Unemployment rate, it doesn't matter! The important thing is this!

This article, ah, it's actually a rewrite, I wrote it last night, and I found that many friends didn't understand, I reviewed it, not that there was a problem with my point of view, but that there was a problem with the way I wrote, so I rewrote it once. Although the full text is basically Mises's point of view, as a communicator, if too many people don't understand it, it's not the reader's problem, it's my problem. Views or those views. The way it is written has changed.

Let's start writing again.

The unemployment rate is a statistic that governments like to count.

However, this data is actually of little significance.

Because, poor countries and regions can also have a very low unemployment rate, for example, some large agricultural countries, what kind of unemployment? Everyone is farming, how many are unemployed?

For example, France and Spain have a large number of young people who have been unemployed for a long time, not because there are no job opportunities, but because there is a good unemployment security system, and young people can get money without working, and young people can take unemployment insurance money for a few years before going to work.

In addition, if we use the current method of calculating the unemployment rate of each country, the more prosperous the society will be in the future, the higher the unemployment rate. For example, when Japan's economy grew by leaps and bounds in the eighties and nineties, a large number of highly educated women did not work and took care of their children and families at home.

In the field of education, the more prosperous the society, the longer people have been educated, and it is not surprising that they are now reading until thirty, which will also increase the unemployment rate in statistics.

There is a main line in human society, the more prosperous the economy, the more leisure time people pursue, because the purpose of life is to consume, not to work.

So, as long as the economy is prosperous, there must be more people who do not work.

You see, since 1991, China's women's labor force participation rate (employment rate) has actually been declining, a full 10 percentage points, is this a bad thing? On the contrary, after 2020, there has been a rebound, is this a good thing?

If you look at this graph backwards, it is actually the curve of China's economic growth, that is, the more the economy develops, the lower the female labor force participation rate, but when the rate slows down, the female labor force participation rate declines slowly.

If you take the decline in unemployment as a good thing, you will think that China's economy has risen after 2020.

If we assume that the real income of all people in China is now five times higher, then there must be many people who work for two years and choose to go out and play for half a year.

In every big factory, there are a bunch of people who stop working in their forties, because they earn a lot of money, enough for them not to work, to accompany their children and families, or to play around by themselves.

So, unemployment can't be a sign of prosperity or poverty in a society.

However, during the Great Depression and the global recession, the unemployment rate often became important, for example, the Federal Reserve made interest rate hikes or cuts based on non-farm payrolls data.

Here, we need to distinguish another phenomenon, that is, what is the unemployment caused by the recession?

Theoretically, labor is a scarce resource, and there are an infinite number of job opportunities at any given time.

The reason why some people are unemployed is not because there are no job opportunities, but because the wages do not meet the expectations of some people, and at the same time, this person has a certain amount of savings, so he can be qualified to be "unemployed".

Just imagine, a person who is destitute, a person who has nothing, he is not eligible to be unemployed, because if he does not work, he will not be able to eat immediately.

He would immediately go looking for a job, and his way of looking for a job was simple, which was to keep lowering the price until the company was willing to hire him. Of course, in modern times, employment is simpler, if you have a mobile phone, you can sign up, and you can immediately become a Meituan delivery worker and start taking orders to generate income.

But during the recession, there was a phenomenon of large-scale career change.

Some dedicated labor, during the recession, became general-purpose labor.

A former teacher and trainee, a former programmer who used to write code in the office, they are all dedicated labor, that is, their core skills are to serve a certain professional field. If, at this time, the company they were in disappears, or the demand for this profession decreases in the entire industry, then they have only one choice, to become a general workforce.

For example, occupations such as food delivery workers, couriers, general workers, and online car-hailing have become safe havens for many people, and some of the dedicated labor force has become a general labor force in the economic recession.

This shift is not only painful about changes in income, but also about changes in the way we work.

Therefore, there are many people who do not accept this kind of conversion, and they choose not to choose to become a general-purpose labor, and they have to wait for the opportunity to continue to become a full-time labor, because they still have savings to support this painful period of unemployment.

At this time, unemployment is still a voluntary choice, that is, it is not that there is no job offer, but that he is unwilling to accept a decline in income and a change in work style.

This is also understandable, a programmer really asked him to run a takeaway and drive an online car-hailing, how many people can accept it?

There has been a rumor that programmers over the age of 35 can't find a job, and of course they can't find a job with the same income as before the age of 35.

Those who say that after the age of fifty and the elderly cannot find a job, are also wrong. There are always job opportunities.

At any time, anyone can find a job in the market, it is nothing more than a matter of wages.

If someone is willing to reduce the price now, such as a salary of 1,000 yuan, is there a job? A lot of work, the Pearl River Delta factories will be full. The key to a recession is not unemployment, but falling wages.

Some people are afraid that Indians will come to work in China, thinking that they will rob Chinese jobs. In fact, no, there are infinite job opportunities, in the middle class of India, there is an area, they live better than the Chinese, most of the white-collar workers who get a monthly salary of two or three thousand yuan, their housework is done by a servant, if it is a department manager, five or six thousand yuan a month, you can hire a driver and a full-time nanny, because the wage is cheap.

In other words, as long as the wages are cheap, many unmet needs will become real needs. If ASEAN and India are allowed to work in China, a large number of China's middle class will be equipped with drivers and nannies.

