It's pretty obvious the declining native born rate is just mirroring the overall decline in labor participation, probably from demographic changes. Old people retire and stop working, after all.
It's ironic that you talk of "ungameable statistics", implying that others are misleading people with the statistics, when you're seemingly trying to do the same thing by selectively presenting that statistic to imply that immigrants are stealing native-born's jobs.
Looking at native born employment doesn’t “imply” anything. It just excludes confounding factors that come into play when looking at trends because immigration changes the composition of the people you’re looking at over time.
I love how Covid lockdowns clearly show up in so many graphs going across the past few decades. It's going to be a real gem for researchers in general going forward.
That is an impressive number of graphs and very cool! I wonder if the author would consider repeating with KDE plots instead of splines, so the pretty shape of the curves has some statistical meaning also
Hot take, but I don’t think it should recover. If anything, I think a combination of low unemployment, higher wages, and a labor force participation rate of ~45-55% would be a sweet spot to aim for:
* It would indicate more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives
* It would suggest more stay-at-home parents to rear children, which is only possible in a safe and stable economic environment
* It’d also suggest a higher amount of community engagement, rather than mere working and resting.
* A rise in successful single-income households would also suggest improvements in cost of living affordability
In our current world, where we expect both parents to work full-time jobs to survive (because the cost of everything assumes a married couple employed full-time, especially in cities), this number is bad; in a healthier society, it might be a good thing.
I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
That's like someone hearing about a landmine problem with people getting their legs blown off, and saying "it's a good thing, as wings are better anyway, and they'll be able to just fly wherever they want" - when nobody is getting wings or mentioned anything about wings.
Likewise, nobody said the higher unemployment is combined with higher wages (it's combined with worse jobs and inflation), or that it indicates "more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives" (rather, family households live hand to mounth, and single with no kids still have troubles financially).
And of course there's absolutely no indication or real possibility that this will be the case.
>I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
Why not also give everybody a free pony while at it? So they can spend all that quality time they gain from not having a job in 2026.
>The return of the proceeds of labor to the people who performed the labor.
It's funny you bring that up, given the statistics on this shows that it's been trending down, but nowhere close to the amount you'd expect from the popular discourse.
For one thing, people to divest themselves of the notion "leaving money on the table" is a bad thing. It's part of the affordability crisis and why two income households are the default. It's already priced in as they say. Until that Ethic gets revised, and all the ethical arbitagers are found and eliminated with extreme prejudice, that vision cannot come to fruition. Because the price you pay will be adjusted to reflect your maximum actuarial capacity to earn. Fun bit is, you on the bottom don't get to make the decisions that effect that change. The people at the top/in the .001% do, because if everyone else made the change first without dealing with them, they're sitting on enough assets to buyout everyone else adopting the new paradigm. Then again, there's also the question of "just let em do it, then ignore their claim." Long as everyone else is in alignment, and we just ignore those people, a second system ought to be able to stabilize to which the .001% can either sync to, or remain ostracized. It does require full solidarity from the 99.99% though. That means literally treating the horded wealth and businesses of these people as no good. Destabilizing in the short term; probably gonna hurt like a sumabitch. A theoretical offramp to the vision, however, it is.
> For one thing, people to divest themselves of the notion "leaving money on the table" is a bad thing.
Unfortunately people will never divest themselves of this notion.
The only reason people "left money on the table" prior to the recent-ish past was incomplete information and a slow feedback loop, but with modern tech they have all the information they need to squeeze out every last dollar.
Algorithmic large database systems (like RealPage for apartments) were already causing this problem pre-AI and now it is going to get supercharged.
The only thing that would stop it is government regulation, and... good luck with that, at least in the US. The government here is well and fully captured by the same people vacuuming up all the wealth.
A lot, because no system or crisis has an "easy solution". That said, a few highlights I've chewed on:
* From the social angle, we have got to address this notion of gender roles being a prerequisite for such a societal outcome. It's not a "women are homemakers and men are breadwinners" type bullshit, and it's not penalizing the homemaker by robbing them of personal growth. It's acknowledging that some of us - for whatever reason at all - may prefer contributing to the success of the home and community rather than the success of a business, and that's a perfectly valid path to follow in life with its own societal rewards and benefits that cannot be directly captured in terms of GDP or wealth. If a woman wants to have a high-growth career while the husband stays at home to raise the kids, we shouldn't be shaming or humiliating either participant for their decisions since both are valid not just to themselves, but to society as a whole.
