The US does not have full employment. The actual percentage of working age people who are employed is below peak levels. Also quite a few people are working part time.

Also, the unemployment rate communicates nothing about the dignity of a job. The 45 year old former factory worker who is now fighting for hours at a retail job counts as employed. He also counts as angry, depressed and ready to burn the system down.

> The US does not have full employment.

* Citation needed.

Here's the Fed saying we are:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan/feds-kapla...

From a similar time frame: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/the-unemployment-rate-is-...

Just like the cost of living index, Politicians often use misleading techniques to calculate "employment rate"

Alright then, let's look at this index that article proposes:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

At 79.9, it's not quite record high employment, but it's close.

Someone working an hour a week counts as employed.

I wonder if the rise of gig-economy type work has dirtied the employment data pool? If you're out of work and looking for a employment, yet you're still scraping by a few bucks every week due to Uber or Lyft or something similar, and you're a part of a significant percentage of people doing the same then unemployment numbers probably aren't as pretty as some would like us to believe.

U6 unemployment numbers include workers who are employed part time but would prefer to be full time, and U6 is near all time lows.

But labor force participation rates are still very, very low. If you'd like a job but don't have one, you don't get counted in any unemployment stats except the aggregate labor force participation.

This caught my attention so I looked for a source. Looks like this rate is the number of people who are Employed (60.7%) or have been actively seeking work in the last week (4%) out of the total population of people who are 16 years or older, not institutionalized, and not active military.

The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?

Overall (all ages) labor force participation rates are low, but labor force participation among people 25-54 are very high.

All ages LFPR are probably low because the Baby Boomers are retiring and Millenials are still in college.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

So, an Uber drive that's in the app available for calls 35+ hours a week but gets few calls, are they part-time or full-time?

Don't worry they are getting paid 80 cents an hour.

No, it doesn't count.

> And yet the US has full employment.

The US has “full employment” only under a definition of “full employment” that allows significant involuntary under- and un-employment to exist while still applying the label.

That an entirely different discussion.

My point is that saying "people are happy but jobless" is missing the point of UBI.

UBI at this point is more an experimental pilot project to see what it does to people not to actually figure out how to pay for it which is another discussion also.

What it's not a pilot project for is to see if people get jobs as it's a proposed solution for a jobsless future for most.

The existence of Marie Condo would suggest we have too much stuff, as would the fact that we are using the earths resources faster than we can replenish them. Growth at the moment is predicated on buying ever more 'stuff', theres a limit to how long we can keep doing that.

At the other end we get better at making ever more stuff with less labour. That widget factory that used to employ 1000 people 50 years ago, now employs 10 for the same output. Now from a stuff buying point of view that's good, your products are cheaper so people can buy more. But what happens at the extreme. 0 employees in a factory? If everyone does that there aren't any employees to buy the stuff you've made.

Both of these trends are happening, both are unsustainable, sooner or later we are going to have to address them.

right, this is why whenever I drive through any major metropolitan area in the U.S the only thing I ever see is people being gainfully employed. What, this U.S you're talking about - it really is Utopia.