Some people are afraid that the elderly cannot find a job, of course, it is not right, the elderly in the world work in a large number of areas, Japan, Hong Kong have a high proportion of elderly people working, and even in their seventies is normal at work. However, it is true that it is indeed difficult for the elderly to find high-paying jobs if they are not workers in the field of knowledge.

In the recession period, it is a process of capital contraction, and the contraction of capital means that the price of labor and land will be reduced, which is an inevitable pain.

In China, the unemployed are often not the poorest rural people, who are not eligible for unemployment, and their families do not have much savings, making it difficult for them to support a person sitting at home. Even the elderly, they are still working, if it is not forbidden by the state, the elderly in rural areas over 60 years old, and a large number of people work on the construction site.

At present, the elderly in rural areas in their sixties are still active in various occupations such as temporary workers, restaurant dishwashers, sanitation workers, and nannies, and the elderly in their seventies are also growing and selling vegetables.

Only city dwellers with savings can wait for a job in their minds, and this waiting process is unemployment.

The more developed the society, the more people save and the more accepting they are of waiting for a new job. Many high-income people, they have extremely high requirements for work, after the last job is not available, they are often not in a hurry to find a job, but to pick a job that he is very satisfied with, which will also bring about a statistical increase in the unemployment rate.

Of course, China's implementation of the unemployment insurance system is also a cause of unemployment, and many employees, after leaving the job, will get a dismissal certificate, and then use this as a basis to receive unemployment insurance benefits, which can be received for up to 24 months.

In a society where welfare prevails, unemployment is even higher. For example, I recently heard from a friend who lives in Spain that one of his friends has not gone to work because he is an orphan and receives government subsidies until he is in his thirties.

In fact, China's unemployment rate is far higher than expected, because a large number of women in their fifties are already receiving pensions, and they no longer work and dance in the square every day.

If they are not working, are they unemployed?

Therefore, the unemployment rate is fundamentally not a reflection of any problems.

But why do you want to count the unemployment rate?

In normal times, the unemployment rate does not matter, but in the process of social development, it rises steadily.

But in a recession, the rise in unemployment, not without job opportunities, is essentially a pain of falling incomes and career changes, and it is a political issue.

He would represent people's dissatisfaction with the economic downturn.

To put it cruelly, the essence of the recession is the contraction of capital, because in the business cycle, a large amount of capital investment in the wrong direction, resulting in the misallocation of resources, the collapse of enterprises, so the amount of capital decreases, which drives the decline in labor and land prices.

So when will capital resume expansion? When the price of land and the wages of laborers are low enough to make a profitable investment, then capital will resume its expansion.

In other words, with less intervention and a drop in land prices and wages, capital expansion will naturally resume and re-enter the zone of economic growth.

However, in the face of recession, governments are often subject to various pressures, which are often determined by politics and public opinion.

In a recession, people feel extremely painful about the fall in land prices, and even more painful about the decline in wages. In China, there have also been cases where local government revenues have fallen imminently, and civil servants have begun to cut their salaries.

In recessions, people tend to put strong pressure on the government through public opinion and votes to save falling prices.

Keynesianism, in fact, is a kind of economic thought specifically designed to combat recessions, and he is not even an economics, he is just a political doctrine that provides short-term economic strategies for the government.

Keynes did not look for the source of the business cycle in the first place, but thought that it was determined by the animal spirit of man, and that people suddenly stopped consuming, causing a large number of businesses to go out of business, and land prices and wages to fall rapidly, so what to do? Save.

The way to save is that if you don't spend it, the government will spend it, and if the government doesn't have money, it will print money to spend.

Of course, the consequence of this method is to prevent the decline in land prices and wages. But at the same time, it also delayed the recession, and the Great Depression in the United States lasted for more than a decade, which is why. If you don't intervene, it may be over in a year or two.

Now the United States government's strategy is the same, the federal government spending is rising, the United States national debt is more than 35 trillion, since 2020, the United States government has never given up increasing government spending to "save the market".

Governments are no exception, including China, it's just a matter of size.

Therefore, the purpose of calculating the unemployment rate is not to save the economy, but to think from a political point of view, that is, how to appease the discontent of society in the short term.

From the government's point of view, this means is not an economic one, but a political one. United States Great Depression, if politicians did not use this method to stop the fall in land prices and wages, the politicians' position could be ruined, and the surging public opinion would replace the current president.

As a result, Keynes's strategy was popular because it met the needs of politicians in the face of a surging public sentiment.

Statistical unemployment is the basic data basis for the implementation of Keynesian policies.

In fact, this kind of statistics is meaningless, and the data that really has some meaning is the income of the general labor force. If a large number of specialized labor forces are unable to find jobs in their fields and crowd into the fields of general labor, it will lead to a large increase in the supply of general labor, which will reduce their incomes.

The unemployment rate data is just a certain basis for political intervention in the economy, and the real meaningful data is whether the real wages of those general labor forces are rising or falling.

If real wages fall to the bottom and stop falling, it means that the economic recovery is coming. If it keeps going down, it's still early.

In China, you have to look at the indicators of recovery and the ongoing recession, just keep an eye on their incomes. If capital expands again, there will be a large number of specialized labor out of the general labor market, and they will go to work elsewhere, thus causing the price of general labor to rise again.

Therefore, in the future, when you go out, you will be able to judge the quality of the economy by asking how much the ride-hailing drivers have earned in recent months, and also how much the delivery workers have earned, rather than looking at indicators such as the unemployment rate.

Public name: Ancient two and ancient three