I suppose it’s in how you word it. I’ve given up on trying to get a job because there is no point in trying. I can’t afford to pay my rent, but I guess you could call that early retirement.
If you can stomach it, the seafood canning and fishing industry in Alaska will usually (IDK what the situation is this year) hire anyone off the street, work them 16 hours a day for several months, and give them "free housing." You'll get dumped back in Seattle in several months with at least $10k in your pocket.
> However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as “prime age” workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023.
It's great how two sources can tell a completely different story about the same numbers.
The first FRED link shows how noisy that subgroup is. It’s bounced around with 83-84% during that time. It was 83.8% in March and 83.5% through much of 2024.
An aging population means 25-54 represent less workers and people "retiring" from the labor force before social security age is likely to be deeply negative for their finances into old age and not just a decision from the relative luxury of being able to select jobs with quick vesting pensions like in past decades.
If pension ages were going down over the years and the average worker were well vested by 55 then in that reality all would be fine.
"retired" at 25-30 is also pretty common, or at minimum self employed and fully sustainable while putting in only 10-20 hours a week usually for 2-3 days a week.
It's likely not even people retiring early, just demographics shifting up the ages. The youngest baby boomers are 61. The percentage of Americans over the age of 60 increased from 22.8% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. Also the younger cohorts moving into the labor force are smaller as well.
I think you are grossly overestimating the number of people >55 years old who free willingly retire early because of having enough new worth. Already millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines.
> millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines
I think you've got something wrong here, "millennials" refers to people currently between 30 and 45 and are surely the least likely to be discriminated based on either age or inexperience.
Or they hit that sweet spot of being old enough to have commitments so they can't be a fresh grad slave and young enough to not have benefitted when the getting was good and easy and so they are discriminated against.
Prime age is meant to filter college kids and retirees which makes sense but it is likely hiding the minor crisis in hiring for college grads. But I agree it's not disastrous just a yellow flag. The 20 year bull market has minted a lot of millionaires amongst the upper middle class and a lot of them are retiring early.
There's nothing wrong with retiring a few years early if you're comfortable doing so. I sorta did. On the other hand, I didn't really want to hang around too long after either.
55+ crushing it on the asset inflation mania they got at ~zero interest, the youngins left holding the bag of the inflationary cost renting out houses their seniors got negative real interest mortgages for.
Not all of them, some of them have just been pushed out of the workforce unwillingly due to ageism while still financially insecure.
I'm all about people being angry with the current situation and pushing for class war, but blanket assumptions about any demographic, including those of a certain age, is not helpful.
Take an hour off at 2-3pm in any major US city and look at how many people are just milling about. Mostly shopping. There are a lot of people in the US that are not working.
Pre-2008 retail was quiet in the middle of the day, now it booms. I can’t comment on if this is a good or bad thing, but I am surprised at how many people are causally walking their dog as I am rushing to compete an essential errand and get back to work.
Asking because I'm genuinely curious myself, how much of this is unemployment vs the fact that so many more people work from home now compared to pre-2008? Many of those that WFH work a more flexible schedule and probably structure their days a lot differently than 20+ years ago.
I think this is going to be a much more common sight in most major western economies - many of them have a rapidly growing aged retired population and a declining young working segment etc.
The effects of this change are definitely being felt, good and bad, in many countries already.
I wonder what degree to which the shopping is inspired by a mixture of
- People anticipating high interest and price hikes in a world where many products are very-slowly-depreciating assets, in the case of game consoles and RAM, even appreciating, and
- A low current of suicidality, with an ambivalent regard towards the prospect of death once the account reaches $0.
- Alternatively, unemployed people in our field often find themselves free from a noncompete to work on profitable projects during unemployment.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I get my errands done at 12 - 3ish.
I work 8 AM - noon, 3 PM - 2 AM. (Exact ranges vary.)
I don't have an office and I've never met most of my coworkers.
I'm exceedingly angry that restaurants and stores are no longer open until midnight. I used to do 11 PM Target shopping, 2 AM Walmart shopping, etc. Nothing is open late anymore, and it sucks.
You realize not everyone works a normal 9 to 5 right, you honestly think every person shopping are unemployed? Are tech workers this deeply out of touch with normal people?
Today I read about Accenture Norway taking in 56 summer internship students from over...1600 applicants. Record year, they reported.
