Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions._

This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment.

I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless.

Due to so-called _identity politics_ , if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.

I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive.

But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to work _at all._

I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don't work that much.

I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem.

Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were _poor_ by the standards of less developed countries like India.

Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible to articulate.

I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more.

When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.

I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software

It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons.

I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more.

Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.

I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh especially heavily on the lower classes who have less money.

But I am less convinced that the trend of low paid work, whether from jobs or gig work, is really some kind of evil, malicious, abusive trend where rich people are being intentionally awful to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. I think it's far more complicated than that and I don't think it gets acknowledged at all. I don't think we are even discussing that angle, in part because no one wants to suggest that poverty isn't really a problem or be accused of implying such by wondering out loud about some of this stuff.

I can afford to occasionally comment on it because I'm already a social outcast that everyone thinks is crazy. I'm not risking that much.

But anyone with any kind of "nice life" and decent reputation either has zero idea how the other half lives or has no real choice but to keep such thoughts private lest they be accused of being up to something nefarious.

<comment><USER51> A lot of what you're saying rings true to me.

There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life.

Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing.

I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly American problem.

But housing - that's literally an issue across the spectrum. It feels like every 'class' of person has basically taken a step down or two if you compare generation to generation. The upper-middle are looking at just about being able to afford starter properties in major cities. The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.

Below that you have stuff like crappy flat shares, unofficial bunking up, or homelessness - to be honest looking at what graduates are doing I can't even imagine what say, a supermarket worker does if they don't have family.

<comment><USER64> > But housing - [...] The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down > in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses > with other professionals.

Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.

<comment><USER63> In the US, we've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the creation of new Missing Middle Housing. This trend likely was worse in 2012 than in 1990.

We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.

It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> People need to get that first job. That first job leads to skills, experience, knowledge of how to interact with coworkers, and so on. Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid.

This is one reason why I'm against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market.

I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn't account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.

<comment><USER50> > Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the > poor are fluid.

This is false. The US ranks very poorly for economic mobility- in fact, even 3rd world countries like Pakistan rank higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Relevant, from the UK side:

"Jobs of the future may not have stable hours, holiday pay, sick pay, or pensions, DWP secretary says"

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig- econo...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-economy- damian-green-speech-holiday-minimum-wage-sick-pay-hours-a7421071.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> Low wages for basic labour are I think the biggest driver of inequality in the US. It's not taxes, or education or anything else.

Break your back, barely make it - that's not the American dream.

A lift in Minimum wage would make a big difference, the rest of us would have to pay for it in higher prices, we can afford it though.

Get medical coverage to the remaining few that don't have it and the US would make great gains.

</comment><comment><USER68> >In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year.

Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.

They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.

I clicked through to [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the- avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the- avenue/2019/11/21/low-wage-work-is-more-pervasive-than-you-think-and-there- arent-enough-good-jobs-to-go-around/), which linked me to [https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage- workfor...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workforce/), which says the definition is on page 5 of [https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/11/201911_...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/11/201911_Brookings-Metro_low-wage-workforce_Ross- Bateman.pdf#page=5). It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition:

> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the > often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year > workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we > consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn > more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the > benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our > definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the > first to do so.

...

> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 > real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in > Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.

They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.

Moving on:

>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.

If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.

>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.

For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:

>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.

Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"

The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.

<comment><USER69> > then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay > for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.

Laughing hard here. You just invented "trickle-down pay raises"!

If everybody has a degree, the degree doesn't matter anymore, does it? Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer. Plus the effect only hold due to a few sectors like IT paying disproportionately - overall, productivity increases over the last 70 years have not been reflected in purchasing power or work hours. The gains disappear into the upper deck.

We need to stop this bullshit mentality that people need to 'educate themselves more' to earn a decent living. The shit jobs will always exist, _and they should pay well just for being shit jobs_ , which is what happens in northern Europe where minimum wages are more than enough to live comfortably as a bartender. There should be absolutely no shame in working for McDonalds (except about the food itself).

<comment><USER70> Of course degrees matter. Knowledge creates productivity, which creates wealth.

