We really need better ways of measuring economic health. I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
Either way, "full employment" doesn't mean much unless you take into account whether people are actually able to live a stable lifestyle or are burning the candle at both ends just to put food on the table. One of these enables folks to buy nonessentials and fund all those sectors of the economy, the other doesn't.
We have good metrics. The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.
Your scenario would be called out by median household income, or better median disposable household income. Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad.
IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Absolutely not.
If corporate revenue increases, but wages stay the same, GDP per capita goes up, yet the workers aren't any better off. All that extra money is being absorbed by the ones at the top.
Median disposable household income is probably the best measure.
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
If I used to make $78k as a full time IT employee, but now have to work two jobs to make $78k, I still have same household income but I’m considerably worse than before.
A combination of hours worked, wages earned and household debt together would paint a much more accurate picture.
This metric of underemployment is captured in U-5 and U-6 in the BLS statistics.
It's less common to report, but in the aftermath of the financial crisis I remember hearing more about it. You can construct a chart in FRED that covers it:
If the analysis in the public discourse doesn't capture what matters, that's a problem, and that some more obscure report contains useful information is only a minor mitigation. If anything I'd say highlighting that obscure report is a perfect example of nerds using their abilities to contribute to the public discourse.
Economists get things wrong all the time. It’s not about others not possibly have thought of it already, it’s about the fact that policy and politics is still driven by other measures that are inaccurate.
Just because economists get things wrong, does not imply that therefore they can be, and need to be, corrected by computer programmers with superficial understandings of the field. You can both be wrong.
This is like arguing that politicians don't need to be corrected by non-politicians, or that people with no understand of programming can't criticize the tech industry.
No one is arguing that being a computer programmer gives a person unique insights here.
False equivalence. Politicians aren’t scientists, and people do criticize programmers all the time. I got at least 3 complaints at work today about bugs in our software.
Saying that economists are scientists and therefore above reproach from non-economists ignores the way that ideology and research become intertwined whenever public policy is involved.
Saying "trust the science" at all times, even when the scientists in question are neoliberal technocrats is how you end up with the populist backlash against "trusting the science" that America is presently going through.
Obviously people criticize can and should criticize programmers, that's the point.
I'm not sure household debt is a great indicator. Someone that has a mortgage will have much more household debt than a renter, but also not have to pay rent.
You could argue household debt is just another form of rent, where you “rent” capital from the wealthy in exchange for paying interest on a monthly basis. Just because you don’t pay a rent directly named as such doesn’t change the substance of it.
Debt, within reason, is just a tool. It provides leverage and it lets you buy things for which you don't have cash-in-hand--houses in particular. It can also encourage overspending (something that car dealers capitalize on) but that's another story.
It's a very different form of rent though, namely because the mortgage borrower has a lot of collateralized debt and the mortgage borrower owns the appreciation (or depreciation) of the property (proportional to their equity).
The amount of equity you have in your home matters. Most recessions do not take 20% off home values, so people with conventional loans are pretty safe. Even the Great Depression just cut valuations about 35%.
If you lose your job in a depression there will be plenty of people willing to buy assets at a discount. If you have equity in your home then your position will be net positive. About half of all mortgages have an outstanding balance less than 50% of the home's value.
That kinda works in the abstract, but it's pretty risky for any individual house. If your house was somehow a representative slice of all US housing, sure maybe it won't drop 35%.
But if you owned a house in Detroit from 2003-2010 it might have dropped 70-80%. Or, more on point for many on HN, if you own a house in the Bay Area worth $2-$3M with 25% equity, and the tech job market collapses, then you might get completely wiped out.
I think debt is good, actually, for most middle class households, and they're actively trying to increase their debt because that results in greater cash-flow, more savings, and more security in terms of retirement. That's why buying a home is Goal #1 for most Americans.
Home mortgage debt is mostly "good" debt for middle class households. Pretty much any other type of debt is a net negative in financial terms. There are less tangible benefits to owning a newer, more reliable car for example, so it can be a bit murky. General consumption debt is a bad bet for pretty much anyone.
Whatever metric or scenario you can think up, I guarantee governments, think tanks, private data companies, or universities are already tracking (or attempting to)
Even if they are, it's not very useful if they have an adversarial relationship to us, the worker. Government is the only one listed above that is supposed to be the champion of the worker, but when was the last time that was true? At some point, you have to do your own digging. Trust but verify.
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
Median disposable income won’t meaningfully capture OP’s case of losing a high-paying job and having it replaced by a low-paying one. For that you need to look at the distribution of household disposable income.
We have terrific economic metrics in America. It really should be part of a mandatory civics class to learn how to read them.
Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out earlier.
I think a better measure would be household income divided by number of adults in the household. Possibly with some consideration for the number of children in the household.
E.g. OECD normalizes household income by household size:
> Household income is adjusted for differences in the needs of households of different sizes with an equivalence scale that divides household income by the square root of household size. The adjusted income is then attributed to every person in the household.
Also a great measure is the money supply & velocity chart - the M2.
If GDP goes up and the velocity of money drops, it means that real economic gains are not being realized by those who actually spend the majority of their income versus saving it.
Not that there's anything wrong with saving money - it's just that the more money that is being spent regularly, the healthier the entire economy is. Generally.
“The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters” is supposedly a good book discussing the inadequacy of GDP as a metric for how well off a society is.
Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off. I think we are using inequality as a very bad proxy for poverty but we have much better metrics for that. I suspect people just dislike it for emotional reasons. I want to point out that Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US. Yet everyone is fine with Sweden.
I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system
If everyone's real wealth doubles, that is great, but it is not a stable equilibrium.
If a very small percentage of the people own a large percentage of the wealth, it compounds. They literally cannot spend all of their income on consumption, except maybe by lighting piles of cash on fire, but that is not a route to doubling the real wealth of everyone in society.
That means that asset prices rise, and fewer people can afford property. Jobs concentrate near where rich people live, because they are the ones with disposable income to spend, making this worse. Transfer payments (rent) from ordinary people to the remaining property owners are high. Wages stagnate, because wealthy people spend most of their money on assets, not goods and services. Consumer demand decreases. Capital moves away from producing things that ordinary people need, because they can no longer afford them, and is instead allocated to producing luxury goods. Social mobility is low because low wages and high property prices make it impossible to work your way up.
The cycle is self-reinforcing, not self-correcting. Most of history throughout the world has consisted of a few very wealthy feudal lords and a large population of serfs.
Strengthening the political system might be nice, but post-Citizen's United, that does not seem to be the direction the US is headed, at least, nor is it in the interests of those who benefit most from the current system.
> Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up,
Not in terms of the ratio between you, which is the way we normally talk about wealth inequality : "he has X times more wealth than I do", or "she makes X times more than I do".
Anyway, this is not how wealth inequality has grown at all. It has happened by most people's real income barely rising at all over 40-50 years, while the rich have seen theirs rise by huge factors (hundreds to many thousands in some cases).
If what you care about is standing real wages why talk about inequality? I'm concerned that it just functions better as rage bait and leads to unproductive policies.
1. it is well established that human pyschology makes relative income and wealth much more significant than absolute. And it doesn't matter which quintile you're in for that to be true.
2. real median household income stayed relatively flat between 1970 and 2012. Since then it has risen again in a significant way.
3. despite the gains in real median household income, the rise in the household income (and net worth) of various upper percentiles (20%, 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1% ... take your pick) has been very, very much larger. consequently, the "double my income, double Musk's income" line is not a description of what has happened.
4. the percentage of GDP that accrues to capital rather than to labor have gone steadily up since 1980.
it matters when "something" become scarce that normal person need to compete with the richests to get, or if one day the richests decided they want something and suddenly those things become scarce. Let's not kid ourselves, majority of politics can be bought by billionaires and when some day fresh waters become scarce or wheat is, it'll be monopolized by the richests. We already get this in some way with housing.
> If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off.
What's this universe that only contains you and Elon? Or do you think that everyone's real wealth has doubled?
> I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system
Citizens United has practically dismissed that possibility in the near term.
Wealth inequality matters a lot when rich people can spend unlimited amounts of money buying influence in politics and then use that influence to enact policies that favor the rich over the poor.
It depends on what you're trying to measure. From a purely rational perspective, increasing inequality doesn't matter if everyone's quality of life is improving. But humans are irrational, and happiness is often tied to social status within the hierarchy. Even if you're materially better off you might find yourself lower on the status scale. Status is a zero-sum game. Maybe we shouldn't care about such things but yet most people do.
At billionairre scale money becomes qualitatively different compared to typical household scale. For households money typically goes to consumption (or future consumption via savings) whereas billionairre money goes to affect how productive (and often political) forces get organized.
At consumption money level at least inequality is also inefficient allocation of resources due to the diminishing marginal utility of money.
Lots of leaps of logic here. I'm certainly not fine with Sweden having a higher disparity of wealth but I don't live in Sweden so I can't effect much change there. We're also ignoring how many safety net benefits Sweden provides its population, ostensibly because it reasonably taxes its wealthy. If Swedes are ok with their situation, it's probably because it's being handled adequately.
The issue with disparity is it's a reflection of the unfair conditions of compensation. Elon Musk's employees make him that money, not Elon. He could make all of his employees multi-millionaires overnight by granting more generous stock plans commensurate with the money they've made the company. Reasonable profit sharing plans basically ensure this, but since companies all collude to not grant them, we see them as relatively rare in the working world. The state should be requiring companies to grant profit sharing. Not gonna bike shed it here, but it needs to be done yesterday.
Certainly not in isolation. It measures inequality. If everyone has nothing you get a perfect Gini score. Pakistan, Ukraine, Belarus and Algeria have a lower (better) Gini score than all of the Americas and most of western Europe and Japan. Want to move?
The Gini coefficients published for deeply corrupt countries like Pakistan and Ukraine are almost certainly a total fiction. Much of the real wealth held by the elites in those countries is hidden from official statistics.
If a software engineer starts working at Applebees, GDP will decrease. If lots of software engineers do it, GDP decreases more.
If corporate revenue increases and is spent (as most revenue is), then the workers will be better off in the most bland "raising all boats" sense of the word - there will be more competition for their labor and more opportunities for them to jump ship.
GDP gets a bad rap but if I had to pick a single metric, that's the one I'd choose.
I attended a talk by Alberto Alesina (RIP) a few years back and he made the point that, yeah, GDP isn't perfect, but by and large, people in countries with a high GDP are healthier and happier. It might not measure the difference between the US and France as well, but it's pretty good at pointing out that Sweden is doing better than Somalia.
One thing I remember from the first Dot-com crash circa 2002 is that the service quality in Silicon Valley area restaurants suddenly got a lot better. There were a lot of former "HTML programmers" forced to find other jobs.
Right - if you ask a heart surgeon to wait tables they'll probably do a great job!
But it's still a waste of their talents and society as a whole will be worse off than if they did heart surgery. You can measure that because a waiter makes minimum wage and a heart surgeon does not - the heart surgeon contributes more to the GDP than a food service worker.
That's the meaning of that metric and that's why it's useful.
That was not the argument. The argument was that their case "lost six-figure job, working as waiter now" was covered by GDP/capita, and it is. Applebee's doesn't make the same revenue per capita as a place that hands out six-figure jobs.
Your argument is the exact reason why the media focus on a single metric is bad - because some but-whataboutism will always pop up and use it as pretext to debate an unrelated issue not covered by the metric.
It's also the exact reason why we shouldn't measure economic health as a single metric at all - it's not that to whom value accrues doesn't matter, it's that it's a different metric than how much value is generated in the first place.
It also explains why there isn't a single best economic policy - the absence of a single metric means there is no strict ordering.
(You can easily construe a counter-argument why median disposable household income isn't the best metric, either: "Median wage is stagnant, everybody needs to take a second job so disposable income goes up". And you can do that for every single metric in isolation)
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
I think the following joke encapsulates the problem with GDP pretty well..
---
Two economists go for a walk in the forest, and having a competitive nature, the first economist sees a pile of bear shit and says to the second "I'll give you $100 to eat that bear shit". The second economist, being one that generally does anything for money, eats the bear shit, takes the $100 and they continue on their walk. The second economist wants to get back at the first, sees another pile of bear shit and says "I dare YOU to eat that bear shit for $100" thinking no way they will actually do it. Not wanting to be outdone by the second economist, the first also eats the bear shit and takes $100.
After walking a bit further, the second economist stops and says to the first "Wait.. did we just both eat shit for nothing??" to which the first replies "No of course not, that would be crazy.. we increased GDP by $200".
---
I can't remember the source of the joke but been around for a while and I may have butchered some of the original details.
I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.
One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.
Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.
I think income is still too crude and misleading. You really need some kind of complex individual economic health measure made of many indicators.
But a more informative proxy would be median net worth - individual, not household, with married couple net worth divided by two for simplicity - as a fairly simple assets vs liabilities calculation.
The net worth distribution would be even more revealing because it would highlight the difference between owners and renters.
This still doesn't reveal net worth stability. In the US you can - and many people do - go from a seven figure net worth to bankruptcy because of a health crisis or (increasingly) a climate disaster.
So you'd want a supplemental distribution showing how variable net worth is, how many people are reduced to bankruptcy at each decile, and how much movement there is in each decile.
Reducing these kinds of complexities to a single number seems misleading at best.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Not necessarily. If most of the difference in pay goes to shareholders and/or executives, then the GDP per capita doesn't change. This could be because technology increases productivity, but in a way that increases wealth inequality, and results not only in greater wealth for the already wealthy, but less wealth for workers who are no longer needed.
Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are.
It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
> It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
I think this is how the electoral college was intended to function. This is a hard problem to solve, especially when some of the players aren't operating in good faith.
