Nuclear Economypill: The true unemployment rate is around 18 percent. Nearly half of uber drivers have a degree.

[Ryo_Hazuki]

I originally started writing this thread as a reply to @ItsOverMan who said this in the thread where @CursedMutantSoul talks about how his boomer parents basically tell him to pick himself up from his bootstraps despite him being unable to find a job, facing potential homelessness, and considering joining the Ukrainian foreign legion just to have a paycheck and avoid homelessness. Keep in mind. @CursedMutantSoul has a degree.

The unemployment rate in America reached 9% in 1974 and 10% in 1982 but I think it was still a lot easier to find jobs back then for Boomers (especially college educated ones), compared to post-2008 for millennials/zoomers.

That's because the unemployment rate is a bullshit statistic. There are lots of unemployed people who are looking for work that aren't included in that statistic for various reasons. The real statistic to go by is the labor participation rate, which is the percent of adults who are currently employed.

As you can see from this chart we never recovered from the 2008 recession (though if you go by the unemployment rate it looks like we did. Same for covid. The labor participation rate never even recovered to 2019 levels.

Now obviously the "true" unemployment rate can't be calculated by just subtracting the labor participation rate from 100 because this doesn't account for retired boomers. But as of March 2026 the labor participation rate is 61.9. I've looked up "percent of US adults who are retired" and according to lendingtree.com "Across all Americans, the share of U.S. adults who reported being retired decreased from 16.8% in March 2022 to 16.2% in March 2024." I can't find anything more recent so I'll roll with that. We also have to account for the disabled. According to social security, 4.1 percent of adults age 18 to 64 are on disability.

So doing the math:

100 - 61.9 - 16.2 - 4.1 = 17.8%

So the true unemployment rate is around 17.8 percent. And of course this is to say nothing about the percent of the population that is underemployed.

At my job, they no longer hire people full time, they start everyone part time and tell them "in 6 months or a year we'll reevaluate you and consider full time hours" but that rarely happens. When a full time employee quits or gets fired, instead of giving a part timer full time hours (which many want) they just replace him with 2 part time employees. Some of the part timers (which are now a large majority compared to us full timers) have a 2nd job, but most don't. And some of them even have degrees.

And speaking of which, nearly half of uber drivers have at least a 4 year degree.

https://steps.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/BERLINER-TAL-What-Drives-Your-Drivers.pdf#:~:text=Uber%20drivers%20have%20higher%20education%20levels%20than,drivers%20are%20female%20(Hall%20&%20Krueger%2C%202015).

"Uber drivers have higher education levels than taxi drivers and chauffeurs – in fact, 47.7% of Uber drivers received a college or advanced degree"

You might say "oh, well some of them have a job and just do uber on the side" but in those cases they're clearly still underemployed even with their main job. Nobody earning a 80k+ a year salary is going to drive for uber with their spare time considering uber is basically minimum wage (or less) when you factor in fuel, car maintenance, and increased car insurance rates.

The only solution at this point is UBI. Hopefully in the 2028 election, UBI will at least be discussed by a frontrunner candidate as opposed to just being "an interesting idea" from a flash-in-the-pan fringe candidate like in 2020 with Andrew Yang. But my fear is instead they're going to go the luddite/decel route and just try to ban data centers and enforce all kinds of restrictions on AI companies. If they do that I'm sure they'll be challenged by the courts but I'll go more into detail about all this in my "future predictions" thread I promised to make like 2 months ago but still haven't gotten around to.

 

[fokusin]

"just study hard brooo, you will get a good paying job brooo"

 

[gracious sub5]

The only solution at this point is UBI

I doubt ubi will be the solution it has some inflationary effects.Taxes on labour would have to be raised to an absurd level

 

[Qech__]

I think it's more that the fundamental reason why you get a college degree has changed. Back in the boomer generation, you'd go get a degree to become well-rounded and would automatically get a job that pays well. In the past, a degree would simply mean you are better educated and have more skills than the average high school graduate. It mainly served as a way to filter out low-quality candidates, and back when jobs had way fewer applicants, this was indeed a viable strategy.
But in the modern era, the value of being well-rounded has decreased and the need for specialized skills has increases. For instance, a humanities major doesn't open up a lot of humanities-specific jobs. However, a PhD in something like AI can easily earn you high 6 figures or even 7 figures at an AI lab. The key difference is that those jobs that require a humanities degree are becoming more and more accessible: you just need to know how to use a computer to do office work for instance, which is a near-universal skill in developed economies. And with platforms like linkedin allowing hundreds of people who all got a degree thinking it would give them a leg up in the hiring process, a degree itself now becomes worthless.

 

[ColderManTruce]

"just study hard brooo, you will get a good paying job brooo"

 

[tranny destroyer1]

How long will this gig economy last though?

