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Are you joking, or do you just not understand what rates are? As of 2010, over 2% of black people were incarcerated, nearly six times higher than whites, and more than double hispanics. Less than 60% of inmates are white, despite the fact that 3 in 4 Americans are white. For accidents: In 2015 one in four fatalities were a minority, even though the workforce is closer to one in five minority. I won't even get into the nonsense about lower class being mostly white.

Are you joking, or do you just not understand what rates are? As of 2010, over 2% of black people were incarcerated, nearly six times higher than whites, and more than double hispanics. Less than 60% of inmates are white, despite the fact that 3 in 4 Americans are white. For accidents: In 2015 one in four fatalities were a minority, even though the workforce is closer to one in five minority. I won't even get into the nonsense about lower class being mostly white.

The bottom line is that the unemployment rate in Seattle is 3.1% (compared to 5.2% in Washington as a whole),

Please provide the definition of "unemployed" used to generate that number. If the definition does not include those who are no longer collecting unemployment due to their benefits period having expired, then those are far from accurate numbers. Progressives have conveniently omitted this crucial detail for decades to paint a rosy picture. As of this past May, there are over 90 million people in this country who are not in the work force.

Faceless, uncountable charity is not a good thing, it is in fact just as bad if not worse than government assistance, and that is why most donations go to real, private charities, churches, etc. that provide assistance but also require accountability. It is high time that we stop pissing away our tax dollars to healthy adults who choose not to work because the over 6,000,000 open jobs https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... are not what they went to school for or it is beneath them, they are drug addicted, etc. If you are concerned for their kids, then take them away and place them with loving families who are not drug addicted (this should be done anyway).

Welfare, food stamps and the like provide no road map to self sufficiency and very little accountability (i.e. drug testing, job searching, etc.) whereas most private charities are much more interested (and by the way effective) in leveraging their funds as a stepping stone out of poverty/dependency. The entire entitlement class created by government exists to buy votes for the Democrats, rather than truly helping people to become self sufficient. (Democrats demonstrably don't care about the needy beyond buying their votes, as demonstrated by their personal behavior: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12...

I personally have donated thousands to private charities with good overhead ratios (google it) and $0 to any Gofundme and I never will because of the lack of accountability, vision, and support structure. If you are truly in need (and don't have thousands in the bank/clothes/shoes/electronics/boats/jet skis/ATVs etc. laying around), you are much better off working with local charities/churches and you are also much more likely to come out in a better position, rather than trying to use Gofundme.

The only caveat here is you need to research where you are giving to make sure they are legitimately helping. I would never donate to the Clinton Foundation for example, because for 2014 (most recent available tax filing) the foundation reported total expenses of a little over $91 million but grants of just $5.1 million were paid out. That’s not even 6 percent of the foundation’s money. Where the rest of that money went and how it was spent is highly suspect. They do other work, but are not transparent about the spending, which for a charity is a huge red flag.

Have any numbers to back up those assertions? I'll just leave this here: https://www.bls.gov/opub/repor...

Quick summary of actual facts:
* 58.7 of all workers in the US earn hourly wages.
* Among ALL hourly workers, 3.9 percent earn minimum wage (or 2.25 percent of the total work force).
* 3 percent of hourly workers earning minimum wage (or 1.7 percent of the total work force) are under the age of 25.
* Among teenagers (16-19 years old) earning hourly wages, about 15 percent of them earn the minimum wage.
* 10 percent of part time workers earn minimum wage, compared to 2 percent of full time workers.

So, as it turns out, the vast majority of minimum wage earners are indeed quite young, often part-time, and as a percentage of the total work force are a fairly small percentage. Let's deal with facts and reality here, and not just make arguments based on ignorance and incorrect perceptions.

Also $13/hr isn't much of a raise in 17 years.

Depends on where you live. In 2000, you could live pretty well on $10 an hour. You still can today.

It's worth mentioning that jobs at that factory average out to more than just 40 hours a week, due to the way shifts are structured. Adjusting the same to a 40 hour week would yield an hourly wage of just under $15. On top of that, they tend to have overtime here and there.

the bloody Chinese can't even do it. Also $13/hr isn't much of a raise in 17 years.

Being part of an iron worker's union is certainly not typical "you can easily get a job with any construction crew making a good living even with no education". This is what your statement implies. Those people have a high likelihood of becoming unemployable due to hernias, bad knees, shoulders, and similar injuries. Only the lucky retire without federal disability assistance.

And no, they don't get the winter off. Building construction never stops.

Ironically, the only thing you likely will have trouble finding is work in a factory.

This is also detached from reality. Factory work has a lot of churn first of all. Secondly, line workers are moving from that to being classified as laborers, logistics, or technicians. Their pay has not improved, but manufacturing has moved from an assembly intensive task to a material intensive one.

I know IT workers live in their cubicle bubble, but some of us handle technology for manufacturers, construction companies, and logistics companies. Some of us still have an understanding and empathy of the hardships faced by the majority of Americans. We are lucky. They are not. For every friend or brother in law that managed to hit the working-class jackpot, there are dozens of workers that don't.

Apparently there are a lot of states where workers make quite a bit less. I always assume being in rural Kentucky with very low cost of living that other areas pay better. I'm not sure how accurate this is because I have several friends and a brother in law that do quite a bit better than this but here is a map for Iron workers for instance that includes all states link

That's interesting, because I live and work in Phoenix, where all of the offers happened.