> public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond
This is convincingly (to me) explained by the removal of critical thinking courses in public schools, at least in the US. I never experienced them myself but I've heard they included exercises like determining if a statement is fact or opinion, true or false, etc. There was very little of that when I was in school and it was certainly never a dedicated hour-block in high school.
I agree with the premise here completely, but not what it's in response to necessarily.
Most people keep very shallow knowledge of most subjects, but this doesn't mean things shouldn't be reported. It just means they(media) shouldn't spend a ton of time explaining how said numbers are calculated. Most people read, hear, or otherwise know the current inflation rate, but not exactly how it's calculated.
All that to say, if some metric isn't being reported, there's a reason - likely for some agenda being pushed.
There's the problem of scale, and also of duration. Let's say Lee Kuan Yew genuinely wants what's best for Singapore as a whole. How do you ensure that the next autocrat will be equally benign?
This is the exact issue. There is a lot more variance in autocrats. You can get Lee Kuan Yew and you can get Kaiser Wilhelm. With democracy you are much more likely to get something in the middle. In the end of the day the cost of an bad autocrat is higher than the opportunity cost of a milk toast government compared to Lee Kuan Yew. China is still catching up from the Mao years.
I do work that social media will change this though
Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast.
Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food
Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.
That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.
It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient.
You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders.
The only thing that actually works is good leadership with long term vision and if anything democracy gets in the way of that.
The benefit of democracy is that it has somewhat of a self-correcting mechanism build in and it functions without violence. Autocracies don't have that.
You say Democracies have a short track record. While this is true in the grand scheme of things, each individual non-Democracy that came before did as well. Rulers conquered each other's countries, usurped the current leaders etc. quite regularly. I'm not sure I'd count that as stable and longer-lasting.
Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.
Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
GDP or even GDP per capita is not the best metric. You can sell 100 iphones for $1000 or sell 500 cheap androids for $200 and both countries will have same GDP but I think output and outcome is much better in latter case (you produced 5x more products and 5x more people can benefits and be more productive with those 'tools'). Sure iphone for $1000 is better than $200 android phone but is it 5x better? Same with cars you can sell ferrari or more cheaper toyotas for the same value. We would have to measure how much goods we can produce.
> the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look.
Indeed. Almost always in these discussions people have already made up their minds about the state of the economy and will just cherry-pick whatever metric best justifies their case (typically that the economy sucks).
There's never been a time in my life where people weren't complaining about how the economy is terrible and how that's clearly obvious if you just look at the real numbers.
Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy. Everyone has a vested interest in the stock market rising, in keeping their jobs, and a shared desire to see things go up forever.
This is why there needs to be some kind of safety net so that the economy is not a proxy for life and death. In the USA, if you run out of money, you are in real trouble. We need to decouple success/failure in the market from personal safety. You should be able to try opening a hot dog stand, have it tank, and still be able to eat and go to the doctor.
>Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy.
Isn't the media incentivized to keep you watching or reading? The common criticism of media is they like to exaggerate a minor issue to get you to click on a headline.
They might be short sellers, or they might be foreign and view the US as an economic rival. There may be more incentives than just more clicks for the media.
A more likely explanation is that outside of a few specialized publications, most members of the media are just as financially and economically illiterate as the average person. I mean how many finance and economics courses do you have to pass to get a degree in journalism or communications? There's no deep media conspiracy here.
> Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire.
Unemployment rates are calculated based on surveys. They call many people and ask a series of questions to determine which category they fit into.
That is part of it but it goes beyond it. I have a group of friends who are pretty much all nerds and every once in a while we end up discussing how desirable different countries are to live in. Because we are nerds metrics will be pulled out. You just need to look at so much and depending what you personally care about things can be very misleading just because you scoped some metrics wrong. It's not obvious to everyone that Ireland has a high GDP because corporate profits get funneled through there. Looking at many European countries you might think salaries are pretty good, especially when PPP corrected. Well, Unless you are a software engineer. Houses might be cheaper, till you look at price per squarfoot... It's genuinely hard.
I’m just going to pile on by suggesting you really concern yourself with looking into why GDP is absolutely not a good measure. You may want to start with the fact that the economist that developed GDP has long been outspoken against how it has been used and wished he had never developed it.
The fact that the government printing money and then squandering it on some thing useless makes the GDP go up, should be your first clue.
I don’t think you are a great success in life if you take on debt from organized crime, spend it on hookers and blow, and then tell everyone how rich you are based on how much you spent, i.e., squandered.
Media covers plenty. We call it "headline unemployment" because it fits in a headline. If you read articles and analysis there's plenty of places in the MSM that get into nitty gritty.
> I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. The thing is, at a large scale, these events don't matter. They are rare enough to be noise in the grand scheme of things.
The reason the U-3 is the canonical "unemployment rate" is because that is where the core signal is. The bulk of the change in all of the other more inclusive rates is the change in the U-3 scaled by some factor.
But really, your complaint has nothing to do with actual employment, but instead with earnings. Wages are also a metric captured and reported by the BLS and better serve your message.
U3 is kinda silly but is mostly used because it is the original employment rate definition and therefore is comparable across time.
U6 would not include the original poster unless his new job was "minimally attached or part-time for economic reasons." U-6 does not, generally, include people who got a new job for lower pay.
The harm is when people take the metric as literally "what percentage of people who want to be employed can find a job", which U-3 emphatically does not represent.
It doesn't directly measure it, true. But the parent poster was saying it has extremely high positive correlation to measures that do measure it, so it probably doesn't matter.
By that logic should we also further broaden "unemployment" to mean "100% - employment rate"? That's a pretty common misconception as well, maybe even more common than the one you listed.
>This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment.
I always wonder how this is captured. For U-3, you could go with the number getting unemployment benefits. For U-6, you'd have to literally call people and ask them, and I've literally never been called to ask if I'm working in my field and I'd guess most of us haven't either. I have to think if they are sampling, it's a very narrow sample likely biased by geography, industry, age, etc.
U-6 mostly comes from the BLS Occupational Employment Survey.
I don't think the original poster would be considered as part of U-6 unless his new job is defined as "marginally attached to the workforce or part-time for economic reasons." Simply getting a job with less pay doesn't put you in U-6.
If that's true, you've identified a huge hole in the measures. And you can't fix what you can't measure. I think you're right, because despite massive tech unemployment in the last 4 years, I don't see any of the charts spiking. Furthermore, people keep saying "this is captured in Figure X" but if it were really captured, it would be somewhat separable and could produce a chart that shows it in detail. I fear we're giving the Fed too much credit here.
The models are pretty complicated and incorporate several data sources, sampling is just one part of it. I've seen (very dry) documents that go into the methodology in detail. The model does introduce some obvious biases through assumptions of representativeness but how those interact with the headline numbers is not straightforward.
You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?
And that is before we talk about alternative signals like the ADP number this like references.
Anytime someone says “we need better ways” you should just read it as “I should do more reading”, because this is a very well studied, understood and measured set of data.
This response is a bit less than helpful. Could you provide an example of a metric from this diverse set that fits what the OP is asking for? I feel like there are at least two use cases from their post:
* a metric that measures if people's jobs are paying enough to put food on the table
* a metric that measures whether people's employment matches their education?
Your second query is more subjective. Most people would probably point you at the U6 underemployment number as that’s the most famous one. I like the employment projections series for this kind of question though
https://www.bls.gov/emp/
If you're talking about the spike in Q1 2020, there's nothing weird going on. That's from all the service workers getting laid off, which bumps up the average because they're typically lower paid, and no longer drag down the "employed" average.
Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
It's also a sign of intense hubris - the idea that thousands of labor economists have never considered something they thought of after 30 seconds of reading means that either a) the economists are all idiots or b) the reader is orders of magnitude smarter than them.
The communications from the BLS are quite good and easily understandable. The problem is that the people making these complaints aren't reading those, they're reading the mainstream reporting on the BLS stats, which is extremely lossily-compressed, and then assuming this makes them qualified to criticize the underlying stats. Journalists deserve some flak here for the superficial way they report on the numbers, but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.
> but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.
One thing is for sure is that people aren't going to do that.
Anyway, it seems disingenuous (or just completely irrelevant) to complain that people are attacking the BLS rather than how this is wielded to perpetrate a polemic.
My point is one doesn't have to go to the original sources, they simply have to ask themselves "is it likely no one has thought of this before?" before launching into a criticism...
This happens everywhere with lots of people in many different contexts. I call it the “‘why don’t we just’ disease”, or WDWJ Disease. When you’re in any leadership position, you have to stay especially careful to catch yourself from falling prey to this pernicious effect and behavior, and its equally debilitating sibling yak shaving when you over index on preventing WDWJ.
> It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6.
The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).
This is a citizenry education problem, a media problem but not a metrics problem.
These metrics are built and used by people who do apply multiple measures - every day. If you are in a trading or macro oriented role, you will not be using just one figure. You will make the effort because your incentives and training encourage you to do so.
The non-specialist, which is most people, is never going to have a set of metrics which make it easy, because no metric can overcome all the practical and technical issues strewn across the path to producing it.
It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not.
You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate.
I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.
"To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily."
> The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data.
> At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated.
> Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
> We really need better ways of measuring economic health.
What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.
If the same amount of wages are getting paid out and its merely getting reallocated as to whom, that's a very different scenario from people getting laid off to reduce labor costs.
Unemployment is meant to track how many people are working, not income equality.
> that's a very different scenario from people getting laid off to reduce labor costs.
Not necessarily. People could be laid off to reduce labor costs, in order to distribute more wealth to those at the top. And since the average is national, it doesn't even have to be at the same company. People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.
> Unemployment is meant to track how many people are working, not income equality.
Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.
> People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.
This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment, this is a sign of firm B outcompeting firm A. It might be interesting in its own right, but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.
> Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.
Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time. No one feels the need to compare the unemployment rates when it's mentioned CEO to employee pay has increased from 20:1 to 290:1 since 1960. Everyone understands that the economy is a complex, multifaceted thing and the fact it may be doing well or poorly by one metric has no bearing on a discussion of a different aspect.
People care about employment rate because work is critical to our culture - we spend most of our lives working, we identify ourselves by our professions, we rely on income for both survival and social status, most of us would find it extremely unpleasant to be without a job for an extended period of time, and most of us would be delighted if our skills were in high demand at the moment such that we could confidently secure better pay. Regardless of wealth inequality, the overwhelming majority of us want unemployment to be low, and primarily frictional. An unexpected spike in unemployment is well correlated with various bad things which we would love to avoid or at least prepare for. It is a useful metric for economic health, like resting heartrate is a useful metric for bodily health. A good resting heart rate doesn't mean you have nothing else to be concerned about, but a bad resting heart rate is a concern regardless of whatever else is going on.
> This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment
It could be. What if B is outcompeting because they have offshored labor, or using new technology that reduces demands for labor. Not that those things are necessarily bad, but just because the total productivity is increasing doesn't necessarily mean everyone is better off.
My point is that the situation described can happen without a change to the average income, and average income isn't a good metric for watching changes in wealth inequality.
> but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.
I never said it was.
> Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time
IME, such things are talked about much less than unemployment, especially in relation to politics and policy.
And I think part of the reason for that is because it is easy to understand, and it is easier to control with policy than other metrics, since the government can just create new jobs and provide incentives to create jobs, even if those jobs are lower paid than the jobs that were lost.
Perhaps we need better metrics actually tracking income inequality, because tracking employment rate without that seems pretty disingenuous as a metric of aggregate economic health.
Or rather, we should be reporting such metrics that we surely must track already together.
I don't follow at all. Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"? The problem is that unemployment, particularly U-3, is a bad signal for aggregate economic health by itself. As is GDP. You need an signal for wealth distribution to get a sense of how a given person can interpret to understand how well the economy is serving them. At the very least.
EDIT: Of course, the ultimate issue is people wanting to cherry-pick metrics to push their polemic. If you have any solutions to that I'm all ears. We've been able to articulate an accurate understanding all along, but that doesn't make for easy headlines or simplistic campaign platforms.
> Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"?
There's no single metric for aggregate economic health in the same way that there's no single metric for aggregate server health. There's a problem in expectations when people complain about U-3; its not supposed to be a measure of economic health. And thats the point being made here.
And yet, that's exactly how U-3 is used by everyone but the labor economists that define it. Hence why this conversation is happening in the first place.
> that's exactly how U-3 is used by everyone but the labor economists that define it
No, it’s not. Enterprise demand planning, market research, hell even political analysis for donors and politicians——everyone who has a use for the data knows how to use them.
If you want to see the contrast in treatment, compare the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal publications versus free media, e.g. CNBC or TV news.
Yes, and the fault is on the people using U-3 that way, not the economists. Talking about the problems with U-3 implies that the economists messed up. The issue is that everyone is looking for a quick 5-second way of making conclusions about a complicated topic.
We don't need a new metric. There is no new metric that will satisfy that criteria. The only solution is to improve the way we talk about the economy.
Is it disingenuous to report obituaries without including birth announcements in the same article? Surely only reporting the one gives a skewed view of demographic health.
News is about reporting new information in a timely manner. When a metric gets updated, it's good to let people know, especially if the new value is unexpected. Many people may have various different uses for this update. It is impossible to give every piece of data anyone could consider useful in a single article. Luckily, that is unnecessary. All that information is publicly available and people can go look it up for themselves at any time.
If you don't care enough to look up the metrics that are reported, that's not a problem with the metrics or the reporting.
> Is it disingenuous to report obituaries without including birth announcements in the same article? Surely only reporting the one gives a skewed view of demographic health.
The point of obituaries is not to give any sense of demographic health.
> News is about reporting new information in a timely manner. When a metric gets updated, it's good to let people know, especially if the new value is unexpected. Many people may have various different uses for this update. It is impossible to give every piece of data anyone could consider useful in a single article. Luckily, that is unnecessary. All that information is publicly available and people can go look it up for themselves at any time.