Previously I imagined only the top-top tier firms could enjoy low single-digit acceptance rate, but here we have Accenture crushing it. Competition must be tough.
(But for what I know, could be that AI has made it easier for people to spam everyone with applications)
My guess is that it's simultaneously easy for a lot of companies to do automated filtering and for candidates to do a lot of automated applications in a way that's easier than sending out a bunch of envelopes. Which makes it harder for candidates who don't have either networks or impressive credentials.
An interesting question but arguably a lot of the most qualified applicants will go FU at that point and only the most desperate will put a stamp on an envelope which is probably not what you want.
Honestly, it probably comes down to more networking and credentials.
They're based in Ireland. There's like 42k software developers in the entire country* and Accenture has 779k staff**, so they had to hire people in foreign places like Norway and the USA.
Tech WAS such a great career now it's total crap! The hey day of tech jobs when you received tons of prospective jobs offers via Linkedin feels like that's drying up (tho it could be my age which is not listed anywhere on Linkedin). From 2012 up until Spring 2025 each month I'd receive 3 to 6 recruiters offering a new UX Research, Design and or Front End Development job. Not anymore and now these jobs you are no competing with 100s to 1000s for just one job and if you are lucky enough to get an interview you have to go through 5 to 12 interviews LOL. Im laughing even more as i vibe code a project in which my previous projects i hired some like a back-end developer or two. Nope I can do it all myself and save money like so many businesses.
Overall I can't imagine the killing of jobs where not many worked to save money (?) and now AI definitely reducing head count futher is a good thing for economy. An economy where these jobs let you buy nice single homes in nice areas wherever.
For me I havent left the job market but it's a huge joke now for techies and soon will be for a lot workers who use a computer to complete their work tasks. In a short or not so short time the computers (agents) will be doing a lot of that work to all of it.
The money printing during COVID screwed everything up. Most of the capital was directly given to banks and businesses, fraudulently in many cases and unnecessarily in most, and everything pooled up into real estate and stocks so anyone who had already owned a large proportion of those became absurdly wealthy in the span of a couple years and everyone else effectively lost 20-30% of their income through inflation. The majority of all money was printed during COVID, no one voted for this to happen, no one bothered to even communicate how it was decided how much money would be printed and who would get it, and no retrospective has ever been done. It’s never been more clear that a small group of the wealthiest investors in the US run the show and the majority of people are wage slaves who had the ladder kicked out above them. Now we’re seeing an administration and elite class that is openly ransacking the country for whatever profits it can extract from a dying empire. I have no idea how this ever gets fixed.
> The capital was either directly given to businesses, fraudulently and unnecessarily in many cases
Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
>ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".
The problem is that these loans went to _businesses_, not workers. There was an orgy of corruption, with newly formed LLCs claiming to have dozens of workers.
And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.
Sorry, but "both sides" went out of the window in 2024.
There are _some_ decent Democrats in the Congress. There are also plenty of bad ones. There are NO decent Republicans in the Congress. And yes, reality appears to be partisan.
To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts.
The effective tax rates have went down modestly, but approximately no one was paying anywhere near that. They were playing the same financial engineered fuck fuck games that are played today to get around it. It's the poor and middle class that can't get around those tax rates.
Yea the covid money printing is regularly pointed to as a reason why MMT is clearly bad but that ignores that there’s literally a solution to this problem in MMT. Raise taxes to reclaim the money. It’s a trivial solution which is sadly politically incredibly challenging.
And yet, the amount of redistribution that's happening has never been higher, far exceeding the era of "94% tax rate on the rich", never mind that nobody actually paid that rate because the tax code was full of exemptions at the time.
I don’t see how this graph shows that claim. It says it’s graphing the effect of welfare on income ratios between top 10% vs the bottom 50% then just has an arrow pointing down saying “Stronger redistribution”
Where is the connection between the percentage being graphed and whatever their definition of “stronger redistribution” is?
And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
>I don’t see how this graph shows that claim. It says it’s graphing the effect of welfare on income ratios between top 10% vs the bottom 50% then just has an arrow pointing down saying “Stronger redistribution”
The chart is supposed accompany an article, which explains what the metric is:
"""A simple measure of progressivity involves comparing the distribution of income both before and after tax. By this measure America redistributes about twice as much today as in the 1960s (see chart 1). Germany and Japan, the next biggest rich economies, also redistribute a lot more than they used to. So do Britain and Canada. Indeed by our estimate, seven in ten countries have more progressive tax-and-benefit systems than in 1990. The ones that have become less progressive tend to be dysfunctional (Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti) or were exceptionally redistributive to begin with (Norway, Sweden)."""
