Hacker News

Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999.

I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

> ...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.

I see some odd effects. I wonder how these would be explained?

According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.

When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.

By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.

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?

I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie. If you apply their stat methodologies to other G-7, you get similar results.