Hot Take: The United States has an unemployment rate of 50 to 60%.
Yes, the official rate is about 4%, but if you define employment, not just as having an occupation, but as being able to afford basic human needs, then things start to look much different.
Housing alone breaks the numbers for millions of people. For one, an American worker needs to earn more than $30/hour to afford a modest 1-bedroom apartment in most US metros without spending more than 30% of his/her salary, yet, about 45% of American workers earn under $20/hour.
The MIT’s Living Wage Calculator puts a living wage for a single adult at $25–$45/hour depending on the location, and by that standard, about 60% of American workers fall short in high-cost regions.
Then there are healthcare costs and the fact that medical debt is the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US.
All-in, a single American adult needs roughly at least $50 000–70 000/year in most metros just to cover rent, food, utilities, and basic healthcare without financial precarity. Only about 40% of American workers earn that or more.
So, if employment is defined as being able to afford basic human dignity, then functional insufficiency rate reaches up to 60% of the American working-age population, who should just be defined as unemployed.
All of this is important because the American economic model gets exported globally through the IMF, the World Bank, business school curricula, Hollywood’s portrayal of American prosperity, and general US soft power.
Developing countries are taught to admire the US’s GDP growth, low official unemployment, stock market performance, entrepreneurship culture and deregulated markets. What gets left out is that US life expectancy ranks below Chile, Slovenia and Cuba or that the US has the highest child poverty rate among wealthy nations.
The cruel irony is that many developing countries that are pushed to adopt American-style economic liberalisation actually already have great things America doesn’t, like universal or near-universal healthcare.
But now they’re being asked to trade genuine human security for GDP numbers and a formal employment rate that, as we’ve established, measures almost nothing meaningful about human welfare.