* From a business perspective, we also need to figure out the right balance of regulations and reforms that prohibit (and meaningfully punish) discrimination based on these sorts of choices. Women shouldn't be penalized for having kids, men shouldn't be penalized for choosing to be a homemaker (full or part-time), and vice versa. It's acknowledging that gaps are normal because life is chaos, and rebuilding work around the flexibility to adapt to life rather than jamming everything into fixed blocks of time or location. COVID showed us this is possible, but the whiplash after shows that those in power refuse to change willingly; changes must come from external actors and forces because power refuses to acquiesce otherwise.
* From a government point of view, it's a lot of social safety nets and reforms. It's fixing healthcare, it's making childcare affordable, it's raising minimum wages; it's also raising taxes on multi-income households proportionate to earned income (higher taxes on higher incomes), expanding affordability programs into higher income tiers (such that unorthodox households aren't punished - this mainly targets immigrant and queer multi-family households), prioritizing "right-size" homeownership (taxing 2nd+ homes at higher rates, or large homes/land plots in dense urban areas at higher rates than multi-family or smaller-plot homes), expanding transit options to reduce costs of vehicle ownership and improve job opportunities, the list goes on for miles. The overarching goal is one of intentional vision rather than piecemeal band-aids: building the legal structures and safety nets needed to not merely "promote" this outcome, but all but mandate it via incentives and punishments. It's as much about reassuring people that their choice is valid and will result in a long and prosperous life as much as it is handcuffing Capital from squeezing blood from stones for shareholder value.
* EDIT: One thing Government could be doing to improve things now, that seems incredibly counter-intuitive on its face, is to stop means-testing benefits. We need to stop caring who is acceptable enough to get social benefits, and instead focus on ensuring benefits are used effectively regardless of who gets them - directly paying landlords instead of handing out vouchers, for instance, or curtailing SNAP/EBT uses away from ultra-processed foods, or just extending Medicare to everybody. Yes, there's a lot of questions around sustainability of these programs, but that's all the more reason to maximize their pool of users, cut out middlemen, and raise taxes to specifically cover costs of services instead of printing money to cover deficits. Patrick Boyle's latest video actually touches on this in the UK, where even high earners aren't motivated to do more work or earn more pay because losing means-tested benefits will cost them more than they would earn.
And that's just the high-level stuff. It's a lot to think about because it requires us to collectively fight for an intended future instead of just one-offing problems individually. That's a lot of work that not a lot of folks have ever had to do outside of minority spaces, and those muscles are going to need to be trained back into use over time. It's not impossible, but it is incredibly hard.
The requirements to be US President isn't to be born in the US, but to be a "natural born citizen."
While the rules of being a natural born citizen is more complicated if born outside of the US, you can generally become one if one of your parents is a US citizen.
I wouldn't call it an Americanism, per se. There are plenty of countries where you can't become a citizen at all without having a relative who is one. There are also plenty of countries where, even being born there is not sufficient for citizenship (in fact, only 35 countries in the world grant citizenship unconditionally via being born within the borders).
It means that if we cut off or discourage immigration, we can’t count on non-native citizens to continue boosting our numbers. So, we have to look at the native-born stats to get an idea of our future.
It’s crazy how the same people that are pro-labor union are also pro-immigration. How do they not realize that immigration is used as a weapon against labor organization? Workers movements of the 20th century were well aware of this obvious fact. But I guess in this hyper polarized culture, people are scared of being labeled a bigot for having a stance on immigration that divergent from the liberal orthodoxy
That seems to be everyone above 16 years of age.
It excludes inmates, that is penal and mental institutions (which in the land of the free is surprisingly sizeable chunk).
Also excludes active military personnel.
Notably it includes people who are disabled but are unable to work.
U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like.
https://www.lisep.org has alternate measures that try accounting for take home wages as well as seasonal variability (construction is noted as being volatile but relatively well paying).
So if the alternate measures mostly follow the same trend as U-3, and the numbers are only higher because they use a looser criteria, what's the point of bringing them up, other than as a cheap rhetorical device?
Suppose we had some way of objectively determining happiness on a 1-10 scale. The government puts out a metric called the "sad rate", which is people who are 2 or less on the scale. What's the point in coming along and declaring "the real sad rate is not actually 5%. If we change the cutoff to 3, it's actually 10%!"? Heck, why stop at 3? Why not declare everyone under 5 sad? Then the sad rate would be even bigger, great for doomposting!
The graph ("vs. Headline Rate")[0] follows the same trend lines as the BLS numbers just with a higher percentage. I don't see how the "poverty wage" methodology (which is arbitrary) is helpful here, it doesn't take into account caregivers or disabled people who may be keeping their wage low on purpose due to benefits cliffs.
Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.
1. Kaiser Permanente healthcare strike sidelined 28,000 workers. The strike ended on February 23rd.
2. The severe weather resulting in two major snow storms made it so that lots of businesses were simply closed for a few days. This meant they couldn’t be properly surveyed.
It still is not good, but the magnitude of how not good is worsened by specific one-time circumstances. Make of that what you will.
Does that matter if the headline is conclusive of the article result? Financial Times is a costly subscription. Furthermore those details, while interesting, do not change the outcome of the article.
I understand the US economy is experiencing some… troubled times. However, 4.4% unemployment rate, while that’s an increase, sounds really low compared to other countries. Am I missing something?
4.4% is the headline number, but there are other measures of unemployment [1] that show we are closer to 8% when you include people that are discouraged from even looking and those working part-time but would prefer a full time job.
There's also a stagnation of salaries relative to inflation and a slow hiring market that has people locked into a job when they'd like to find something better. The K-shaped recoveries have people slipping out of the middle class. Combine with housing increasing faster than inflation, future generations having a lower quality of life than their parents.
The wealthy are doing what they can to try to direct the narrative elsewhere, by controlling media sources, blaming immigrants, blaming China, and blaming the government. But we really have far too much wealth concentration to be sustainable, not unlike the ending of a game of monopoly. If a more stable solution isn't found soon, I fear things will get much worse than they already are.
You can also look at the prime-age employment-population numbers, which show ages 25 to 54.
It shows nearly 20% unemployment rates.
I think this is a better number, personally, than the 4.4% one that conveniently skips out on so many. It's always felt like an "optics" number to me. Like asking themselves how much can they possibly massage the data to look as good as possible.
I think it's meaningful to consider the amount of people who are unemployed even if they're not looking for work or can't work. It better highlights that there are societal level problems that are preventing a lot of these people from working when I imagine most of them would like to be - they just can't because of childcare needs, disability, incarceration, lack of access to opportunities, domestic abuse, etc.
US economy is robust, the problem is that people don’t have the same safety nets when out of work.
No job means no healthcare or reduced coverage for many people for example, so it
is a bigger deal to have unemployment.
Which means a Finnish or Spanish level unemployment would be much more catastrophic, however anyone expecting the demise of USA will have to keep waiting as the country is very rich and developed and as a result they will re-group and be fine - eventually.
The worst case for the US is a USSR style splintering. Many of the individual constituent states may come out the other end fine or better with time, but that doesn't make "the US" fine.
The U-3 rate does not include those that drove for Uber one hour in the month. The gold standard metric is labor participation rate of white men over 20, and that's not looking good: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300028
For what? "labor participation rate" or "labor participation rate of white men over 20"? The former is regularly cited, but the latter seems like a contrived statistic to make a point.
You’re absolutely right. The labor market is still quite strong. All the doom and gloom from places like HN is coming from the many layoff announcements and fear of AI.
It's not that numbers are a farce but different industry segments are doing better or worse than other.
HN being a tech forum that now increasingly skews East and Midwest (heck, it's not even 7am yet in the West, but look at the degree of engagement on here) means most HNers are impacted by a slowdown in tech hiring, which exacerbates the sense of pessimism.
And tbf, if you aren't working in a tech hub like the Bay or NYC, you are going to be screwed if you are laid off - employers increasingly restrict remote work to those employees who have proven internal track records, and inshoring hubs like in RTP, Denver, Atlanta, etc are on the chopping block.
Honestly, I thought you were quoting an SNL skit, but now I see this quote in a transcript from his 2026 state of the union speech.
That being said, over my lifetime I've heard many TV talking heads, people I assume are much more well informed than me, claim that presidents don't really have that much to do with the state of the economy, despite the levers they pull, and it's all a matter of timing whether they reap the benefits of a good economy or get pummelled for a bad economy. That doesn't stop them from taking credit when things are good (or pretending that things are great with things are actually pretty meh).
Arguably never has their been a Potus willing to destroy the economy. Potus can pull levers to try and boost the economy which is more or less at the whim of everyone else participating. That is the truth that was being referred to before. Now we have a Potus bent on destroying it so the levers he pulls are actually effecting the economy in ways. But he still doesn’t control it.
Presidents don't. That's because presidents don't unilaterally dictate trade policy, or start wars, or micromanage immigration policy. Congress is supposed to do the work of running the country. However, this president has side stepped all the usual ways that the US runs under the guise of "emergency" powers.
Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic. It also never recovered from a major drop after the 2008 recession.
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