<comment><USER69> You're taking that sentence as an absolute, not in the context of low-wage jobs. And it it is a liberal fantasy, right next to meritocracy. That wealth stays put exactly where it is, at the top of the chain. All studies on labor show productivity gains far outpacing salaries in the past century. A well- paid knowledge worker today can barely meet the lifestyle of his factory worker grandparents.

<comment><USER68> [https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07...](https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf)

This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely, although it only goes back a quarter century.

<comment><USER71> This is only because America has incredibly bloated healthcare costs - <USER2> "compensation" mostly isn't all that valuable.

A $1000 slice of pizza is still only 1 slice of pizza.

<comment><USER68> This is inflation adjusted, which means it accounts for all that.

<comment><USER71> This also only goes until 2006, Obamacare didn't even exist yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> In this global economy, much depends on the quality of education/training our workers are getting compared with other countries. In many cases, there are better educated workers elsewhere. It is not clear to me what the US is doing to stay competitive. Sure, we have top tier universities, but below this level, I think we are getting beat.

</comment><comment><USER73> If - in America - we stopped bringing in millions of poor and uneducated young working age people every year - legally and illegally - wages would rise. This is common sense and supported by research [0].

[0]: [https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration](https://cis.org/Report/Wages- Immigration)

</comment><comment><USER74> We could achieve 100% unemployment by putting anyone without a job in work camps. Living with a bunch of friends who are still struggling, everyone is aware that opportunity isn't easy even in this "ideal" conditions. And frankly the number of employers who will abuse the hell out of you is somewhere around 30-60%.

</comment><comment><USER75> If we really wanted to put more money in people's pockets and have a more progressive tax code we should, at the very least, start chipping away at taxing incomes. A good start would be to make any cost of necessities (shelter, food, healthcare, transportation) should be tax deductible.

<comment><USER76> Why not just get rid of the income tax and only have sales tax? We could make exceptions for basic food and shelter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Agreed. "Job quality" / Wages versus cost of living should also be taken into account.

</comment><comment><USER78> I'm really glad that we have a presidential candidate (Yang) sophisticated enough to run on UBI. I've never voted before but I finally have hope that the government might make structural adjustments to the changing realities of our world.

</comment><comment><USER79> Maybe aggregate salary would be a much better measure than unemployment

</comment><comment><USER80> "Unemployment" is the result of a lack of entrepreneurs, don't drive them out of your neighbourhood.

</comment><comment><USER81> I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something, anything that was an actual real new product or service.

We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.

<comment><USER82> I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that... bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human effort is going into that.

<comment><USER81> I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful.

Not so exciting after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> > Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve > workers' economic security.

Amazed how all these articles gloss over or totally ignore what workers themselves can do to better their situation

> These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American > adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low > wages.

>What should be done?

By who?

</comment><comment><USER84> Fighting against unemployment means you are creating unnecessary jobs. It's creating an army of disposable, obedient, consenting slaves.

Think about fast food and the damage it's doing. All this money, metals and resources and all those people could be paid to deliver better healthcare, educate people, etc while people could just prepare their own food instead.

I can't count the times I was called either a communist, a moocher, a parasite, an euro-something, etc I'm so jaded from this subject. Sometimes I'm scared that the government might try and find new tricks or excuse to not give me welfare, because I'm certain the public opinion would not have any trouble in seeing me homeless.

Misguided economic policies stem from some form of cultural, subjective ideology. I still have to be convinced why it's the government's role to push people to go back to work, instead of just giving them the bare minimum so they can eat and find shelter. The amount of money you need for welfare is ridiculously low compared to the advantage it allows. We're just scared of moochers and people having free time.

And even if I'm wrong, it's not like governments will force people to work or continue to let large-scale homelessness happen. The idea of everyone-for- himself is completely the opposite of our species: we're a social society, and civilization needs to help everyone because it's in the interest of all countries. Until we're able to question the "we need workers for civilization to function" meme, nothing will improve.

I cannot count how many times I rant about this. I can already hear the pedantic, rational people explaining how I'm stealing their taxes.