What's more, if you look at the BLS figures, out of the 388 major cities in the US, 308 fall at or below the natural rate of unemployment, and should therefore qualify as a so called hot spot.

https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/...

Some of these cities are in the 1% range, which means there's a serious labor shortage in those areas, and none of them are the three you mentioned, in fact those three areas don't even make the top 50. And while the average wage in these cities isn't as high as the ones you mentioned, the cost of living is considerably lower, meaning that your purchasing power is very likely higher than those areas.

Just to give you an idea, Phoenix is roughly comparable to SF in terms of employment, and 100k a year is considered low income in SF, whereas in Phoenix 100k a year basically means that money is not at all an issue for you.

At any rate, I don't know about you, but I think 308 out of 388 being at or below the natural rate of unemployment isn't very few, rather it's a big majority.

On the days they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours. --On an average day, 22 percent of men did housework--such as cleaning or laundry--compared with 50 percent of women. Forty-three percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 70 percent of women. Men were slightly more likely to engage in lawn and garden care than were women--12 percent compared with 8 percent.

Women worked around the home more than twice as many days as men, and spent more time each day that they did than men did.

2.6 hours average per day that women did housework, x 3.5 days = 9,1 hours (this does NOT include caring for children or elderly parents, which also falls mostly on women).

2.1 hours per day that men did housework, x 1.54 days per week = 3.234 hours per week. That's way less than half as much. If it's so insignificant, why aren't men doing it. That 50.8 minutes a day extra, 7 days a week, works out to 101 minutes each day that women do housework. Considering the day has 24 hours, and that work takes 8.5 hours, leaving 15.5 hours. Now throw in commute time - 2 hours, leaving 13.5 hours. Let's not forget sleep - 8-3/4 hours according to your chart, leaving 5.25 hours. At some point you have to eat breakfast and supper, say you round down the number on your chart to 1 hour total. That leaves 4.25 hours. Oh, and you have to shower and sh*t, do it quick because you don't have much time, and get dressed and undressed. Your chart gives 40 minutes a day for "personal grooming", but we'll throw in taking a dump, just because we're generous. Leaves you 3.58 hours.

And we still haven't included things like caring for children, parents, etc., helping with homework (which is NOT housework), where the hell do you find almost 2.6 hours for housework every second day? 3.58 hours - 2.6 hours = just under an hour of "free time" to do ALL other things - watch tv, play with the kids, talk to family and friends, nag the hubby for not doing his fair share, etc. An extra 40 minutes would be HUGE.

Based on Department of Labor and other numbers, something like 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. workforce is primarily employed as a professional driver of some sort, adding up everything from short and long haul truckers to taxi drivers and so forth.

Your numbers are far off. Just "Heavy and Tractor-trailer Truck Drivers", which only account for freight movers, not package delivery drivers, not taxis, are 5% of the national jobforce. Then there are the support jobs. Truck stop workers, dock workers, hotels, restaurants, and so on. In many industries for every one primary job position, three are created to support it. I'd imagine that in transportation the number is less, and many people will have a job regardless of whether a machine or a man is driving.

If all these people suddenly are out of work as many have been projecting, unemployment numbers will be increased by double-digits. The global economic crisis will look like a joke in comparison.

Source.

20 hours for women each week, vs 8 hours for men

The difference is not significant enough to be worth lying about. Men tend to work for 41 minutes more per day, women tend to do about a half hour more housework per day. If you're going to argue the point, do so with actual statistics not whatever you're misremembering.

Outside of tech hiring, the young are still on the short end of the opportunities.

Indeed. Unemployment decreases with age. It is the young that have a hard time finding jobs, not the old.

The real problem is jobs being replaced by machines, A.I., etc. This should decrease the costs of those goods and services. But instead, it's making the rich richer and the poor unable to afford those goods and services because they're out of work.

If you look at the BLS employment-population ratio they have data back to 1948 and it swings between 55% and 65%, currently at 60.2%. That is to say, there's not an exceptional number of people out of work even though it's considerably lower than the 90s and early 00s even though wages are depressed. They've mainly been depressed the last ~50 years first because of a Europe recovering from WW2 and then a huge influx of cheap labor, particularly Indian and Chinese on the world market affecting supply and demand. But wage costs particularly in China have increased rapidly, in manufacturing it's now $3.60/hour or 1/6th of the US. When you factor in productivity, language issues, cultural issues, time zone differences, transport costs etc. it's not that absurdly cheap anymore. It's hard to have a crystal ball but unless China's wages stop going up they'll pretty soon stop dragging US wages down. India is a bit further behind, but they too are not so cheap as they were.

And males spend on average 52 minutes more at work than females..
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2...

So if females are doing 2.6 hours of household work per day and males are doing 2.1 that points to males performing more work per day than females.. 0.86+2.1 = 2.96... And then males also perform more lawn and garden care than females bumping it up even higher..

If we use your like from above that is from 2015 males worked 42 minutes more per day so that would put the numbers at 0.7+2.1 = 2.8.

Then you also have a much larger percentage of females not working full-time or not working at all, ie staying at home, that could account for the 85/67% split of household work performed by males/females..

From your provided link we can even see that males perform more work per day than females so i think we should equalize this and have females increasing their workload..

There we go... if you can abuse statistics i can too..

In most normal relationships you divide the work in an equal manner, but the type of work may be different... If i go out and do lawn/garden care or other work on the house that would be more physical straining than cooking or cleaning.. Just counting hours is neither fair or good representation of this... If i'm at home and have energy while my counterpart is really tired i do most of the work, and the same goes if it's the other way around...

