Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- This definition sounds like U-6 unemployment (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE) with an additional term for people making below a living wage. That's better constructed than most of these "real stats" I see, so I hate to be too critical. But they don't really engage with the important question of whether this metric is sufficiently robust for policymakers to use. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be quite a bit more volatile than the headline rate; if the Fed tried to target it, for example, would they end up doing a bunch of unnecessary rate cuts to stave off unemployment spikes that aren't real?
- A huge demonstration of why we need to move from a 5 day working week.
Some of the gains that have gone to the top need to be paid to spread the work over more people, a 4 day week would be a start.
by stuaxo - In basic economic theory, high wages mean that there's insufficient supply. So I wonder why don't the "truly unemployed" people learn whatever the market rewards and compete with the highly paid workers.
If it is because they can't for whatever reason, 4 day working week doesn't solve anything.
(Genuine question, I'm not making some kind of a right-wing point.)
by RivieraKid - Looking at the "True Rate" vs "Headline Rate" graph.... The "Headline Rate" seems to be a good proxy for the "True Rate".
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
by j16sdiz - an unemployment rate of about 3-4% is considered "full employment" aka "we're good".
If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
by riffraff - I'm pretty confused here. The graph implies unemployment is among the lowest it's been in decades? Is that right?
Also where does the discrepancy come from? That's a huge difference (5x!) with the official stat!
Is this actually measuring "underemployment", i.e. people who wish they were working full time but are stuck with some bullshit jobs? (And by bullshit I don't mean what Graeber means, but "this pays like crap and melts my brain but I can't find anything better.")
by andai - > Is this actually measuring "underemployment"
Sort of. It's "all of the above". So basically low demand for labor.
* Looking for a job.
* People who don't work full time but want to.
* Poverty wages. (below $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes)
by pas - Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?
I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.
I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.
The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.
And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.
So what do people actually do?
[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
by afpx - > So what do people actually do?
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
by anal_reactor - Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want.
I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.
FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
by Gareth321 - You're quite literally asking a billion dollar question. And a deeply-rooted reason on why the larger job market was so easy to break. Feed into that distrust, and no one gets hired, at all. Though the difference is that a reasonable company can bear a bad hire for a few months (or years) and not be in the red. You probably cannot.
So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.
After that:
- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).
- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).
- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).
- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).
None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
by johnnyanmac - I had a female friend who moved to San Francisco and lived alone without a vehicle. So if she needed some handyman work, she would summon a Taskrabbit from the app. I found Thumbtack to be a decent equivalent of this, and I tried it once.
All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.
So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.
Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.
So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.
My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.
- The short answer is probably to find people making online content about the thing you want done, and contacting them.
I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.
Personally though I live in a city where there are a few electronic repair shops, so I’d just take it there.
by keiferski - Most of the time, I don't hire for one off little jobs proactively.
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
by koliber - I think people have mentioned this, but I haven't seen an answer: why not ask friends and neighbours? That's what I do, and I've had success with it (though I'm more frequently the person that neighbours and friends ask for professional contacts). When no one knows of anyone, you search and call people and evaluate/assess. It's not _easy_, but it doesn't seem like such a big problem.
Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
- The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.
I am so annoyed by that fact.
by ozim - Similar statistics for Australia: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemploy...
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
by RachelF - Thanks, this is interesting.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
- Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures? Seems like they're attempting to exaggerate the race and gender differences, even though they'd be perfectly obvious even with a fair graph. Real credibility own-goal, especially given the topic at discussion.
--edit-- Top of the range is also varying between each graph, smaller issue but still ... weird. If you're trying to accurately convey percentages, this is not the way to do it.
- > exaggerate the ethnicity and gender differences
They call that race and sex, but probably mean gender, not sex. And there is no such thing as race, see wikipedia.
Are those even social scientists?
by a3w - "There are three degrees or classes of lies: there are lies, damned lies and statistics" :D
- Gah! the first two graphs were fair so i dropped me guard. Ye this piss me off.
- > Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures?
Honestly, look at the graphs you see today. Nobody starts at zero any more, with the two stacked tildes interrupting the vertical axis to indicate an omitted range.
I imagine this bad habit started in the 90s when no affordable/free graphing software had the feature. Then it fossilised into graphing ineptitude.
by euroderf - A percentage chart does not always have to start at zero. Scaling the y-axis to the range of the data is commonly used to make within-chart trends easier to see. I don't think this is evidence of a nefarious motive... it looks more like a stylistic choice.
- I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.by annzabelle
- Or simply people who have 2 part-time jobs totally 40 hours.by iLoveOncall
- A lot of smaller companies over-hire part-time labor to minimize cost of overtime, medical benefit support, and mandatory wage increases. In general, employee-at-will and dependent-contractor status is only popular in the USA, and often is outright illegal for good reason in most other countries.
Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
by Joel_Mckay - > ...or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
by ElProlactin - Might need to change the labelling from 'living' wage to 'surviving' wage.by BLKNSLVR
- This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1].
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
by bpodgursky