Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?<p>I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.<p>I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.<p>The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?<p>The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.<p>The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.<p>And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.<p>So what do people actually do?<p>[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
<i>The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.</i><p>Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.<p>I am so annoyed by that fact.
And this is why I'm irritated whenever a comment just thoughtlessly answer "Just raise your offer bro". There might be some transaction barriers that make paying a service no longer worth it, one of them is the amount of fraud like you mentioned, another is societal problem that reduces people's competency as a whole so competent people becomes too few to search.
Most of the time, I don't hire for one off little jobs proactively.<p>I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.<p>Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.<p>Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
I think people have mentioned this, but I haven't seen an answer: why not ask friends and neighbours? That's what I do, and I've had success with it (though I'm more frequently the person that neighbours and friends ask for professional contacts). When no one knows of anyone, you search and call people and evaluate/assess. It's not _easy_, but it doesn't seem like such a big problem.<p>Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
Well yes. I for one won't sign up for an odd one-off job for a stranger because it more often than not ends up in a quagmire of unfulfilled miscommunicated expectations. It's not fraud per se, it's just.. a wrong approach.<p>Join a community first, ask for help after that.
Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want.<p>I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.<p>FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way
Search optimisation is deterministic. The algorithms are quite sophisticated but even an older LLM can easily work around them right now. There will be some kind of AI arms race but I think the net effect of that will destroy search as a platform. What arises from the ashes? I can only speculate. Possibly distributed search. Possibly something like torrent swarms. uTorrent's distributed search has been available for decades and it's surprisingly resilient. Possibly something like I2P or Tor. Possibly AI agents creating amorphous and transient search tasks/communities. Even in these early days it's possible to cobble together hobby search engines using various sources for cheap/free.<p>I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.
Generative engine optimisation is a separate field. Websites that are SEO aren't necessarily GEO, they're having to be reoptimized for that. One strategy is to post fake conversations onto Reddit, where one bot how to do something, and another bot says the best way is with the product being optimised.<p>LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.
The short answer is probably to find people making online content about the thing you want done, and contacting them.<p>I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.<p>Personally though I live in a city where there are a few electronic repair shops, so I’d just take it there.
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
I think the thing is it’s no easier to hire someone to do a job you need done outside of work (at least the first time you need that job done) than it is to hire someone for a job at your workplace.<p>Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.<p>Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.
Competence is chain of trust. Chain of trust is adversarial to current market forces.
Maybe social forces as well. I don't have the same 'local trust networks' that my parents did for finding someone nearby to do something--probably because I spend most of my time online. And I had more confidence in what I found in the paper Yellow Pages that got delivered to my door than I do in what is presented in an online search, say, for local contractors.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem</a><p>Related issue
Not really because it works if candidates are trustworthy and you can evaluate the candidate without "hidden issues".<p>Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.<p><i>The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.</i>
Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.<p>That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.<p>So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!<p>Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.<p>A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.<p>When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.<p>Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.<p>And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
For real. I'd pay good money for a concierge service to find me the right person.
had any luck with college students? That's where i would start. interviewing is time consuming tho.
In context of your problem there are three groups of people:<p>1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.<p>2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.<p>3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.
> So what do people actually do?<p>In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
You're quite literally asking a billion dollar question. And a deeply-rooted reason on why the larger job market was so easy to break. Feed into that distrust, and no one gets hired, at all. Though the difference is that a reasonable company can bear a bad hire for a few months (or years) and not be in the red. You probably cannot.<p>So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.<p>After that:<p>- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).<p>- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).<p>- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).<p>- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).<p>None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative.<p>I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them.<p>It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."<p>Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
I do not think so. Ok, from the polls. But in the polls, it seem, I've quickly googled, if you've worked 1 h/week, they will not count you as unemployed. It is a different statistics. The registration in labor office, it is official employement, paid not less than min. wage, you can afford healthcare, etc. While the second poll does not care if you can afford healthcare or not.
