50% U.S. Unemployment? Not in 20 years. Right Now.

Note: You say we exaggerated? Your 2014 BLS Update is below.

#IncomprehensibleTruth is still truth. This is only the very beginning of the kinds of breathtaking wake up calls and cataclysmic shifts we'll discover amidst accelerating #BigData in the coming decade.

The first tenant of economics is, "compared to what?" What do we mean by #Unemployment? How many ways has that word been laundered, spun, and compared to false and misleading metrics, to date? This chart begins to pull back the curtain; but you should get the data for yourself and press #OpenData into service of both illuminating our current predicament and forging new ways forward.

Fig 1. -- Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate.

LEGEND
totnonpart (top purple line) =  Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate. Number of Americans displaced, discarded, disabled, dropped out of the count and completely off the Workforce Map.
civnonpart (orange/yellow line) = Civilian Labor Force Non-Participation Rate (100-civpart).
u6rate (green line) = True Total #Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons.
unrate (bottom blue line) = MSM Consensus Crowd-Control #Unemployment Story

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED mobile)

Don't like that slice on The Data? Try the direct BLS view on for size:

2014 BLS Update

Still don't like The Data? Think it's out of context? Try this compared to what view, vs. GDP & Profits:


What will really bake your post-scarcity noodle is that right now, in 2013, we've created the first 3D printed food, straight from the Star Trek replicator. Got change for a paradigm?

"Capitalism has shortfalls," says Richest Man in the World, Bill Gates.

“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - Telegraph

This is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.

Core issue that killed #MLK was #EconomicInequality #ItsNotAboutRace It's about #BasicIncome Sustainable #Postscarcity #EndPoverty

It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality. 

King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.

Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:

• @BasicIncome
• Facebook: Basic Income Rights
• @RentaBasica
• @RevenuDevie
• @BasicIncome_J
• @Grundeinkommen
• @BINews

And if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.

Does Economic Expansion Require Growing Inequality?

Obviously, economic expansion does not require hoarding, quite the contrary. We're impressed to finally see Business Week taking the situation seriously and reporting the facts more accurately in Ms. Rand, Meet Singapore. Mr. Hayek, Meet Norway, including an occupy-wall-street tag: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/ It's a great start.

"Is rising inequality the price of rapid economic growth? Advocates of deregulation often argue that the increasing concentration of wealth is driven by greater rewards going to innovators and entrepreneurs who drive the economy forward. But is this kind of trade-off really a given? Not really."

Thank you for demonstrating the integrity to present the data as it is, BW!

Conservative American Enterprise Institute Supports #BasicIncome

In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State:

"America's population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people. This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 (that was 2006, $15,000 more realistic) cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society."

Current models indicate that $1,200/mo is much more realistic in U.S., today. The exact number is secondary to first educating the American public about this vital, fundamental, fiscally responsible overhaul of the costly, hopelessly fragmented, often duplicated, abused, and ineffective needs-based welfare programs.

H/T @Benjamin_Flex

Dig Deeper:

• Life after Jobs.
• What MLK said.
• Dr. Cornell West: don't be afraid to say Revolution.

Economies are Circulatory Systems

Currencies go into and out of circulation, not distribution. It's not about redistribution at all, lunkheads, it's about sustainable global resource circulation. If you clot up 43% of your blood in 1% of your body, it doesn't matter where the clot is; the whole body is going down. People and societies are complex adaptive biological systems, not rigorous, reductionist mathematical formulations.

Basic Income (global | us) is not merely about the theoretical mathematics of economics. It's about acknowledging and addressing the everyday biological realities of human existence, lack, homelessness, hunger, and the persistent threat thereof, which strips economic agents -- American, and global citizens -- of anything even remotely resembling democratic, free market bargaining power.

Economic Security Beyond Reach of Many Americans

Source: NYTimes.com

"A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living."

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Educated, Unemployed, Frustrated: Not just the over 40 crowd any more

New York Times on America's new normal:

About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.

My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009, and could find paid work only as a lifeguard and a personal trainer. Unpaid internships at research institutes led to nothing. After more than a year he moved back in with his parents.

The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes

Richard Wolff, Guardian.co.uk: "Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures."

The Future of Money & Technology Summit

Finally. The step function to the next increment (the ++) may be nearing readiness for implementation with The Future of Money and Technology Summit, February 28, 2011.

Live Images of the New Normal: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ

SOURCE: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ:

The extension for unemployment benefits that is part of the compromise tax deal is good news for many of the unemployed, but it won’t provide aid to anyone who’s been out of a job over 99 weeks.