Sure, but the issue is that the reporting treats the metric as meaningfully representative of accessibility of employment when it's actually representative of who is seeking the unemployment benefit.
> If you don't care enough to look up the metrics that are reported, that's not a problem with the metrics or the reporting.
> The point of obituaries is not to give any sense of demographic health.
And the point of unemployment statistics is not to give any sense of economic equality.
> Sure, but the issue is that the reporting treats the metric as meaningfully representative of accessibility of employment
Because it is a pretty good proxy for this. When unemployment is high, wages tend to stagnate and it takes longer on average for people to find new employment. When unemployment is low, wages go up and people tend to have a much easier time finding a job quickly. There is a remarkable correlation between people seeking unemployment benefits and accessibility of employment. Sure there are people who would rather take a low paying job than the benefits, but there have always been such people, and the proportion doesn't quickly change, so within reason you can compare the situation at time A with the situation at time B based on the metric which is measured the same way at both times and get a pretty good sense of what the difference is.
It is not the end all be all, but nothing ever could be. It is one of countless metrics, all of which have their appropriate uses.
The U6 unemployment rate is supposed to cover those who are underemployed. What is usually reported is the U3 unemployment rate which is closest to that used internationally as defined by ILO.
Supposed to, but doesn't. The U6 rate includes two new things: part-time workers, and a very strangely-defined category: people who are NOT working at ALL, AND were looking for work previously, AND have stopped looking for 4+ weeks.
It doesn't capture the common on-the-street definition of the word "underemployment", such as a tech worker flipping burgers at mcdonald's.
Perhaps that category is simply to hard or expensive to measure, or it's specifically being avoided. Either/or really.
There are six kinds of unemployment stats the US tracks (below). Nothing sounds specific to underemployment by skills specifically (maybe u-6?). That would probably come from other metrics, like quintile income distributions shifting downwards?
You didn't ask, but just in case (from an internet search):
U-1: Long-term unemployed
* Definition: People unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percentage of the civilian labor force.
* Purpose: Measures persistent unemployment.
U-2: Job losers and temporary workers
* Definition: People who lost jobs or completed temporary jobs, as a percentage of the labor force.
* Purpose: Captures recent layoffs and temp contract ends.
U-3: Official unemployment rate (headline rate)
* Definition: Total unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force.
* Purpose: This is the standard "unemployment rate" reported in news and economic discussions.
* Definition: U-3 plus discouraged workers (those who want a job but stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available).
* Purpose: Adds a layer of marginal attachment to the labor force.
U-5: Unemployed + All marginally attached workers
* Definition: U-4 plus all others marginally attached to the labor force, not just discouraged workers.
* Marginally attached workers: People not currently working or looking for work but who want a job and have looked in the past 12 months (but not the past 4 weeks).
U-6: Broadest measure
* Definition: U-5 plus part-time workers who want full-time jobs (i.e., involuntary part-time workers).
* Purpose: The most comprehensive measure of labor underutilization, including: Discouraged workers, Marginally attached workers, and Underemployed part-timers
I have been thinking about this a lot recently as well and think there is a really simple answer and fix and am frustrated I haven’t seen it meaningfully attempted or discussed anywhere (passively consuming message boards etc)
Cash flow per person (per household) just like the IRS does (except also including money from loans).
A big tech company firing a few thousand current employees and hiring twice as many H1B workers shows a net gain for jobs health, when this represents wages dropping, more people unemployed, and has a very negative impact on the economy. Many big companies game the metrics being Goodharted by regulators and watchdogs, and people guilelessly buy into the headlines, without inspecting the reality underneath.
There's also labour participation and underemployment to look at.
In your case underemployment would go up.
You need to look at all metrics together to get a bigger picture. Example is unemployment is down, but so is labour participation. That doesn't mean there was job growth, it means people stopped looking.
Or if unemployment is down, but underemployment is up. Similar picture emerges.
Same with the stock market completly decoupled from the real economy. It's a wealthy index, there could be a real recession and the stock market still would go up.
I may be one of those statistics soon. My company refuses to lay people off but they are sending people out via wildly unrealistic expectations (move the goal post). The job market for six figure salaries is weak and I imagine many companies are doing this very same thing.
I am a bit confused.. If you are willing to work at Applebee's for minimum wage job, then you are employed. Why should you be considered unemployed?
If you all you can find are the minimum wage jobs and you choose not to work there, then you should be considered unemployed and if you are long term unemployed, U6 captures that.
We know about all of those things and BLS publishes (or at least used to) reliable stats on them.
The unemployment rate as reported is probably the best way to report objectively on employment and the ebb and flow of layoffs and hiring. A more qualitative assessment requires more adjustments and interpretation.
It’s called under-employment. It has been widely discussed in the literature but it’s very difficult to measure. Economic statistics do suffer somewhat from a lamplight effect.
You seem to want better reporting of economic news. I would say to vote on it with your pocket and pick a better selection of news sources, but I'm not sure those better sources still exist.
Either way, nearly nobody uses the numbers you see on the headlines for any serious decision.
Applebees drops prices to enable their employees to eat at Applebees. Margins fall, wages universally clamped to minimum wage, layoffs hit. Fewer Applebees workers with lower wages means a shrinking demand side of the Applebees ouroboros, resulting in a spiral of Applebees price cuts, revenue drops, layoffs. The end state of humanity is a desolate Applebees parking lot strewn with desiccated human corpses and the last person alive is the largest shareholder of Applebees, inside the store, consuming their own flesh.
Not at you personally, but your post being top and active, while not really relevant to the story presented always makes me wonder do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?
> do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?
No, they upvote because they agree with it.
Just as some people flaunt their incompetence with basic math or civic involvement as a point of pride, it’s somewhat common in tech for folks to hold their lack of familiarity with economics, particularly econometrics, as a point of pride. (If you wanted to bury it, you’d flag it.)
I agree, among the many things that need way better measurements, chief among them besides unemployment, being economic preference, is an alternative to the nonsensical GDP.
But regarding unemployment, another absolutely bizarre fact of that measure of whether people have a means of producing in order to be compensated and become consumers, is the fact that is an American citizen loses his job and cannot find one after 90 days… poof, he’s not counted and therefore the unemployment rate increased. Furthermore, if now a foreign person comes into the USA, whether legally or internally, and is employed, the unemployment rate decreases, and it is not really captured that the lower wage the foreigners are willing to take, also further undermines all other wages.
Frankly, we should really be assessing why the heck we are even allowing ourselves to be managed as a vector in a database of numbers like some widget. The only real reason the ruling class cares about the “unemployment rate” is primarily to gauge whether they need to put more bodies on the fire to suppress wages and keep the anxiety and stress of the peasants competing high enough to keep profits maximized.
If it was actually “we need high skilled workers, the ruling class would have done things a long time ago to foster developing high skilled workers over the last 30+ years that they’ve been complaining about that while just using it as an excuse to fall back onto their old ways of importing brown people to suppress wages and to serve them and their decadent lives. “Who will cut our grass and raise our children” they cry out, just like when their slaves we’re taken from them.
This is like looking at your revenue numbers and choosing to focus on the number of units sold and disregarding price per unit. The government releases TONS of analysis on wages and wage growth (e.g. the "price per unit"). The St. Louis FRED is a great resource.
I don't blame you. I blame the media for bad reporting. If you dig deeper, I can think of a few reasons why the media would choose to focus on some metrics and not others but I'll leave my conspiracy theories for another discussion.
We do - People employed part time for Economic Reasons.
If what your looking for is 'People with salaries below the highest they've ever earned', then you're just going to get a very noisy metric of sales people on bad commission years, etc.
Why do we care so much if jobs are created or not created? The market is the market, either we need more jobs or we don't. If there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more? We're just dressing up socialism in capitalism's clothes. If you want to seriously do capitalism, then there is absolutely no reason to measure employment. If it's zero then it's correct, if it's 100% then it's correct, the number is always correct.
The problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter. Why do we care so much if people have jobs? Because in America you will die homeless and starve without one. The core issue is much further down Maslow's hierarchy.
The food and housing are too expensive so much so that we are now flabbergasted by the reality of the end game of this system, and we're trying to use euphemistic metrics to broom the larger issue (food and a roof) under the bed. The situation is so bad that a large percentage of Americans are absolutely fine dragging anything that resembles economic competition (immigrants) by their fucking ears off the street, mom dad and child, and dumping them in some random country. The larger US population is unable to cede even an ounce of empathy because their wallets are held hostage by a loan-based society/growth-oriented pricing (my house MUST be worth 40% more since I bought it - really? I see.). We're at an inflection point.
This could be a false analogy, but I'll throw it out there. Imagine a startup that cannot sell their product because it simply sucks. Now imagine not coming to terms with that and doing relentless A/B testing and pointing at the data from that. You won't solve shit with that data, go back to the drawing board.
Infinite growth and infinite "go work more and harder" doesn't sound like the path forward for America. This is very much a "work smarter" situation, because you have to be stupid to keep buying that paradigm. The deal we made with capitalism had nothing to do with annihilating our core conscious of feeding and housing everyone. Capitalism was never supposed to eradicate that human virtue and certainly not add a layer of "must have money and must have job" to stay dry/warm and not hungry, and at the very least not be in constant financial anxiety (which is the day-to-day psychological torment the average American faces).
Another way to interpret employment numbers is to simply meditatively say out loud "There's 70k people this month that are on the rails because this society is that cut-throat about money for literally everything, down to the bagel, down to the roof".
----
Anyway, the new bill congress just passed targeted SNAP, so we definitely cut off more people from affordable food. This entire country is going to need something like SNAP for 300+ million Americans in about 10 years, so we'll all get to watch the poetry of this one.
> if there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more?
…yes.
> problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter
We track these. And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. Not to the quality most people want. But to a degree that will sustain you.
And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free.
I’m speaking about mass scale unemployment and underemployment. Our homeless infrastructure cannot even handle our homeless. The underemployed and underpaid are basically 6 months removed from homelessness without work, so call a duck a duck.
How long can you keep food/shelter without a job? Six months for the average American? If we are going to artificially create jobs, then I recommend we artificially house and food people instead because that’s the core issue. Your average American is freaking scared of everything if they go 6 months without a job, and that’s a problem.
If the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created them at any price, no price would be too low or too high. The reason the market doesn’t conjure up food and shelter for people is because that’s not what it’s for, so it’s best we decouple.
I’m suggesting that a large percentage of Americans are functionally homeless and basically on a weekly food-shelter lease program in our society that can be cut off to them at any time (sorry, capitalism). In America we call this a career, gig, a livelihood.
Forever. That’s how free works. If you can get to an American city, which most American towns will happily help you out with, you can access free food and shelter virtually limitlessly.
> if the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created at any price , no price would be too low or too high
Market failure is real. Rates, regulations and barriers to entry can and do inhibit labour demand formation.
This has been a critique of the figures for decades, but the current numbers are too convenient for the powers-that-be to change into something more reflective of reality. Trust me, spending fifteen months unemployed in the middle of nowhere and with access to raw data helped me understand a lot about the deliberately engineered shortcomings of our current datasets.
It’s in the vested interest of leaders to control the narrative. That’s why we have/had so many regulations that prevent them from doing so.
I think it's even worse, because that single metric, unemployment, is highly manipulatable. Administrations have been known to redefine "employment" in order to make the number look more favorable.
Goods-producing companies were net hirers (+32,000). Services lost 66,000 jobs, with losses concentrated in professional/business services (-56,000) and education/health services (-52,000).
Regionally, losses were concentrated in the West North Central Midwest (-28,000), South Atlantic (-21,000) and Mountain states (-20,000). (Map with old data [2].)
Firms with 1 to 50 employees and 250 to 499 employees laid people off while smaller mid-size and large companies were net hirers.
“Year-over-year pay growth for job-stayers was little changed for June at 4.4 percent compared to 4.5
percent in May. Pay growth for job-changers was 6.8 percent in June, down slightly from 7.0 percent last
month.” (Pay growth was highest in finance, +5.2%, and lowest in information services, +4.1%.)
Have you used your linkedin profile? If you're looking for a job or are active you're going to get more attention. Your name will also start being added to lead databases when you apply for jobs and those will kick around for a couple years until it's marked as uninteresting.
ADP and BLS numbers are measuring different things. For people that care about these things, the nuances are well-understood.
As a rough heuristic, ADP overfits to private sector jobs and BLS overfits to government jobs. There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
> There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
Surely that doesn't apply when both metrics are bad? I don't know. I'm not familiar with job reporting statistics. So info / perspective would be appreciated.
Also, when you say "over fits" I'm used to that in a machine learning context where it means data outside the fit is worse. Did you mean that ADP is more accurate with private sector and BLS is more accurate with public sector. Or is it more a matter of ADP comes in higher with private sector and BLS comes in higher with public sector. Usually, "overfit" is a bad thing in a machine learning context, but I wouldn't expect ADP to do worse in private and BLS to do worse in public. But the opposite. I would appreciate it if you could clarify the terminology from your perspective.
Yes, ADP is more accurate with private sector jobs and BLS is more accurate with government jobs, because their data sources are heavily biased toward having accurate data in those subsets respectively. They both generally assume that the data they don’t have looks like the data they do have despite the selection bias and disjointedness of their data. BLS extrapolates private sector employment from government employment and census data in ways that no one thinks is representative but that is what they work with. ADP has no government employment data in their model but has a relatively exhaustive sample of private sector employment.
People that know account for these biases. This is why the ADP > BLS heuristic exists. If private sector jobs growth is less than government job growth, reflecting the biases in their respective models, that is interpreted as either the government sandbagging the numbers with make-work jobs or private sector employment being so poor that the monotonic government employment eclipses private sector job growth. Either way, it is a bad sign.