They might only get 6 weeks of *paid* maternity leave... But you have a lot of women that takes unpaid leave too...

The crap in the studies performed about the pay-gap is that they take *all* full-time working women and then *all* full-time working men... They sum up the two groups and see that there is a difference...
Some areas that are not considered is that men on average work more hours per day than women.. If you could a difference in 10%! that would be 1.2 months of extra work per year.
For some statistics: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2...

I'm all for equal pay for equal work... But the whole war being fought by the SJW is just dumb..... If women would get paid less for the same amount of work then why would not companies hire a lot more females and pocket the difference?

Not sure about you, but when looking at developers at our company there are differences between female coders and male coders..
- Female coders do not fight for their ideas as much and are more prone to accepting what others want. Even if their idea might be better.
- Female coders have a wider span in competence.. We have quite a few really bad ones and some really great ones, but not too many average ones.. Male coders we have a few bad ones and a few good ones, but the majority are quite average.. Pay-difference between the great coders and average coders is not too high either. This may be a reason why a pay-gap might show since the crap coders always get a lot less.
- Females tend to socialize a lot more at the workplace compared to their male counterparts... This of course affects the amount of work they get done and would show up in a performance-review.

Of course i know females that are the complete opposite of the above and perform great work, but i'm talking on average... And the above is from what i can see from the developers working in our company... The great female developers we do have even have higher salaries than their male counterparts with the same level of knowledge and experience just because they want to get more females hired. (~7 to 8 % females atm)

There is plenty of proof that men get paid more, moron. Or don't you know how to do a search? Open your mind to facts instead of mindlessly believing shit?

Proof that there is no pay bias? Hah!

And it doesn't end at work. Just look at the bias against women in housework. 8 hours a week for men, 20 hours a week for women. And if the man's retired and the woman's still working, she still has to make her lunch before going to work (I know a woman in that exact situation). It's ridiculous. I'd have told him to turn off the tv and do his share, or you can do your own laundry, your own shopping, and your own cooking and cleaning up. Fair is fair, and that should include an equitable distribution of labour in the home.

Just another reason men die younger. Women get fed up and leave, and they lose their "built-in housekeeper" and can't fend for themselves. And there's a sociological-biological bias against women, because women are generally younger than their spouses, and it's the man who is more likely to need extra care and are unable to do house work for health reasons later on in the marriage. And since women also live longer than men, women are often the ones who end up alone with nobody to help them when they need it. From the BLS

-On an average day, 85 percent of women and 67 percent of men spent some time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management.

On the days they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours.

On an average day, 22 percent of men did housework--such as cleaning or laundry--compared with 50 percent of women. Forty-three percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 70 percent of women. Men were slightly more likely to engage in lawn and garden care than were women--12 percent compared with 8 percent.

So even in the home, where both partners are supposed to be equal, women work more days in housework, for more hours each week. Or did you think that clean underwear magically picked itself off the floor where you left it, jumped into the washing machine, and snuck back into your dresser? You don't see the disparity because you're so used to it everywhere that you've become blind to it.

For whatever reason many, such as yourself, particularly "conservatives" fail to realized that both unions and companies engage in "collective bargaining." A company is a collection of people providing capital, a union is a collection of people providing labor. Strikes, work halts, layoffs, furloughs etc are all the same arm of different groups (using your market influence). Collective groups exercising their power to get better terms.

If you don't think union's represent the interest's of a labor provider you are ignorant of both the statistical evidence https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2... (there are a multitude of papers detailing the correlation between union power and increased wages) and basic economics http://www.investopedia.com/te...

actually according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics labor force participation did decrease during Obama's presidency, from about 65% to about 63%. Why it decreased, and why it decreased _then_ more than in the couple of years before (it appears to be essentially flat during Bush's second term), is of course up for discussion.

However, the same site's figures for Employment Level shows an increase in the absolute number of employed people (over 16) from 2010-2016, following a drop from 2008-2010, for a net increase overall. So we have a lowering percentage of the population linked to an increase in absolute numbers. Assuming there's not a definition mismatch, that would imply that employment growth is not keeping up with population growth.

I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable. [...] what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible?

Some might not be the most palatable, but I think they're pretty easy:
Restrictions: native citizen, and immigrants must become naturalized citizen (for at least one full year?) before they can receive benefits
Application: Start UBI at a very low number, say $100, and increase this every year until the target amount is hit. At the same time you decrease other government benefit payments by the same amount, and if the payment goes to $0 the benefit is summarily cancelled for that person.

Maybe even do the ramp-up thing for new immigrants as they get on the path to citizenship.

This will allow society to transition much easier, and the government benefit overhead will also decrease (non-linearly?) over time so that those employees aren't suddenly dumped (which, even if they started off receiving full UBI could still be a large shock to the system.) Such a transition might even take half of a generation to complete, depending on how slow society wants (or is able) to move. Such a slow transition would also make it easier to reverse course, if it seems that UBI is working out contrary to the results of every study or trial conducted (to my knowledge.)

I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense

A large argument for UBI is that it removes clerical overhead. All citizens, a check, the end. With a negative income tax you bring a lot of that overhead back in, because now the accountants have to make sure that every citizen is getting not a penny more in their UBI check than their income allows.

I think providing people an incentive to work

I never understand this line of thought. Why do you believe that even a significant minority of the population would become life-long stay-at-home-slobs? And why does that reason not already happen for the super-wealthy, the vast majority of whom (AFAIK) still hold various positions for various sums of money? Why is it impossible for a person to have worth if they don't have work?

