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Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

Wild to think a country can have both too much employment and millions living below the poverty line.

Yah which is exactly why this response is not going to work.

The issue right now with "full employment" is incentive based -- after covid large numbers of people opted out of the jobs available to them because they finally recognized how much they have been being screwed over by the employer classes. The social contract is bad -- people are unhappy with raw deals.

I think the only thing that could actually work right now will require actually addressing the structural social wealth imbalances.

Too much employment --> introduce mandatory hour caps and increase mandatory vacation allowances and decrease retirement ages.

Too much overhead per employee -- get healthcare the hell out of the employment contract ...

It's insane to me that when we saw relative cross class wage growth for the first time in decades -- the immediate conclusion of all the decision makers had been that the labour market is over-exuberant and needs to be tamped down...

It’s important to understand that the Fed has limited tools at its disposal. Congress does have the power to enact the required structural changes. However, the Fed Chair has not been very vocal about this so it always seems like the Fed is the only agency that can do anything about the situation.

Honestly Powell should stop pretending he has any control over the situation and say it explicitly that rate hikes aren’t really having the intended effect. He is a bad Fed chair.

Not everyone has the same skills and capabilities.

Also the poverty line is a moving target. People with streaming TV and video game consoles are technically in poverty in the US. In the 1960-70s, access to those items would be only for ultra wealthy.

You mean non-existent. The Atari 2600 came out in 1977 and it's very difficult to have streaming TV without the internet, which came about in the 80s and 90s.

>Also the poverty line is a moving target. People with streaming TV and video game consoles are technically in poverty in the US

Yea, this is a tricky one. Is there something below poverty? Googling it says the poverty line is $35,801 for a family. I have relatives in a foreign country that would die for $35k (even all things relative). They have a TV but that's about it. No streaming, no reliable cell phones, etc. All through college and even a bit before, I would have lived in what was considered poverty... but to say "I lived in poverty" just sounds silly.

Depending on where one lives 35k may not even cover rent and food after taxes so that basically leaves you with debt or constantly accruing more and more poverty which in turn it becomes harder and harder to get out of.

Yay they can stream while their kids don't have decent winter coats, shoes, or access to dental care. What progress.

Too much employment is a weird problem description to begin with. The more I think about it the weirder it gets.

Yes, it is extremely weird, especially alongside the overt contempt for employees being so prominent. Really makes you wonder who the economy is meant to actually work for.

My friend mentioned something similar on the topic of wages being 'too high': "it's pretty screwed up that the economy essentially needs a significant portion of workers to be two paychecks away from financial disaster to be sustainable."

Just imagine an absurdly overheated economy where a few million workers are doing something of really marginal or negative value, like cold calling seniors to sell them dogecoin. That’s not our economy today, but that’s ultimately what the Fed is looking out for, and it’s what you’d get if you have too loose money for too long.

If negative social value work is lucrative, people will do it. If it's not lucrative, people won't do it.

This has no relation at all with the employment rate.

It’s not the social value it’s the economic value, and as interest rates rise riskier and less productive use of capital becomes less attractive.

It is also a joke on the very well (empirically) established characteristic of employment to self-regulate over the same range.

Pretending that the government can push that number low or high for any long period is a joke. It can smooth some noise, or make some extra noise, and that's all.

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