Government job reports this year have been revised down up to 35%.
> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised down by 65,000, from
+185,000 to +120,000, and the change for April was revised down by 30,000, from +177,000 to
+147,000. With these revisions, employment in March and April combined is 95,000 lower than
previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from
businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the
recalculation of seasonal factors.)
Revised down from previously reported projections. But the numbers are pretty neutral.
> Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.9 percent), adult
women (3.9 percent), teenagers (13.4 percent), Whites (3.8 percent), Blacks (6.0 percent),
Asians (3.6 percent), and Hispanics (5.1 percent) showed little or no change over the month.
Recent government payroll data has been hugely suspect. On the big release day the numbers are rosy and get reported to much hoopla and "told you" celebration, but then are subsequently revised downwards to little fanfare or notice. And for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact.
> for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact
No, this is not the reason. The numbers that get fanfare are the preliminary BLS numbers. BLS collects data through surveys. Preliminary data are published with incomplete responses. As more employers respond, the numbers get updated.
Guess which employers tend to report late? Those that are doing lots of hiring and firing. So the stable numbers come in first. Then the volatile numbers later. This is well documented, happens on the way up and down, and is constantly (and wrongly) quoted as a partisan conspiracy going both ways.
The numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction. It could be that there are other things going on, but simply that volatile numbers come in later doesn’t seem to explain the bias.
> The numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction.
summary of mean revision for seasonally adjusted numbers, since 2003 are
2nd-1st: 8
3rd-2nd: 2
1st-3rd: 10
but 2025 has been consistently, so far, be negative revisions. Dec 2024 has some positive revisions but 2023-2024 on the whole was negative while 2017-2022 were on the whole positive revision. so I dont think that there is data to support consistently wrong in one direction.
> numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction
Because the data have been going in one direction recently. When the job market booms, the revisions are upwards. Then everyone gets to wax lyrical about how BLS is socking the President.
I've been unemployed for months. In the last couple of weeks, I've been rejected for jobs as a pool cleaner, shelf stocker, and a state job requiring me to check multiple email accounts and watch security cameras. I've also recently been rejected as an overnight courier and software tester.
Whatever you imagine the job market to be like, I assure you it's worse.
Shelf stacking requires psychometric tests, another online test, a group assessment, individual assessment then 3 hours of free labour on the shop floor for another assessment! What world are we living in
Don't lose hope; I left grad school right before the first dotcom failures 25ish years ago. I think you'll find that when some novel technology erupts onto the scene, the job market goes through a shift of semi incoherence, that hits folks like us.
but, it's temporary and can introduce a way more enthralling era of jobs.
I hope you have saving to draw on. It’s been very bad for folks AB’s it’s only going to get worse from here.
I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
> But the contraction was capped by payroll expansions in goods-producing roles across industries such as manufacturing and mining. All together, goods-producing positions grew by 32,000 in the month, while payrolls for service roles overall fell by 66,000.
If your metric is "more/better jobs", then yes tariffs are a failure.
But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
Part of the goal of the tariffs (and other non-tariff related policies) seems to be to reset leverage at all layers of the labor markets, pushing higher skilled and paid workers into lower skilled and paid manufacturing jobs by increasing the labor availability pool (primarily via workers being unable to get jobs at their previous skill/salary level).
For example, imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin at a mining company.
Similarly, cutting Medicaid benefits and adding work requirements could trigger increased availability of the lowest skilled labor, thereby reducing the wages that people doing that labor can demand.
That is all a boost for employers seeking lower cost but high skilled labor, but a knock down for all the workers.
> imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin
Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs? Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy like the US.
> seeking lower cost
Well they certainly aren't supporting increased tariffs if that's what they want.
> Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs?
Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
> Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy
Last I heard, software engineering done overseas is not subject to tariffs.
>Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
Source? My prototypical software engineer is someone working for a SaaS, or similar services based company (eg. insurance company or bank), not someone developing software for a car company or metal parts shop.
If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions.
The bigger loss for all employees is the shareholders primary fallacy giving executives excuses to pay workers less. Since there’s no competition for many consumer goods then there’s no pressure to keep prices low and companies just up their profit margin.
The loss in IT / software jobs are again mostly profiteering using AI as an excuse.
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage.
Unions represent only 9.9% of US labor [1], primarily in the public sector and the skilled trades. White collar workers and low skill workers tend not to have the benefit of a union.
Tariffs are maybe OK if you are, for example, an domestic auto assembly worker (assuming no job losses due to demand reduction or supply chain cost increases), but otherwise not great.
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions
That will take at least 5yrs to a decade to be a major economic change, not a few months after tariffs
For the rest, when analysis seems a bit too convenient it usually is.
High-prestige work as an escape hatch from poverty has failed, and that may be a good thing. When people accept that dirty or "unskilled" labor has to be done, and that it deserves a living wage as much as any educated position, we'll be stronger as a country. Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
> Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.
This is at odds with
> Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people
... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).
> ... who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment, via incentives to labor or by education, not as the result of hordes being forced into lower skilled labor at lower pay.
> ... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).
Plenty of big unions out there, and plenty of places where growing base actually strengthens the union, since they can afford to do more for members in the event of a strike. People will back their union if their union is fighting for them.
> Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment,
That's one way innovation and efficiency occur, for sure. Plenty of other ways. Most of human history innovation and efficiency gains were done without capital. Not all money is capital, and not all non-monetary resources are capital either.
> Plenty of big unions out there, and plenty of places where growing base actually strengthens the union, since they can afford to do more for members in the event of a strike.
Union membership is strictly bound by the number of jobs.
Unions, especially in the private sector, cannot directly control the number of jobs. At best they can negotiate the percentage of union jobs at a facility or site.
An influx of non-union labor into an industry where unions already don't represent much of the labor force weakens a union's bargaining position.
The unions could try to attract those non-union workers to the union by explaining the protections that come from labor organizing, but if people are desperate enough for work, they likely won't want to rock the boat by joining a union.
Adding to that, in the US at least, the labor protections functions of the Federal government are being systematically undermined.
>But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
I can't keep track of how many times how "X" is some sort of dastardly ploy to oppress workers, only for (different?) people to argue that "not X" also oppresses workers, with plausible sounding stories for both sides. Last time it was work from home. Is is a dastardly plot to subjugate workers by exposing them to international competition, and dehumanize them by making every interaction mediated by a glowing rectangle? Or is return to office a dastardly ploy by the capitalist class to regain leverage, by forcing workers to waste time commuting, getting distracted in open concept offices, and buying overpriced lunches?
The same is true for Tariffs. In the 2010s it was not unpopular for leftist types to say how globalization was a disaster for the American middle class, and how it only enriches capitalists. Now you're saying that tariffs were actually some sort of 5d chess move by the capitalist class to crash the economy, so they can subjugate workers? Nevermind that the capitalist class seemed pretty against the tariffs, given how much stock market dropped, and only recovered after Trump walked back on his tariffs. That's not to say something is wrong just because there's a plausible sounding argument for the opposing side, but it does mean you need to do more legwork to prove your point than to tell a nice story.
Welcome to the world of grayscale where almost anything is never a clear win or loss. If Trump’s ideas sounded like clear losses why would he win, if they were all clear losses why would he have so many people against him? The parties aren’t at a 50-50 split by chance, American politics pushes division in the electorate where about half think the idea is bad and about the other half thinks the idea is great.
The parties definitely shift over time as well, with moderates pushing for more trade and far left and right pushing against, we just see the far right in form control of the red side while the blue side is still moderate.
The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America. That is both a large sample size, and probably broadly representative of the economy. There will of course be some business segments that are over or underrepresented but that is different than disregarding the entire report as noise.
ADP reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.
Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.
It doesn't matter how large your sample size is if your sampling method is biased. This could be measuring market share gain/loss in different segments of a steady employment environment.
> disregarding the entire report as noise
Studies with bad / non public sampling methods should be, at a minimum, treated with great skepticism. Why would that not apply here?
A factual number that has less statistical noise or political bias is extremely valuable. Yes, one needs to factor for the biases but that doesn't mean the number should be ignored.
The trend is useful, since one can fairly safely assume that most of the biases haven't radically changed.
ADP data does have a bias, but it is so much data it provides a valuable signal. The importance of understanding the source of your data and how it represents the largest population is something every scientist has been drilled on.
Noise is the absence of a signal. A biased signal is fine, just account for the bias.
ADP is huge and covers a broad range of sectors. It would be a very interesting result (and a very extraordinary claim) if the employment data from non-ADP companies went in the opposite direction of ADP. I certainly see no evidence that firms underrepresented in ADP's data are hiring prodigiously.
> assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy
No such assumption is made except by an errant reading of the report. The ADP report [1] can be used to predict BLS numbers, but it’s also independently useful. The reason the headline is 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost is because 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost, ADP can directly count that.
There have been many instances of ADP and BLS job reports being out of step, which can be expected because of their differing methodologies. On the other hand, nobody with a brain can take BLS surveys at face value under these circumstances.
Just one data point to add -- the small firm (~150 ppl) I'm currently working at recently laid off 25 people. The reasoning was there are dark clouds in the horizon in the housing market (the company is related to real estate btw).
They're US numbers, and they're from a private HR firm, not government numbers. It doesn't mean they're not meaningful, but they are a biased sample towards large companies using the HR software in US employment
We really need better ways of measuring economic health. I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
Either way, "full employment" doesn't mean much unless you take into account whether people are actually able to live a stable lifestyle or are burning the candle at both ends just to put food on the table. One of these enables folks to buy nonessentials and fund all those sectors of the economy, the other doesn't.
We have good metrics. The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.
Your scenario would be called out by median household income, or better median disposable household income. Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad.
IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Absolutely not.
If corporate revenue increases, but wages stay the same, GDP per capita goes up, yet the workers aren't any better off. All that extra money is being absorbed by the ones at the top.
Median disposable household income is probably the best measure.
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
If I used to make $78k as a full time IT employee, but now have to work two jobs to make $78k, I still have same household income but I’m considerably worse than before.
A combination of hours worked, wages earned and household debt together would paint a much more accurate picture.
This metric of underemployment is captured in U-5 and U-6 in the BLS statistics.
It's less common to report, but in the aftermath of the financial crisis I remember hearing more about it. You can construct a chart in FRED that covers it:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JWGw
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If the analysis in the public discourse doesn't capture what matters, that's a problem, and that some more obscure report contains useful information is only a minor mitigation. If anything I'd say highlighting that obscure report is a perfect example of nerds using their abilities to contribute to the public discourse.
Economists get things wrong all the time. It’s not about others not possibly have thought of it already, it’s about the fact that policy and politics is still driven by other measures that are inaccurate.
Just because economists get things wrong, does not imply that therefore they can be, and need to be, corrected by computer programmers with superficial understandings of the field. You can both be wrong.
This is like arguing that politicians don't need to be corrected by non-politicians, or that people with no understand of programming can't criticize the tech industry.
No one is arguing that being a computer programmer gives a person unique insights here.
False equivalence. Politicians aren’t scientists, and people do criticize programmers all the time. I got at least 3 complaints at work today about bugs in our software.
Saying that economists are scientists and therefore above reproach from non-economists ignores the way that ideology and research become intertwined whenever public policy is involved. Saying "trust the science" at all times, even when the scientists in question are neoliberal technocrats is how you end up with the populist backlash against "trusting the science" that America is presently going through.
Obviously people criticize can and should criticize programmers, that's the point.
Econ nerds are nerds with a different focus than coding nerds. Both are still nerds.
#ImAnEconNerd
Please take a look at the guidelines
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Notably:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
This entire thread is nothing if not a perfect indicator of how difficult it is to get an good/accurate gauging of employment health.
And that's before you even get into bad actors or actors with a POV to push who selectively highlight one metric over another confounding metric.
I'm not sure household debt is a great indicator. Someone that has a mortgage will have much more household debt than a renter, but also not have to pay rent.
This would need data to contextualize.
You could argue household debt is just another form of rent, where you “rent” capital from the wealthy in exchange for paying interest on a monthly basis. Just because you don’t pay a rent directly named as such doesn’t change the substance of it.
Debt, within reason, is just a tool. It provides leverage and it lets you buy things for which you don't have cash-in-hand--houses in particular. It can also encourage overspending (something that car dealers capitalize on) but that's another story.
It's a very different form of rent though, namely because the mortgage borrower has a lot of collateralized debt and the mortgage borrower owns the appreciation (or depreciation) of the property (proportional to their equity).
A home dweller is paying "rent" to the government as property taxes, possibly indirectly through a mortgage.
Exactly my point. Rent and mortgage debt is functionally very similar and total household debt wouldn't capture rent obligations.
Don't matter. You still have the debt. If you lose your job in a depression, odds are no much other people will be in the market to buy your home.
The amount of equity you have in your home matters. Most recessions do not take 20% off home values, so people with conventional loans are pretty safe. Even the Great Depression just cut valuations about 35%.
If you lose your job in a depression there will be plenty of people willing to buy assets at a discount. If you have equity in your home then your position will be net positive. About half of all mortgages have an outstanding balance less than 50% of the home's value.
That kinda works in the abstract, but it's pretty risky for any individual house. If your house was somehow a representative slice of all US housing, sure maybe it won't drop 35%.
But if you owned a house in Detroit from 2003-2010 it might have dropped 70-80%. Or, more on point for many on HN, if you own a house in the Bay Area worth $2-$3M with 25% equity, and the tech job market collapses, then you might get completely wiped out.
I think debt is good, actually, for most middle class households, and they're actively trying to increase their debt because that results in greater cash-flow, more savings, and more security in terms of retirement. That's why buying a home is Goal #1 for most Americans.