</comment><comment><USER85> we have a problem world wide

When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of high costs of rent or homeownership.

Its not going away and its going to get worse.

</comment><comment><USER12> The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn't true.

<comment><USER3> Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.

<comment><USER12> I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

<comment><USER86> The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

<comment><USER87> LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

[https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504](https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504)

"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER88> That's the beauty (to some) and problem (to others) with the definition of poverty: we keep moving the goalposts/standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

<comment><USER90> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States:

> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the > employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, > by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard > deviations in Germany.[1]

Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.

Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.

[1] [https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408-eng.htm)

<comment><USER91> > Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data.

Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.

Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).

Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!

<comment><USER92> Not to mention that people's personal moods do not necessarily reflect the quality of their material position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Automation takes a toll, and the market decides the cost of things (e.g. how much an employer is willing to pay an employee for a specific task). One facet of that toll is that employers are much less willing to pay a premium for tasks they believe can be handled by automation.

</comment><comment><USER94> I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system.

In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.

<comment><USER95> Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you?

This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.

<comment><USER94> Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

<comment><USER88> There's a difference between having the right to the _concept of an axe_ and having the right to _my specific axe_. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

<comment><USER96> It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple's sequence of numbers that instruct it.

<comment><USER88> You also didn't make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That's quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple's phones should be theirs because _reasons_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> This is insane. The rise in wages for the bottom half are higher than they have ever been and it is solely because of low unemployment. How in the world do some people become economists and not understand supply and demand?

<comment><USER98> There are factors at play other than supply and demand

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.

<comment><USER29> I'm skeptical that America's forefathers envisioned a future where a reasonable degree of financial security is exclusively for business-owners.

<comment><USER99> At that time, financial security did not exist at all (or almost). There was no social safety net, no food stamps, no tax to redistribute. There was no reason to envision there will ever be different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> People who lived in socialism know that, there was even 0% unemployment :-)

</comment><comment><USER101> Since employment is tied to not starving, I'd say its worth a fair amount.

<comment><USER102> Very tenuously tied to not starving. There are plenty of working-class people who have to avail themselves of community food pantries and at least in my large city the homeless have access to three meals a day.

And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly low standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Similarly, minimum wage isn't worth much if there's high unemployment

<comment><USER104> minimum wage isn't worth much. period.

These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries.

Minimum wage should be abolished.

<comment><USER105> "The market" is not some all-powerful, benevolent force that will always achieve the best outcome for humanity or society as a whole. Markets are disproportionately controlled by the current holders of wealth (and therefore power), who will naturally tend to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. And so some kinds of regulation are often appropriate to protect the less powerful participants.

<comment><USER104> free market IS all-powerful. times change, technological progress moves forward, financial powers rise and fall, it's natural, it's evolution, a chaos controlled by the market (and not by the billionaires, it's not Russia). If you interfere, you are making things worse, delaying the inevitable, promoting dependence, killing individuality (or even progress).

<comment><USER106> The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the "free market" and I don't understand reactions to market failures that amount to "Well we can't do anything about that". Of course we can, it exists for us, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> I do not agree with that, having a job is always a good thing for mental health. It is always better than staying at home doing nothing.

<comment><USER108> Having work one finds valuable is.

Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.

Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.

IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.

You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don't also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.

Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.

<comment><USER109> > Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".

I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.

I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.

<comment><USER110> There might be someone who can rotate one tire and not four.

I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> I see this as a new tactic from the left. Since they can't complain about unemployment in the record lows since forever, they complain about the jobs themselves.

<comment><USER112> See the trump difference? There is NONE:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060)

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Regarding health benefits, can I float a crazy idea?

Let part-time and gig economy workers pick their own insurance plans, and in exchange for every hour in their contract (or hours driven, etc. in the case of gig economy workers), require the employer (yes, we should close the loophole nationwide like California is trying to do) to contribute around 1.5% toward the monthly premium, until the employee/worker has, say, 60% of the premium paid for. This would work well for people juggling 2-3 part-time jobs or gigs and, at least in terms of health benefits, put them on par with FTEs.

