How many unemployed workers are there today? The unemployment rate in the US is roughly 6% as of February 2021. However, I’m hard pressed to find anywhere close to 6% of the people I know who are unemployed. If you listen to the media, you’d think the world was coming to an end again. But, if you look around, traffic is back and businesses are bustling again.
Off the top of my head, there are two acquaintances I know who aren’t working. One guy is well-off and voluntarily quit his job last year to relocate back to his home country. The other guy got let go two years ago after a hedge fund he was working at blew up. He can find work if he wants, but he decided to travel the world for a couple years instead. Are they considered unemployed? Hard to say.
How many unemployed friends do you have right now? With 6% unemployment, there should logically be about 18 people I know out of 300 who are unemployed. If you believe the media’s “underemployment” figure of ~10%, then roughly 30 people of the 300 should be underemployed or jobless.
I looked on Facebook and LinkedIn to dig a little deeper, and I found only three more people who are currently in transition. If you count the 2 above, which I don’t because they can find work if they want to, the unemployment rate in my network is 1.7% (5 out of ~300). Is unemployment really that high? Maybe people who have internet connections are a protected group…
Unemployment Rate Disconnect
I want to try and understand this disconnect in the unemployment figures. Perhaps the disconnect has something to do with living in San Francisco and knowing many people with Masters and Doctorate degrees.
But, as I look once again at my online connections, many are from around the country and the world. In addition, many work in various fields, and just have their undergraduate degrees. Perhaps we tend to hang out with other people who are more similar to ourselves? In other words, if you are employed, you tend to just hang out with other employed people.
Whereas if you are unemployed, you can’t hang out with the employed during the day because they are working. Thus, you may tend to stick with other unemployed folks who have more freedom to do what they want.
Maybe there are people online that I know who are unemployed. But, perhaps they just don’t change their LinkedIn profile to save face. It’s just so hard to tell.
Every time I take a mini-staycation and go wander around San Francisco in the middle of the day, everywhere I go is absolutely packed. From the french bakery around the corner, to the major shopping districts, people are everywhere. It’s the same thing when I go to San Diego, New York City, Honolulu, or Los Angeles. Something is going on here and I can’t place my finger on it.
Or perhaps there is actually no disconnect at all, because there’s no point in working at the local KFC when you can collect unemployment benefits. Why try and earn an extra $400 bucks a month slaving away when you can spend your time searching for a better job and make almost the same through unemployment? I’m almost tempted to buy a shirt that says, “Why Work?”
The Answer Lies In The Comments
Thanks to the comments so far, I think we can come up with an answer to the massive disconnect. Did you know that about 50% of Americans have some sort of college education, but only 30% of Americans have college degrees?
I have to admit that I thought the number was closer to 50-60% for those who have degrees. When employers and the media increasingly start comparing undergraduate degrees to just high school diplomas, it becomes increasingly clear that education is one of the keys to employment.
If you own a company, it is your duty to shareholders that you maximize profits and do some good in the process. Part of becoming the best company is to hire the best people.
You’re likely going to hire a skilled and educated worker with a college degree or higher than someone who didn’t make it through college, for whatever reason. Sure, there will be exceptions, but when there are thousands of unemployed college educated workers as well, you might as well start from the top down.
I asked six other people I know to survey their own circle of friends and acquaintances. The sample set grew to over 1,200 and all of them said they only know 2-4 people each. They are all college educated people with 7-15 years of experience in law, high tech, banking, and internet. I think we’re just hanging around with people who are roughly similar to ourselves in educational background.
Buckle Your Seatbelts!
At the present, it seems like the unemployment picture is much better than expected in the big cities. The bottom line is this: do whatever you can to get a college education.
Readers, please share with us how many unemployed people you know. What percentage is that of your total network? Please also tell us where you’re located. Let’s be completely objective here and avoid the biases to analyze the true level of unemployment.
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I think the answer to this is mostly in rural america especially around the rust belt think michigan ohio upstate ny etc. Im from utica initially and go back to visit every now and again. Take a walk down downtown utica and not the nice parts of silicon valley and I assure you youll have better luck finding more unemployed people to fill the statistics.
Also you tend to make friends through other friends or in your daily activities. If those activities included working in tech or finance, hanging out at a private club or going to college youre certainly not going to be running into a lot of long term unemployed. Again hard times could hit anybody but the long term unemployed are the bottom 10 percent who get let go that nobody wants to hire back on and those people dont want to move down the social ladder because theyve become accustomed to a standard of living and can get by the same on unemployment as the lower job.
