America's True Unemployment Rate

Re:America's True Unemployment Rate by smsm42 on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @08:15PM (#24843663)

$20,000 was chosen because LISEP concluded that anything beneath that wage could fairly be considered a poverty wage, based on the U.S. poverty guidelines put out by the Department of Health and Human Services, which considers a three-person household to be in poverty if it has an income of less than $20,000 per year.

Which underlines my point - poverty is not the same as unemployment. For starters, not all people live in three-persons households, especially ones that earn low wages (e.g. single young people just starting their professional careers). Secondly, defining every poor person as "unemployed" is making the term meaningless - just say "poor" then.

> Because your comment is full of generalizations and cynicism

I raised very specific issues with this methodology, and with the terminology specifically, but if all you can do is dismiss them as "cynicism" (do you even know what it means? it doesn't match any part of my objections) then fine, whatever.

I am objecting to the use of an established term to mean something this term is not supposed to mean. There's nothing "cynical" about it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:America's True Unemployment Rate by didibus on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @04:00AM (#24845702)

I think you just explained the point of the article to yourself.

That when a politician brags about unemployment being so low to a voter, they're doing so to fool the voter, who likely associate unemployment rate as a measure of how well off everyone is doing, while in reality it doesn't, because if you look at the "true" unemployment, i.e., what that voter is thinking, which is how poor are Americans overall, well you'd actually see a pretty glooming picture with a large number of Americans living below poverty and the number growing year over year.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:America's True Unemployment Rate by smsm42 on Thursday October 22, 2020 @02:04AM (#24855335)

Unemployment is not the only economic measure. Basically what you're advocating is fighting misleading claims by politicians by creating your own, even more misleading (at least the politicians talk about unemployment when they say "unemployment") metrics which makes even harder for the voter to understand what is going on because it mixes a half-dozen of different societal problems into one number.

> if you look at the "true" unemployment, i.e., what that voter is thinking, which is how poor are Americans overall

Unemployment is not a measure how poor people are. While unemployment can lead to poverty, it's not the same as poverty. It's like saying "we'll add a number of sick people, obese people, people not working out, old people, people eating too much sugar, people not eating enough vegetables, people who smoke and people who drink alcohol - and call it 'true health index' and will demand to treat this number as if all these people were actually sick". Somehow you think it's more clear this way?

> well you'd actually see a pretty glooming picture with a large number of Americans living below poverty

There already are statistical measures of poverty. You don't need to call them "true unemployment". Call them "measures of poverty".

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