UBI would allow for survival and little more. It's not going to be a very fun survival, but you'll have a roof, three squares, and clothes. People will still want extravagances, larger dwellings, more options in meals; all of which which require more money, which requires a job. Even those who are content with their UBI won't necessarily stop "working": 25% of Americans volunteer, and for many of these people it's beyond what they already do for a living (I'm a software developer by trade but a shift manager at a feline rescue by volunteering). While the charity landscape would probably change greatly, there would still be a need for volunteers and I expect that number would climb. UBI would also open a lot of interest in thrifty living, so there would be "share work" in communities, person A maintains a garden, person B repairs homes, and they exchange services/goods for help with the other.

4% unemployment is better than most of Europe. I've been to Columbus. I've been to Berlin and Frankfurt too, and - besides the German cities being somewhat cleaner in the well-traveled areas - there wasn't otherwise much difference, in my experience. But your experience isn't any more valid than mine is.

You're partially right (you can have been out of work for ten years but if you were actively looking, you're considered to be unemployed), but underemployment numbers have been declining, too. The U-6 number is down to 8.6%, the lowest it's been since November 2007. The lowest it's been on record (going back to 1994) is October 2000, when it reached 6.8%. The unemployment rate (U-3) was 3.9% at that time; most economists consider employment around the 4%-4.5% range to be full without overheating the economy, and the Fed had raised interest rates by about a percentage point since mid-1999.

Note: U-6 is defined as "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force." Basically, everyone willing to work full time but not getting it. (Full time doesn't mean a single full-time job. If you work two part-time jobs that add up to 35 or more hours per week, you're considered a full-time worker.)

And if you see the labor force participation rate, try to determine what population that the figure is based on. And who gets counted as participating. (E.g., if an H1B worker is counted as participating, is he also counted as a part of the population used in calculating the rate.)

The LFPR is pretty clear on who is involved, though you need to understand a few definitions.

• The LFPR is defined as "the labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population."
• The civilian noninstitutional population is defined as "persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia who do not live in institutions (for example, correctional facilities, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces."
• The labor force is defined as "all persons classified as employed or unemployed in accordance with the definitions contained in [the BLS glossary]."
• Employed persons are defined as "persons 16 years and over in the civilian noninstitutional population who, during the reference week, (a) did any work at all (at least 1 hour) as paid employees; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm, or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family; and (b) all those who were not working but who had jobs or businesses from which they were temporarily absent because of vacation, illness, bad weather, childcare problems, maternity or paternity leave, labor-management dispute, job training, or other family or personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off or were seeking other jobs."
• Unemployed persons are defined as "Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed."

I snipped the definitions slightly for space, but they're all at this BLS link if you need more details.

So the H1B worker is counted as participating, as is the illegal immigrant construction worker. It's all persons, not all citizens or all permanent residents. If you're 93 and retired, but living on your own and not looking for and not wanting a job, you're part of the civilian noninstitutional population, so you factor into the LFPR, but not into the unemployment or underemployment rates. If you're 15 and working a part-time job, you're not counted in the LFPR or employment or unemployment status.

The LFPR, though, has a great deal of downward pressure on it from retiring Baby Boomers. That will level out eventually, and the LFPR may begin to climb as they die off, but the highest that it ever got was 67.3% in early 2000. Don't expect to see something above 70% unless there's a mass die-off of old people.

U-4 is published. Even U-6 is only 8.6%, and it counts people who stopped looking.

https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...

Yes, unemployment is open to interpretation and yes, there are different ways of presenting the data. The "usual" figure is U4, but for others U6 might be more meaningful. I think U6 is probably a better estimate, but that's just my opinion. What ISN'T my opinion is that no matter what number you use, unemployment is creeping downwards.

No, all evidence shows that when an individual human unit gets wealthier, it slows its rapid breeding. Humans don't need to produce more children when fewer die out, either, as a society.

As a population, a human society includes a gradient of wealth. The expansion of that society causes scarcity pressures, which eventually limit that expansion. Those limits are felt at different levels in different ways.

Think about food. If you have fertile land in good climate to produce food for 10,000,000 people, and have a population of 5,000,000, what happens if you raise your population by 20%? You add 1,000,000 people. You've still got the same specifications for making food: if you have to expend 10% of your population to make food, then before you had 500,000 people working on food production (farmers, fertilizer chemists, shipping, tractor makers, tool makers, etc.), and now you have an additional 100,000.

With that expansion, there's 20% more food, 20% more people, and 20% more hours of each type of labor going into making the food. The cost per unit of food required for each person is unchanged.

Now what happens if you have 10,000,000 people and bump by 20%?

You now have 2,000,000 more people to feed, and you have to farm on less-viable land. You need more irrigation and more fertilizer. You get lower yield, so need to farm over a wider span of land. That means more farm hands, more seeding, and an increase in all inputs (e.g. you need more fuel for the tractors, more water irrigating that whole span, twice the fertilizer to handle twice the land area, etc.).

Up to now, 2 million people required 200,000 laborers to make food. Now it requires 400,000 for these additional 2 million mouths to feed. That means the marginal cost of food is higher--in total, 11.67% instead of 10% of your population works on making food.

That means 1.67% of your income which was spent on other things is instead spent on food production. Those other things aren't made (less wealth) because they can't be bought. For rich people, this is essentially-unimportant: food requirements are generally constant, and rich people buy more-expensive food (pay for additional luxury) and so have both flexibility and an existing deep investment in luxury--and they still pay a very small portion of their income for food, even if they're eating caviar and lobster.

