If the US were going through a recession and suffering from high unemployment, and Mexico wasn’t, then this would be a funny and topical (if obvious) joke.
But actually, US unemployment is stubbornly, almost weirdly low (at 4%), and GDP is growing faster than Mexico’s. Even, like, real inflation-adjusted median income is going up steadily in the US.
So is the joke just, “Imagine if a poor country had to send money to a rich country! That’s not happening, of course, but can you imagine if it did?”
You’re talking about people not in the labor market? That’s another number you can look up, you know…it’s down a few percentage points from 2000, but holding steady in line with the past 5 years, after a sharp drop due to COVID.
Two things to consider: first, a low rate of unemployment means it’s much easier for those people to rejoin the labor force, if they want. And second, this includes people of all ages, including the Boomers, who are retiring en masse, which I would guess largely explains the rise starting in the mid 70s, as the boomers hit working age, and the fall starting in 2010, when the first of them started to retire.
As far as participation by “working age” people who are able to work, I see a sharp fall from 80.5% in ~2006 (pre-financial crisis) alll the way down to 77.5% today. And of course, you can factor in boomers retiring early there. Oh, and actually that only includes men, so we should also consider shifting social mores: it’s far more acceptable for a man to be a stay-at-home parent than it used to be, for example.
Altogether…I still don’t find the comic very timely.
That’s not it, unemployed is someone who doesn’t have a job but is looking for one. If you don’t have a job and isn’t looking for one, that doesn’t go into the calculation otherwise my wife and kids would be counted as unemployed.
When I was 8, my parents taught me how to do a handstand. That’s when I stopped using the potty. Is it messy? Yes, sometimes, if you don’t trickle it right. But handstand shitting has worked for me for decades now.
No, that’s not what happened. See my reply. It’s true that the unemployment rate only factors in people who are actively working or looking for work: if you don’t look for work for a certain number of months, you aren’t factored in the ‘labor market’ anymore, so children and retirees aren’t included, but also stay-at-home parents, people playing games in their parents’ basement, people who took a few years off to travel, etc.
But that number hasn’t changed dramatically in the past few years (well, except of course for a sharp rise in 2020 followed by a quick fall in 2021…). It has risen in the past few decades, but there are reasons for that (boomers aging out of the labor force, for example).
There’s not some crazy new secret unemployment crisis.
It is a thing, people who aren’t actively looking for work (or working) aren’t factored into unemployment numbers. A stay-at-home parent isn’t considered unemployed, or the unemployment numbers would be closer to 40%.
Basically, the unemployment rate means: what share of people are looking for work, but can’t find any?
This also means that there’s a certain number of people who try to find work, aren’t able to find any, and eventually just give up to (stereotypically) move into their parents’ basement or whatever. I take it that AFaithfulNihilist is implying that the number of those people is rising significantly, but there’s not really any evidence for that.
We also have numbers on discouraged workers. BLS publishes all of those numbers, it’s not like they’re a secret. It just tells you a lot less than the mainline number.
A few issues with using Unemployment and GDP to get a pulse check on the economy, namely that having a job does not meaning you’re making anywhere near enough to survive even modestly and GDP is Gross Domestic Product which… just means we’re being productive?
Shit costs more, we’re being paid less, groceries are getting close to matching what I pay in rent, and I rarely feel like I can take a day off from work without getting behind financially. There is very little air to breathe. No room for mistakes.
The joke is that we used to be in a spot where sending money to Mexico made sense because they had ‘tighter margins’ and now the reverse is true. Most of us are living on a fucking thread with no ability to make real plans for the future. It’s bleak in America.
Yeah, so, anticipating that argument, I included inflation-adjusted median income in my original comment. That is, the income of an average American household after factoring in price rises due to inflation. If you ignore the spike in 2020 (which I’m pretty sure was just the COVID bailouts–and incidentally, the cause of subsequent inflation), Americans–median Americans, not the ultra-wealthy, not the 1% or the 10%, are doing better than they’ve ever done in history.
Of course, that doesn’t include rises in housing costs, education & healthcare, which by some calculations largely nullify the apparent rise in income. But overall? Mexico is not sending remittance to the US to help poor struggling Americans. In fact…
And a common misconception is that we arrived at this point due to inflation, which is not the case. Corporations have increased prices due to covid, which was fair, and have refused to lower them. This is becoming more apparent across all industries including homes where the price goes up not because of some external force but for the same reason since the dawn of capitalism.
Corporations have increased prices due to covid, which was fair, and have refused to lower them.
Corporations will always raise prices when they can, if it won’t cause a major drop in sales. That’s because they’re greedy! But also because the corporations upstream of them are also greedy and also raising prices, so their costs are also growing. When the cost of produce goes up for you, it goes up for McDonalds, too.