><i>...and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland</i><p>and<p>> <i>It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.</i><p>Do you even fact-check yourself before making specious claims[0][1]? You HAVE to be registered via RAV to be counted. Full stop.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/surveys/als.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...</a><p>1 - <a href="https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefits-how-to-register-and-what-you-get/#The_Unemployment_Insurance_Fund_Explained" rel="nofollow">https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefit...</a>
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.<p>Goes to show why he was unemployed for a year after graduation.
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.<p>Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.<p>I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...
I surely didn't. But knowing to not know is an inherent and central lesson from higher education, one would think.
If the uni time didn’t trigger basic instinct of “researching” then that was a huge waste of time and money
For this reason I use the employment rate instead. The unemployment rate, as you've correctly pointed out, is very narrowly defined. Obviously so as to trick voters into thinking that everything is fine. The employment rate can't really be gamed like that.<p>The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortunately this isn't solved by using the employment rate. There are various ways to measure this but they all contain some measure of subjectivity.
> You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed."<p>I would hope that someone who can work 20 years a week gets paid a lot, even if they work at a pizza place!
I don't understand the issue with saying that someone who is employed is ... employed.<p>If the claim is that a single number (the unemployment rate) does not capture all the high dimensional features of society & work, then well of course!<p>If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure? It's not a particularly contentious position though I don't see any way forward - even with a _single_ number to discuss, half this thread is making wrong claims about its methodology.
You're applying nuance to a discussion which so often does not lend itself to nuance. Successive governments love to focus on the unemployment figure as though that is <i>the</i> mark of a healthy jobs market. As you've pointed out, it's not. It's not even close. We should be speaking about it far less, and about other, more qualitative metrics far more. We don't, though, and the cynical reason is that the unemployment metric was designed to make things <i>appear</i> better than they are.
I guess it depends were you live, but in $HOMECOUNTRY, politicians also talk about wage levels (esp. their evolution vs inflation), etc.
>If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure?<p>Yes, the gaslighting is the biggest problem. If we can't admit there's a problem (and politicians never want to admit the numbers are bad unless [other team] is in charge) then we can't begin to approach a real solution.<p>>It's not a particularly contentious position though<p>You'd be surprised. Even colloquially, that single number is how a lot of people try to justify that "job market is good, people are lazy". Because that person is not in a situation of searching for a modern job. This thread getting it right or wrong is irrelevant to that end. This isn't a board full of policy makers nor economists (at least, I don't think it is...)
I’d be surprised if that’s how they measure it, it’s a common misunderstanding in the UK that this is what the stat means.
I my country you have to regularly check in with the bureau for unemployment to be included in the stats, even though that bureau hadn’t found a job for anyone ever.<p>I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.<p>Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
It's not uncommon to use that as a measurement in addition to the ILO's definition.
The problem is that different unemployment statistics measure different things, and the headline number often gets interpreted as "everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one"
It has been a rough year for those entering the job markets. However, I would suggest trying this service if you are willing to relocate for awhile.<p><a href="https://www.aerotek.com/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.aerotek.com/en</a><p>It is a firm that helped place a few friends over the years. Good luck =3
Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999.<p>I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.
A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.
No then the money would go into inflating the stock market or gold etc. And won't get back into the economy.
If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate.<p>I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.<p>LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
You may be confusing LVT with property transfer tax? LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.<p>In practice it disincentivises investment in land (rent-seeking and speculative land hoarding) while incentivising land development. In cities this manifests as more, cheaper, homes, and lower rents, and is highly progressive.<p>I say in practice because we have over a century of explicit and implicit LVT implementations in the real world to demonstrate this. Most implementations of LVT have gone down as described. Estonia is a pretty fantastic case study - 90% of property is owner-occupier! And you might find this new study of implicit LVT in the US interesting - LVT correlates with higher earnings and demographic diversity: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272726001714" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...</a><p>The challenges for LVT are really about how to transition the tax in for areas that are occupied, but severely underdeveloped. If a low-density inner-city area ought to be high-density, the owners are being charged accordingly. Long term, it stimulates development and the new housing surplus (splitting the tax burden of LVT across a much greater number of owners) balances things out. But that's no consolation to the people being told they have to pay tax on their backyard as if it's already a block of flats.
>LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.<p>This is comment is an exercise in lying with definitions. The N year carrying cost of the land is the same or higher even if the entry cost is lower.<p>It's like a low down payment loan.<p>The "value" of the land does not change. Only who captures it does.
Well, I (and most economists) disagree.<p>I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.<p>But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
> The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax.<p>As a homeowner, who else bears my tax?
Reducing the insane wealth concentration at the top has positive side effects if it prevents whatever's been happening in politics the last decade.
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.<p>The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.<p>Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence<p>Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
I'd refine your opener to:<p>- economists have a good idea of how economies have worked _to date_
- they posit new policy to achieve goals
- these policies introduce second-order effects that they failed to predict<p>I mean, Friedman's criticism of Keynes was excellent, and forsooth, his policies made stonks go up. But i don't think there economy is any better for them; i think we are, broadly, worse off.<p>I support LVT, but there will be second-order effects. I guess we are doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, at a higher level than economic boom-and-bust.
What if a first owned property is not taxed, but additional properties are?
LVT can be deferred to the time of sale.
Unfortunately that doesn't really help. It has the effect of eroding the asset value such that it quickly means the owner can't sell.<p>In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.<p>Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)<p>And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.
How will they use it as collateral if it has no value upon sale?<p>Similarly, why would the next place be expensive if it couldn't be used as a speculative asset?
The tennant pays now anyway. Of a landlord could charge more rent they would.<p>Two identical properties, one under mortgage and one that isn’t, have identical rental prices. The costs to the landlord are irrelevant.
I understand where you are coming from here. And there are multiple levers in play here.<p>The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.<p>There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.<p>If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.<p>Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.<p>This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.
Wealthy people would never sell their houses. Keep them in the family or rent them out.<p>Anyone who had to move for a job or wanted to downsize their house for retirement years would be screwed, though.
better off taxing people that own more than 1 property and leave people just trying to live alone.
I'd like to see both an automatically adjusting dynamic tax on owning more than one property in the same municipal or arbitrarily useful region, as well as dynamically banning the ownership of more than one. Everytime I mention this, I get "blah blah we have a democracy blah blah freedom" etc.. but it's no such a democracy if one particular age-range dor demographic of people owns all the assets and politically protects them from diminishing in value or facing competition. Pending presumably complex implementation details, but a healthy system that prevents generational fiefdoms would probably adjust to severely disincentivise even the possibility of acquiring more than one of the most important finite resources in urban areas.
If I'm not mistaken there is a tax on secondary residences in France.
I am not an accountant, but my understanding is there is a "taxe d'habitation" from which primary residences are exempt, but which must be paid on secondary residences.<p>Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.
Pied-à-Terre Taxes are pretty easy taxes to implement, because usually the ones affected may not even live in the town/state to vote against it to begin with. But ultimately this only covers a very small slice of homeowners.
A wealth tax would also be beneficial in reducing wasteful stock buybacks. Without any benefits from high stock prices, boards and shareholders will be less inclined to impose those price targets on CEOs, CEOs will be less incentivised to "cheat" on quarter-based performance and the myopic share price performance view of their companies, hence will reduce stock buybacks and returning money to shareholders. That leaves very few options - either reinvest into the company or pay out dividends, and the latter is unfavorable for shareholders compared to the former.
i did recently see something interesting where if you look at buybacks from the Mag7, they basically almost entirely offset vesting employee RSUs. which kind of makes sense, those RSUs have to come from <i>somewhere</i> or they dilute the current shares.<p>i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.