Your piece here has nearly zero credibility. Nobody in their right mind measures economic indicators by who they know. Certain sectors (secondary education, for example) would find extremely low unemployment among their peers. For construction workers it is a very different picture. Factor in age groups and you have another perspective. Seniors are being very hard hit because employers figure that there is less “damage” because the seniors can retire if laid off so they become a target of downsizing. And seniors who don’t want to retire are hitting the age discrimination wall even though it is against the law. I find the whole tone of your article to be insulting, condescending, elitist, narrow minded, and completely lacking in academically sound basis. Shame on you for publishing such dribble.
Are you suffering Norm? Share with us your perspective.
Notice the date of this article, and where unemployment and the stock market is now.
Be an optimist. Life is too short.
I personally know 22 people who are out of work, all but two are either just out of college and having a very hard time finding work, or are over 50 and were forced out of their jobs because of “cut backs.” 6 people in my acquantance were fired the moment they began having health problems related to their age, one had to have a stint put in his leg, another had to have her back looked at, and so on. As soon as they started using the company insurance plan, which none of them had ever had to do before, suddenly they found that they were no longer an asset to the team and summarily dismissed. My demagraphic and theirs is lower middle class, mostly retail and office workers and a few photographers forced out of their field as much by changes in technology as the shakey economy. One has had to take out a substantial lone to go back to school, after having gotten his Master’s in photography a decade ago, now pretty much useless unless you want to push buttons at a Wal-Mart kiosk.
Yikes, 22 sounds like a lot! Are they able to collect uneemployment insurance? I really hope so. What will become of them ?
All of these responses are basically anecdotal in nature. Random observations by a self-selected set of respondents isn’t useful except as a means to validate your personal preconceptions. A large percentage of the people I know are out of work, or working in much less skilled jobs. They all have college degrees, and I myself have an MBA. This is still no basis for assessing a national phenomenon because its not statistically significant. Of course the government statistics are “cooked”, but they can provide a rough estimate of what’s going on nationally if you forage through the data to find the useful facts. One thing we know for sure, things don’t look good no matter how you slice it.
As a side note, I think this is only a tiny sample of what we’re in for over the next 25 years. Things don’t look good for the near future, and the reasons why are too numerous to mention here. Capitalism is a high speed, one-way, dead end drag race. It’s tremendous fun while it lasts, but it will always end in the same way. The primary purpose of a civilized society is to promote the human well-being of all it’s members. All social activities (economic, political, etc.) must be subordinated to this single purpose, or else why would any rational human being consent to be a member of society? There must also be a means for people to acquire individual benefit from their personal efforts (merit), but without damaging the well-being of the other members of the society.
In any case, based on my viewpoint, I predict that unemployment (real) will continue to rise over the next 10 years to levels that are currently unthinkable (> 30%). This will be a global phenomenon as well. If you want to know why I think this will be our path then you should review the work of such thinkers as Nicole Foss, Albert A. Bartlett, David Harvey, Joseph Tainter, Chalmers Johnson, Ha-Joon Chang, Dmitry Orlov, etc. The old “Cowboy Economics” based on “every man for himself” is dead, and we need to evolve to “Spaceship Economics” based on “we’re all in this together”.
I doubt that 9 to 10% of the workers (vs. students, mom’s, retired, etc.) I know are unemployed but that really does not mean a lot. I’m employed, educated, middle aged, a live on the CA central coast so I would not really be associating with the ones hardest hit. I don’t live in the CA Central Valley, associate with lots of teen-20’s or low educated and those group are having lots of troubles. I have several friend who have been out of work for over a year. On friend has been laid-off twice and is have to commute from Gilroy to his current job in San Diego.
Skill, talent, and hard work makes a big difference in life but luck applies. Many people have made career bets in fields like manufacturing and construction and just found out they that their efforts have been marginalized. They may be able to recover but years of life investment has been wiped out.
Many of you sound very out of touch. There are about 1000 resumes for every job advertised in the Atlanta metro area. Most unemployed don’t even know that software is sorting resumes and deleting the ones that do not meet certain criteria. There are now sites that help us understand how to construct a resume to be sorted to our advantage, but who knows about it? Maybe some IT folks who have had to create their own one man companies in hopes of filling the gap until an interview is offered. I’ve had one interview in 3 1/2 yrs…for any job, not just IT. Publix will not even consider me probably b/c my resume isn’t sorted in my favor. Each company sorts resumes differently so how can we win?