As you get into middle-class and poor, this increase in the cost of food reduces wealth substantially. The middle-class feel poorer; the poorest can't afford to eat. Because of this pressure, they also don't have the capacity to rear families, and will tend to slow down population growth.

As shown by history, resolving this scarcity pressure causes a population increase. This has been demonstrated as recently as 2006, where the recession caused slowed population growth in the United States, and the reduction of unemployment lead to a notable but small increase in population growth (see 2008-2012 versus the employment-population ratio and the unemployment rate as indicators of factors impacting how Americans perceive their access to financial stability). Back in the early 1900s, scarcity of food in particular lead to development of new fertilizers and intensive farming techniques; since the 1950s, world population has been on a sharper upward trend. It keeps happening.

A sharp increase in the sense of stability among family-minded Americans who would like to start a family or have a larger family but who don't feel they can afford it right now will lead to the obvious: sudden financial stability, the perceived capacity to enlarge their family as they've always dreamed, and more children. So it is, so it's always been.

No, all evidence shows that when an individual human unit gets wealthier, it slows its rapid breeding. Humans don't need to produce more children when fewer die out, either, as a society.

As a population, a human society includes a gradient of wealth. The expansion of that society causes scarcity pressures, which eventually limit that expansion. Those limits are felt at different levels in different ways.

Think about food. If you have fertile land in good climate to produce food for 10,000,000 people, and have a population of 5,000,000, what happens if you raise your population by 20%? You add 1,000,000 people. You've still got the same specifications for making food: if you have to expend 10% of your population to make food, then before you had 500,000 people working on food production (farmers, fertilizer chemists, shipping, tractor makers, tool makers, etc.), and now you have an additional 100,000.

With that expansion, there's 20% more food, 20% more people, and 20% more hours of each type of labor going into making the food. The cost per unit of food required for each person is unchanged.

Now what happens if you have 10,000,000 people and bump by 20%?

You now have 2,000,000 more people to feed, and you have to farm on less-viable land. You need more irrigation and more fertilizer. You get lower yield, so need to farm over a wider span of land. That means more farm hands, more seeding, and an increase in all inputs (e.g. you need more fuel for the tractors, more water irrigating that whole span, twice the fertilizer to handle twice the land area, etc.).

Up to now, 2 million people required 200,000 laborers to make food. Now it requires 400,000 for these additional 2 million mouths to feed. That means the marginal cost of food is higher--in total, 11.67% instead of 10% of your population works on making food.

That means 1.67% of your income which was spent on other things is instead spent on food production. Those other things aren't made (less wealth) because they can't be bought. For rich people, this is essentially-unimportant: food requirements are generally constant, and rich people buy more-expensive food (pay for additional luxury) and so have both flexibility and an existing deep investment in luxury--and they still pay a very small portion of their income for food, even if they're eating caviar and lobster.

As you get into middle-class and poor, this increase in the cost of food reduces wealth substantially. The middle-class feel poorer; the poorest can't afford to eat. Because of this pressure, they also don't have the capacity to rear families, and will tend to slow down population growth.

As shown by history, resolving this scarcity pressure causes a population increase. This has been demonstrated as recently as 2006, where the recession caused slowed population growth in the United States, and the reduction of unemployment lead to a notable but small increase in population growth (see 2008-2012 versus the employment-population ratio and the unemployment rate as indicators of factors impacting how Americans perceive their access to financial stability). Back in the early 1900s, scarcity of food in particular lead to development of new fertilizers and intensive farming techniques; since the 1950s, world population has been on a sharper upward trend. It keeps happening.

A sharp increase in the sense of stability among family-minded Americans who would like to start a family or have a larger family but who don't feel they can afford it right now will lead to the obvious: sudden financial stability, the perceived capacity to enlarge their family as they've always dreamed, and more children. So it is, so it's always been.

No, all evidence shows that when an individual human unit gets wealthier, it slows its rapid breeding. Humans don't need to produce more children when fewer die out, either, as a society.

As a population, a human society includes a gradient of wealth. The expansion of that society causes scarcity pressures, which eventually limit that expansion. Those limits are felt at different levels in different ways.

Think about food. If you have fertile land in good climate to produce food for 10,000,000 people, and have a population of 5,000,000, what happens if you raise your population by 20%? You add 1,000,000 people. You've still got the same specifications for making food: if you have to expend 10% of your population to make food, then before you had 500,000 people working on food production (farmers, fertilizer chemists, shipping, tractor makers, tool makers, etc.), and now you have an additional 100,000.

With that expansion, there's 20% more food, 20% more people, and 20% more hours of each type of labor going into making the food. The cost per unit of food required for each person is unchanged.

Now what happens if you have 10,000,000 people and bump by 20%?

You now have 2,000,000 more people to feed, and you have to farm on less-viable land. You need more irrigation and more fertilizer. You get lower yield, so need to farm over a wider span of land. That means more farm hands, more seeding, and an increase in all inputs (e.g. you need more fuel for the tractors, more water irrigating that whole span, twice the fertilizer to handle twice the land area, etc.).

Up to now, 2 million people required 200,000 laborers to make food. Now it requires 400,000 for these additional 2 million mouths to feed. That means the marginal cost of food is higher--in total, 11.67% instead of 10% of your population works on making food.

