Not to be rude, but is this just a list of your feelings on the matter or is there real data and consensus behind them?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703

The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.

What looks unusual in this graph is that the line usually spikes rapidly during and after a recession. It's not clear what we're in right now, since recessions are declared after the fact, but the slow trend upwards without a declared recession does look like a break from past decades.

I was about to post the same thing. It is cyclical, and over the last several decades, the percentage of long-term unemployed during low unemployment periods seems to have steadily increased more than the rate during high unemployment periods, covid excepting.

The level seems to be increasing, clearly, despite the cyclical components

Between 1950 and 2008 it briefly spiked above 20 six times total. Since 2008, the number never meaningfully fell below 20, staying in the 30-40 zone between 2008 and 2015, and then hovering between 20 and 25 since then. Yes, it's obvious that the status quo has changed.

IMO the reason is that there's simply more paper trail behind you. If you fall behind once, it's not like you can get your things, change name, and start a new life in another state.

> if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.

I want to be named Charizard but my country doesn't allow name change.

I guess the real question is: is there anywhere for the layperson to hide? Whose acorns will survive?

Seems?

Especially when you realise that our tolerance for AI propping up the rest of the economy has stifled the "natural selection" that weeds out poor performers and poor business choices and rewards innovation and success. An imprecise economy is a worrying thing.

The eight round interviews are incredibly stupid from the hiring side as well. My job’s thankfully not gone quite that far, but I’ve had a bunch of hiring panels where I don’t have anything to add that the four other people who interviewed the candidate didn’t already cover and my involvement in the process was just a complete waste of time.

> Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.

That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.

> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.

There is no job.

> It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.

When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.

On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.

> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.

Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface.

Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature.

As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire.

Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization.

You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process.

You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge.

Edit: can't reply

> There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.

That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination

> There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases

Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin

> economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.

A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment.

Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee.

But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire.

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Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.

The average non cyclical component of longterm unemployment has been rising steadily since the 50s tho

Hostility to labor has been accelerating throughout my 25 years in the workforce. Graduated into dotcom bust then global financial crisis then another massive transfer of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy in response to covid. If you don't already have yours good luck getting it.

Interest rates are relatively high compared to what they were several years ago. When interest rates are low everyone and their dog gets hired because its cheap to do that. When interest rates are high companies need to be more selective and growth/risk taking decreases.

If we can somehow get inflation under control it will trigger lower interest rates and hiring will increase again. But the current, and possibly only, strategy is to stagnate wage growth and increase the number of people out of work so that the economy has less money circulating in order to reduce inflation.

I've lived through a few of these. Its definitely cyclical.

The American economy and GDP was driven by consumer spending (around 68%). Who knew if you offshored the jobs, pushed an ever increasing share of capital to higher tax brackets and away from consumers, and then started replacing consumer/workers with AI, that a consumer driven economy would drop off?

"U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-2140...

And since our taxation system is also primarily worker funded (over 50%) and during times of loss businesses/capitalists can write off a ton of their share of the tax burden, we're in for a lot of pain.

Wow, you're the first person I've ever heard of to buy land in the woods to prepare for the imminent economic disaster.

If you know about this ahead of time, and can be a contractor, then forming a corporation that is its own tax entity gives you this in the US. I did exactly this in the mid-90s when 9 months of work was suddenly going to yield 4-5x what I had made the previous year, then I would lose the position immediately after, and I knew I would need a break at that point. I paid myself the regular salary whether the corporation was making a lot or making nothing. The corporation had to pay taxes on the profit the first year, but it could deduct the loses against those profits in later years. The same thing happened 5 years later. All my work for a decade was through the corporation I had formed. You can also do things like have a company car (with the company deducting insurance, gas, maintenance, etc.), rent your home office to the company, and much more. US tax laws are much better for corporations and their owners than for individuals.

Here in the Netherlands you can actually request your income for taxes to be averaged every 5 years.

Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.

People with lumpy incomes get absolutely brutalized by the tax code. It sucks but also not easy to remedy. The calculations and exemptions change every year, so it isn’t as simple as looking back five years and averaging it.

Best we can do is loss recognition for the capital class.

But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.

Good point.

In a controlled economy when it is dialed down and or slips out-of-control and dips downward, that's what you get.

>Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.

That's quite a bit like a macro element of nature.

Too many people for too few remaining resources either way.

Gilding, albeit more toilets than lilies, is on the up and up.

If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players.

  The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. 

is just the latest in an extraordinary personal achievement by just one of the current crop of players.

If you're being generous you can give them some credit for arresting demographic decline. Albeit likely too little, too late.

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As I understand it, OBB reverted section 174.

Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.

I used to agree with your statement, but it's feeling more and more it's not true.

The Trump administration feels that accountability is only for the people who report accurate data. They get fired.

> Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they’ve also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person’s previous income.

The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.