Unemployment
kkrisberg | August 30, 2017The idea that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer is one of those regularly debunked talking points that won’t disappear. So, here’s yet more evidence that the ACA has had very little impact on the labor market.
In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Stanford University economists found that even though different regions experienced varying labor market effects likely related to the ACA, the overall impact to jobs numbers was insignificant. In particular, researchers wrote: “Our findings indicate that the average labor supply effects of the ACA were close…
lborkowski | October 25, 2013Ian Frazier's in-depth New Yorker article on homelessness in New York seems especially timely, coming after a government shutdown that demonstrated how quickly low-income workers can fall into homelessness if their paychecks suddenly stop. (The shutdown also demonstrated some things about Congress, but I won't get into that here.) Here in DC, contract employees who serve food and clean offices in federal buildings were abruptly out of work. John Anderson, a line cook at a Smithsonian Museum, told the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley he had to work out a deal with his landlord because he…
lborkowski | September 28, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's not news that unemployment is bad for a person's health. But it turns out that just the threat of unemployment is bad as well.
A recent study, published in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that perceived job insecurity is also linked to poor health outcomes, even among those who had jobs during the recession. Researchers found that perceived job insecurity was linked with "significantly higher odds" of fair or poor self-reported health as well as recent symptoms suggesting depression and anxiety attacks. The findings…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
catdynamics | September 16, 2010There are some things to be said for staring at scatterplots and times series plots
Calculated Risk, in case you hadn't heard, is one of the best economics and finance blogs on the Net.
Bill at CR is a demon for generating plots:
This one is Business Outlook Survey - question is, of course, what is the instantaneous second derivative.
Or look at Government Employment - Fed, State and Local, and now, with Education sector excluded!
There is the Infamous Employment vs Recession chart
and
why you should go to university... (click to embiggen)
- modulo opportunity costs of course
CR…
sastyk | June 24, 2010From HuffPo, this article about the likely outcome that the Democrats will fail to pass an unemployment extension - unfortunately it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it will be crushingly hard on millions of people who have just been barely making it, and now aren't.
The legislation, known as the "tax extenders" bill, would reauthorize extended unemployment benefits for people out of work for six months or longer, would protect doctors from a 21 percent pay cut for seeing Medicare patients, and would provide billions in aid to state Medicaid programs.
Come Friday, 1.2 million people…
sastyk | February 16, 2010Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the Depression. Besides the pleas for help and the accounts of the situation on the ground, there was a profound anger at those who needed help. "Paddle your own canoe or sink" one letter wrote. A "Poor Southern Arkansas Woman" wrote that she felt she was a slave required to carry thousands of idle men on…
sastyk | February 12, 2010Everyone needs to read Don Peck's superb Atlantic Magazine piece on why the jobs aren't coming back anytime soon. It confirms what I began writing back in late 2008 - that most often economic crises of the kind we have been seeing last a decade or more.
Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65…
razib | January 16, 2010No Longer Their Golden Ticket:
In fact, "The Deep End" was conceived in 2007, that halcyon era of $160,000 starting salaries and full employment even for law grads who had scored in the 150s on their LSAT's.
Those days are over. As the profession lurches through its worst slump in decades, with jobs and bonuses cut and internal pressures to perform rising, associates do not just feel as if they are diving into the deep end, but rather, drowning.
Lawyers who entered the field as recently as a few years ago could reasonably expect a life of comfort, security and social esteem. Many are now…
grrlscientist | August 2, 2009While the economy is still performing CPR on itself, you may find yourself without a job. Worse still, if you are like me, you may not be able to find another one. In the meantime, here are 101 ways to improve your life (and take up some extra time) when you can't find a job no matter how hard you pound the pavement.
Here's my edited version of their list along with some of my annotations. Those activities I've done, or do, are noted with a red asterix.
*Catch up on all those books you've ever wanted to read through the local library. :: I go to the library nearly every day, thanks to MY…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2009tags: book review, memoir, homelessness, unemployment, Cadillac Man, Thomas Wagner
The homeless are everywhere in New York City. I run across them every day while riding public transit, while walking around the city and while using wireless in the public libraries. After a few conversations with homeless people, I've learned that most of them avoid shelters because of the risk of violent crime there. So where do they sleep? Where do they go to get a shower and clean clothes? Are all homeless people either crazy or crackheads? How did these people end up living on the streets in the first…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2009tags: frugal living, survival skills, unemployment, underemployment, financial crisis
I have been barely surviving living frugally for nearly all of my life, although I have been taking this to the extreme these past five years. But now that many of you are also having to either cut back on your living expenses, due to unemployment, underemployment or fear that you will become un(der)employed soon, I no longer feel I have to be so secretive about my own lifestyle, so I thought I'd share some of my own tried-and-true strategies for basic survival skills with you.
Life style changes:…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2008tags: Hunger in America, food banks, food pantries, soup kitchens, food stamps, poverty
Image: Orphaned.
One thing that the Thanksgiving Holidays has made clear: America, the land of plenty where holiday overeating is celebrated as a social good, is suffering from a food availability crisis. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture describes a range of food security categories, ranging from "food secure," which includes high food security and marginal food security, and "food insecure," which includes low food security and very low food security.…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2008tags: unemployment, humor, satire, streaming video
So, you all thought the Streetwalking Lawyers of Seattle video was humorous, did you? Well, after a quick trip through my time machine to the year 2009, I have found that streetwalking lawyers was prescient. [1:28]
grrlscientist | March 31, 2008tags: The Streetwalking Lawyers of Aurora Avenue, humor, satire, streaming video
"The Streetwalking Lawyers of Aurora Avenue" is a great idea that I should emulate to get a job .. maybe I can hang around in the garment district with a set of pipettemen and offer to clone rich people so they can get transplants of their own organs from their clones? [1:26]
grrlscientist | November 2, 2007tags: book review, white-collar unemployment, job hunting, Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich
While I was flying back to NYC last weekend, I read (yet another) book about job hunting. This book detailed the obvious; that searching for a white-collar job is not as easy as you might think, as you'll learn in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich (NYC: Metropolitan Books; 2005). In this book, Ehrenreich posed as an unemployed white-collar worker, in search of a job in public relations and event planning. To avoid being identified as a journalist via a…