Say Hello to Full Employment

This article seems to use the terms &quot;unemployed&quot; and &quot;jobless&quot; interchangeably.<p>People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.<p>On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.<p>From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html</a>

&quot;For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job.&quot;<p>So what? If there&#x27;s a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that&#x27;s a mismatch. You may say beggars can&#x27;t be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

Des Moines resident. &quot;Full&quot; just means that the number of minimum wage jobs exceed the number of those unemployed. Software industry here is total crap. Only large tech employers are Principal, Wells Fargo, DuPont, John Deere.<p>Principal will tank when the market drops (company almost tracks large index funds), they have already hearded most employees into shared community desks like cattle with draconian policies against any personal items or even paper.<p>DuPont is about to be eaten alive by State funded Chinese seed corn.<p>John Deere is at an inflection point where they need massive RD spending in a bad economy. Either they ship autonomous bots for seed&#x2F;weed&#x2F;feed or they become a dinosaur.<p>Wells Fargo ... isn&#x27;t exactly the most ethical corporation.

We&#x27;re also 9 years away from the end of the last recession.<p>The longest we&#x27;ve gone without a recession in the past 100 years is 10 years.

&gt; Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job.<p>I think this sentiment has been repeated time and again here on HN.<p>I suspect the tech community is particularly attuned to it, as our sector has something like this employment situation even when the economy as a whole isn&#x27;t doing as well.

There are some other great numbers with respect to this full employment<p>- In 2017 the combined reshoring and related foreign direct investment (FDI ) announcements surged, adding over 171,000 jobs in 2017. he U.S. had gone from losing net about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year at the beginning of the last decade, to adding net 30,000 jobs in 2016. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reshorenow.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reshoring-initiative-2017-data-report-reshoring-plus-fdi-job-announcements-up-2-800-since-2010&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reshorenow.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reshoring-initiative-2017-data-re...</a><p>- Within the United States, growth also has become more balanced across industries. As in past years, the service sector, supported by growth in employment and real wages, has grown steadily with increases in retail trade, business services, personal services and construction activity. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalcommons.unl.edu&#x2F;bbrbin&#x2F;166&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalcommons.unl.edu&#x2F;bbrbin&#x2F;166&#x2F;</a><p>- Job-hopping increases, in possible boon to wage growth and productivity <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;in-this-economy-quitters-are-winning-1530702001" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;in-this-economy-quitters-are-wi...</a>

And here I am. Laid off after 2 months, among hundreds of workers, and unable to find employment. Someone tell me more about these &quot;more jobs than people&quot; again. BTW I have a B.S in Computer Science and living in the USA.

Looking at statistics instead of stories:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IAPCPI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IAPCPI</a><p>In Iowa 2008 was the biggest drop in nominal personal income since 1955. The period 2009-2017 had the slowest nominal personal income growth since the end of the great depression in 1931. 2017 was one of 3 years to record negative income growth in the last 50 years (2008, 1993).<p>This all speaks of a labor market working far beneath capacity, one that hasn&#x27;t yet made up the loss of income from the last recession. One no where close to full employment which leads to constant and substantial overall income gains.

I hate these kinds of numbers because they hide the fact that most of these jobs do not provide a living wage.

This article&#x27;s title is pretty terrible... &quot;say hello to full employment&quot; - then proceeds to discuss the employment situation in Iowa for the length of the article.

Talking to an in-law on the city council back home, the local places that do jobs like tire changes, oil changes, pizza delivery, are having issues finding people. Even with 15 dollars an hour wage, and this is in a small 2 store town. I didn&#x27;t even ask if those are 40 hour jobs or part time, makes me wonder.

We&#x27;re not at full employment. Full employment implies wage growth but wages still aren&#x27;t growing very fast. This is a case where we&#x27;ve gamed the metric. If wages continue to grow faster then we&#x27;ll know we&#x27;re getting towards full employment.

When I open this page on my phone I am greeted with a privacy modal that blocks the entire screen, with a consent button below the fold, which I cannot reach because scrolling appears busted. (Mobile Safari)

Hello Full Employment, good luck making up for 4 decades of absent real wages growth, I suspect it&#x27;s going to be a difficult climb.

Lol in todays Investors Chronical (weekly version of the FT for investors) there was an article discussing the Philips curve - it commented that the official unemployment rate is of by about 2x that actual rate in the states and not much better in the UK.

Wage growth is not going to pick up. There are a billion people in the other hemisphere that are poor and will gladly accept the same work for subpar pay. That wage growth will pick up in any meaningful way is another false line fed to us by the right wing message machine.

Wasn&#x27;t &#x27;jobs,jobs, jobs&#x27; Trump&#x27;s core economic message?

The national unemployment rate has always been political fodder and not a good indicator to the heath of people employed. Statistical smoke and mirrors considering they do not count people who&#x27;ve stopped looking for work because they cannot find it, those who are under-employed, or those who are earning less this year compared to last due to inflation and wage stagnation.

Ugh! We should be striving for ways to create a zero employment society.