>And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
1. If you read the original paper[1], they seem to be doing it for weird economics reasons:
"We then sequentially remove capital gains, which are not in national income"
I don't know enough about economics to dispute this, but given that they bothered to adjust for other factors like imputed rent and "corporation retained earnings", I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
2. On page 16 they have an actual breakdown of all the adjustments, which lists the effect of removing capital gains at between 0.7% to 1.4%. In other words, not enough to change the conclusion.
Oh the sweet shock therapy. Kids sniffing glue, women emigrating to prostitute, emergency services and doctors killing people for kickbacks, oligarchs, organized crime. Fun times.
As someone who's looking for a job, this is what I fear. How does one distinguish themselves from the thousands of other people who say "Claude, write a cover letter for this company, make no mistakes", and their cover letter has the same tone as every other cover letter?
Networking turned from a suggestion into being the only way of getting hired. I don't need a job, but I've gotten several emails from recommendations and I didn't have any 3 years ago or so, maybe an odd one here and there.
I think getting scouted is also one of the better ways of getting hired by having an active github profile with at least one popular open-source project even if it is AI slop.
It was never AI, it’s not “recession”, it’s not xyz, it’s simply since covid the wealth distribution got worse, further. It’s why you see the very few are with an exponential networth increase while the majority are suffering, at the same time, those who hold that networth are pulling all sort of shenanigans to keep the market alive and far from crashing for as long as possible, but it’s eminent and it will happen soon, the only exception is starting a major war to meat grind all these young men otherwise they will revolt for sure.
The current regime and the previous regime both reported extremely low unemployment outside of the pandemic but don't let your partisan bigotry get in the way of facts. You are the reason why the uniparty is able to do this, as you will always be willingly blind to it as long as it has the right color coating on it. You are personally at fault.
I mean, the current party in power is making out in the open moves to profit directly from tanking the federal government. What's the centrist view in this one? A little robber baroning as a treat?
And I'm not going back, either. Reckon I can slowly liquidate assets for as long as I have left to live. To hell with all this shit, my farm is enough.
The amount you can capture by directly enjoying it is crazy. You get double taxed on your labor. Once when you earn it, another when you spend it, and then the people you pay get taxed yet again on that! Plus their regulatory costs of licensing, insurance, property taxes, compliance, the cut of the shareholders/owners.
If you just do it yourself... there is no one to tax or take anything off the top. It often ends up you double your "income" from your work or better.
America has $0 property taxes in unincorporated Alaska, and possibly a few other places. The rates are determined locally. I pay very little but we also have no public roads and basically no fire or police.
We live in a capitalist society. This means we prioritize making money via capital rather than through labor. It looks like we just got what we've asked for. I'm not sure what the problem is.
If you're playing labor in a capitalist society, you're playing a losing strategy.
And here is one for 55+yo: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230
All is fine
I know many ex-colleagues who have been retired early -- they face age discrimination and cannot find work.
It's great how two sources can tell a completely different story about the same numbers.
That should already make you skeptical, and after looking at the chart, I'm more on side "all is fine" than the doom narrative the article is pushing.
An aging population means 25-54 represent less workers and people "retiring" from the labor force before social security age is likely to be deeply negative for their finances into old age and not just a decision from the relative luxury of being able to select jobs with quick vesting pensions like in past decades.
If pension ages were going down over the years and the average worker were well vested by 55 then in that reality all would be fine.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
I think you've got something wrong here, "millennials" refers to people currently between 30 and 45 and are surely the least likely to be discriminated based on either age or inexperience.
Worth noting this is people who have a job, it includes the under-employed.
Not all of them, some of them have just been pushed out of the workforce unwillingly due to ageism while still financially insecure.
I'm all about people being angry with the current situation and pushing for class war, but blanket assumptions about any demographic, including those of a certain age, is not helpful.
Pre-2008 retail was quiet in the middle of the day, now it booms. I can’t comment on if this is a good or bad thing, but I am surprised at how many people are causally walking their dog as I am rushing to compete an essential errand and get back to work.