</comment><comment><USER114> Taco Bell has just started experimenting with $100k salaries for their store managers (a raise from about $70k) because low unemployment has tightened the pool of workers available.

We're headed in the right direction. With low unemployment, rising blue collar wages, and strong equity markets it would be absolute foolishness to make a big change in any direction.

</comment><comment><USER115> Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the society.

<comment><USER116> Eventually you approach (modern) slavery though, and the transition is not black to white, but a continuous one. So your argument, without any qualifications, actually implies that (modern) slavery is not a problem. I hope it is obvious to you why that is a highly unreasonable argument.

<comment><USER101> No. Slavery isnt voluntary by definition, and that is it's most essential feature.

<comment><USER116> I don't quite see your point. I agree that both traditional and modern slavery is not voluntary. But if there are no other options, other than taking an extremely low-paying job, then modern slavery is exactly what you get.

None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary, and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "...we need to rethink the fundamentals of our economic and social policies"

They suggest fixes in the next paragraph that are not fundamental, have already been implemented, and have directly contributed to the problem:

"Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers' economic security. Boosting wages through tax credits, a higher minimum wage, or supporting sectoral bargaining; supporting families with high-quality child care; and giving workers more control over their time via stable scheduling are just a few options."

A fundamental shift occurred in 1776 and has been slowly bastardized since. Read Thomas Sowell, Peter Schiff, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mesis, Ron Paul, etc.

The central planners are the problem.

<comment><USER117> Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863?

<comment><USER118> It seems a bit disingenuous to assume that the parent commenter laments the emancipation proclamation just because he/she has a differing view on fiscal policy. This is ad hominem by definition. Not very contributory to the conversation. What parts of his/her points do you disagree with?

<comment><USER119> Oh this one is easy. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504) for the statement:

> The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of > 1964.

If you think I'm quoting out of context, entertain yourself with the rest of the comment. It's on this very story. No digging necessary.

<comment><USER117> +1 nice find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Unemployment is NOT very low. The government publicizes a fake unemployment number which includes a HUGE imaginary subtraction called "discouraged workers", which was originally imagined during the Clinton administration. To get a real idea about EMPLOYMENT, including those pesky minorities that Clinton excluded, see the employment population ratio, ages 25-54:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060)

When Obama left office we were STILL in an economy destroyed by Bush, STILL at employment levels BELOW the bottom of the past 2 recessions!

Now that Trump has been in office employment has grown NO DIFFERENTLY THAN UNDER OBAMA, for the past 3 years the Trump difference is INVISIBLE.

<comment><USER120> So from the FRED series you link to, the current market is the second best for employment in history. How is that "NOT very low"? It's better than any point in history other than a couple years when the dot com bubble was inflating.

BLS labor statistics are phenomenal. It's some of the most trustworthy data available. Please don't call them "fake" just because you want to use a different time series than someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> >53 million people earn low wages, with a median of just $10.22 per hour. That's nearly half of the 18 to 64 workforce.

10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too.

It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all.

Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.

*edit:

To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity)

<comment><USER122> Doubling the minimum wage does not cause costs to double. This is a very flawed analysis- the minimum wage doesn't affect the entire population (less than half!) so raising that wage only raises the costs of things a small, proportional factor, if at all.

I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far too often.

<comment><USER121> You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply cost more because they are able to spend the money.

This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.

Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.

Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods.

I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.</comment></comment></comment>


2013 Rails Rumble Gem Teardown - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwellable.com/blog/Rails-Rumble-Gem-Teardown

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the author - this is a detailed analysis of the gems used in the 2013 Rails Rumble. It ends up being a snapshot of gem popularity and trends. A lot of surprises in here, at least for me.

<comment><USER2> The biggest surprise for me is that only 4 of 221 _didn 't_ use Rails. I pretty much go to Sinatra by default nowadays and I'd assumed that was more common now than it clearly is.

<comment><USER3> I find that surprising. After building a few Sinatra apps, I went back to Rails and decided there were not many reasons to use Sinatra anymore. Small, non-public, services are ok. Anything that has users, handles user input or most "web apps" and it's nice to leverage all of the work that has gone into building Rails.