Fair point, and explains why I was downvoted. My focus was on mostly the usual slew of companies that don't reward their employees in stock options, but handsomely reward their CEOs - O&G, pharma and biotech, advanced manufacturing, etc.
Why do you think a wealth tax would reduce stock buybacks? I don't see the relation.
Currently equity appreciation is desirable for HNWIs because wealth isn't taxed, only income realized is. The more their wealth appreciates, the more viable it becomes as collateral they can borrow against, raising their borrowing capacity. CEOs, the board and the major shareholders fall under this group too.<p>Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy that cash and prop up their equity value. CEOs love this easy trick because it increases their equity holdings' value, and also lets them hit quarterly share price targets which allows them to accrue more equity options. But at the end of the day, this money isn't benefiting the company, so it's just air.<p>With a wealth tax, the incentive to acquire increasing wealth dampens somewhat. You're only taxed once you cross a certain threshold usually, but once you cross it, the resulting tax hit can be quite sudden and severe. You hold equity but you have to hand over a significant amount of cash immediately, so you'd have to liquidate your holding, which is why a lot of HNWIs hate it.<p>In fact, it's why there are active strategies (usually involving philanthropy and blind trusts) in Switzerland (which has a global wealth tax) that allow to optimize your wealth just so you stay below the threshold. But at least, that wealth isn't being hoarded and is being actively deployed in other ways.
Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. The lower tax rate is simpler than actually accounting for these differences.<p>Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.<p>Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
><i>Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income.</i><p>Learning that their wage income makes them immune to inflation and is risk-free seems like it may be surprising news to many Americans.
> In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.<p>That may be the case but it doesn't prevent anybody from borrowing against it, which turns that fiction and illiquidity into very real liquid dollars. That same mechanism could be used for paying your taxes as it reveals that this is merely an excuse.
> losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.<p>Neither is true.<p>The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation.<p>The risk of a wage earner is to lose their employment because the business folds. Just like the shareholder in that business. It's again unclear why the tax system should compensate both differently for this.
Asset holders do not have losses from inflation since the assets go up in price.
Stock market in USA is high due to all the pumping.<p>The only ones screwed are middle class who have money on bank accounts. And middle + low class when buying food.<p>Inflation hits low and middle class the most, its a hidden tax on them. Rich are asset heavy so they dont care.
I have had this sneaking suspicion for years now that most of the money needs to be locked up because if we actually gave it to the masses to spend we'd see massive inflation and/or environmental catastrophe (worse than the current one). I don't mean to defend the wealth gap, and I'm not trying to make a statement on how things should be. I just think there may be an unfortunate reality that we need most of the world to have less because we can't currently support a middle class globe.
this is already happening via asset price inflation.<p>where i live (Seattle) small businesses are trapped in a death spiral as their rents are going up, the wages they have to pay are up to even attract workers who also need to pay rent, but purchasing power has not caught up.
Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Nice way to increase GDP without doing anything actually useful, right?
>"we need most of the world to have less"<p>Hi Elon
Economists have been championing Georgism for more than a century and we <i>still</i> refuse to consider it. I would argue that unreasonably expensive land prices are the most serious economic and social issue in the West today. It's a systemic problem, from which so many other issues are caused: homelessness, poverty, suppressed economic activity, inflation, class stratification, "failure to launch," fertility rates, inequality, etc.<p>The problem is that we've taught generations that the best retirement plan is a home, and now if we allowed home prices to fall, generations of people would be without their retirement plans. Voters don't like that very much. It's absurd that we allowed things to progress to this point, and unwinding it is going to be extremely painful. I think this only resolves when renters outnumber home owners to a material degree and vote for land value taxes. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Is capital gains / wealth tax a fix here though? Definitely not saying it doesn't work, I have no idea. But I'd be curious to hear both sides of the argument.
How do you tax wealth on unrealised gains?<p>Australia’s current federal Labor government proposed such a a scheme, but had to back pedal hard when <i>everyone</i> told them it ain’t gonna work.<p>The same federal Labor government introduced changes to capital gains tax, after promising “50 times” they wouldn’t. All the while a not insignificant fraction of MPs and Senators of said party sold significant realestate holdings before they made public their plans.