Home mortgage debt is mostly "good" debt for middle class households. Pretty much any other type of debt is a net negative in financial terms. There are less tangible benefits to owning a newer, more reliable car for example, so it can be a bit murky. General consumption debt is a bad bet for pretty much anyone.
Whatever metric or scenario you can think up, I guarantee governments, think tanks, private data companies, or universities are already tracking (or attempting to)
There is a huge quantity of data about the US.
Even if they are, it's not very useful if they have an adversarial relationship to us, the worker. Government is the only one listed above that is supposed to be the champion of the worker, but when was the last time that was true? At some point, you have to do your own digging. Trust but verify.
At least though 2024. It remains to be seen how much of that data is still being collected in a post-DOGE world.
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AND you’ve reduced unemployment by not just one, but two jobs. Success! /s
Ironically, you're proving the person you're responding to right: The problem is trying to get a holistic view by focusing on one metric in isolation.
You need to consider multiple metrics. Any one metric by itself is going to have holes.
The old “number of dudes on a street corner” metric works perfectly fine by itself.
Folks at the bottom of the pile are perfect economic bellwethers.
You're right but this would require caring about the poorest in society which the US seems to have a problem with.
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
Median disposable income won’t meaningfully capture OP’s case of losing a high-paying job and having it replaced by a low-paying one. For that you need to look at the distribution of household disposable income.
We have terrific economic metrics in America. It really should be part of a mandatory civics class to learn how to read them.
Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out earlier.
I think a better measure would be household income divided by number of adults in the household. Possibly with some consideration for the number of children in the household.
E.g. OECD normalizes household income by household size:
> Household income is adjusted for differences in the needs of households of different sizes with an equivalence scale that divides household income by the square root of household size. The adjusted income is then attributed to every person in the household.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
Also a great measure is the money supply & velocity chart - the M2.
If GDP goes up and the velocity of money drops, it means that real economic gains are not being realized by those who actually spend the majority of their income versus saving it.
Not that there's anything wrong with saving money - it's just that the more money that is being spent regularly, the healthier the entire economy is. Generally.
For that we have the Gini coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
“The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters” is supposedly a good book discussing the inadequacy of GDP as a metric for how well off a society is.
Even better one: real wages, and income and wealth inequality.
And the money velocity!
A healthy economy is one where money is made via wages, and spent via economic activity.
The more active a given dollar is in terms of circulation through the economy, the healthier the economy usually is.
Economies tend to stagnate when a small group of people hoard the vast majority of the money, and don't circulate it back into the economy.
Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off. I think we are using inequality as a very bad proxy for poverty but we have much better metrics for that. I suspect people just dislike it for emotional reasons. I want to point out that Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US. Yet everyone is fine with Sweden.
I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system
If everyone's real wealth doubles, that is great, but it is not a stable equilibrium.
If a very small percentage of the people own a large percentage of the wealth, it compounds. They literally cannot spend all of their income on consumption, except maybe by lighting piles of cash on fire, but that is not a route to doubling the real wealth of everyone in society.
That means that asset prices rise, and fewer people can afford property. Jobs concentrate near where rich people live, because they are the ones with disposable income to spend, making this worse. Transfer payments (rent) from ordinary people to the remaining property owners are high. Wages stagnate, because wealthy people spend most of their money on assets, not goods and services. Consumer demand decreases. Capital moves away from producing things that ordinary people need, because they can no longer afford them, and is instead allocated to producing luxury goods. Social mobility is low because low wages and high property prices make it impossible to work your way up.
The cycle is self-reinforcing, not self-correcting. Most of history throughout the world has consisted of a few very wealthy feudal lords and a large population of serfs.
Strengthening the political system might be nice, but post-Citizen's United, that does not seem to be the direction the US is headed, at least, nor is it in the interests of those who benefit most from the current system.
> Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up,
Not in terms of the ratio between you, which is the way we normally talk about wealth inequality : "he has X times more wealth than I do", or "she makes X times more than I do".
Anyway, this is not how wealth inequality has grown at all. It has happened by most people's real income barely rising at all over 40-50 years, while the rich have seen theirs rise by huge factors (hundreds to many thousands in some cases).
That's not at all what I've seen in the US. The middle class has shrunk but that part of the overall population has moved to upper income.
Meanwhile, real (aka inflation corrected) median household income has gone up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
If what you care about is standing real wages why talk about inequality? I'm concerned that it just functions better as rage bait and leads to unproductive policies.
1. it is well established that human pyschology makes relative income and wealth much more significant than absolute. And it doesn't matter which quintile you're in for that to be true.
2. real median household income stayed relatively flat between 1970 and 2012. Since then it has risen again in a significant way.
3. despite the gains in real median household income, the rise in the household income (and net worth) of various upper percentiles (20%, 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1% ... take your pick) has been very, very much larger. consequently, the "double my income, double Musk's income" line is not a description of what has happened.
4. the percentage of GDP that accrues to capital rather than to labor have gone steadily up since 1980.
it matters when "something" become scarce that normal person need to compete with the richests to get, or if one day the richests decided they want something and suddenly those things become scarce. Let's not kid ourselves, majority of politics can be bought by billionaires and when some day fresh waters become scarce or wheat is, it'll be monopolized by the richests. We already get this in some way with housing.
> If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off.
What's this universe that only contains you and Elon? Or do you think that everyone's real wealth has doubled?
> I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system
Citizens United has practically dismissed that possibility in the near term.
Wealth inequality matters a lot when rich people can spend unlimited amounts of money buying influence in politics and then use that influence to enact policies that favor the rich over the poor.
It depends on what you're trying to measure. From a purely rational perspective, increasing inequality doesn't matter if everyone's quality of life is improving. But humans are irrational, and happiness is often tied to social status within the hierarchy. Even if you're materially better off you might find yourself lower on the status scale. Status is a zero-sum game. Maybe we shouldn't care about such things but yet most people do.
At billionairre scale money becomes qualitatively different compared to typical household scale. For households money typically goes to consumption (or future consumption via savings) whereas billionairre money goes to affect how productive (and often political) forces get organized.
At consumption money level at least inequality is also inefficient allocation of resources due to the diminishing marginal utility of money.
Lots of leaps of logic here. I'm certainly not fine with Sweden having a higher disparity of wealth but I don't live in Sweden so I can't effect much change there. We're also ignoring how many safety net benefits Sweden provides its population, ostensibly because it reasonably taxes its wealthy. If Swedes are ok with their situation, it's probably because it's being handled adequately.
The issue with disparity is it's a reflection of the unfair conditions of compensation. Elon Musk's employees make him that money, not Elon. He could make all of his employees multi-millionaires overnight by granting more generous stock plans commensurate with the money they've made the company. Reasonable profit sharing plans basically ensure this, but since companies all collude to not grant them, we see them as relatively rare in the working world. The state should be requiring companies to grant profit sharing. Not gonna bike shed it here, but it needs to be done yesterday.
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> Leftists don't care
Please avoid ideological swipes like this on HN. It's covered in multiple guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's an extremely simplistic view of our economics works.
Perhaps the Gini coefficient would be a better metric to capture this?
Certainly not in isolation. It measures inequality. If everyone has nothing you get a perfect Gini score. Pakistan, Ukraine, Belarus and Algeria have a lower (better) Gini score than all of the Americas and most of western Europe and Japan. Want to move?
The Gini coefficients published for deeply corrupt countries like Pakistan and Ukraine are almost certainly a total fiction. Much of the real wealth held by the elites in those countries is hidden from official statistics.
If a software engineer starts working at Applebees, GDP will decrease. If lots of software engineers do it, GDP decreases more.
If corporate revenue increases and is spent (as most revenue is), then the workers will be better off in the most bland "raising all boats" sense of the word - there will be more competition for their labor and more opportunities for them to jump ship.
GDP gets a bad rap but if I had to pick a single metric, that's the one I'd choose.
I attended a talk by Alberto Alesina (RIP) a few years back and he made the point that, yeah, GDP isn't perfect, but by and large, people in countries with a high GDP are healthier and happier. It might not measure the difference between the US and France as well, but it's pretty good at pointing out that Sweden is doing better than Somalia.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
One thing I remember from the first Dot-com crash circa 2002 is that the service quality in Silicon Valley area restaurants suddenly got a lot better. There were a lot of former "HTML programmers" forced to find other jobs.
Right - if you ask a heart surgeon to wait tables they'll probably do a great job!
But it's still a waste of their talents and society as a whole will be worse off than if they did heart surgery. You can measure that because a waiter makes minimum wage and a heart surgeon does not - the heart surgeon contributes more to the GDP than a food service worker.
That's the meaning of that metric and that's why it's useful.
Not if those are replaced by automation, offshoring, or outsourcing.
That was not the argument. The argument was that their case "lost six-figure job, working as waiter now" was covered by GDP/capita, and it is. Applebee's doesn't make the same revenue per capita as a place that hands out six-figure jobs.
Your argument is the exact reason why the media focus on a single metric is bad - because some but-whataboutism will always pop up and use it as pretext to debate an unrelated issue not covered by the metric.
It's also the exact reason why we shouldn't measure economic health as a single metric at all - it's not that to whom value accrues doesn't matter, it's that it's a different metric than how much value is generated in the first place.
It also explains why there isn't a single best economic policy - the absence of a single metric means there is no strict ordering.
(You can easily construe a counter-argument why median disposable household income isn't the best metric, either: "Median wage is stagnant, everybody needs to take a second job so disposable income goes up". And you can do that for every single metric in isolation)
In this episode of how economists lie to us all…
I mean it's basically their job.
GDP is fairly easy to measure, and since a society normally consumes as much as it produces, it's a pretty good measure of average economic health.
You're right that there is more nuance you'd wish to see, but it's harder to measure, and I don't know how much it's normally worth.
> it's a pretty good measure of average economic health
Median economic health strikes me as far more interesting than mean. I don't really care how well rich people are doing.
We all need to be concerned when they’re doing too well
>I don't really care how well rich people are doing.
ahem "people of wealth"
Maybe "people currently experiencing extraordinarily fine housing"?
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
I think the following joke encapsulates the problem with GDP pretty well..
---
Two economists go for a walk in the forest, and having a competitive nature, the first economist sees a pile of bear shit and says to the second "I'll give you $100 to eat that bear shit". The second economist, being one that generally does anything for money, eats the bear shit, takes the $100 and they continue on their walk. The second economist wants to get back at the first, sees another pile of bear shit and says "I dare YOU to eat that bear shit for $100" thinking no way they will actually do it. Not wanting to be outdone by the second economist, the first also eats the bear shit and takes $100.
After walking a bit further, the second economist stops and says to the first "Wait.. did we just both eat shit for nothing??" to which the first replies "No of course not, that would be crazy.. we increased GDP by $200".
---
I can't remember the source of the joke but been around for a while and I may have butchered some of the original details.
I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.
One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.
Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
I think income is still too crude and misleading. You really need some kind of complex individual economic health measure made of many indicators.
But a more informative proxy would be median net worth - individual, not household, with married couple net worth divided by two for simplicity - as a fairly simple assets vs liabilities calculation.
The net worth distribution would be even more revealing because it would highlight the difference between owners and renters.
This still doesn't reveal net worth stability. In the US you can - and many people do - go from a seven figure net worth to bankruptcy because of a health crisis or (increasingly) a climate disaster.
So you'd want a supplemental distribution showing how variable net worth is, how many people are reduced to bankruptcy at each decile, and how much movement there is in each decile.
Reducing these kinds of complexities to a single number seems misleading at best.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Not necessarily. If most of the difference in pay goes to shareholders and/or executives, then the GDP per capita doesn't change. This could be because technology increases productivity, but in a way that increases wealth inequality, and results not only in greater wealth for the already wealthy, but less wealth for workers who are no longer needed.
> The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.
This is what I'm getting at. I recognize there are more detailed measures, but they also never seem to inform the public discourse.
Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are.
It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
> It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
I think this is how the electoral college was intended to function. This is a hard problem to solve, especially when some of the players aren't operating in good faith.
> public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond
This is convincingly (to me) explained by the removal of critical thinking courses in public schools, at least in the US. I never experienced them myself but I've heard they included exercises like determining if a statement is fact or opinion, true or false, etc. There was very little of that when I was in school and it was certainly never a dedicated hour-block in high school.
I agree with the premise here completely, but not what it's in response to necessarily.
Most people keep very shallow knowledge of most subjects, but this doesn't mean things shouldn't be reported. It just means they(media) shouldn't spend a ton of time explaining how said numbers are calculated. Most people read, hear, or otherwise know the current inflation rate, but not exactly how it's calculated.
All that to say, if some metric isn't being reported, there's a reason - likely for some agenda being pushed.
Are the metrics not reported? Everything I mentioned can be found and it's discussed. Just with more niche audiences or piecemeal
One just needs a couple of hours per important subject with proper mentorship. Then most mews is repeated patterns or red herrings
Or more education.
Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.
Lol, wut? Any system that's been working better in practice?
There are small outlier countries like Singapore that have extremely well but at scale democratic countries have greatly outperformed other systems
There's the problem of scale, and also of duration. Let's say Lee Kuan Yew genuinely wants what's best for Singapore as a whole. How do you ensure that the next autocrat will be equally benign?
This is the exact issue. There is a lot more variance in autocrats. You can get Lee Kuan Yew and you can get Kaiser Wilhelm. With democracy you are much more likely to get something in the middle. In the end of the day the cost of an bad autocrat is higher than the opportunity cost of a milk toast government compared to Lee Kuan Yew. China is still catching up from the Mao years.
I do work that social media will change this though
milquetoast, not milk toast
Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast. Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food
TIL
Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.
That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.
It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient.
You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders.
The only thing that actually works is good leadership with long term vision and if anything democracy gets in the way of that.