That means 1.67% of your income which was spent on other things is instead spent on food production. Those other things aren't made (less wealth) because they can't be bought. For rich people, this is essentially-unimportant: food requirements are generally constant, and rich people buy more-expensive food (pay for additional luxury) and so have both flexibility and an existing deep investment in luxury--and they still pay a very small portion of their income for food, even if they're eating caviar and lobster.

As you get into middle-class and poor, this increase in the cost of food reduces wealth substantially. The middle-class feel poorer; the poorest can't afford to eat. Because of this pressure, they also don't have the capacity to rear families, and will tend to slow down population growth.

As shown by history, resolving this scarcity pressure causes a population increase. This has been demonstrated as recently as 2006, where the recession caused slowed population growth in the United States, and the reduction of unemployment lead to a notable but small increase in population growth (see 2008-2012 versus the employment-population ratio and the unemployment rate as indicators of factors impacting how Americans perceive their access to financial stability). Back in the early 1900s, scarcity of food in particular lead to development of new fertilizers and intensive farming techniques; since the 1950s, world population has been on a sharper upward trend. It keeps happening.

A sharp increase in the sense of stability among family-minded Americans who would like to start a family or have a larger family but who don't feel they can afford it right now will lead to the obvious: sudden financial stability, the perceived capacity to enlarge their family as they've always dreamed, and more children. So it is, so it's always been.

For some reason, corporations prefer to hire expensive white men, rather than cheap black women.

Probably because there were 1.1 million software developers in 2014 and there are 6 female black software developers?

USCIS has already considered Computer Programmer positions more skeptically. to qualify for an H-1B, the position has to require at minimum a bachelor's degree in a specialty field, or the equivalent. some Programmer positions are complex and require this, some do not.

the weird thing is, USCIS should already know this: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/comput...

seems like USCIS officers are about as well trained as TSA officers

There is and has been a push to try to get more men into teach at the elementary school level, a career field that is heavily dominated by women (~78.5% women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.

Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.

To be fair, Jeff Immelt is simply speaking from one of the basic fallacies. He probably learned it at management school, and hasn't spent even a moment in critical thought about it.

Specifically, modern economics assumes infinite consumption which implies infinite need for work. "Infinite consumption" comes from either the Malthus'ian idea that human population will grow exponentially until resources run out, or the idea of "always wanting more", as in bigger house, more cars, more land, more toys, etc.

Personal consumption has limits, and industrialized nation population *doesn't* grow without bounds, and productivity keeps going up, and you start to realize that the job pool is finite, and any reduction in jobs puts stress on the people who need to find jobs to live.

The US is at about $50,000 per person in production, and that's a huge amount. Note that this is per person, and not per working person. We have enough wealth in this country to let everyone live comfortably with only half our workforce - and productivity keeps going up.

It's a fallacy of modern economics, it's unsustainable (labor versus shrinking job market) and something has to give eventually.

Whether we transition to a different system that lets people enjoy our production, or whether civilization crashes and burns, depends on people like Jeff Immelt.

Specifically, whether Jeff Immelt, and other like him, can unlearn modern economics and help transition us to a different model.

Excluding that single category, Per capita Federal funding: Metro $8,171, Nonmetro $6,773.

Of course, that's only the spending side. Urban household income is $71k, where rural household income is just $50k (2015). Federal taxes for a family of 4 on $70k is about $5400 and on $50k roughly $2300. So, your average metro denizen "gets" maybe 6x his federal taxes back, where the average non-metro "gets" about 12x.

Obviously, because of the progressive income tax, averages aren't going to add up. The fact is that there are more humans living in cities. Those city dwellers earn more money and pay more taxes than rural residents. Money is going to flow from cities to the country.

The data are readily available. Even broken out by career. What is false about it?

"We make only one quarter of what are [sic] forbears [sic] did after you adjust for inflation against the PCI [sic] index."

You're full of illiterate bullshit.The CPI Inflation Calculator shows a 1957-2015 increase of 843%. The Average Wage Indexing Series shows wages went up 1321%. The average person makes over 50% more today than in 1957. In addition, the number of 2 earner families more than doubled, so families as a whole do even better than that.

" I agree with all the comments about a degree not equaling a guaranteed job. Even in engineering."

even? I think you mean "especially".

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/archit...

"Job Outlook, 2014-24 0% (Little or no change)"

And in a social model based on continuous growth, that's pretty much a death sentence unless we implement a steady-state economy. (Society will have to fall a lot more before these ingrained, trained-from-birth ideas about growth will be questioned.)

"While most of our graduates do find decent starting technical jobs within a reasonable amount of time"

I'd bet that these technical jobs are indeed literally technical jobs; things a technician would have done 20 years ago. I worked in a plant that designed and built packaging systems, the kind of machine that puts labels on all kinds of bottles. I understand you need some engineers to design the thing, but do you really need an engineer to unbox a Herma high-speed labeller, read the manual and bolt it to the frame?

The business world has an over-abundance of confidence in where the US is heading at this point which are driving these numbers. These numbers were precipitated by Obama over his last 8 years but to be honest he never inspired this level of confidence.

Hell yeah! We will completely ignore that monthly job gains were even higher in the last month of Obama's presidency, as reported in the summary, and even higher still in February 2016, which preceded the election. But wait, also the same thing in 2015, which preceded Trump's nomination. Bit of a dip in 2014, but even higher numbers in 2013.

This totally supports your argument, so long as you avoid thinking about anything connected to reality.