Is there a country that has implemented these ideas and where the results have been like you expected?
> You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down<p>If <i>any</i> price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.
And it's economics 101. The price is the symptom. The root cause is a shortage. Fix the shortage and the symptom follows. Try to fix the symptom and the root cause will make things worse.
Or decrease the demand/population. Which seems to be something we're bareling towards regardless.
I feel like the inflation of everything except wages will eventually show up in housing prices. People pay so much for existence, there’s not the same budget for housing. There’s only so much people can afford and also there’s now been a long track record of young generations having stunted starts.<p>Also not sure how the supply will be affected by boomers exiting the market. I know there will be no surge in supply, but I’m not certain there’s enough buyers at the prices they would expect. If that’s the case, supply will build and prices will drop.
Or you tax it. Or, more correctly, you remove the current protections that allow land to appreciate tax-free for decades. That would move capital out of land and free it for other uses. The current system was designed to put money/people into houses post WWII but has gone too far in promoting radical multi-generational wealth structures.<p>We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth. For half a century, in France, it's been told that real estate was the safest/best investment for households; everyone was passively peer pressured each year, whatever the macroeconomic situation at the moment, to buy. This is a Ponzi scheme, so even the middle class households that recently bought their own shitty flat in Paris will never vote for such a tax because their overpriced asset would lose value and it's often their only lifelong investment.<p>The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.<p>Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
> I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth<p>Most places do tax real estate. I was surprised to look it up and find that Paris has some of the lowest property tax rates in the world.<p>Land Value Tax would be a little different, though. It's a proposal to replace most or all taxes with a simple tax on the estimated value of the land. One of the key features of LVT is that if land becomes valuable over time, the tax on that land becomes so high that the owner is forced to sell it. The idea is that the LVT ensures optimal usage of the land by forcing people who own land in valuable areas to use it for a business. So if you buy a house and the area becomes popular 10 years later, your tax bill might get so high that you have to sell it to a developer who will build a high-rise on it, or a grocery store that can afford the high tax rate.<p>It would never be accepted in practice when everyone's 70 year old parents were being forced to sell their modest forever homes. There's also a major problem where the structures aren't considered at all, so one person with a $2 million home living next to someone with a $200,000 100-year old home would pay the same tax rate if they're on the same size lot, because it only cares about the value of the land.<p>I don't know why Land Value Tax has become the default solution to everything on the internet, because I think most people would actually hate what it did to society. Having progressive taxes that scale with people's income, spending, and size of their home is good for making the tax burden proportional to wealth and consumption. Replacing it all with a tax that just taxes how much your property is worth ignores everything except the value of your land, which is completely out of your control over several decades of life as the world changes around you.
Soo was it more or less than that? Don’t leave us hanging like that!
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.<p>I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
Job and slavery are two very different things. I love free markets too but not to the level of autism (for lack of better word) and ignoring how things actually work in the physical world. Shallow economic theory doesn't create happy and functional families. Economic theory that is mostly rigged to serve the rich, entrenched, and powerful anyways.
Many jobs require additional expenses: car, commute, babysitting, living in expensive city, no insurance for work related injuries...<p>So "not enough to live on" often means, it does not even pay job related expenses! Employees are subsidizing their employers!<p>My partner had a good job offer, but is at home! Buying extra car, petrol, child care... We would loose 150euro a month...
You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".<p>People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.<p>That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.
I understand that argument, but what does it have to do with the unemployment rate?<p>You seem to be confused about the point I'm making, which is that low-paying jobs drive people to take on more employment, not less.
But "employment" is tracked as a binary, not as a "number of jobs someone is working".<p>So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not <i>quite</i> 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but <i>generally</i> at least 1 job less.)<p>So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make <i>sense</i> for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.