<comment><USER2> The thing that bothers me about Rails is how much stuff is "on" by default. I like to have enabled every single accessible endpoint in my apps by hand to avoid security issues.

I'd love for there to be a variant of Rails or even just an add-on that made a Rails app totally "mute" and then you had to enable every tiny thing by hand or in a config file so you knew every single vector into the app and what dependencies there were. Rails has had enough security issues for me to be that paranoid, and at least with Sinatra, I have a bit more work to do but I know I've tested every single hole I opened up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to see the turbolinks. I have yet to use them, currently migrating a mid-size app to 4 and will try them out. But, that was my experience with jQuery mobile's similar ajax link by default strategy. Their great, until you have any kind of form and then you're soon disabling the ajax part and appreciating a fresh, clean dom being loaded.

</comment><comment><USER4> Did you just look at the Gemfiles?

Especially things like CoffeeScript get put in the Gemfile by the default generator and there's still a big chance, that no line of CoffeeScript is in the project after all ...

<comment><AUTHOR> I only had access to the Gemfiles. There's a disclaimer line near the top of the post that tries to caveat the Coffeescript/SASS numbers appropriately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> dominant ERB use surprised me, I would have guessed it much lower. Have people been moving back?</comment>


Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics <comment><USER2> That's terrifying. Russia should take the Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and give _Australia_ to China to compensate? And what Australia thinks of this is irrelevant? Lovely.

There's a reason all of eastern Europe wanted into NATO - to protect themselves against exactly this kind of aggressive "geopolitics".

Russia is trapped in a 19th-century view of the world. That would be merely unfortunate, if it didn't affect their neighbors...

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't say that they didn't stick to a strategy.</comment></comment>


How Fast Can You Build A Server? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/03/13/how-fast-can-you-build-a-server/

<comment><USER2> How on earth is building a server/computer... that's just inserting the cpu/ram and plugging in sata cable while everything is already screwed and in place. Lame...

<comment><USER3> Still, the video explains some outages that I experienced while I was a customer at the planet :)

No esd protection, dropping parts in to the machine, sitting your unused RAM on _paper_ (one of the best insulators). It's really enlightening.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Deploy your web apps, APIs and databases for free - <AUTHOR> https://unubo.com/2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

We created Unubo to simplify cloud deployment. It provides the easiest way for you to deploy anything whether it's a Node.js app, a PHP based serverless function, a PostgresSQL database, or even a Ghost blog.

Any feedback is welcome!

<comment><USER2> The UI is gorgeous! Also looks pretty useful although I haven't used it yet.

I'll be sure to try it out in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What if I just want to publish a set of static pages, how this would be compared with Netlify (not in terms of pricing of course).

<comment><AUTHOR> Netlify started out by allowing you to host static sites, so this is easy to do. Anything additional that you might find useful requires extra steps, and is not as simple as it could be.

One example is selecting a particular region to deploy. With us it's as simple as selecting the region you want to deploy to from a drop down menu.

Other stuff like our detailed uptime/status monitor and the ability to roll back to a previously deployed state are also worth mentioning.

Unubo uses one flow for each deployment type, so in case you wanted to deploy something else in the future, you have the option to do so - and are already accustomed to do it.

<comment><USER3> Nice to hear all those good features :) I would like to try yours instead of netlify then, although it will be some static pages in the beginning. Thx

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. Any other questions or comments, just let me know. In app, this is how you can contact us: [https://twitter.com/UnuboHQ/status/1162812311557607425?s=20](https://twitter.com/UnuboHQ/status/1162812311557607425?s=20)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How long will it remain free? Do you have to pay for it eventually? I don't understand the business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> The free tier will always remain, to get people used to our platform.

We will soon be releasing paid plans that enable higher performance (memory, storage) and new features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be a dumb question, but does the service host your web app, or is it for helping you to deploy to other cloud providers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not dumb at all. It is actually hosted with us, on our infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> Cool. On the free tier, is the app put to sleep after a certain amount of time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, we won't put your app to sleep.

<comment><USER4> Nice</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>