 

[fatass30000]

it has become a shit show, they need to regulate these bitch ass companies way more. My boss from my old job had started adapting the same strategy of only hiring people part time so he doesn’t have to pay full benefits. I hate these bitch ass niggas because they’re literally millionaires and they’re doing this shit to save a couple pennies. I met my boss a handful of times and this mf is the cheapest person i have ever met, i don’t get their obsession with money if they’re just gonna hoard it instead of spending it.

 

[fatass30000]

How long will this gig economy last though?

in like 40-50 years i’m guessing that things will become bad enough that the people actually start doing something instead of observing themselves being fucked over by these corporations. They keep becoming more and more bold with their policies and how they treat people and it’s unsustainable, there will come a point where the average person will wake up.

 

[Ryo_Hazuki]

How long will this gig economy last though?

From now until the post-labor era where most work is automated.

My boss from my old job had started adapting the same strategy of only hiring people part time so he doesn’t have to pay full benefits.

From what I've seen all the fast food joints in my area are doing the same thing. At my job part timers now outnumber full timers like 4 to 1. One of my fears is they're just going to start cutting people's hours and I'll get knocked down to part time.

It's not just where I live though, this is a nationwide trend that's been going on for a while. Also they always tell new employees they'll consider them for full time after they work part time for a year, but they very rarely ever actually do this. It's like "temp to perm" jobs. Very rarely do they actually go "temp to perm". They hire temps to deal with a temporary spike in work and then discard them once things stabilize. Either that or they just do an endless cycle of hiring and disposing of temps every few months. That way they don't have to provide benefits.

This is the reality of the job market now.

I doubt ubi will be the solution it has some inflationary effects.Taxes on labour would have to be raised to an absurd level

There's going to need to be a federal wealth tax for sure, because they won't be able to support it just through income tax.

 

[grimlockcel]

Just walk in and hold frame, a good handshake cant hurt either!

 

[IWWorkER]

The only solution at this point is UBI

Wouldn't that collapse the employement rates even lower ? Why bother working if you can get on UBI ?

 

[Balding Subhuman]

Its going to get a lot worse I feel like. Eventually there will be UBI most definitely


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkYWwWAXgKI

Why bother working if you can get on UBI ?

Higher standard of living

 

[fatass30000]

From what I've seen all the fast food joints in my area are doing the same thing. At my job part timers now outnumber full timers like 4 to 1. One of my fears is they're just going to start cutting people's hours and I'll get knocked down to part time.

jobs in warehouses seem more appealing tbh, they’re always looking for people and the pay is decent. But from what i heard the job is soul crushing.

It's not just where I live though, this is a nationwide trend that's been going on for a while. Also they always tell new employees they'll consider them for full time after they work part time for a year, but they very rarely ever actually do this. It's like "temp to perm" jobs. Very rarely do they actually go "temp to perm". They hire temps to deal with a temporary spike in work and then discard them once things stabilize. Either that or they just do an endless cycle of hiring and disposing of temps every few months. That way they don't have to provide benefits.

This is the reality of the job market now.

one thing i don’t understand is, are they not tired of having to train the new hires or having them fuck up stuff since they’re new? Most new hires at my job were always incompetent and needed direction every few seconds, especially now with the younger generation (some of these dumbass niggas don’t even know how to mop). So i don’t see the point of always hiring new people if they’re gonna quit in a couple months since they spend the first month or two learning the job. But im guessing management doesn’t give a fuck and makes it your problem if the new hire is incompetent.

 

[CursedMutantSoul]

I originally started writing this thread as a reply to @ItsOverMan who said this in the thread where @CursedMutantSoul talks about how his boomer parents basically tell him to pick himself up from his bootstraps despite him being unable to find a job, facing potential homelessness, and considering joining the Ukrainian foreign legion just to have a paycheck and avoid homelessness. Keep in mind. @CursedMutantSoul has a degree.


That's because the unemployment rate is a bullshit statistic. There are lots of unemployed people who are looking for work that aren't included in that statistic for various reasons. The real statistic to go by is the labor participation rate, which is the percent of adults who are currently employed.

View attachment 1704733

As you can see from this chart we never recovered from the 2008 recession (though if you go by the unemployment rate it looks like we did. Same for covid. The labor participation rate never even recovered to 2019 levels.

Now obviously the "true" unemployment rate can't be calculated by just subtracting the labor participation rate from 100 because this doesn't account for retired boomers. But as of March 2026 the labor participation rate is 61.9. I've looked up "percent of US adults who are retired" and according to lendingtree.com "Across all Americans, the share of U.S. adults who reported being retired decreased from 16.8% in March 2022 to 16.2% in March 2024." I can't find anything more recent so I'll roll with that. We also have to account for the disabled. According to social security, 4.1 percent of adults age 18 to 64 are on disability.

View attachment 1704732

So doing the math:

100 - 61.9 - 16.2 - 4.1 = 17.8%

So the true unemployment rate is around 17.8 percent. And of course this is to say nothing about the percent of the population that is underemployed.