You're just cherry-picking though. Things were massively different in 1945 in tons of ways. For example Jim Crow was still active for one. Food prices were MASSIVELY higher for another.
This could also easily be measured via what is declared in taxes.
> <i>there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.</i><p>That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.<p>For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr.
But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.<p>Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
One really nice economic factor of the dole is that it disappears at a rate of 50c for each $1 of earnings above $150 and at 60c above $256, so there's no welfare cliff.<p>This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.<p>I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.
> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.<p>Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.<p>Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.
Can you explain what you're saying? Do you mean that in 1999 fewer people worked low paying jobs?
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From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics.<p>In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:<p>> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.<p>The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.<p>FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig</a>.
> From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be.<p>But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.<p>They set it up this way because TRU is a <i>conservative</i> measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.
A lot of smaller companies over-hire part-time labor to minimize cost of overtime, medical benefit support, and mandatory wage increases. In general, employee-at-will and dependent-contractor status is only popular in the USA, and often is outright illegal for good reason in most other countries.<p>Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
Or simply people who have 2 part-time jobs totally 40 hours.
168M employees / 340M people in the US.<p>Means 51% unemployed people.<p>Raw figures
> ...or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.<p>I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.<p>The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
there is a cliff, such that a the 2 adults, 2 children on 22,500 gross income may have access to $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [linked in other comment].<p>However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 110 extra pre-tax dollar per week across both adult earners, and so just about 1.35 an hour raise for each adult, or 2.70 for either one of them is a real loss of over 12,000 dollars. It takes nearly $5 an hour raise for BOTH adults at the 22,500 to become even minimally better than the loss of those transfers.<p>There is a significant number of households in the second quartile (at or slightly above 36.4K) than in the bottom quartile, and yet those are living on less than what has been defined as the 'survivable wage' by the 48.7K number<p>So yes, the "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is even higher than the number of households earning 26K would reveal.
And much of that assistance is <i>not</i> a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.<p>It is, <i>simultaneously</i>, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, <i>and</i> really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
Absolutely True.<p>I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.<p>My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.<p>The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.<p>The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Might need to change the labelling from 'living' wage to 'surviving' wage.
This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1].<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+transfers+for+26k+income&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDgzODJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&fbs=ABfTbFVyMZGZf1hfvX9uKjN_-G8cY2oODYyTyZk24Xz37_7FQ33TJTgGUSXMPMOdfjOY7e2Q30AopdyVXXfWdu5WnLoZpdMFWVURTY5I2n8dJLm7dR0vrPXatW3_GpGBwWsVmgDyXSroLXaj4nxeWEQNyufndIirE5sDOZkwfdjAF7oMKIEHiPeRgaTwcW1Qmzu2s-ykHlrY2kDc8gtmzWKMBoLosjtSQw&aep=10&ntc=1&sxsrf=APpeQntKu90ESlBbLl3OnociVYc4_Ky8cg%3A1788325544931&mstk=AUtExfDzg-FioWra-be8ype8wHuIqcwzhMuMoPwW8eJg5yWUHQ56TBLKabq-bHRS1bQ7IaLeOSw9TO9ONLTMfjiNfijOlQm9MBGVqo5fJpZYC-ZSPDSa0gXG56n-pmJ9Pzq9zflvaooxRl8LRl8JkEpfXStuNQPrMbAzXgC49xWzF9E08CQP13JKMI5BZUTxq5nDCXM7cLN3YEUpwK_lrJD0IXH_cwjj0Uj6KVRzBb6oRQY_LQnD-FSVh__Cd4771yGqqPGdtFmq_5vXmQ&aioh=3&csuir=1&cs=0&ccb=1&hl=en-US&biw=1728&bih=963&udm=50&atvm=2&mtid=z66Xat3xGqinptQP-vKwkAM" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...</a>
Take a step back.<p>A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.<p>But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.
