>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 $25,000 annually before taxes.
So many discussions online about unemployment take a framing like this, implying not so subtly that the government is lying about what unemployment _actually_ is. But the feds are publishing all of this data and being transparent about it. Nothing about having some arbitrary cap at salaries below 25,000 make this a “truer” metric.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics literally publishes six different unemployment rates, each of which includes different combinations of unemployed, discouraged people who are not job searching, "marginally attached workers", and people working part time who want to be full time.
Here is the table of 2023 averages by state for each of these six rates:
The "True unemployment rate" from the link is basically U-6, except they use $25k as a cutoff to define marginally attached workers. It isn't immediately obvious how BLS defines marginally attached workers, so that might be different. It's not some government secret!
Yeah, it's just downright misleading to qualify someone working a full time job making $24k/yr as unemployed. The US national minimum wage, believe it or not, only amounts to $15k/yr for full time employment (40 hrs/wk!).
I think you could certainly call these people "poor", but not unemployed. That word means something different.
Sure the term might not be ideal but it serves a purpose. Living in the current US with 24k a year is miserable (more or less depending on location).
When people bring up unemployment in terms of public policy, they generally are discussing actionable problems. Like "the unemployment rate is 6% so the gov should make incentives to hire more people".
These discussions could (ought to) include people that can't afford a car in the non-walkable US, or who have to live with relatives or roommates because affordable housing is a fantasy. "Maybe someone working full time should be able to afford their own place and eat more than rice and ramen"
Someone making 15k a year working 40 hours is functionlly unemployed, in every sense of the phrase imo
> Someone making 15k a year working 40 hours is functionlly unemployed, in every sense of the phrase imo
We have a much better metric for that though, which is the poverty rate.
You can be employed and in poverty and you can be unemployed and not be in poverty. You can even be earning less than a living wage and be out of poverty if you have savings or other financial assistance from family, etc.
Tracking unemployment for what it is makes sense. Muddling the term doesn’t.
> Like "the unemployment rate is 6% so the gov should make incentives to hire more people".
So like, to make those people earning under 24k get a second job?
I don't see how you can use unemployment rate to justify making jobs when it already includes people who have jobs. The two need to be split up so the real number can be used for that argument.
That's earning federal minimum wage. 29 States, including many of the most populous states, have higher minimum wages.
> The CPS does not determine whether workers are covered by the minimum wage provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or by individual state or local minimum wage laws. The estimates of workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage are based solely on the hourly wage that respondents report (which does not include overtime pay, tips, or commissions). It should be noted that some respondents might round their hourly earnings when answering survey questions. As a result, some workers might be reported as having hourly earnings above or below the federal minimum wage when, in fact, they earn the minimum wage.
> Some workers reported as earning at or below the prevailing federal minimum wage may not in fact be covered by federal or state minimum wage laws because of exclusions and exemptions in the statutes. Thus, the presence of workers with hourly earnings below the federal minimum wage does not necessarily indicate violations of the FLSA or state statutes in cases where such standards apply.
> Estimates of the number of minimum wage workers in this report pertain only to workers who are paid hourly rates. Salaried workers and other workers who are not paid by the hour are excluded, even though some have earnings that, if converted to hourly rates, would be at or below the federal minimum wage. Consequently, the estimates presented in this report likely underestimate the actual number of workers with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage. BLS does not routinely estimate the hourly earnings of workers not paid by the hour because of data quality concerns associated with constructing such an estimate.
> Several states have established minimum wage rates that exceed the federal level. (Information on state minimum wage laws is available at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/state.) Users should be cautious about comparing state estimates with CPS estimates in this report because of differing statutory minimum wages. It also should be noted that the CPS sample is based on residence; workers report their earnings on their job, which may not be located in the same state in which they live. In addition, the degree of sampling error may be quite large for some state estimates.
The word is underemployed and for the author's purposes are still job-seekers who quality for government benefits. The practical difference between them and actual unemployed people isn't much when it comes to policy.
Then why are saying they're measuring "unemployment" when they're actually measuring underemployment? Words mean things and they're choosing the wrong words specifically in order to mislead.
Also, tracking poverty is more meaningful than tracking underemployment. There are millions of stay at home parents in this country who would qualify as underemployed, but who aren't in poverty because their spouse or possibly other family member supports them.
No you're not. It means you're removed from both the numerator and the denominator. By no means does it mean you count as employed; that would be silly.
Another way of phrasing this is 23% want a job earning more than 25K per year and are incapable of finding one. I can’t imagine living on 25K per year. While I would technically be “employed” I wouldn’t be happy about it. What is the purpose of measuring employment? I think satisfaction with one’s living circumstances is certainly part of the reason. From that perspective, the measure proposed in TFA makes some sense.
Looking at the first graph, it doesn't seem like this is a "shadowstats" group of cranks trying to tell you that the economy is worse than it is. According to their "true rate", the unemployment situation (as they define it) is now better than it has ever been. The "true" stats look better than the real ones.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re tracking the wrong thing and we’ve lost sight of why we even started tracking these type of stats to begin with.
Are Americans prospering? Can they afford minimum needs like food and housing? Is the average American quality of life remaining consistent or increasing?
I want to see America as a whole do better and sometimes I wonder if stats are being deliberately reported in a way that obscures the truth of the matter.
I once got downvoted into oblivion on this very website for advocating for a society with 90% unemployment. The stats are just stats but they're not necessarily what we should be chasing.