The benefit of democracy is that it has somewhat of a self-correcting mechanism build in and it functions without violence. Autocracies don't have that.
You say Democracies have a short track record. While this is true in the grand scheme of things, each individual non-Democracy that came before did as well. Rulers conquered each other's countries, usurped the current leaders etc. quite regularly. I'm not sure I'd count that as stable and longer-lasting.
Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.
Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.
>You say Democracies have a short track record.
I actually said the exact opposite.
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
GDP or even GDP per capita is not the best metric. You can sell 100 iphones for $1000 or sell 500 cheap androids for $200 and both countries will have same GDP but I think output and outcome is much better in latter case (you produced 5x more products and 5x more people can benefits and be more productive with those 'tools'). Sure iphone for $1000 is better than $200 android phone but is it 5x better? Same with cars you can sell ferrari or more cheaper toyotas for the same value. We would have to measure how much goods we can produce.
But it covers their case.
> the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look.
Indeed. Almost always in these discussions people have already made up their minds about the state of the economy and will just cherry-pick whatever metric best justifies their case (typically that the economy sucks).
There's never been a time in my life where people weren't complaining about how the economy is terrible and how that's clearly obvious if you just look at the real numbers.
Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy. Everyone has a vested interest in the stock market rising, in keeping their jobs, and a shared desire to see things go up forever.
This is why there needs to be some kind of safety net so that the economy is not a proxy for life and death. In the USA, if you run out of money, you are in real trouble. We need to decouple success/failure in the market from personal safety. You should be able to try opening a hot dog stand, have it tank, and still be able to eat and go to the doctor.
>Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy.
Isn't the media incentivized to keep you watching or reading? The common criticism of media is they like to exaggerate a minor issue to get you to click on a headline.
except when it affects the economy thus their investment (be it 401k or something else)
They might be short sellers, or they might be foreign and view the US as an economic rival. There may be more incentives than just more clicks for the media.
Yet, for the last few years the media has been poopooing and economy that's by pretty much all measures was very strong.
A more likely explanation is that outside of a few specialized publications, most members of the media are just as financially and economically illiterate as the average person. I mean how many finance and economics courses do you have to pass to get a degree in journalism or communications? There's no deep media conspiracy here.
> Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire.
Unemployment rates are calculated based on surveys. They call many people and ask a series of questions to determine which category they fit into.
It's the incentive. There is a reason the media focuses on easily juiced metrics.
That is part of it but it goes beyond it. I have a group of friends who are pretty much all nerds and every once in a while we end up discussing how desirable different countries are to live in. Because we are nerds metrics will be pulled out. You just need to look at so much and depending what you personally care about things can be very misleading just because you scoped some metrics wrong. It's not obvious to everyone that Ireland has a high GDP because corporate profits get funneled through there. Looking at many European countries you might think salaries are pretty good, especially when PPP corrected. Well, Unless you are a software engineer. Houses might be cheaper, till you look at price per squarfoot... It's genuinely hard.
Add in that most media companies these days are a branch of large corporations and it's easy to see where their incentives lie.
I’m just going to pile on by suggesting you really concern yourself with looking into why GDP is absolutely not a good measure. You may want to start with the fact that the economist that developed GDP has long been outspoken against how it has been used and wished he had never developed it.
The fact that the government printing money and then squandering it on some thing useless makes the GDP go up, should be your first clue.
I don’t think you are a great success in life if you take on debt from organized crime, spend it on hookers and blow, and then tell everyone how rich you are based on how much you spent, i.e., squandered.
Media covers plenty. We call it "headline unemployment" because it fits in a headline. If you read articles and analysis there's plenty of places in the MSM that get into nitty gritty.
> I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. The thing is, at a large scale, these events don't matter. They are rare enough to be noise in the grand scheme of things.
The reason the U-3 is the canonical "unemployment rate" is because that is where the core signal is. The bulk of the change in all of the other more inclusive rates is the change in the U-3 scaled by some factor.
But really, your complaint has nothing to do with actual employment, but instead with earnings. Wages are also a metric captured and reported by the BLS and better serve your message.
U3 is kinda silly but is mostly used because it is the original employment rate definition and therefore is comparable across time.
U6 would not include the original poster unless his new job was "minimally attached or part-time for economic reasons." U-6 does not, generally, include people who got a new job for lower pay.
The harm is when people take the metric as literally "what percentage of people who want to be employed can find a job", which U-3 emphatically does not represent.
It doesn't directly measure it, true. But the parent poster was saying it has extremely high positive correlation to measures that do measure it, so it probably doesn't matter.
By that logic should we also further broaden "unemployment" to mean "100% - employment rate"? That's a pretty common misconception as well, maybe even more common than the one you listed.
>This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment.
I always wonder how this is captured. For U-3, you could go with the number getting unemployment benefits. For U-6, you'd have to literally call people and ask them, and I've literally never been called to ask if I'm working in my field and I'd guess most of us haven't either. I have to think if they are sampling, it's a very narrow sample likely biased by geography, industry, age, etc.
U-6 mostly comes from the BLS Occupational Employment Survey.
I don't think the original poster would be considered as part of U-6 unless his new job is defined as "marginally attached to the workforce or part-time for economic reasons." Simply getting a job with less pay doesn't put you in U-6.
If that's true, you've identified a huge hole in the measures. And you can't fix what you can't measure. I think you're right, because despite massive tech unemployment in the last 4 years, I don't see any of the charts spiking. Furthermore, people keep saying "this is captured in Figure X" but if it were really captured, it would be somewhat separable and could produce a chart that shows it in detail. I fear we're giving the Fed too much credit here.
The models are pretty complicated and incorporate several data sources, sampling is just one part of it. I've seen (very dry) documents that go into the methodology in detail. The model does introduce some obvious biases through assumptions of representativeness but how those interact with the headline numbers is not straightforward.
You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?
And that is before we talk about alternative signals like the ADP number this like references.
Anytime someone says “we need better ways” you should just read it as “I should do more reading”, because this is a very well studied, understood and measured set of data.
This response is a bit less than helpful. Could you provide an example of a metric from this diverse set that fits what the OP is asking for? I feel like there are at least two use cases from their post:
* a metric that measures if people's jobs are paying enough to put food on the table
* a metric that measures whether people's employment matches their education?
Your first query is simply real wages. There are several real wage metrics in the bls data set. Here is a commonly referenced one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Your second query is more subjective. Most people would probably point you at the U6 underemployment number as that’s the most famous one. I like the employment projections series for this kind of question though https://www.bls.gov/emp/
That real weekly wage data is basically why Trump almost and then did get reelected in one chart.
The more I look at that chart the stranger it gets. It feels like a good case for concluding CPI isn’t calculated properly
If you're talking about the spike in Q1 2020, there's nothing weird going on. That's from all the service workers getting laid off, which bumps up the average because they're typically lower paid, and no longer drag down the "employed" average.
Also, does it count the COVID checks?
Why?
For the second one I was hoping there was something like employment satisfaction, but thank you!
https://www.bls.gov/nls/ The longitudinal survey asks some job satisfaction questions though I’ve never tried to look for it by education level.
About the US specifically, your government reports underemployment numbers, as do almost every country report salaries distribution.
This is all extremely well-known public information gathered and distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which they compile for free.
Here are all (6) unemployment measurements that the BLS makes(U1 thru U6): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
The BLS tracks damn near everything you could ever dream up economically: https://www.bls.gov/
Here you can browse every metric that the Federal Reserve Bank tracks: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
Which metric(s) capture what he is talking about?
Take a look at the St. Louis FRED website and search for wages and wage growth.
FRED is a good resource. Do you know if there's a wage growth dataset that only analyzes job changes between companies?
Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
It's also a sign of intense hubris - the idea that thousands of labor economists have never considered something they thought of after 30 seconds of reading means that either a) the economists are all idiots or b) the reader is orders of magnitude smarter than them.
This is also a sign that communication of the semantics in understandable terms is pretty bad.
The communications from the BLS are quite good and easily understandable. The problem is that the people making these complaints aren't reading those, they're reading the mainstream reporting on the BLS stats, which is extremely lossily-compressed, and then assuming this makes them qualified to criticize the underlying stats. Journalists deserve some flak here for the superficial way they report on the numbers, but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.
> but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.
One thing is for sure is that people aren't going to do that.
Anyway, it seems disingenuous (or just completely irrelevant) to complain that people are attacking the BLS rather than how this is wielded to perpetrate a polemic.
My point is one doesn't have to go to the original sources, they simply have to ask themselves "is it likely no one has thought of this before?" before launching into a criticism...
This happens everywhere with lots of people in many different contexts. I call it the “‘why don’t we just’ disease”, or WDWJ Disease. When you’re in any leadership position, you have to stay especially careful to catch yourself from falling prey to this pernicious effect and behavior, and its equally debilitating sibling yak shaving when you over index on preventing WDWJ.
> It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6.
The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).
> You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?
If I could never see another passive aggressive response like this again I would die happy.
You of course know that "you of course know _____, right" is the preferred HN rebuttal format, right?
Neck and neck with "Got an example of X?"
Active aggression is looked down upon in this forum
This is a citizenry education problem, a media problem but not a metrics problem.
These metrics are built and used by people who do apply multiple measures - every day. If you are in a trading or macro oriented role, you will not be using just one figure. You will make the effort because your incentives and training encourage you to do so.
The non-specialist, which is most people, is never going to have a set of metrics which make it easy, because no metric can overcome all the practical and technical issues strewn across the path to producing it.
It sounds silly but we should take it one step further and look at life satisfaction. Who cares about jobs if people are unhappy?
Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.
It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not.
You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate.
I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.
The linked article is talking about ADP.
"To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily."
The BLS does do several measures.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
Their (BLS) news release also provides more detail.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...
> The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data.
> At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated.
> Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
Some of the unemployment metrics do include folks not actively looking for work: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
> We really need better ways of measuring economic health.
What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.
That's why unemployment is one of many metrics, and we don't put all our weight into a single metric...
> and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same
Of course it would, the percentage of people unemployed would be the same.
> six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage
Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change.
> doesn't include those not actively looking for work
Participation rate section of the jobs report.
> Either way ...
Savings rate, hours worked, consumer credit, default rates etc cover all of this.
> Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change.
Not if someone else at the top got paid more.
If the same amount of wages are getting paid out and its merely getting reallocated as to whom, that's a very different scenario from people getting laid off to reduce labor costs.
Unemployment is meant to track how many people are working, not income equality.
> that's a very different scenario from people getting laid off to reduce labor costs.
Not necessarily. People could be laid off to reduce labor costs, in order to distribute more wealth to those at the top. And since the average is national, it doesn't even have to be at the same company. People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.
> Unemployment is meant to track how many people are working, not income equality.
Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.
> People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.
This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment, this is a sign of firm B outcompeting firm A. It might be interesting in its own right, but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.
> Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.
Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time. No one feels the need to compare the unemployment rates when it's mentioned CEO to employee pay has increased from 20:1 to 290:1 since 1960. Everyone understands that the economy is a complex, multifaceted thing and the fact it may be doing well or poorly by one metric has no bearing on a discussion of a different aspect.
People care about employment rate because work is critical to our culture - we spend most of our lives working, we identify ourselves by our professions, we rely on income for both survival and social status, most of us would find it extremely unpleasant to be without a job for an extended period of time, and most of us would be delighted if our skills were in high demand at the moment such that we could confidently secure better pay. Regardless of wealth inequality, the overwhelming majority of us want unemployment to be low, and primarily frictional. An unexpected spike in unemployment is well correlated with various bad things which we would love to avoid or at least prepare for. It is a useful metric for economic health, like resting heartrate is a useful metric for bodily health. A good resting heart rate doesn't mean you have nothing else to be concerned about, but a bad resting heart rate is a concern regardless of whatever else is going on.
> This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment
It could be. What if B is outcompeting because they have offshored labor, or using new technology that reduces demands for labor. Not that those things are necessarily bad, but just because the total productivity is increasing doesn't necessarily mean everyone is better off.
My point is that the situation described can happen without a change to the average income, and average income isn't a good metric for watching changes in wealth inequality.
> but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.
I never said it was.
> Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time
IME, such things are talked about much less than unemployment, especially in relation to politics and policy.
And I think part of the reason for that is because it is easy to understand, and it is easier to control with policy than other metrics, since the government can just create new jobs and provide incentives to create jobs, even if those jobs are lower paid than the jobs that were lost.
Perhaps we need better metrics actually tracking income inequality, because tracking employment rate without that seems pretty disingenuous as a metric of aggregate economic health.
Or rather, we should be reporting such metrics that we surely must track already together.
This is akin to saying that we need a better metric than CPU temperature to track internet download speed.
I don't follow at all. Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"? The problem is that unemployment, particularly U-3, is a bad signal for aggregate economic health by itself. As is GDP. You need an signal for wealth distribution to get a sense of how a given person can interpret to understand how well the economy is serving them. At the very least.
EDIT: Of course, the ultimate issue is people wanting to cherry-pick metrics to push their polemic. If you have any solutions to that I'm all ears. We've been able to articulate an accurate understanding all along, but that doesn't make for easy headlines or simplistic campaign platforms.
> Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"?
There's no single metric for aggregate economic health in the same way that there's no single metric for aggregate server health. There's a problem in expectations when people complain about U-3; its not supposed to be a measure of economic health. And thats the point being made here.
And yet, that's exactly how U-3 is used by everyone but the labor economists that define it. Hence why this conversation is happening in the first place.
> that's exactly how U-3 is used by everyone but the labor economists that define it
No, it’s not. Enterprise demand planning, market research, hell even political analysis for donors and politicians——everyone who has a use for the data knows how to use them.
If you want to see the contrast in treatment, compare the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal publications versus free media, e.g. CNBC or TV news.
