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My kind of Friday night 🙌🏼
Slow, but beautiful start to the week 🥰
Is buying a house in Bombay worth it?
Which companies did you go to after FAANG?
People got fed up with poverty wages and decided to flex their working class muscles. ✊
You mean, people got fed up with employment and would rather stay home ✊
The unemployment benefits vary by state but on average, combined federal + state averaged to almost $25 an hour which exceeded the wage of about half the people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. There other other factors (childcare) as well but to pretend that unemployment benefits didn’t drive this staff shortage is ridiculous
Good on states like Florida for ending COVID benefits. I’m willing to bet that we’ll see the largest workforce participation and consequently largest increase in GDP output from those states.
Hopefully all the woke migrating Californians don’t push those policies out the back door!
When you give up unemployment benefits you also have to factor in things like commute, childcare, etc. And with min wage minus all those expenses you actually end up with less than unemployment benefits.
Rising Star
I think people who imagine this being some sort of unorganized workers revolt are correct to a certain extent. What they don’t realize is that this has a real possibility of speeding up automation as the marginal cost of labor approaches the marginal cost of capital.
Mind blown in a bad way.
I discussed this post with a friend and they pointed out something that I forgot. Many restaurants use a combination of full time and part time employees.
The part-time high school students segment appears to be avoiding work. The theory… their income is discretionary so they are deciding to not work. Earlier this might have related to the vaccine age but 12-years and up can get the vaccine now.
In 2019 around 19% of 16 to 19 year olds were employed while enrolled in school. This population segment is around 6.5% of the US population in 2019.
In raw numbers the population is approximately 21,370,000. 19% of ~21M is 4M.
The elderly part-time workers have also withdrawn from the labor market if they could.
This could be playing a role with the labor shortage and it has nothing to do with unemployment payments… but rather people who have make choices and investing their time differently.
Also there appears to be an increase (but we won’t get statistics until 2022) in multi-generations living together (grandparent, parents, children). If the grandparents don’t have to pay for housing, they may not need the part-time job.
So… there is some truth and lies in the $25/hour average statement.
The lie …. there is no standard deviation associated with this $25/hour average. People who make decisions based on averages without a standard deviation are not smart decision makers. This is a pet peeve of mine. It is like no one learned math in school. 
Without a standard deviation you don’t know a lot. You could have standard deviation of $1/hour which would mean this is a common experience for unemployed people. Or it could be $35/hour which means it is a more uncommon situation.
Averages are lies without a standard deviation.
The truth .. there is one news article about something that one guy said in Oregon about another person’s unemployment. It is a pet peeve of mine how the restaurant owner, https://www.kgw.com/amp/article/news/local/what-happens-when-unemployment-benefits-pay-more-than-your-job/283-eddf110b-ab17-4407-b2ea-d18d3fd2d33e , states an hourly wage which includes tips. Tips are not guaranteed. And this also probably shows how he tries to hire people.
He probably tells potential employees that they will make $16/hour. Depending on the shift, the number of tops turned per hour, restaurant pricing they could also be making $10/hour.
Microsoft , I agree and disagree.
I agree about the distribution of unemployment payments being more even because lower income families and middle income families use unemployment most often. So the richer folks (I don’t know the cut line.. but I have seen an estimate) have other resources. When you shave off the top income, you do have a more even distribution.
With that said…
Unemployment is managed via the state. Individual states figure out the formula for benefits. 
One factor in the formula unemployment is how much they paid into unemployment via their paycheck. People who are paid more, pay more into the unemployment fund and take more money out. So the distribution could be $2/hour to $3/hour (yes I know of a business who is still trying to hire at the minimum wage for tipped employees) to $50/hour.
Why don’t we know the standard deviation if someone calculated $25/hour ? No one has actually calculated a city, state or national average. I could be wrong about this.. but I have only heard of one person telling a story.
One or two people does not create an valid average. We have individual examples which get conflated into a state or country average. If the man mentioned in the article above calculated the real average across all his employees and the standard deviation.. I would find that really interesting to learn from.
Does paying unemployment increase the unemployment rate? This has been studied since 1940s in the US. It has been studied about UK system and Germany and Sweden.. etc
For the most part the answer has been yes. Yes there appears to be a correlation. However, unemployment payments expires after 26 weeks.. so it delays some people’s re-entry into the job market. And some studies show the reason for delay in re-entering are complicated. It ranges from “I suck at interviewing” to “I am focused on retraining”.
But saying that the $600 is the only cause the labor shortage is not reasonable. People who were unemployed because of COVID March 2020 to Dec 31, 2020 ran out of benefits. The first COVID vaccine in the US was Dec 14, 2020.
They are available for work. Many are CHOOSING not to work for restaurants.. avoiding McDonalds jobs. Some are CHOOSING to stay home and take care of the kids because the family figured out how to live on one income.
My local McDonalds has a $200 hiring bonus for anyone who stays at least 2 months. And they raised their starting pay to $11/hour.