I believe the goal of humanity should be that pushing a button for food pellets all day long is not a moral imperative or a necessity for survival. 100% unemployment should be the goal, and the end of scarcity that would require its feasibility.
There would still be jobs. People want to eat more than food pellets. People want massages and the robot ones aren’t as good. People will make music, paint paintings, read books, and watch movies.
There may not be money, but there will be some economy for services and non-physical goods.
Social status will always be scarce because it's a zero-sum game; in order for one person to rise another must fall. Even if basic necessities were free the majority of people would choose to work in order to have more than their peers. This is just human nature.
How is social status a zero-sum game? If someone dives into a lake to save a drowning child and people label them a hero, elevating their social standing, whose social standing has declined as a direct result? Likewise for a scientist making a discovery, or an artist creating a masterpiece, or a youtuber becoming a niche internet celebrity, or a neighbor getting a new pool. Social status can be created out of thin air and allotted arbitrarily.
And in a post scarcity world, why would having more than your peers confer social status to any degree, nonetheless enough to justify the various drawbacks of laboring for such possessions?
Social status is not about deciding with whom to allocate your time, and people don't generally choose how they allocate time based on how many hours of labor someone else does nor do most people labor to get other people to allocate more time with them. Indeed, people generally spend time apart from the people they want to allocate their time to in order to labor.
>Indeed, people generally spend time apart from the people they want to allocate their time to in order to labor.
Only because they cannot get everything they need from the people they want to spend time with, so they have to trade outside that group.
This game begins all the way when kids are deciding who to sit next to at lunch in elementary school. It’s a simple fact that time and attention are limited, so there have to be cuts made once demand exceeds supply.
Actually, it might even begin earlier, as I currently have a breastfeeding toddler who is always keeping an eye on who his mom is allocating her time to, and ensures that he is number one…much to the chagrin of his sister and me.
If you were laboring to buy a seat next to someone at lunch, you had a very messed up childhood.
Again, that is not what the term social status refers to, nor is it the goal of most people's labor, nor is it something that would logically be acquired by labor.
Your breastfeeding toddler does not wish to monopolize your partner's time because of her high social status which was elevated by her labor; he wants a secure source of food. Children will probably always want their mothers, but in a post scarcity world no one needs to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
Social status is multi-dimensional, especially in this day and age. I am near the top of the hierarchy for <obscure hobby> in <my town>. I am closer to the bottom for many others.
I disagree that it is human nature. At least not generally speaking.
There are people who are innately competitive. And there are people who don't care.
I'd argue that a lot of people are apparently competitive because of social pressures. You'll have to discount the effects of modern society on people's minds before you could make a claim on what human nature actually is like.
Modern society only exists because pre-modern people were so competitive. While a minority might not care, the majority of people in every society constantly compete for status. Always have, always will.
There are other forms of social status. Under communism people could be nominally wealthy, but party status carried a lot more weight.
However I would note many, many people are not motivated by status. I for one would rather be unknown and my relative status compared to anyone else is about the last thing I will ever concern myself with. I’m not alone, even if the status seekers stand out for all their attention seeking.
If you renamed it "applying some artistic license to motivate the populace" instead of "lying" could we then talk about it without being called cranks?
Anything stated by the government about the economy has an effect on said economy, so it makes sense to massage the metrics. But what makes the government's chosen cutoff truer than another one?
It's easy to use data to mislead; you see this all the time in organizations of any size, but especially in larger organizations - why would you expect the government to be the sole exception?
Would you say that the Kentucky government patting itself on the back for unemployment rates of 3.9%, while in fact real unemployment is at minimum 21.6%, is something other than the government lying about what unemployment actually is?
Being on disability - which is what this data shows - precludes you being employed 99% of the time. It also legally limits how much you can be employed.
The rules are complex, but for every $1 you earn you lose roughly $0.50 in benefits, until they quickly reach $0 for even a modest job.
> Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since
That's an astounding amount of hair splitting to claim that the people in charge of governing - literally with the title "govern-or" - are not "the government."
I am describing how a democratic republic works. It is government by the people, for the people. There are government representatives, who if elected are partisan, and who are otherwise appointed or employed. The government of a republic is separate from these individuals and has an agenda of its own.
One of those agendas is publishing numerous economic data.
The individuals in service of the government and the media outlets that they talk to are where the proverbial cherry-picking takes place.
Partisan politicians and partisan media, not some incoherent notion of “the government.”
>But the feds are publishing all of this data and being transparent about it.
So?
If you're happy that the feds are "publishing all of this data and being transparent about it", then you should be happy for what the TFA does too (even if you disagree with their conclusion): they use this published data in a way that they think is more insightful.
Should the feds conclusions and choice of criteria be unchallenged just because they publish their data?
>Nothing about having some arbitrary cap at salaries below 25,000 make this a “truer” metric.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also has all manner of "arbitrary cutoff points".
The number they use is not meant to be magical constant of the universe, it's just supposed to be a more insightful cutoff to understand the real impact of unemployment.
Besides, the main job of government agencies is to make the government and their managers look good.
So many discussions online about unemployment take a framing like this, implying not so subtly that the government is lying about what unemployment _actually_ is. But the feds are publishing all of this data and being transparent about it. Nothing about having some arbitrary cap at salaries below 25,000 make this a “truer” metric.