That’s a concern because the number of 99ers may be increasing. The number of people who have received their final payments from extended-benefits programs this year through the end of October — the most recent month for which data are available — is over one million, and that number has been steadily increasing. Separately, the Labor Department reported that nearly 10% of the unemployed in the third quarter of 2010 — more than one million people — had been out of a job and looking for work for about two years or more. Meanwhile, initial claims for unemployment have been trending lower recently, but the biggest surge came in early 2009. The peak of 643,000 claims in a single week came in March of last year, 89 weeks ago. Anyone still unemployed since that peak is likely to run out of benefits soon, if they haven’t already.

The New York Times adds that amidst this mancession:

Misplaced confidence in market forces is making it virtually impossible for the unemployed to man up — or woman up.

None of these figures even begin to take into account those who fell off of the 99-week edge-of-the-economic-Earth, prior to this most recent capitalist extremist economic cleansing. A post-information, post-scarcity economy is by definition a public-private partnership. Neither side can be the supreme commander; each must do their part.

We need Free Markets to create new products, services, innovations, and the number of jobs possible. It's utterly absurd to mandate non-productive, make-work J.O.B's (Justifications Of Being). It's even worse to panic and claw back industrial jobs that are needed for development throughout the rest of the world.

We need Basic Income to provide for social stability and human dignity in a nation where nearly 20% U-6 Unemployment is already the norm; and it's heading to 30% because we keep becoming more and more labor efficient. We should not roll back those efficiency gains just because we've never encountered such breakthrough levels of achievement ever before in history. In the so-called advanced west, should look at the world as it is and make the adaptive changes required to show the way forward. If we do not, why would today's developing nations seek to emulate us at all, if widespread unemployment, poverty, and panic are the final outcomes of mastering the efficiencies of advanced industrialization?

It's time to increment our understanding, time to move forward. That's the PlusPlus in Capitalism++. BasicIncome.Org | USBig.Net

Unsustainable Resource Skews: The Messsage Made it Through

But the WORK remains to be completed.

Do a little googling in various time frames for the quoted phrase "unsustainable resource skews" and you will find that we began signaling this particular message from approximately April 2007. So, it may have taken a little over three years to really reach mainstream exposure, but every single character typed in every single random forum and chat session, adding just one more voice to the rising global chorus for change, has been worth it.

That said, over the intervening time, many of us have come to the conclusion that there may ultimately be no other way of addressing what NPR has fleshed out as overwhelmingly unsustainable Income Inequality, or Slate's expose series on The United States of Inequality, or the New York Time's mandate for Confronting Income Inequality, other than to make the entire unsustainably skewed system completely irrelevant.

The institutional pathology just runs too deep and the hoarding dementia at the helm is impossible to reason with. If Warren Buffet can't get through, who can? It's pointless to confront people who are incapable of comprehending their own mental illness, or who refuse to adjust their world view to the empirical data right before their very eyes. They're fixated on a particular perception and to hell with facts.

We also may not need to resort to dramatic measures like rapidly aggressive taxation. For one, that wouldn't really make for structural change; it just moves around the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So let's leave the demented to continue living in their make believe world a little longer, while we go about the business of accelerating adaptation for the real world that the rest of us live in. Things will fall apart gradually all around them; they won't understand what's gone wrong; and by the point that they do notice there will not be much empathy left for that world view because when we gave it the opportunity to change, it decided to dig in with a rabid, foaming, snarling, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine. Since the Objectivists among that number would be first and foremost to say, "we all choose our own fate," then apparently the 95% of us at the bottom can see precisely the fate chosen by an economically sociopathological 5% of the population.

If you were numbered among that 5% and made the decision was to dig in with what you got, then when the rest of the 95% of us unilaterally decide that what you got is worthless, do you see how that works, now? Oops, too late.

There are extraordinary new efforts underway and proven programs that have been a quarter century or more in the making that could essentially obviate the entire current economic fiction. When the time comes, the transition can be done relatively quickly, with little or no social unrest because 95% of people will be instantly better off and only 5% will be raging like lunatics; at which point, we will all indeed see pathological hoarders for what they've always been: snarling demented sociopaths; literally, people who lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience; and in extreme cases, even while paying lip service to those very principles.

Look, nobody is saying that "all rich people are demented." That's absurd. Anyone who has read this space with any frequency knows that's nothing even remotely close to the point. The sad problem is that there is a large enough number of textbook-defined clinical sociopaths in that 5% that we may have no other choice but to simply move forward without them.

So maybe this provides something of a definition for the "++" that some have asked me about, wondering what precisely that means. It means we simply leave the previous iteration behind. It's broken, don't fix it. Leave it on the side of the road and walk on. No big conflict. No big votes. Just move on. We'll figure it out.

Happy 50th Birthday from AARP! Here's Your Free "Will Work for Food" Sign

"After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.

For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.

Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.

“There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed,” said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. “I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady,” she said. “It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don’t even realize it.”"

Growing numbers of people do realize this and even know the exact individuals responsible for willfully causing it. This is where things get very up close and personal, precisely as forecast in several of this blog's earliest entries.