Yes, and the fault is on the people using U-3 that way, not the economists. Talking about the problems with U-3 implies that the economists messed up. The issue is that everyone is looking for a quick 5-second way of making conclusions about a complicated topic.
We don't need a new metric. There is no new metric that will satisfy that criteria. The only solution is to improve the way we talk about the economy.
Is it disingenuous to report obituaries without including birth announcements in the same article? Surely only reporting the one gives a skewed view of demographic health.
News is about reporting new information in a timely manner. When a metric gets updated, it's good to let people know, especially if the new value is unexpected. Many people may have various different uses for this update. It is impossible to give every piece of data anyone could consider useful in a single article. Luckily, that is unnecessary. All that information is publicly available and people can go look it up for themselves at any time.
If you don't care enough to look up the metrics that are reported, that's not a problem with the metrics or the reporting.
> Is it disingenuous to report obituaries without including birth announcements in the same article? Surely only reporting the one gives a skewed view of demographic health.
The point of obituaries is not to give any sense of demographic health.
> News is about reporting new information in a timely manner. When a metric gets updated, it's good to let people know, especially if the new value is unexpected. Many people may have various different uses for this update. It is impossible to give every piece of data anyone could consider useful in a single article. Luckily, that is unnecessary. All that information is publicly available and people can go look it up for themselves at any time.
Sure, but the issue is that the reporting treats the metric as meaningfully representative of accessibility of employment when it's actually representative of who is seeking the unemployment benefit.
> If you don't care enough to look up the metrics that are reported, that's not a problem with the metrics or the reporting.
This seems wildly naive.
> The point of obituaries is not to give any sense of demographic health.
And the point of unemployment statistics is not to give any sense of economic equality.
> Sure, but the issue is that the reporting treats the metric as meaningfully representative of accessibility of employment
Because it is a pretty good proxy for this. When unemployment is high, wages tend to stagnate and it takes longer on average for people to find new employment. When unemployment is low, wages go up and people tend to have a much easier time finding a job quickly. There is a remarkable correlation between people seeking unemployment benefits and accessibility of employment. Sure there are people who would rather take a low paying job than the benefits, but there have always been such people, and the proportion doesn't quickly change, so within reason you can compare the situation at time A with the situation at time B based on the metric which is measured the same way at both times and get a pretty good sense of what the difference is.
It is not the end all be all, but nothing ever could be. It is one of countless metrics, all of which have their appropriate uses.
The U6 unemployment rate is supposed to cover those who are underemployed. What is usually reported is the U3 unemployment rate which is closest to that used internationally as defined by ILO.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
Supposed to, but doesn't. The U6 rate includes two new things: part-time workers, and a very strangely-defined category: people who are NOT working at ALL, AND were looking for work previously, AND have stopped looking for 4+ weeks.
It doesn't capture the common on-the-street definition of the word "underemployment", such as a tech worker flipping burgers at mcdonald's.
Perhaps that category is simply to hard or expensive to measure, or it's specifically being avoided. Either/or really.
There are six kinds of unemployment stats the US tracks (below). Nothing sounds specific to underemployment by skills specifically (maybe u-6?). That would probably come from other metrics, like quintile income distributions shifting downwards?
You didn't ask, but just in case (from an internet search):
U-1: Long-term unemployed
* Definition: People unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percentage of the civilian labor force.
* Purpose: Measures persistent unemployment.
U-2: Job losers and temporary workers
* Definition: People who lost jobs or completed temporary jobs, as a percentage of the labor force.
* Purpose: Captures recent layoffs and temp contract ends.
U-3: Official unemployment rate (headline rate)
* Definition: Total unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force.
* Purpose: This is the standard "unemployment rate" reported in news and economic discussions.
* Limitations: Doesn’t count discouraged workers or part-time workers wanting full-time jobs.
U-4: Unemployed + Discouraged workers
* Definition: U-3 plus discouraged workers (those who want a job but stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available).
* Purpose: Adds a layer of marginal attachment to the labor force.
U-5: Unemployed + All marginally attached workers
* Definition: U-4 plus all others marginally attached to the labor force, not just discouraged workers.
* Marginally attached workers: People not currently working or looking for work but who want a job and have looked in the past 12 months (but not the past 4 weeks).
U-6: Broadest measure
* Definition: U-5 plus part-time workers who want full-time jobs (i.e., involuntary part-time workers).
* Purpose: The most comprehensive measure of labor underutilization, including: Discouraged workers, Marginally attached workers, and Underemployed part-timers
I have been thinking about this a lot recently as well and think there is a really simple answer and fix and am frustrated I haven’t seen it meaningfully attempted or discussed anywhere (passively consuming message boards etc)
Cash flow per person (per household) just like the IRS does (except also including money from loans).
A big tech company firing a few thousand current employees and hiring twice as many H1B workers shows a net gain for jobs health, when this represents wages dropping, more people unemployed, and has a very negative impact on the economy. Many big companies game the metrics being Goodharted by regulators and watchdogs, and people guilelessly buy into the headlines, without inspecting the reality underneath.
There's also labour participation and underemployment to look at.
In your case underemployment would go up.
You need to look at all metrics together to get a bigger picture. Example is unemployment is down, but so is labour participation. That doesn't mean there was job growth, it means people stopped looking.
Or if unemployment is down, but underemployment is up. Similar picture emerges.
Unemployment might say the same, but there's also data about wages, so, not sure what do you mean.
Same with the stock market completly decoupled from the real economy. It's a wealthy index, there could be a real recession and the stock market still would go up.
I may be one of those statistics soon. My company refuses to lay people off but they are sending people out via wildly unrealistic expectations (move the goal post). The job market for six figure salaries is weak and I imagine many companies are doing this very same thing.
I am a bit confused.. If you are willing to work at Applebee's for minimum wage job, then you are employed. Why should you be considered unemployed?
If you all you can find are the minimum wage jobs and you choose not to work there, then you should be considered unemployed and if you are long term unemployed, U6 captures that.
Politicians can keep lying that the economic situation is great, because the number of unemployed is not rising.
Meanwhile he can't afford rent, even though statistics show everything is ok.
We know about all of those things and BLS publishes (or at least used to) reliable stats on them.
The unemployment rate as reported is probably the best way to report objectively on employment and the ebb and flow of layoffs and hiring. A more qualitative assessment requires more adjustments and interpretation.
There are a number of other metrics compiled and reported that answer some of your questions, e.g.:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART Labor Force Participation Rate
These are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
https://www.bls.gov/ces/
It’s called under-employment. It has been widely discussed in the literature but it’s very difficult to measure. Economic statistics do suffer somewhat from a lamplight effect.
BLS reports breakdown changes in employment by sector. This is obviously watched closely by investors.
You seem to want better reporting of economic news. I would say to vote on it with your pocket and pick a better selection of news sources, but I'm not sure those better sources still exist.
Either way, nearly nobody uses the numbers you see on the headlines for any serious decision.
If every ex-6-figure worker has to work at Applebee's to make ends meet... then who's eating at Applebee's?
Applebees drops prices to enable their employees to eat at Applebees. Margins fall, wages universally clamped to minimum wage, layoffs hit. Fewer Applebees workers with lower wages means a shrinking demand side of the Applebees ouroboros, resulting in a spiral of Applebees price cuts, revenue drops, layoffs. The end state of humanity is a desolate Applebees parking lot strewn with desiccated human corpses and the last person alive is the largest shareholder of Applebees, inside the store, consuming their own flesh.
Total wage $ would cover it.
Not at you personally, but your post being top and active, while not really relevant to the story presented always makes me wonder do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?
> do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?
No, they upvote because they agree with it.
Just as some people flaunt their incompetence with basic math or civic involvement as a point of pride, it’s somewhat common in tech for folks to hold their lack of familiarity with economics, particularly econometrics, as a point of pride. (If you wanted to bury it, you’d flag it.)
I agree, among the many things that need way better measurements, chief among them besides unemployment, being economic preference, is an alternative to the nonsensical GDP.
But regarding unemployment, another absolutely bizarre fact of that measure of whether people have a means of producing in order to be compensated and become consumers, is the fact that is an American citizen loses his job and cannot find one after 90 days… poof, he’s not counted and therefore the unemployment rate increased. Furthermore, if now a foreign person comes into the USA, whether legally or internally, and is employed, the unemployment rate decreases, and it is not really captured that the lower wage the foreigners are willing to take, also further undermines all other wages.
Frankly, we should really be assessing why the heck we are even allowing ourselves to be managed as a vector in a database of numbers like some widget. The only real reason the ruling class cares about the “unemployment rate” is primarily to gauge whether they need to put more bodies on the fire to suppress wages and keep the anxiety and stress of the peasants competing high enough to keep profits maximized.
If it was actually “we need high skilled workers, the ruling class would have done things a long time ago to foster developing high skilled workers over the last 30+ years that they’ve been complaining about that while just using it as an excuse to fall back onto their old ways of importing brown people to suppress wages and to serve them and their decadent lives. “Who will cut our grass and raise our children” they cry out, just like when their slaves we’re taken from them.
This is like looking at your revenue numbers and choosing to focus on the number of units sold and disregarding price per unit. The government releases TONS of analysis on wages and wage growth (e.g. the "price per unit"). The St. Louis FRED is a great resource.
I don't blame you. I blame the media for bad reporting. If you dig deeper, I can think of a few reasons why the media would choose to focus on some metrics and not others but I'll leave my conspiracy theories for another discussion.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196
We do - People employed part time for Economic Reasons.
If what your looking for is 'People with salaries below the highest they've ever earned', then you're just going to get a very noisy metric of sales people on bad commission years, etc.
Why do we care so much if jobs are created or not created? The market is the market, either we need more jobs or we don't. If there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more? We're just dressing up socialism in capitalism's clothes. If you want to seriously do capitalism, then there is absolutely no reason to measure employment. If it's zero then it's correct, if it's 100% then it's correct, the number is always correct.
The problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter. Why do we care so much if people have jobs? Because in America you will die homeless and starve without one. The core issue is much further down Maslow's hierarchy.
The food and housing are too expensive so much so that we are now flabbergasted by the reality of the end game of this system, and we're trying to use euphemistic metrics to broom the larger issue (food and a roof) under the bed. The situation is so bad that a large percentage of Americans are absolutely fine dragging anything that resembles economic competition (immigrants) by their fucking ears off the street, mom dad and child, and dumping them in some random country. The larger US population is unable to cede even an ounce of empathy because their wallets are held hostage by a loan-based society/growth-oriented pricing (my house MUST be worth 40% more since I bought it - really? I see.). We're at an inflection point.
This could be a false analogy, but I'll throw it out there. Imagine a startup that cannot sell their product because it simply sucks. Now imagine not coming to terms with that and doing relentless A/B testing and pointing at the data from that. You won't solve shit with that data, go back to the drawing board.
Infinite growth and infinite "go work more and harder" doesn't sound like the path forward for America. This is very much a "work smarter" situation, because you have to be stupid to keep buying that paradigm. The deal we made with capitalism had nothing to do with annihilating our core conscious of feeding and housing everyone. Capitalism was never supposed to eradicate that human virtue and certainly not add a layer of "must have money and must have job" to stay dry/warm and not hungry, and at the very least not be in constant financial anxiety (which is the day-to-day psychological torment the average American faces).
Another way to interpret employment numbers is to simply meditatively say out loud "There's 70k people this month that are on the rails because this society is that cut-throat about money for literally everything, down to the bagel, down to the roof".
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Anyway, the new bill congress just passed targeted SNAP, so we definitely cut off more people from affordable food. This entire country is going to need something like SNAP for 300+ million Americans in about 10 years, so we'll all get to watch the poetry of this one.
> if there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more?
…yes.
> problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter
We track these. And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. Not to the quality most people want. But to a degree that will sustain you.
And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free.
I’m speaking about mass scale unemployment and underemployment. Our homeless infrastructure cannot even handle our homeless. The underemployed and underpaid are basically 6 months removed from homelessness without work, so call a duck a duck.
How long can you keep food/shelter without a job? Six months for the average American? If we are going to artificially create jobs, then I recommend we artificially house and food people instead because that’s the core issue. Your average American is freaking scared of everything if they go 6 months without a job, and that’s a problem.
If the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created them at any price, no price would be too low or too high. The reason the market doesn’t conjure up food and shelter for people is because that’s not what it’s for, so it’s best we decouple.
I’m suggesting that a large percentage of Americans are functionally homeless and basically on a weekly food-shelter lease program in our society that can be cut off to them at any time (sorry, capitalism). In America we call this a career, gig, a livelihood.
> How long can you keep it without a job?
Forever. That’s how free works. If you can get to an American city, which most American towns will happily help you out with, you can access free food and shelter virtually limitlessly.
> if the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created at any price , no price would be too low or too high
Market failure is real. Rates, regulations and barriers to entry can and do inhibit labour demand formation.
I edited.
I’ll edit this again if you have a response.
> I’ll edit this again if you have a response
Not how comment threads work.
This has been a critique of the figures for decades, but the current numbers are too convenient for the powers-that-be to change into something more reflective of reality. Trust me, spending fifteen months unemployed in the middle of nowhere and with access to raw data helped me understand a lot about the deliberately engineered shortcomings of our current datasets.
It’s in the vested interest of leaders to control the narrative. That’s why we have/had so many regulations that prevent them from doing so.
I think it's even worse, because that single metric, unemployment, is highly manipulatable. Administrations have been known to redefine "employment" in order to make the number look more favorable.
The actual report: https://adp-ri-nrip-static.adp.com/artifacts/us_ner/20250702...
Goods-producing companies were net hirers (+32,000). Services lost 66,000 jobs, with losses concentrated in professional/business services (-56,000) and education/health services (-52,000).