1-Month Net Change: All employees, thousands, total nonfarm, seasonally adjusted
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2013 211 286 130 197 226 162 122 261 190 212 258 47
2014 190 151 272 329 246 304 202 230 280 227 312 255
2015 234 238 86 262 344 206 254 157 100 321 272 239
2016 126 237 225 153 43 297 291 176 249 124 164 155
2017 238(P) 235(P)

Graph.

Source.

Working hours invested in purchasing food have decreased dramatically. The average American household income was $4,200 in 1950, of which $1,400 went to food; in 2015, it was $54,000, of which $6,500 went to food. That's 2,000 working hours either way; it's 12,850% as many dollars income, but 4,640% as many dollars spent on food. The cost of a median household's food for a year in 1950 was 660 labor-hours; in 2015, it was 240. 240 is less than 660, so food is cheaper.

Clothing, same way, 240 hours in 1950, 70 hours in 2015.

Housing, average 983sqft new single-family in 1950, 28% of the budget including rent or mortgage, utilities, maintenance and supplies, and other operational costs; that's 570 hours worked per 1,000 square foot of housing afforded. 2005, a new single-family home was 2,300 average, 33% of the budget in total; that's 287 hours worked per 1,000 square foot of housing afforded. 287 is less than 570.

Decade after decade, we spend fewer hours to purchase our food, our clothing, our basic personal care needs. We buy bigger houses, better cars, more and better healthcare, and a greater load of luxuries. The American work week was 90+ hours in 1900, with 40% of that going to just food for the home; by 1950, the work week was 40 hours, with 33% going to food--barely more than a third as many hours worked to feed the household.

Everything gets cheaper. It's the only way it can happen. That's what technical progress does.

As it happens, the US government collects statistics by gender of how much time is spent on which activities in the home. The relevant table is on page 9. I'll reproduce the relevant bits on housework here.

Hours per day, Average
Total: 1.84
Men: 1.43
Women: 2.23

Average percent engaged in the activity per day
Total: 76.4
Men: 67.0
Women: 85.2

Average hours per day for persons who engaged in the activity
Total: 2.41
Men: 2.13
Women: 2.61

I end up with the majority of the cooking and cleaning tasks; the girlfriend's ability to cook is pretty minimal. We're working on it. Anyway, for the average person it's not anything like a full-time job, but 2-3 hours per day, six days per week is definitely one of the larger components of human activity -- looks like the list goes sleeping, leisure, working, housework, eating.

Didn't see a post on it yet, but yet another Trump job creation victory! Seems like we'll be hearing a lot more like this in the coming four years.

I wonder what Trumps re-election prospects will be given a dramatic rise in jobs and economic growth is pretty much assured at this point, due to the administration before holding the economy down for so long... the geologic concept of elastic rebound applies here I think.

Say what?
The unemployment rate has been on a steady decline for the last 6 years. That was after we entered a recession (which, by the way, was caused by previous administrations) It is right about at pre-recession levels.

But don't let actual data stand in the way of your argument.

  And this announcement is just that - an announcement. A promise of jobs. By a company that markets people who sell an image, who do jobs that do nothing, for a premium price. If you don't mind, I'll just sit back and wait to see what happens.

We were told that globalization is the future, it will increase our prosperity and so on. After decades of this most consumer goods are very cheap and very poorly made. All salaries stagnated. At the same time a whole bunch of folks are out of jobs and can't afford to buy food.

Now we are trying protectionism. Consumer good are still relatively cheap but the jobs are gradually coming back. Salaries ticked up for the first time since 90s.

So could someone explain to me why we hate protectionism?

Citations needed. And if you're not going to, then I get to provide my own non-sourced counterpoints:

What cheaply made consumer goods are you referring to? Cars are far more advanced in quality. Foods are highly processed, but we are starting to see easier access to less processed foods for those who want them now that there is a market for them. Electronics are generally inexpensive for well made products. You can buy super-cheap ones if they fit your needs, but you really do get what you pay for. Manufactured goods have not seen a noticeable decrease in any quality across the board.

Salary stagnation relative to inflation has been a problem for nearly 50 years. What statistical link do you have that shows that salary stagnation is an effect of globalization vs protectionism? If you have none, what do salaries have to do with protectionism?

Are people out of jobs because of globalization or modernization or a mix of both or neither? Sometimes a job goes away because less people are needed to do that task. Those jobs are not coming back. Sometimes a job goes away because nobody here would do it at the pay that makes it economically feasible. Those jobs are not coming back. Sometimes a job goes away because the company feels it can cut costs to do that part of the business in another country. Some of those jobs may come back, while others will remain gone when the parent company decides it's just better to leave the country altogether. At best, protectionism trades some jobs for others. It does not create jobs.

Salaries ticked up for the first time since the 90s? Really? Where the hell are you getting your data from? Even if it were true, how the hell could you tie it to protectionism when the protectionist policies aren't even in place as laws or executive orders yet?!

I'd say protectionism is bad if for no other reason than because its proponents seem to correspond highly with people who pull unsubstantiatable claims out of their asses to appeal purely to emotion...

How many people hold jobs in retirement? What is the percentage? Go look it up: most of them don't. Your own data proves you wrong. Lousy confirmation bias.

Ha! Talk about confirmation bias - in the face of trivially obvious examples, you're holding to your contention that people work only for money because that's how you personally feel... pot, meet kettle.

This labor report says that >25% of U.S. people 65 and older (eligible for Social Security) continue to work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2...

That number is higher than I expected, actually. I never said that all retirees work, and it isn't really central to my point. Retirement wasn't my only example - we also have the working rich, and volunteer organizations that demonstrate the existence of a human tendency to do useful work for reasons other than monetary compensation.

