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Comment by rendang | Hacker News Reader

We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...

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> unemployment is close to all-time lows.

Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.

Unemployment being at all time lows means nothing if those employed with the minimum wage cannot afford the same quality of life than people did in the past earning the minimum wage of their time, because it means you aren't really comparing the same thing.

The minimum wage is not relevant as very few people make it. Wage earners at the top, bottom, and middle can afford a better (materially speaking) quality of life in the USA than at any time in the past:

https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...

This doesn't seem to take into account the price of land or the price of education or the price of healthcare, therefore claiming that they can afford a better quality of life it's highly misleading, if this is taking such things into account I would like to know exactly how.

All of those are part of the basket of goods and services tracked in the Consumer Price Index

Doesn't the CPI produce an average estimate of what everyone is already paying for housing as opposed to the full sticker price for a new entrant? Meaning if most people are living in houses they bought in the past at much lower prices and interest rates, then the CPI will be heavily weighted towards their costs as opposed to the much smaller fraction of renters and first-time buyers.

Are you somehow connecting low unemployment with high purchasing power by your median worker through a bunch of logical hoops?

Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the top.

Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs in the middle.

Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the bottom.

https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...

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