The effects of this change are definitely being felt, good and bad, in many countries already.
- People anticipating high interest and price hikes in a world where many products are very-slowly-depreciating assets, in the case of game consoles and RAM, even appreciating, and
- A low current of suicidality, with an ambivalent regard towards the prospect of death once the account reaches $0.
- Alternatively, unemployed people in our field often find themselves free from a noncompete to work on profitable projects during unemployment.
I work 8 AM - noon, 3 PM - 2 AM. (Exact ranges vary.)
I don't have an office and I've never met most of my coworkers.
I'm exceedingly angry that restaurants and stores are no longer open until midnight. I used to do 11 PM Target shopping, 2 AM Walmart shopping, etc. Nothing is open late anymore, and it sucks.
At the gas stations I worked at, the shifts were 7AM-3PM, 3PM-11PM, and 11PM-7AM.
I used to do a lot of things at abnormal times. What does a quick beer after work look like when you're done at 7AM?
I also don't know many unemployed people cruising around malls looking for ways to spend money.
Previously I imagined only the top-top tier firms could enjoy low single-digit acceptance rate, but here we have Accenture crushing it. Competition must be tough.
(But for what I know, could be that AI has made it easier for people to spam everyone with applications)
Honestly, it probably comes down to more networking and credentials.
They're based in Ireland. There's like 42k software developers in the entire country* and Accenture has 779k staff**, so they had to hire people in foreign places like Norway and the USA.
* OK, it says "Computer Programming": https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/...
** and I have no idea how many of them do "Computer Programming"
Overall I can't imagine the killing of jobs where not many worked to save money (?) and now AI definitely reducing head count futher is a good thing for economy. An economy where these jobs let you buy nice single homes in nice areas wherever.
For me I havent left the job market but it's a huge joke now for techies and soon will be for a lot workers who use a computer to complete their work tasks. In a short or not so short time the computers (agents) will be doing a lot of that work to all of it.
Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...
Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".
And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program
There are _some_ decent Democrats in the Congress. There are also plenty of bad ones. There are NO decent Republicans in the Congress. And yes, reality appears to be partisan.
To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
Where is the connection between the percentage being graphed and whatever their definition of “stronger redistribution” is?
And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
The chart is supposed accompany an article, which explains what the metric is:
"""A simple measure of progressivity involves comparing the distribution of income both before and after tax. By this measure America redistributes about twice as much today as in the 1960s (see chart 1). Germany and Japan, the next biggest rich economies, also redistribute a lot more than they used to. So do Britain and Canada. Indeed by our estimate, seven in ten countries have more progressive tax-and-benefit systems than in 1990. The ones that have become less progressive tend to be dysfunctional (Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti) or were exceptionally redistributive to begin with (Norway, Sweden)."""
>And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
1. If you read the original paper[1], they seem to be doing it for weird economics reasons:
"We then sequentially remove capital gains, which are not in national income"
I don't know enough about economics to dispute this, but given that they bothered to adjust for other factors like imputed rent and "corporation retained earnings", I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
2. On page 16 they have an actual breakdown of all the adjustments, which lists the effect of removing capital gains at between 0.7% to 1.4%. In other words, not enough to change the conclusion.
[1] https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequal...
What we've done to other countries has finally turned inwards. It was just a matter of time.
They are being inundated with thousands of AI slop applications each week.
Hiring has devolved to word of mouth recommendations.
Networking turned from a suggestion into being the only way of getting hired. I don't need a job, but I've gotten several emails from recommendations and I didn't have any 3 years ago or so, maybe an odd one here and there.
I think getting scouted is also one of the better ways of getting hired by having an active github profile with at least one popular open-source project even if it is AI slop.
Original headline: "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation rate falls to lowest in 50 years, outside of the Covid era"
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
If you just do it yourself... there is no one to tax or take anything off the top. It often ends up you double your "income" from your work or better.
“You deserve to starve instead!!” - is this really the position you want to argue?
Not everywhere is America, fellow hacker.
But wow, 98€ is about how much it takes for me to take my family out to lunch at a fast food restaurant.
the US seems much more speculation and leverage based, rather than capital being used by private owners to apply labour to to make useful goods
If you're playing labor in a capitalist society, you're playing a losing strategy.