Some people will choose not to work under UBI, but that's actually desirable to some extent because paying work will be in short supply as automation becomes increasingly sophisticated. Other people will continue to work for money because they want disposable income. Yet others will work because of status, altruistic tendencies, or boredom. The idea that people work solely for money is objectively wrong, and in fact, there's some evidence that compensation causes people to do worse work than they would otherwise do. There's a book called Drive by Daniel Pink that explores this pretty thoroughly, and is actually based on scientific evidence.

Here you go. We recently outgrew the dip caused by the Bush recession.

I don't understand the constant "programming jobs are going away" comments. They're really not, and there are a lot of us in the US with a good salary.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/comput...

In 2014 there were 1,114,000 software developer jobs. Projections are that it will grow 17% between 2014 and 2024, meaning we plan to add 186,600 jobs. Which, incidentally, is a much higher rate of growth than other jobs.

Having known young people who tried to become electricians, Pay is not as good as you think for the first 20 years and getting in the field is very hard on top of it. I don't know any plumbers or carpenters but those professions have been seeing the highest fatality rates in years lately.

Specifically
https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
Fatal injuries among construction and extraction occupations rose by 2 percent to 924 cases in 2015â"the
highest level since 2008. Several construction occupations recorded their highest fatality total in years, including construction laborers (highest since 2008); carpenters (2009); electricians (2009); and plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (2003).

Wages for carpenters in most states is in the $18,000 to $37,000 range-- which doesn't indicate a shortage. And high end wages are $67,000 in states like NY. Where $50,000 will get you a very bad apartment so $67,000 isn't as great as it sounds due to the high cost of living.

According to ECON101, when demand outstrips supply, the price of a good goes up.

In this case, that means wages so I decided to take a look. According to the Federal Bureau of lagor statistics, STEM salaries grew at ~2% a year from 2013-2015 nationally. Meanwhile wages for "Computer Systems Design and Related Services" grew at ~2.3 a year. Inflation last year was 2.1% so if there is a STEM shortage, it must be very small.

In comparison if you are part of the ownership class, your NASDAQ index fund grew by 50%.

Anyone else have any good numbers to back up the anecdotes?

Looking at the numbers for H1-B visas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_demographics_and_tables) I would argue that the impact on the US employment market (146,305,000 labor force with a total of 315,857 H1-Bs issued in 2014; see also https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2014/cpsaat11b.htm) as a whole will be rather negligable. I find it difficult to argue that this is anything but another populist stunt.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator (that's based on the consumer price index):

$500B USD in 2016 ~= $359B USD in 2000
$550B USD in 2000 ~= $766B USD in 2016

So, basically, they're at about 72% of the value they were at in the early 2000s. To be fair, they were a behemoth at the time, so that's still quite a feat, but it does go to show how far they've fallen.

https://data.bls.gov/timeserie... already provides a good starting number, you don't have to pull one out of thin air. From this chart... with filtered US people, has participation rate of 62.7, which means 37.3 are NOT participating. Why don't you start from that number first?

Not only should you not trust the "government" data, you shouldn't trust anyone's data, in the sense that you shouldn't accept what people presenting the data claim to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is human to game the system; it's built into our minds and into our culture. When we have a message to send, we find the data that makes the best case possible for the message that we want to send, and that is the data that we show.

I'm sure many have heard the saying "... popularised in United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" (Wikipedia). At the heart of this is that when you get to pick what data to show, what statistics to publish, you get to control the impression people take away from viewing that data.

If the question is whether you can trust that the actual data presented by a government agency is "good," the answer is probably "yes" as long as you understand all of the assumptions behind the collection and presentation of the data, as well as the particular meaning of the terms being used to describe the data as used by the people who gathered, processed, and are presenting the data. This, in effect, makes it very difficult to take anything anyone with an agenda says at face value, including the government. Two examples of problems with government data come to my mind immediately: Inflation, and Employment.

In the United States, inflation is typically measured by the government using something called "the Consumer Price Index." This represents the change in the cost of a "basket" of consumer goods over time. The goods are supposed to be representative of the goods that most people need to acquire as part of their regular daily existence. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm But whether or not this inflation value applies to you and your family depends upon how closely your purchases match the assumptions built into the CPI. To the extent to which you deviate from the CPI, the real effects of inflation upon your purchasing power will vary. Are the people who create the basket of goods used to measure inflation trustworthy? I'm sure that they believe that they are, and I'm sure that they try as best as the can to get it right according to what they think is right. Do they measure it how I would measure it? I don't know, and I would have to understand much about their methodology n order to answer that question.

Employment. Big grey area, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Ideally, you would measure the total number of people working, and divide it by the total number of people who would like to be working (assuming for this method that everyone who is working wants to be working), and that would tell you the "employment rate" (and the unemployment rate would be 100% minus the employment rate). Even assuming that you can get accurate numbers regarding how many people are working, its almost impossible to know how many people want to work but can't find a job. Some measures use the number of people who are collecting unemployment compensation, but not everyone who wants a job collects unemployment. Other measures might try to estimate the total labor force using age, etc. Obviously how you estimate this number affects the employment/unemployment rate calculation, quite significantly.

No matter whose data you are viewing, you need to understand the assumptions and the methodology behind collecting, processing, and presenting the data in order to know what that data might saying, and even then you aren't seeing all of the data that isn't being presented (that might give you a more complete picture). Even science has trouble with this, so don't expect anything better from politicians.