And yet unemployment is the lowest in decades!
Anyway, sometimes unemployment rate could be misleading. For example, Cambodia's UR is 0.3% [1]. However beneath the impressive statistic lies a harsher reality of widespread near-unemployment, masked by the methodology: Anyone who works just one hour a week is considered employed.
The employed include people aged 15 and over who, during the reference week worked for one hour or more for pay, profit, commission or payment in kind, in a job or business or on a farm,” notes a 2013 ILO working paper on its methodology. Which means that anyone who has some kind of garden in the backyard, and if they go and grow some vegetables on their farmland, they will always be considered employed [2]
In developing countries the informal sector holds about 60% of the ecomony.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...
[2]https://english.cambodiadaily.com/editors-choice/cambodias-l...
I'm very curious how this turns out given the deflationary economy. Will this drive inflation I wonder?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192398/employment-rate-i...
PS: It was higher every year from 1990 to 2008 showing just how bad things are right now.
My point though, is that automation, just like the last 250 years since Industrialization started, has not caused unemployment on an aggregate level. Instead an increase in production and living standard happens, decade after decade.
Socially, some of this is muddled by stay at home mothers with automation like washing machines making a dramatic difference in hours worked.
Since a worker today produces ~30x as much as a worker 250 years ago (to the extent it is calculable, that's where estimates land), It's not too surprising many choose this path.
Most of the jobs listed were before people started tracking things like unemployment.
There’s plenty of busywork type jobs in Japan and Australia, from what I’ve seen.