At my job, they no longer hire people full time, they start everyone part time and tell them "in 6 months or a year we'll reevaluate you and consider full time hours" but that rarely happens. When a full time employee quits or gets fired, instead of giving a part timer full time hours (which many want) they just replace him with 2 part time employees. Some of the part timers (which are now a large majority compared to us full timers) have a 2nd job, but most don't. And some of them even have degrees.

And speaking of which, nearly half of uber drivers have at least a 4 year degree.

https://steps.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/BERLINER-TAL-What-Drives-Your-Drivers.pdf#:~:text=Uber%20drivers%20have%20higher%20education%20levels%20than,drivers%20are%20female%20(Hall%20&%20Krueger%2C%202015).

"Uber drivers have higher education levels than taxi drivers and chauffeurs – in fact, 47.7% of Uber drivers received a college or advanced degree"

You might say "oh, well some of them have a job and just do uber on the side" but in those cases they're clearly still underemployed even with their main job. Nobody earning a 80k+ a year salary is going to drive for uber with their spare time considering uber is basically minimum wage (or less) when you factor in fuel, car maintenance, and increased car insurance rates.

The only solution at this point is UBI. Hopefully in the 2028 election, UBI will at least be discussed by a frontrunner candidate as opposed to just being "an interesting idea" from a flash-in-the-pan fringe candidate like in 2020 with Andrew Yang. But my fear is instead they're going to go the luddite/decel route and just try to ban data centers and enforce all kinds of restrictions on AI companies. If they do that I'm sure they'll be challenged by the courts but I'll go more into detail about all this in my "future predictions" thread I promised to make like 2 months ago but still haven't gotten around to.

Insanely high IQ thread

 

[VanGobbel]

lifefuel for ubercels

 

[DoomThreeKoala]

Brutal.

The job market is officially DEAD. Well, looking at it this way, it died a long time ago. What we're seeing now are the incoherent spasms from its corpse.

 

[Ryo_Hazuki]

one thing i don’t understand is, are they not tired of having to train the new hires or having them fuck up stuff since they’re new? Most new hires at my job were always incompetent and needed direction every few seconds, especially now with the younger generation (some of these dumbass niggas don’t even know how to mop). So i don’t see the point of always hiring new people if they’re gonna quit in a couple months since they spend the first month or two learning the job. But im guessing management doesn’t give a fuck and makes it your problem if the new hire is incompetent.

Well most of these jobs don't actually take a month or two to learn. It's mostly low skill, highly repetitive jobs that they're doing this with, at least from what I can tell. And clearly they've done the math, and the cost of hiring, training new employees, and dealing with their fuck ups is still lower than the cost of hiring full time permanent employees and giving them benefits.

And the ones who make these types of policies are always high enough on the food chain that they don't have to deal with any of the problems the policy causes. Take my job for example. The policy of only hiring people part time isn't coming from the assistant managers or even the general manager. It's either coming from the regional manager or someone even higher up than that. Not someone who has to deal with hiring and training new employees. That's the responsibility of the assistant managers and the general manager, and for the training it's often delegated to regular employees like me. Some of the new employees I've had to train were real fuck ups, I made a post about one example here. Most of them aren't that bad, but the ones who were bad were truly awful. A good chunk of the new hires don't last more than a few weeks, and I can usually tell within minutes of training a new employee if they're going to be one of them. They just can't handle the stress of such a fast paced workplace and neurotic micro-managing managers yelling at them, so they quit or they just get fired.

 

[deleted dude]

"just study hard brooo, you will get a good paying job brooo"

 

[The Notorious SLAV]

That's because the unemployment rate is a bullshit statistic. There are lots of unemployed people who are looking for work that aren't included in that statistic for various reasons. The real statistic to go by is the labor participation rate, which is the percent of adults who are currently employed.

It almost feels like the concept of "unemployment" was redefined specifically so that finding the actual number of people who work and don't would be a bit harder. Which layperson's first instinct would be to look for "labor participation rate" rather than the unemployment rate when thinking of that?

 

[HurdyGurdyMan]

Nothing worse than “man made hell.”

 

[SlayerSlayer]

with high unemployment people will die for israel willingly without a need for a draft

 

[CursedMutantSoul]

jobs in warehouses seem more appealing tbh, they’re always looking for people and the pay is decent. But from what i heard the job is soul crushing.

one thing i don’t understand is, are they not tired of having to train the new hires or having them fuck up stuff since they’re new? Most new hires at my job were always incompetent and needed direction every few seconds, especially now with the younger generation (some of these dumbass niggas don’t even know how to mop). So i don’t see the point of always hiring new people if they’re gonna quit in a couple months since they spend the first month or two learning the job. But im guessing management doesn’t give a fuck and makes it your problem if the new hire is incompetent.

Learn to write

 

[kapri]

Best part is that this doesn't make college degrees useless, it makes them needed more for bringing less. Fuck my goy life

 

[fatass30000]

Learn to write

learn how to be employed

 

[CursedMutantSoul]

learn how to be employed

FUCK OFFFFFF