Low cost of wealth accumulating snowballs those that have alot of said wealth accumulated. Look at swedens wealth inequality (gini coefficient) statistics to get a somber example.

Counter intuitive enough; making borrowing harder, and wealth holding more costly may reduce land and housing costs.

A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.

Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. The lower tax rate is simpler than actually accounting for these differences.

Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.

Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.

I have had this sneaking suspicion for years now that most of the money needs to be locked up because if we actually gave it to the masses to spend we'd see massive inflation and/or environmental catastrophe (worse than the current one). I don't mean to defend the wealth gap, and I'm not trying to make a statement on how things should be. I just think there may be an unfortunate reality that we need most of the world to have less because we can't currently support a middle class globe.

Is capital gains / wealth tax a fix here though? Definitely not saying it doesn't work, I have no idea. But I'd be curious to hear both sides of the argument.

Economists have been championing Georgism for more than a century and we still refuse to consider it. I would argue that unreasonably expensive land prices are the most serious economic and social issue in the West today. It's a systemic problem, from which so many other issues are caused: homelessness, poverty, suppressed economic activity, inflation, class stratification, "failure to launch," fertility rates, inequality, etc.

The problem is that we've taught generations that the best retirement plan is a home, and now if we allowed home prices to fall, generations of people would be without their retirement plans. Voters don't like that very much. It's absurd that we allowed things to progress to this point, and unwinding it is going to be extremely painful. I think this only resolves when renters outnumber home owners to a material degree and vote for land value taxes. Things will get much worse before they get better.

Is there a country that has implemented these ideas and where the results have been like you expected?

> You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down

If any price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.

Or you tax it. Or, more correctly, you remove the current protections that allow land to appreciate tax-free for decades. That would move capital out of land and free it for other uses. The current system was designed to put money/people into houses post WWII but has gone too far in promoting radical multi-generational wealth structures.

We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.

I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth. For half a century, in France, it's been told that real estate was the safest/best investment for households; everyone was passively peer pressured each year, whatever the macroeconomic situation at the moment, to buy. This is a Ponzi scheme, so even the middle class households that recently bought their own shitty flat in Paris will never vote for such a tax because their overpriced asset would lose value and it's often their only lifelong investment.

The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.

Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.

Significantly less. Wanted a job? Walk through any neighborhood being built with a tape measure in your pocket. You'd have a job doing something before you made it past the 4th house. Had a car? Delivering food paid enough to afford a modest apartment.

Job and slavery are two very different things. I love free markets too but not to the level of autism (for lack of better word) and ignoring how things actually work in the physical world. Shallow economic theory doesn't create happy and functional families. Economic theory that is mostly rigged to serve the rich, entrenched, and powerful anyways.

Many jobs require additional expenses: car, commute, babysitting, living in expensive city, no insurance for work related injuries...

So "not enough to live on" often means, it does not even pay job related expenses! Employees are subsidizing their employers!

My partner had a good job offer, but is at home! Buying extra car, petrol, child care... We would loose 150euro a month...

You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".

People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.

That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.

One really nice economic factor of the dole is that it disappears at a rate of 50c for each $1 of earnings above $150 and at 60c above $256, so there's no welfare cliff.

This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.

I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.

> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.

Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.

Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.

That data is in the article, "true unemployment" was higher in 1999. The last few years are the best years on the graph.

"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."

Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.

>...and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland

and

> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

Do you even fact-check yourself before making specious claims[0][1]? You HAVE to be registered via RAV to be counted. Full stop.

0 - https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...

1 - https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefit...

I do not think so. Ok, from the polls. But in the polls, it seem, I've quickly googled, if you've worked 1 h/week, they will not count you as unemployed. It is a different statistics. The registration in labor office, it is official employement, paid not less than min. wage, you can afford healthcare, etc. While the second poll does not care if you can afford healthcare or not.

> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.

I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...

Well, about 40 percent of unemployed people (i.e. receiving benefits) are employed in Germany.

And in the other direction, not receiving benefits meaning "not unemployed", and "in re-trainings", or sometimes "too old" means not calculated in, either.

I don't understand the issue with saying that someone who is employed is ... employed.

If the claim is that a single number (the unemployment rate) does not capture all the high dimensional features of society & work, then well of course!

If the claim is that politicians & media focus too much on a single number to judge whether the labour market is doing ok, then sure? It's not a particularly contentious position though I don't see any way forward - even with a _single_ number to discuss, half this thread is making wrong claims about its methodology.

> You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed."

I would hope that someone who can work 20 years a week gets paid a lot, even if they work at a pizza place!

I my country you have to regularly check in with the bureau for unemployment to be included in the stats, even though that bureau hadn’t found a job for anyone ever.

I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.

Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.

It's not uncommon to use that as a measurement in addition to the ILO's definition.

The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.

They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.

And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.

It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.

Take a step back.

A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.

But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.

And this is why I'm irritated whenever a comment just thoughtlessly answer "Just raise your offer bro". There might be some transaction barriers that make paying a service no longer worth it, one of them is the amount of fraud like you mentioned, another is societal problem that reduces people's competency as a whole so competent people becomes too few to search.

Well yes. I for one won't sign up for an odd one-off job for a stranger because it more often than not ends up in a quagmire of unfulfilled miscommunicated expectations. It's not fraud per se, it's just.. a wrong approach.

Join a community first, ask for help after that.

Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way

For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.

I think the thing is it’s no easier to hire someone to do a job you need done outside of work (at least the first time you need that job done) than it is to hire someone for a job at your workplace.

Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.

Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.

Competence is chain of trust. Chain of trust is adversarial to current market forces.

Not really because it works if candidates are trustworthy and you can evaluate the candidate without "hidden issues".

Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.

The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.

This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!

Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.

A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.

When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.

Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.

And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.

2 and 3 are the same in my own lived experience.

1.5, not enough skill for 2 or 3 and not enough money for 1 so they own nothing and convince themselves to like it.

2.5, somewhere between 2 and 3.

> We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all

Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.

> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.

Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.

Yeah go ask a homeless person why don’t they become a hedge fund manager or neurosurgeon. Are they stupid?

Because learning involves being effectively unemployed for multiple years, and is only available to those who did well in school. Then, on the other side, you're still not guaranteed a job. Add to all of that the fact that you'll probably have to move and effectively restart your life elsewhere.

My fiancée is currently in the middle of this. I don't know if she would've been able to go through it alone.

You have to be looking for a job or employed to be part of the labor force count. Stay at home moms arent in the labor force, neither are students that dont want to work.

Probably is. Unless you're the top 20% you're probably on the chopping block via RNG and sometimes just whole departments are getting sacked for 'automations'.

There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides.

"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.

If you do this with PPP with every other country on earth, which ones look the best?