Full Story by Motoko Rich: Older Unemployed Struggle to Rejoin the Work Force - NYTimes.com

More Responsibility. Less Pay. More Risk. Less Reward.

"A statistical slaughterhouse of historic proportion. 30 percent of jobless people 55 or older have been out of work for a year or longer, a higher rate than any other age group; some may never find another job." Amplify’d from www.mercurynews.com

Americans in their 50s especially hard-hit by recession

In this bloody free-for-all of a recession, Americans in their 50s are really taking it hard on the chin.

"Is it because we're in our 50s?'' Kahn wonders. "What else could it be? Someone on the other end is looking at our résumés, doing the math and thinking, this woman's a fuddy-duddy. I feel like we've been put out to pasture. It's like we're reaching retirement age, but we're not ready for retirement."

Peek inside this statistical slaughterhouse: As older Americans headed for retirement, the recession cut into their plans, sending retirement account balances down 32 percent from a peak of $8.7 trillion in September 2007 to $5.9 trillion in March 2009, according to AARP. As the recession kicked in, more than one of every four foreclosures and delinquencies involved Americans age 50 and older, this on top of the decade's already sharp increase in bankruptcy filings for the 55-and-above set.

Some may never find another job: A Pew Economic Policy Group report in April said nearly 30 percent of jobless people 55 or older have been out of work for a year or longer, a higher rate than any other age group.

It is a demographic squeeze play of historic proportion, with a jobless rate not seen since the Great Depression.

In a sign of the angst gripping many who see their retirement fading into the future, a poll this year of people ages 44 to 75 found that more than three in five fear depleting their assets more than they fear dying.

"Typically," he says, "they've been downsized out of a job or else put into another position with more responsibility for less pay, and that puts even more stress on their lives, financially and emotionally."

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bax66x

Percentage of U.S. Adults at Work is Lower Now, Than Six Months Ago

NPR Marketplace Commentator David Frum: Old assumptions equal a stagnant economy:

Supposedly, the recession ended last summer. Yet the percentage of adult Americans at work is lower now than it was six months ago. Businesses continue to shed jobs faster than they create them.

The risk that employment will decline further as the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus ends is very real. Consumers are not spending, because they feel poor -- and getting poorer. They borrowed a lot of money in the 1990s and 2000s. Their equity in their homes has shrunk or disappeared.

These wretched figures should force us to rethink old assumptions.

The 2007-2008 economic collapse was a really, really big calamity. Yet, we have not taken that calamity's big lessons. Yes, we've tightened bank regulation a little. It will be tougher in the future for banks to bet 30 times their capital that uncredit-worthy borrowers will somehow find the money to repay huge loans. But the idea that home ownership is for everybody? That capital gains from housing will compensate ordinary Americans for stagnant wages? That we can raise living standards while importing a million low-wage workers every year?

On those fundamentals, Albert Einstein's old lament still holds: Everything has changed -- except our thinking.

Attacking Social Security vs Adaptive Social Security

Attacking Social Security:

"It’s a lot easier to imagine working until you’re 70 if you have a comfortable office job than if you’re engaged in manual labor. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society — and the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers. And remember, the retirement age is already scheduled to rise under current law.

So let’s beat back this unnecessary, unfair and — let’s not mince words — cruel attack on working Americans. Big cuts in Social Security should not be on the table." - Paul Krugman

Adaptive Social Security: When we implement the guaranteed U.S. Basic Income it will permanently fix all of this and make the costly means-tested and perpetually gamed welfare system obsolete, saving billions of dollars and improving both individual and institutional integrity of the entire system, because there is no longer any incentive to lie, cheat, or steal from a system which, as currently designed, encourages that kind of maladaptive behavior.

We are Victims of our own Success

What does it actually mean to vote for or against extending unemployment benefits? In the context of seeking sustainable solutions, I'm afraid to say, almost absolutely nothing.

In practice, these stop-gap measures are indeed wasteful, as opponents cry, but only from the perspective of institutional denial of the fact that we are in the process of transitioning to the post Job Trance era.

Less than 65% of Americans (and dropping fast, due to ever accelerating increases in efficiency) current provide at least 100% of required goods and services for the entire economy. That means, 40% of Americans CAN'T BE IN THE WORKFORCE at all ... EVER.

We simply cannot, as bald pragmatic matter, let 40% or more of the population drift further and further into poverty and despair simply because of a deprecated, dysfunctional, nineteenth century industrial delusion about how the world used to work 100 years ago.

We suggest that it is time to open the floor to discussion and debate about economies as Circulatory Systems rather than distribution systems. Only hoarders and oligarchs amplify and defend the narrative of distribution, because it is their unsustainable resource skews that have gradually been the paramount unintended consequence of efficiency-addicted hyper-industrialization, thusly destroying the proper circulation of currency throughout the system as a whole.