So here’s the thing, though. Normally, companies can’t raise prices, because people won’t buy their products at the higher price, because they’re also greedy. Or, their competitors will undercut them. But when everybody has more cash, and their accounts are nice and plump, the higher prices won’t deter them and they’ll buy anyway. If it’s only a few people who have more money, companies can’t change their prices too much, so inflation doesn’t result. But when everybody has more money, like say the government injects 5 trillion dollars into the economy, suddenly they can raise their prices and people will still pay!
We call this phenomenon inflation. And incidentally, even factoring in inflation, median worker pay is still rising.
CEOs are overpaid. But that really doesn’t have anything to do with inflation.
When the cost of produce goes up for you, it goes up for McDonalds, too.
That’s not happening at all. There has actually been deflation in inputs.
If you want to know how bad we’re being fucked, search for the PPI, the producer price index. CPI, the one we always hear about, is the measure of inflation to us, the consumer. The PPI is the measure of inflation to producers, what they pay for goods and services to produce the goods and services we buy.
The PPI has been back to “normal” for a while now. Pretty much as soon as the post COVID logistics issues were mostly ironed out. The difference between PPI and CPI changes is almost all profit.
We don’t get daily articles on the PPI though, I wonder why.
Tell people about PPI whenever you can, online or off, the more people know, the better. It’s easy enough to say inflation is just down to greed but being able to back it up by comparing two simple charts will help people really understand.
What your PPI graph shows is that it was sky high for the whole pandemic. More than 20%! That’s far higher than CPI inflation. Really, prices should’ve soared!
Also, PPI seems to be an index of raw materials for manufacturing; it’s focused on tracking costs of manufacturing inputs, not so much up the chain. In a service-oriented economy like the US, it’s not a very relevant statistic.
You really think restaurants are getting their food from some secret marketplace where everything is 90% off?
The only reason it didn’t go up 20% is you can’t get blood from a stone so they had to take a haircut on their profits. Click the food tab, you can see there has been an annualized ~5% deflation for most of a year now. That’s the point. Inputs don’t determine retail costs, they charge as much as they can.
And yes, restaurants do buy from wholesalers. The chart I liked is specifically intermediate inputs. If you’re so ignorant about the way things work that you think restaurant owners are going to the grocery store, I don’t know what to tell you.
Obviously. And always have. They have always got a good deal for buying bulk and setting up long-term contracts. But when food costs go up, wholesale costs go up too. If that weren’t the case producers would prefer to sell to customers instead, so companies would have to offer more to get the raw materials they need.
You don’t think the ‘greedy’ food production industry is gonna raise their prices for restaurants? You think Tyson Foods is giving their corporate customers 50% off the price they could be charging?
Or are you saying that food prices have fallen (i.e. Tyson et al are charging lower prices), but that all the restaurants in America, along with all the grocery stores, are conspiring to keep prices high for consumers? And no single mom & pop shop is like, hey, we could lower our prices to our old pre-pandemic profit margin and make a fucking killing by being the cheapest store/restaurant in town? You think all the little places complaining about upstream food costs are lying? Or is there some kind of line drawn, where some small stores & restaurants get the shitty prices, but at a certain point they get the secret conspiracy pricing?
Do you genuinely think that giving Americans a few hundred bucks caused immediate and persistent inflation? Because I’m more inclined to blame the spike on a collapse in the global supply chain due to quarantining of factory workers and container ship crews, and the subsequent increases on a combination of factors, including interest rates (or, more accurately, what caused the raise in interest rates) and corporate greed.
Every person got $1200 in the form of a relief check, plus $500 per child. That by itself would explain the sharp rise in apparent median income in 2020. Also, though, welfare was much more generous and easy to join during the pandemic. And of course there were major handouts to businesses. The government printed a
ton of money during the pandemic.
All of that extra cash (plus some supply-chain factors, sure) triggered inflation. But again: even adjusting for inflation, incomes are right where they were in 2019.
When you are fired or lose your job in america, you can get unemployment benefits, or pay to compensate until you can find another job. You have to be participating with your state’s program to get the money. If you quit your job, aka you choose to leave, you cannot get unemployment benefits. The government tracks this number of people it’s paying out to AS the unemployment rate. It’s always been another misnomer name, misleading.
I…don’t get the joke?
If the US were going through a recession and suffering from high unemployment, and Mexico wasn’t, then this would be a funny and topical (if obvious) joke.
But actually, US unemployment is stubbornly, almost weirdly low (at 4%), and GDP is growing faster than Mexico’s. Even, like, real inflation-adjusted median income is going up steadily in the US.
So is the joke just, “Imagine if a poor country had to send money to a rich country! That’s not happening, of course, but can you imagine if it did?”
