* Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person
* Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else
* Cheap globally accessible labor
* Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services.
* Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans
* Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703
The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully.
I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts.
Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet.
And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time.
Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor.
Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP.
Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand
It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
IMO the reason is that there's simply more paper trail behind you. If you fall behind once, it's not like you can get your things, change name, and start a new life in another state.
> if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
I want to be named Charizard but my country doesn't allow name change.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...
No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc.
Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.
I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.
There is no job.
50 is not well-enough experienced.
You're talking to the ones who were not among this category of unemployment statistics.
Their experience is just as real if they never faced as tough a market personally, but it is pure survivor bias.
For many of the other over-70's now, the ones who are still living could often tell you how in the 1970's there would be hundreds of applicants for every entry-level job of any kind. Many with advanced degrees.
You want to work for minimum wage, bus tables in a restaurant or collect trash for the sanitation department? Too bad, the odds are overwhelmingly against you whether you have current experience in the field or not.
>There is no job.
Exactly. That's the way it was, only much worse then.
Still, right now things are looking gradually worse as misguided financial macro forces are gathering steam, without the more mature influence that would make a positive difference.
As for "status-quo" that actually can be something stable, and worth working your way up to reach sometimes. Although very often regarded as mediocrity OTOH.
This type of financial malfeasance is so familiar that I think the better terminology is the SNAFU.
Roger. Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
There's just a new normal now you're expected to accept.
Same situation though :(
Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.
When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.
On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.
Wait, what?
That only makes sense if the hiring panel is made up exclusively of people whose job is nothing but hiring.
That has never been the case anywhere I have worked or seen.
TurboTax is a great example of this - the entire purpose of their existence is to make sure that filling taxes is as complicated as possible so that people keep using their services. In other countries simpler and cheaper tax systems are used, but if such a system was adopted in the US, the entire business model of TurboTax would immediately collapse, so they will fight tooth and nail against any improvement.
It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.
Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface.
Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature.
As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire.
Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization.
You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process.
You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge.
Edit: can't reply
> There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination
> There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases
Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin
> economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment.
Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee.
But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire.
---
Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.
There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases. 2 months firing is a joke compared with 4 months at least, which those same companies spend looking for talent.
The main reason is not enough ideas what to do - economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.
The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.
In a controlled economy when it is dialed down and or slips out-of-control and dips downward, that's what you get.
>Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.
That's quite a bit like a macro element of nature.
Too many people for too few remaining resources either way.
One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).
Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.
But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.
Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it.
What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean.
Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.
If we can somehow get inflation under control it will trigger lower interest rates and hiring will increase again. But the current, and possibly only, strategy is to stagnate wage growth and increase the number of people out of work so that the economy has less money circulating in order to reduce inflation.
I've lived through a few of these. Its definitely cyclical.
I do think this time is a little bit different. I don't think a lot of these jobs are coming back. Maybe ever.
I'm not saying I'm some crazy woodland luddite maniac, I mean, I'll be tailscaling into the business VPS from the cabin... but... yeah, I think this time is a bit different. I think stuff like this has happened before with like "John Henry was a Steel Driving Man" sort of vibes? But a lot of people are going to try to out-machine the machines right now, and I think that's a losing strategy?
We'll see in 10 years, and I'm in a bit of a privileged position that I'm able to do this, so I don't envy the folks who are struggling right now? But, more concretely, I do think this is different. Interest rates are absolutely part of it, but there's so much deviation from the historical norms right now that I think normalcy bias is a loosing move.
Personally, I'm adapting - also, I'm playing with robots, but that's mostly because it's fun.
And compared to last 50 years, Interest rates are still WAY lower, and unemployment is still WAY higher.
Make no mistake: Sure, the "curve" of unemployment trends downwards as interest rates drop [1]. But the "base" of unemployment is constantly increasing with each cycle [2]. There is no reality of unemployment rate going back to what it was before.
It's easy to be unaware of this pattern if one is constantly re-employed and never part of the 27-week unemployed graph, or if the point of reference is just the post-2000 or post-2008 crisis.
But 20% baseline of people who are unemployed more than 27 weeks. Let that sink in. It's pretty insane. And that baseline is only increasing.
What the OP commenter says has truth in data to it: Unemployment increase is not a linear scale of a working society. It's driven by tipping points where major changes happen (e.g. the current political changes in US).
Sources:
1. Unemployment rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703
2. Interest rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFF
But also, it seemed pretty synergistic given how things are going. I guess it definitely made the sale a little easier to stomach.
"U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-2140...
And since our taxation system is also primarily worker funded (over 50%) and during times of loss businesses/capitalists can write off a ton of their share of the tax burden, we're in for a lot of pain.
If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players.
The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion.
is just the latest in an extraordinary personal achievement by just one of the current crop of players.
here's mine: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-ch...
Democrats Push for Transparency on Venezuelan Oil Money Controlled by U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-de... | https://archive.today/pWvLH - February 11th, 2026
Trump’s Claim to Venezuelan Oil Money Draws Scrutiny in Congress - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-... | https://archive.today/xhNT9 - January 7th, 2026 (“President Trump’s declaration that he would personally control the proceeds from oil produced in Venezuela drew instant condemnation on Wednesday from Democrats in Congress who noted that the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking.”)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/16/prediction-markets-insider-...
- higher interest rates
- section 174
Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.
I used to agree with your statement, but it's feeling more and more it's not true.
Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew?
This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.
This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading.
Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it.
This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do.
tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.
- Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead.
- H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face
- Contract work again, ran its full course
- Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway
These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.
The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.