As someone who grew up below the poverty line for much of my life — 2x the poverty line seemed like wealth to me. There are absolutely people getting by on “feels like” 50k a year.<p>There are not really frills, but in terms of “have shelter and food” it can work. Not everywhere is SF.
As someone who lived much of their life in real poverty, you can live a pretty decent life on $50k in most of the US. Yeah, you won’t be posting your vacations on Instagram but who cares. Many people live a decent life within these income constraints. There is an enormous amount of government subsidies if you are this poor.<p>Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.
That’s not a decent quality of life. I know you may feel differently and find it hard to think about it objectively because you lived it, but you had a poor quality of life. It’s great that you’re doing well and you made it through, but don’t romanticize it.
Compared to 99.9% of people in history, it's a king's life, and even today $50k is a top decile income. Of course, the US is more expensive than most countries, so you can move it down a bit, but it's tough to argue that you're not in at least the top 25% of people living today at least.
> ...you can live a pretty decent life on $50k in most of the US.<p>Where? And what's the size of the household?<p>It's one thing to make $50,000/year as a single young person sharing an apartment with 2 other people. It's another to be a family of 4.<p>> Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone.<p>"Decent" is subjective, but we can look at hard numbers.<p>After taxes, $50,000 will be somewhere between $39,000 and $42,000 in much of the US. That's $3,250 to $3,500/month. The median rental price of a 1 bedroom apartment in the US is about $1,500. A 2 bedroom is somewhere around or north of $1,800. That means the median 1 bedroom apartment already eats up almost 50% of your after-tax income at the lower end.<p>According to BLS, the average spend on groceries in the US is now over $500/month. The average cost of a used car in the US is now over $25,000. A set of new tires will run you $400 to over $1,000. The average cell phone bill is $140/month.<p>Do I need to keep going?<p>Numerous studies show that over half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and almost three-quarters of middle income earners say their wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living.<p>What doesn't benefit anyone is to pretend that tons of people aren't struggling.
Sure sounds like they can’t afford a family of 4 on that income. They have control over both variables in that situation.
Of course two people with low incomes shouldn't have two kids. But (as detailed in my other comment) you need a 4 person household with 2 kids to get tax negative at $50,000/year. Even a 3 person household with 1 kid isn't tax negative in most of the US at $50,000/year.<p>So the other poster's argument that $50,000/year isn't so bad because of transfers, tax credits, subsidies, etc. doesn't hold up to real-world examples.
>They have control over both variables in that situation.<p>A modest proposal?<p>And sadly, some states may not in fact give them control over that situation.
It's unavoidably true that 50% of Americans are going to be below the median. I understand why someone might feel frustrated or say they're struggling if they look at their home, car, groceries, etc. and see that 50% of Americans have better ones. But no economic policy can solve this. A meaningful analysis has to be based on some level of functional adequacy, not just comparing median expenses to below-median income.
It's not about everyone being above average. it's about as few people as possible falling through the cracks because they lost their job. Or in recent cases for the youth, are unable to even get a leg in the door of the job market.<p>Sadly, we have more than a few people ignorant or outright apathetic towards systematic issues and act like not being rich is a personal failing.
> After taxes, $50,000 will be somewhere between $39,000 and $42,000 in much of the US<p>NO. WRONG. Read what I actually said. This was after transfers, at the OP's income range US income tax is NEGATIVE and puts you at the $49,000 I cited.
> NO. WRONG.<p>Yelling doesn't prove your point, and you conveniently avoided answering the most important questions, like where and what household size?<p>First, there is no credit that offsets payroll tax.<p>A single person with $50,000/year income is not negative. They'd have about ~$34,000 in taxable income and pay ~$3,800 in federal income tax. A 2 person household filing jointly with no kids would still pay about $1,800.<p>A family of 4 (2 children) with $50,000/year gross income gets a benefit and probably keeps all of that (or a bit more) in take-home after the standard deduction, child tax credit, EITC. At 155% of the poverty line, they're probably above the SNAP gross-income cutoff but they'd probably get ACA premium subsidies and reduced-price school meals.<p>But they're still living at 50% of the median household income for a family of 4 and you'd have to explain how you think 4 people living on $4,100/month is anywhere near decent or easy in most of the US. The median rent alone for a 2 bedroom in the US eats up over 40% of that amount.<p>A family of 3 (1 child) in most states will not be negative after payroll and state tax at $50,000/year gross household income.
