5/10/20

Why so many people lost jobs - overexploitation

One number strikes most - the rate of participation in the labor force dropped to the level of the earlier 60s (60.2%) and much larger unemployment problems for females. What actually happened in the 60s and 70s was the increase in the participation of females, who entered the labor force mostly in the service sector of the economy. It was the time when females started to do accustomed homework (e.g. child and personal care, accommodation and food)  for money. Before that happened, this extremely important work was not paid-up by money. When it happened, females entered the world of money and ... now have to pay taxes. Moreover, they now work for capital, which takes approximately 60% of the income (the current share of capital income in the total personal income).  It seems to be kind of overexploitation of unessential workers who suffer first because their work can be easily stopped without any essential harm to people life unlike energy and water supply, food production (remember extraordinary measures to protect meat factories),  medical services, security like police and army, and so on.
Economically, one could count the homework as a part of GDP as applied to imputed rent, which is never paid as such (various imputations give ~15% of the US GDP with the imputed rent of ~6%). However, the loss of tax and profit, in this case, would be a large part of the Gross Domestic Income. It is clear that the temporarily stopped services will restart soon and the tax and profit will be regained by the state and capital. But the COVID-19 epidemic highlighted many problems in economic theory and real economy. The best time to learn something important for laypeople and scientists. For example, it is clear that some economic definitions and measurements are biased. 

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