It turns out unemployment is low if you don’t count most of the people that are unemployed!
You’re talking about people not in the labor market? That’s another number you can look up, you know…it’s down a few percentage points from 2000, but holding steady in line with the past 5 years, after a sharp drop due to COVID.
Two things to consider: first, a low rate of unemployment means it’s much easier for those people to rejoin the labor force, if they want. And second, this includes people of all ages, including the Boomers, who are retiring en masse, which I would guess largely explains the rise starting in the mid 70s, as the boomers hit working age, and the fall starting in 2010, when the first of them started to retire.
As far as participation by “working age” people who are able to work, I see a sharp fall from 80.5% in ~2006 (pre-financial crisis) alll the way down to 77.5% today. And of course, you can factor in boomers retiring early there. Oh, and actually that only includes men, so we should also consider shifting social mores: it’s far more acceptable for a man to be a stay-at-home parent than it used to be, for example.
Altogether…I still don’t find the comic very timely.
Unemployment rate only includes those in the labour force- those of retirement age, underage or not able to work aren’t included.
They are however factored into the employment rate… just to fuck with you.
That’s not it, unemployed is someone who doesn’t have a job but is looking for one. If you don’t have a job and isn’t looking for one, that doesn’t go into the calculation otherwise my wife and kids would be counted as unemployed.
The method for measuring unemployment hadn’t changed for decades.
When I was 8, my parents taught me how to do a handstand. That’s when I stopped using the potty. Is it messy? Yes, sometimes, if you don’t trickle it right. But handstand shitting has worked for me for decades now.
why are dutch people like this
deleted by creator
probably because people who aren’t seeking employment by definition AREN’T UNEMPLOYED
Is that what has happened?? Doctored statistics or some shit? Curious to know more.
No, that’s not what happened. See my reply. It’s true that the unemployment rate only factors in people who are actively working or looking for work: if you don’t look for work for a certain number of months, you aren’t factored in the ‘labor market’ anymore, so children and retirees aren’t included, but also stay-at-home parents, people playing games in their parents’ basement, people who took a few years off to travel, etc.
But that number hasn’t changed dramatically in the past few years (well, except of course for a sharp rise in 2020 followed by a quick fall in 2021…). It has risen in the past few decades, but there are reasons for that (boomers aging out of the labor force, for example).
There’s not some crazy new secret unemployment crisis.
Ah-ha. So basically people are working, they just aren’t getting paid enough. Is that right?
How do you figure?
I’m referring to the fact that so many people seem to have trouble just getting by and making a decent living. Wondering what the cause is, I suppose.
What do you mean, is this a thing in the US?
It is a thing, people who aren’t actively looking for work (or working) aren’t factored into unemployment numbers. A stay-at-home parent isn’t considered unemployed, or the unemployment numbers would be closer to 40%.
Basically, the unemployment rate means: what share of people are looking for work, but can’t find any?
This also means that there’s a certain number of people who try to find work, aren’t able to find any, and eventually just give up to (stereotypically) move into their parents’ basement or whatever. I take it that AFaithfulNihilist is implying that the number of those people is rising significantly, but there’s not really any evidence for that.
We also have numbers on discouraged workers. BLS publishes all of those numbers, it’s not like they’re a secret. It just tells you a lot less than the mainline number.
A few issues with using Unemployment and GDP to get a pulse check on the economy, namely that having a job does not meaning you’re making anywhere near enough to survive even modestly and GDP is Gross Domestic Product which… just means we’re being productive?
Shit costs more, we’re being paid less, groceries are getting close to matching what I pay in rent, and I rarely feel like I can take a day off from work without getting behind financially. There is very little air to breathe. No room for mistakes.
The joke is that we used to be in a spot where sending money to Mexico made sense because they had ‘tighter margins’ and now the reverse is true. Most of us are living on a fucking thread with no ability to make real plans for the future. It’s bleak in America.
Yeah, so, anticipating that argument, I included inflation-adjusted median income in my original comment. That is, the income of an average American household after factoring in price rises due to inflation. If you ignore the spike in 2020 (which I’m pretty sure was just the COVID bailouts–and incidentally, the cause of subsequent inflation), Americans–median Americans, not the ultra-wealthy, not the 1% or the 10%, are doing better than they’ve ever done in history.
Of course, that doesn’t include rises in housing costs, education & healthcare, which by some calculations largely nullify the apparent rise in income. But overall? Mexico is not sending remittance to the US to help poor struggling Americans. In fact…
And a common misconception is that we arrived at this point due to inflation, which is not the case. Corporations have increased prices due to covid, which was fair, and have refused to lower them. This is becoming more apparent across all industries including homes where the price goes up not because of some external force but for the same reason since the dawn of capitalism.