In everyday practice, sustainable economies are like the body's circulatory system. We talk about how much currency is in circulation, not in distribution. It's time to open public solutions dialog on a subject that has been under careful study and analysis for decades: universal Basic Income, the most sustainable and adaptive means of maintaining a healthy Circulatory System, one that maintains the health of the capillaries of the economy first and foremost, where the transpiration of the real world economy takes place in everyday lives.

Without the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, and waste at the very fringes of our body's circulatory system, the heart can do no good whatsoever. To date, the measures taken to stimulate the economy have all focused on the wrong problem: shocking the heart to do more work. The moral problems and failures may be at the heart of the system, but the functional failures are at the edges and fringes of the system. Right here, in our everyday lives.

Let's be clear: nobody is demonizing free markets here; rather, we acknowledge that in the west, we are today a victim of our own particular brand of frenetic, neurotic success. As any alcoholic or drug addict who "made it to the top" will tell you, just because that dysfunction seemed to fuel success, doesn't mean that it actually helped. In sad fact, too often the very things that we thought were our best support structures can turn out to be the underlying cause of our greatest miseries.

GOP: Decreasing Homelessness and Starvation Makes Economies Worse

Thankfully, it looks like we can still count on The Atlantic to provide a platform for intellectual honesty about such matters. Special thanks to Daniel Indiviglio for saying it plain:

... the official reported unemployment rate should be reflective of labor market turmoil. In that sense, the unemployment rate as currently calculated more likely underestimates the struggle so many Americans face. The broader measure of unemployment was 16.5% for June. There are a lot of Americans who are so discouraged they have temporarily given up on finding work or can't get anything full time. The government doesn't consider them unemployed, even though they certainly are ...

A Few Comment Excerpts:

Timothy: All I have to say is what is wrong with these people ?! Do they think that what unemployment is giving us to barely survive on is great living to the point that one wouldnt want to look for work ? Are you kidding me ? I am not even getting by ! I have lost 2 homes 2 cars and demolished my credit and everything i have worked for my entire life ! So No I am not overjoyed about being on u/i. People are starving while [politicians] went on break and I find that very sad !

Jessica: The people that they are talking about, that left the work force, are those that have exhausted all their benefits. The real, live, unadjusted unemployment rate is well above 14-15%. They keep adjusting the numbers to see fit... but the people know differently. I think that it is great that all these people think that living on the unemployment benefits, are just living high on the hog.... wow the stupidity continues to amaze me...

KCSam: Now I've heard it all. Unemployment benefits boosting the unemployment rate? Aren't we blaming the victim here?

Germany's Take on a Basic Income for All

According to a growing bloc of Christian Democrats—under the leadership of Dieter Althaus, former premier of the German state of Thuringia—the problem isn’t that the state is providing insufficient incentives to work, but rather that the state is enforcing a duty to work at all. The only way that Germany can honor people’s right to material dignity while freeing the labor market of distortions, they argue, is by means of bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen, or unconditional basic income: a single monthly payment, pegged to levels currently received by the unemployed, guaranteed to every citizen from cradle to grave.

More fundamentally, basic-income advocates argue that the duty to pursue work is based on the mistaken assumption that there’s work to be had. A growing number of economists suggest that Germany reconcile itself to the fact that in the postindustrial age, the country will provide ever fewer opportunities for low-skilled workers. In this context, policies in pursuit of full employment make no sense; indeed, the demands currently made on the out-of-work are nothing less than perverse.

Furthermore, the advocates of basic income say, the contemporary mind-set has allotted to salaried work an exaggerated role in shaping personal identity. Basic income would allow Germans to combine different avenues of part-time work or pursue types of labor that aren’t normally honored with pay, such as caring for the elderly. (This is an important difference between Murray’s concept and the German one: Murray sees his yearly $10,000 grant as a spur to work; the German variation pivots on the belief that many Germans ought to be taking up pursuits outside the classic economic framework.) Also, basic income would encourage citizens to think more like entrepreneurs in pursuing work and allow unfettered labor markets to regain control over wages. (Emphasis by ed.)

SOURCE: A Basic Income for All? by Cameron Abadi, City Journal Spring 2010.

via StatusNet message from Olivier Auber at Sun 06 Jun 2010 09:09:01 AM PDT:

RT @NeuerWeg: [City Journal USA] A Basic Income for All? http://alturl.com/mmmn #Grundeinkommen #revenudevie #basicincome

Middle Class: Our Poor and Huddled Masses

“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”

Yeah, that should fix it all up real quick.

"Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come."

Her counselor has a couple of possibilities — a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.

And even these numbers are A Complete Fiction.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

Welcome to the American Dream 2.0. Isn't time to make the REAL change?

IMAGE: New York Times