A huge demonstration of why we need to move from a 5 day working week.<p>Some of the gains that have gone to the top need to be paid to spread the work over more people, a 4 day week would be a start.
for me the most interesting aspect is that a bachelor degree makes you have a double chance of being employed vs having a high school/college degree and again double the chance vs having no high school degree.<p>also it's interesting that these institutes still dont know how to do well understandable and intuitively readable graphs by not starting at a real reference point all thew time (not starting at 0, but sometimes at 20)!
Looking at the "True Rate" vs "Headline Rate" graph....
The "Headline Rate" seems to be a good proxy for the "True Rate".<p>As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
Similar statistics for Australia:
<a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemployment-estimates-march-2026" rel="nofollow">https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemploy...</a><p>It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Thanks, this is interesting.<p>Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.<p>We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.<p>It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
> We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all<p>Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.<p>> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.<p>Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
To your point, the argument about the 20% Gas Export tax has been interesting. Fossil fuel lobbyists employed by foreign companies clearly and openly buying politicians to try and fend it off, when it's obviously in Australia's interests to implement it.
What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
While I struggle to see the value here, I dont trust the official numbers and applaud their efforts to come up with alternatives.<p>However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.<p>Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
> the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes<p>Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is<p># unemployed/# employed<p>where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
> the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job ...<p>What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
It is typically who is able to be part of the labour force.<p>remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable.<p>So it is an age group, with caveats.
Always feels like the official numbers miss all the folks piecing together contract work just to get by. U6 is better, but still feels low.
I see some odd effects. I wonder how these would be explained?<p>According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.<p>When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.<p>By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.
Just a guess but gig work might be picking up some of that slack?
State level minimum wages were much less common in 1995, so it was easier for workers to be below their poverty threshold. Even though the federal wage got stuck, in many states today, the minimum wage is high enough that it's not possible for a full time worker to make less than $26,000 in a year.
Next add in under employment to get a good picture of the state of the US.
Time series also show a slanted worldview that real unemployment was worse in 90s. Have they not adjusted for dollar inflation? 1999 is really suspicious: Normally at 30-40% unemployment you fear for public unrest and uprising, did I miss an important piece of world history there?
I am a software engineer and lost my job a week ago.
Know a few folks still looking for months after layoffs. The official numbers definitely feel rosier than the ground truth.
How do they get data on people who work part time but want a full time job, and how do they calculate a living wage?
Something looks fishy when it’s just the other graph +20.
This definition sounds like U-6 unemployment (<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE</a>) with an additional term for people making below a living wage. That's better constructed than most of these "real stats" I see, so I hate to be too critical. But they don't really engage with the important question of whether this metric is sufficiently robust for policymakers to use. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be quite a bit more volatile than the headline rate; if the Fed tried to target it, for example, would they end up doing a bunch of unnecessary rate cuts to stave off unemployment spikes that aren't real?
I am curious as to why the TRU is not adopted as a standard metric.<p>1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it.<p>2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase).<p>3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality.<p>It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie. If you apply their stat methodologies to other G-7, you get similar results.
The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.
Just because the economic system we have has always been shitty for a high percentage of our neighbors doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Other top economic countries being similar doesn’t excuse it.
> Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.<p>The fact that "does not have a full-time job" is accompanied by "but wants one", but "has no job" isn't shows how unserious this statistic is.<p>So my 90 years old retired grandma is functionally unemployed? Same for my multimillionaire retired 50 years old uncle? Nonsense.
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