Fucking greed.
I know that’s not as convincing as graphs so allow me to procure one I find more relevant.
Corporations will always raise prices when they can, if it won’t cause a major drop in sales. That’s because they’re greedy! But also because the corporations upstream of them are also greedy and also raising prices, so their costs are also growing. When the cost of produce goes up for you, it goes up for McDonalds, too.
So here’s the thing, though. Normally, companies can’t raise prices, because people won’t buy their products at the higher price, because they’re also greedy. Or, their competitors will undercut them. But when everybody has more cash, and their accounts are nice and plump, the higher prices won’t deter them and they’ll buy anyway. If it’s only a few people who have more money, companies can’t change their prices too much, so inflation doesn’t result. But when everybody has more money, like say the government injects 5 trillion dollars into the economy, suddenly they can raise their prices and people will still pay!
We call this phenomenon inflation. And incidentally, even factoring in inflation, median worker pay is still rising.
CEOs are overpaid. But that really doesn’t have anything to do with inflation.
That’s not happening at all. There has actually been deflation in inputs.
If you want to know how bad we’re being fucked, search for the PPI, the producer price index. CPI, the one we always hear about, is the measure of inflation to us, the consumer. The PPI is the measure of inflation to producers, what they pay for goods and services to produce the goods and services we buy.
The PPI has been back to “normal” for a while now. Pretty much as soon as the post COVID logistics issues were mostly ironed out. The difference between PPI and CPI changes is almost all profit.
We don’t get daily articles on the PPI though, I wonder why.
Tell people about PPI whenever you can, online or off, the more people know, the better. It’s easy enough to say inflation is just down to greed but being able to back it up by comparing two simple charts will help people really understand.
PPI
CPI
What your PPI graph shows is that it was sky high for the whole pandemic. More than 20%! That’s far higher than CPI inflation. Really, prices should’ve soared!
Also, PPI seems to be an index of raw materials for manufacturing; it’s focused on tracking costs of manufacturing inputs, not so much up the chain. In a service-oriented economy like the US, it’s not a very relevant statistic.
You really think restaurants are getting their food from some secret marketplace where everything is 90% off?
The only reason it didn’t go up 20% is you can’t get blood from a stone so they had to take a haircut on their profits. Click the food tab, you can see there has been an annualized ~5% deflation for most of a year now. That’s the point. Inputs don’t determine retail costs, they charge as much as they can.
And yes, restaurants do buy from wholesalers. The chart I liked is specifically intermediate inputs. If you’re so ignorant about the way things work that you think restaurant owners are going to the grocery store, I don’t know what to tell you.
Obviously. And always have. They have always got a good deal for buying bulk and setting up long-term contracts. But when food costs go up, wholesale costs go up too. If that weren’t the case producers would prefer to sell to customers instead, so companies would have to offer more to get the raw materials they need.
You don’t think the ‘greedy’ food production industry is gonna raise their prices for restaurants? You think Tyson Foods is giving their corporate customers 50% off the price they could be charging?
Or are you saying that food prices have fallen (i.e. Tyson et al are charging lower prices), but that all the restaurants in America, along with all the grocery stores, are conspiring to keep prices high for consumers? And no single mom & pop shop is like, hey, we could lower our prices to our old pre-pandemic profit margin and make a fucking killing by being the cheapest store/restaurant in town? You think all the little places complaining about upstream food costs are lying? Or is there some kind of line drawn, where some small stores & restaurants get the shitty prices, but at a certain point they get the secret conspiracy pricing?
Do you genuinely think that giving Americans a few hundred bucks caused immediate and persistent inflation? Because I’m more inclined to blame the spike on a collapse in the global supply chain due to quarantining of factory workers and container ship crews, and the subsequent increases on a combination of factors, including interest rates (or, more accurately, what caused the raise in interest rates) and corporate greed.
I do think that injecting almost 5 trillion dollars into an economy can trigger inflation, yes.
Every person got $1200 in the form of a relief check, plus $500 per child. That by itself would explain the sharp rise in apparent median income in 2020. Also, though, welfare was much more generous and easy to join during the pandemic. And of course there were major handouts to businesses. The government printed a ton of money during the pandemic.
All of that extra cash (plus some supply-chain factors, sure) triggered inflation. But again: even adjusting for inflation, incomes are right where they were in 2019.
When you are fired or lose your job in america, you can get unemployment benefits, or pay to compensate until you can find another job. You have to be participating with your state’s program to get the money. If you quit your job, aka you choose to leave, you cannot get unemployment benefits. The government tracks this number of people it’s paying out to AS the unemployment rate. It’s always been another misnomer name, misleading.