There are more jobs than people out of work, something the American economy has never experienced before

[Darth Wedgius]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/there-a ... -work.html

Not that this means that unemployment will be a thing of the past, due to geographic distribution of the unemployed vs. the opportunities, the skill sets required vs. skills present, etc.

Wages have not risen that much yet, but I expect that to be a lagging thing.

Nevertheless, it seems like good news, overall.

[clearspira]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/there-a ... -work.html

Not that this means that unemployment will be a thing of the past, due to geographic distribution of the unemployed vs. the opportunities, the skill sets required vs. skills present, etc.

Wages have not risen that much yet, but I expect that to be a lagging thing.

Nevertheless, it seems like good news, overall.

Give it ten years and automation will see to that.

[Darth Wedgius]

can we make that 15? I can retire then.

[LittleRaven]

Wages have not risen that much yet, but I expect that to be a lagging thing.

Wages aren't just failing to rise, they're falling. They've been falling for quite some time, even as our economic indicators skyrocket. Nobody is quite sure why this is, but the case that's happening is pretty air-tight at this point.

Which means that something very strange is going on. The statistics your article highlights are only the latest of many, MANY indicators saying that everything is going gang-busters. And we have lots of historical data about what happens in times where demand for labor is high - wages RISE. During WW I and II, during the reconstruction of Europe, hell even after the Black Plague....wages RISE. Often very substantially. And yet wages remain stubbornly low. So either the law of supply and demand has broken down when it comes to the labor market....or there's something wrong in our indicators, probably sometime we don't understand yet.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The numbers in the news article don't seem to match what I'm seeing in the report they linked.

[ProfessorDetective]

Wages have not risen that much yet, but I expect that to be a lagging thing.

Wages aren't just failing to rise, they're falling. They've been falling for quite some time, even as our economic indicators skyrocket. Nobody is quite sure why this is, but the case that's happening is pretty air-tight at this point.

Which means that something very strange is going on. The statistics your article highlights are only the latest of many, MANY indicators saying that everything is going gang-busters. And we have lots of historical data about what happens in times where demand for labor is high - wages RISE. During WW I and II, during the reconstruction of Europe, hell even after the Black Plague....wages RISE. Often very substantially. And yet wages remain stubbornly low. So either the law of supply and demand has broken down when it comes to the labor market....or there's something wrong in our indicators, probably sometime we don't understand yet.

Or the economic leaders are refusing to raise them. Just a thought.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

It's kinda hard to make speculations on such broad indicators. That report they linked to just talked about job openings and job closings. It didn't even say anything about how many people were looking for jobs, but these all may just account for trivial discrepancies.

It might be fair to assume that these are urbanized jobs where such types of data can be crunched together to make more consistent sense out of them, but yeah maybe overall. Still not too big of a deal.

What kind of jobs are we talking about though, and what kind of impact was the shift in availability supposed to make compared to how it was before. If wages are falling, then is it the case that employee restructuring took place and they just created some superfluous positions that nobody wants? We need more data.

[Mecha82]

Wages have not risen that much yet, but I expect that to be a lagging thing.

Wages aren't just failing to rise, they're falling. They've been falling for quite some time, even as our economic indicators skyrocket. Nobody is quite sure why this is, but the case that's happening is pretty air-tight at this point.

Which means that something very strange is going on. The statistics your article highlights are only the latest of many, MANY indicators saying that everything is going gang-busters. And we have lots of historical data about what happens in times where demand for labor is high - wages RISE. During WW I and II, during the reconstruction of Europe, hell even after the Black Plague....wages RISE. Often very substantially. And yet wages remain stubbornly low. So either the law of supply and demand has broken down when it comes to the labor market....or there's something wrong in our indicators, probably sometime we don't understand yet.

Or the economic leaders are refusing to raise them. Just a thought.

Well people in charge of Corporations and shareholders want to make more profit and keeping wages down is one way they do it. So you are correct about that.

[LittleRaven]

Or the economic leaders are refusing to raise them. Just a thought.

But of course, if this is the case, then our economic model is not only flawed, but it's very foundation has been irreparably shattered.

Virtually everything about the modern field of economics rests on the assumption that Western economics are, by and large, driven by free markets. Not 100% free, of course, there are always regulations, borders, arbitrage effects...and dozens of other things which muddy the waters, but nothing that would push us into anything that could reasonably be called a command economy. In short, there shouldn't be any 'economic leaders' that are capable of putting a clamp on wages, because in theory, there can't be. It shouldn't even be possible. If Amazon doesn't want to pay its workers a decent wage, and labor is in demand, then in theory someone will be happy to pay their workers more and Amazon will be unable to hold onto its work force.

To be fair, this assumption has been tested in the past. I'm sure we all remember the Stabilization Act of 1942, where the Federal Government decided to freeze wages in light of wartime shortages. It....did not go well. Yes, companies complied with law and froze salaries, but they still needed labor, so they found all kinds of other ways to compensate workers in order to lure them away from their competitors. (this has a lot to do with how the US ended up with such a strange health care system...one of the things companies could offer that was not a 'wage' was 'health insurance,' and boy was it popular!) So, economists reckon, if the Federal Government, the most powerful institution in the land, could not enforce a salary cap, how on Earth could any private industry do it? It SHOULD be impossible.

Admittedly, 1942 was a long, long time ago. Maybe things are different now. Maybe there really IS a cabal of powerful people that are capable of holding wages down. But if that's the case, you can pretty much throw the last 50 years of economic research out the window, because that runs contrary to the most basic assumptions of the field.

[sayla0079]

The problem with jobs is area for example up here i'm either over qualified or under qualified for the jobs here.