Regionally, losses were concentrated in the West North Central Midwest (-28,000), South Atlantic (-21,000) and Mountain states (-20,000). (Map with old data [2].)
Firms with 1 to 50 employees and 250 to 499 employees laid people off while smaller mid-size and large companies were net hirers.
“Year-over-year pay growth for job-stayers was little changed for June at 4.4 percent compared to 4.5 percent in May. Pay growth for job-changers was 6.8 percent in June, down slightly from 7.0 percent last month.” (Pay growth was highest in finance, +5.2%, and lowest in information services, +4.1%.)
[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtCw0itWYAQSzri.png
I used to have multiple recruiters reach out to me daily on LinkedIn regarding software engineering positions.
And this was for multiple years.
That hasn't been the case for the last 3 or 4 months.
None of this surprises me and it shouldn't for others.
Have you used your linkedin profile? If you're looking for a job or are active you're going to get more attention. Your name will also start being added to lead databases when you apply for jobs and those will kick around for a couple years until it's marked as uninteresting.
Odd, it's gotten better for me over the last 3-4 months. The year or two prior to roughly March 2025 were very quiet, though, maybe 1 a month at most.
It's crazy hot now in semiconductors. Anyone with couple of years experience is approached by recruiters daily.
Important: "[payroll processing firm] ADP's report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report"
ADP and BLS numbers are measuring different things. For people that care about these things, the nuances are well-understood.
As a rough heuristic, ADP overfits to private sector jobs and BLS overfits to government jobs. There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
> There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
Surely that doesn't apply when both metrics are bad? I don't know. I'm not familiar with job reporting statistics. So info / perspective would be appreciated.
Also, when you say "over fits" I'm used to that in a machine learning context where it means data outside the fit is worse. Did you mean that ADP is more accurate with private sector and BLS is more accurate with public sector. Or is it more a matter of ADP comes in higher with private sector and BLS comes in higher with public sector. Usually, "overfit" is a bad thing in a machine learning context, but I wouldn't expect ADP to do worse in private and BLS to do worse in public. But the opposite. I would appreciate it if you could clarify the terminology from your perspective.
Yes, ADP is more accurate with private sector jobs and BLS is more accurate with government jobs, because their data sources are heavily biased toward having accurate data in those subsets respectively. They both generally assume that the data they don’t have looks like the data they do have despite the selection bias and disjointedness of their data. BLS extrapolates private sector employment from government employment and census data in ways that no one thinks is representative but that is what they work with. ADP has no government employment data in their model but has a relatively exhaustive sample of private sector employment.
People that know account for these biases. This is why the ADP > BLS heuristic exists. If private sector jobs growth is less than government job growth, reflecting the biases in their respective models, that is interpreted as either the government sandbagging the numbers with make-work jobs or private sector employment being so poor that the monotonic government employment eclipses private sector job growth. Either way, it is a bad sign.
Government job reports this year have been revised down up to 35%.
> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised down by 65,000, from +185,000 to +120,000, and the change for April was revised down by 30,000, from +177,000 to +147,000. With these revisions, employment in March and April combined is 95,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Revised down from previously reported projections. But the numbers are pretty neutral.
> Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.9 percent), adult women (3.9 percent), teenagers (13.4 percent), Whites (3.8 percent), Blacks (6.0 percent), Asians (3.6 percent), and Hispanics (5.1 percent) showed little or no change over the month.
Recent government payroll data has been hugely suspect. On the big release day the numbers are rosy and get reported to much hoopla and "told you" celebration, but then are subsequently revised downwards to little fanfare or notice. And for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact.
Why assume conspiracy, when the reason is known?
This isn't a recent phenomena
> for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact
No, this is not the reason. The numbers that get fanfare are the preliminary BLS numbers. BLS collects data through surveys. Preliminary data are published with incomplete responses. As more employers respond, the numbers get updated.
Guess which employers tend to report late? Those that are doing lots of hiring and firing. So the stable numbers come in first. Then the volatile numbers later. This is well documented, happens on the way up and down, and is constantly (and wrongly) quoted as a partisan conspiracy going both ways.
The numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction. It could be that there are other things going on, but simply that volatile numbers come in later doesn’t seem to explain the bias.
> The numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction.
summary of mean revision for seasonally adjusted numbers, since 2003 are
2nd-1st: 8
3rd-2nd: 2
1st-3rd: 10
but 2025 has been consistently, so far, be negative revisions. Dec 2024 has some positive revisions but 2023-2024 on the whole was negative while 2017-2022 were on the whole positive revision. so I dont think that there is data to support consistently wrong in one direction.
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
> numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction
Because the data have been going in one direction recently. When the job market booms, the revisions are upwards. Then everyone gets to wax lyrical about how BLS is socking the President.
Yes it does. It firms are consistently firing , the preliminary data will always be better and then revised down.
Preliminary reports always underplay the direction of the change
I'm about to lose my job too. The job market looks terrible.
I've been unemployed for months. In the last couple of weeks, I've been rejected for jobs as a pool cleaner, shelf stocker, and a state job requiring me to check multiple email accounts and watch security cameras. I've also recently been rejected as an overnight courier and software tester.
Whatever you imagine the job market to be like, I assure you it's worse.
Shelf stacking requires psychometric tests, another online test, a group assessment, individual assessment then 3 hours of free labour on the shop floor for another assessment! What world are we living in
Don't lose hope; I left grad school right before the first dotcom failures 25ish years ago. I think you'll find that when some novel technology erupts onto the scene, the job market goes through a shift of semi incoherence, that hits folks like us.
but, it's temporary and can introduce a way more enthralling era of jobs.
I hope you have saving to draw on. It’s been very bad for folks AB’s it’s only going to get worse from here.
I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
> But the contraction was capped by payroll expansions in goods-producing roles across industries such as manufacturing and mining. All together, goods-producing positions grew by 32,000 in the month, while payrolls for service roles overall fell by 66,000.
Is this tariffs working as intended?
If your metric is "more/better jobs", then yes tariffs are a failure.
But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
Part of the goal of the tariffs (and other non-tariff related policies) seems to be to reset leverage at all layers of the labor markets, pushing higher skilled and paid workers into lower skilled and paid manufacturing jobs by increasing the labor availability pool (primarily via workers being unable to get jobs at their previous skill/salary level).
For example, imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin at a mining company.
Similarly, cutting Medicaid benefits and adding work requirements could trigger increased availability of the lowest skilled labor, thereby reducing the wages that people doing that labor can demand.
That is all a boost for employers seeking lower cost but high skilled labor, but a knock down for all the workers.
> imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin
Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs? Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy like the US.
> seeking lower cost
Well they certainly aren't supporting increased tariffs if that's what they want.
> Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs?
Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
> Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy
Last I heard, software engineering done overseas is not subject to tariffs.
>Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
Source? My prototypical software engineer is someone working for a SaaS, or similar services based company (eg. insurance company or bank), not someone developing software for a car company or metal parts shop.
If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions.
The bigger loss for all employees is the shareholders primary fallacy giving executives excuses to pay workers less. Since there’s no competition for many consumer goods then there’s no pressure to keep prices low and companies just up their profit margin.
The loss in IT / software jobs are again mostly profiteering using AI as an excuse.
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage.
Unions represent only 9.9% of US labor [1], primarily in the public sector and the skilled trades. White collar workers and low skill workers tend not to have the benefit of a union.
Tariffs are maybe OK if you are, for example, an domestic auto assembly worker (assuming no job losses due to demand reduction or supply chain cost increases), but otherwise not great.
1. Union Membership (Annual) News Release - 2024 A01 Results https://share.google/dmIydp7foghcJ1Lo2
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions
That will take at least 5yrs to a decade to be a major economic change, not a few months after tariffs
For the rest, when analysis seems a bit too convenient it usually is.
Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.
High-prestige work as an escape hatch from poverty has failed, and that may be a good thing. When people accept that dirty or "unskilled" labor has to be done, and that it deserves a living wage as much as any educated position, we'll be stronger as a country. Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
> Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.
This is at odds with
> Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people
... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).
> ... who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment, via incentives to labor or by education, not as the result of hordes being forced into lower skilled labor at lower pay.
> ... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).
Plenty of big unions out there, and plenty of places where growing base actually strengthens the union, since they can afford to do more for members in the event of a strike. People will back their union if their union is fighting for them.
> Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment,
That's one way innovation and efficiency occur, for sure. Plenty of other ways. Most of human history innovation and efficiency gains were done without capital. Not all money is capital, and not all non-monetary resources are capital either.
> Plenty of big unions out there, and plenty of places where growing base actually strengthens the union, since they can afford to do more for members in the event of a strike.
Union membership is strictly bound by the number of jobs.
Unions, especially in the private sector, cannot directly control the number of jobs. At best they can negotiate the percentage of union jobs at a facility or site.
An influx of non-union labor into an industry where unions already don't represent much of the labor force weakens a union's bargaining position.
The unions could try to attract those non-union workers to the union by explaining the protections that come from labor organizing, but if people are desperate enough for work, they likely won't want to rock the boat by joining a union.
Adding to that, in the US at least, the labor protections functions of the Federal government are being systematically undermined.
> Union membership is strictly bound by the number of jobs.
Good news, the number of jobs is not strictly bound.
> Adding to that, in the US at least, the labor protections functions of the Federal government are being systematically undermined.
Yeah, that, at least, we can agree on.
>At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
The goal originally was for Trump to become the center of attention worldwide. This is pretty much the only reason tarrifs are in place.
Also a tool for extortion, much like how Trump was impeached for extorting Ukraine by withholding congressionally-mandated aid funds.
>But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
I can't keep track of how many times how "X" is some sort of dastardly ploy to oppress workers, only for (different?) people to argue that "not X" also oppresses workers, with plausible sounding stories for both sides. Last time it was work from home. Is is a dastardly plot to subjugate workers by exposing them to international competition, and dehumanize them by making every interaction mediated by a glowing rectangle? Or is return to office a dastardly ploy by the capitalist class to regain leverage, by forcing workers to waste time commuting, getting distracted in open concept offices, and buying overpriced lunches?
The same is true for Tariffs. In the 2010s it was not unpopular for leftist types to say how globalization was a disaster for the American middle class, and how it only enriches capitalists. Now you're saying that tariffs were actually some sort of 5d chess move by the capitalist class to crash the economy, so they can subjugate workers? Nevermind that the capitalist class seemed pretty against the tariffs, given how much stock market dropped, and only recovered after Trump walked back on his tariffs. That's not to say something is wrong just because there's a plausible sounding argument for the opposing side, but it does mean you need to do more legwork to prove your point than to tell a nice story.
Welcome to the world of grayscale where almost anything is never a clear win or loss. If Trump’s ideas sounded like clear losses why would he win, if they were all clear losses why would he have so many people against him? The parties aren’t at a 50-50 split by chance, American politics pushes division in the electorate where about half think the idea is bad and about the other half thinks the idea is great.
The parties definitely shift over time as well, with moderates pushing for more trade and far left and right pushing against, we just see the far right in form control of the red side while the blue side is still moderate.
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As a way to shift labour into less productive, lower paying industries? Yes.
Americans yearn for the mines.
When the government is robbing all consumers with tariffs, more bad news will come …
The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America. That is both a large sample size, and probably broadly representative of the economy. There will of course be some business segments that are over or underrepresented but that is different than disregarding the entire report as noise.
ADP reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.
Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.
source: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250702107/be-...
ADP has always been out of sync with BLS numbers. Here is an article in the Atlantic all the way back in 2011 talking about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-o...
> That is both a large sample size,
It doesn't matter how large your sample size is if your sampling method is biased. This could be measuring market share gain/loss in different segments of a steady employment environment.
> disregarding the entire report as noise
Studies with bad / non public sampling methods should be, at a minimum, treated with great skepticism. Why would that not apply here?
A factual number that has less statistical noise or political bias is extremely valuable. Yes, one needs to factor for the biases but that doesn't mean the number should be ignored.
The trend is useful, since one can fairly safely assume that most of the biases haven't radically changed.
ADP is predominant in large companies and has little hold in startups. It skews the stats.
ADP data does have a bias, but it is so much data it provides a valuable signal. The importance of understanding the source of your data and how it represents the largest population is something every scientist has been drilled on.
two small companies i used to work for used adp.
...You know that "startup" is not synonymous with "small company", right?
What's the situation in the vast swath of the economy that's made up of small non-startup companies?
> ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America
that's less than 20%. If you had 10 people to interview and interviewed 2 of them i wouldn't say you interviewed a representative sample of the 10.
No, but if I had 1000 people to interview and interviewed 200 of them at random then absolutely yes.
I know right. Statistics.
The key is "at random". Businesses are not randomly assigned to use ADP
That's a separate problem. I have no idea what the sampling bias is, but the issue isn't that they "only" sample 20% of the population.
Noise is the absence of a signal. A biased signal is fine, just account for the bias.
ADP is huge and covers a broad range of sectors. It would be a very interesting result (and a very extraordinary claim) if the employment data from non-ADP companies went in the opposite direction of ADP. I certainly see no evidence that firms underrepresented in ADP's data are hiring prodigiously.
> assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy
No such assumption is made except by an errant reading of the report. The ADP report [1] can be used to predict BLS numbers, but it’s also independently useful. The reason the headline is 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost is because 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost, ADP can directly count that.
[1] https://adpemploymentreport.com/
It depends on how randomly representative it is. If it is close to random, then it's better than most poll data.
There have been many instances of ADP and BLS job reports being out of step, which can be expected because of their differing methodologies. On the other hand, nobody with a brain can take BLS surveys at face value under these circumstances.
https://wellsfargo.bluematrix.com/docs/html/c42ca8a8-178f-40... | https://archive.today/BhC0n
What in the bad-URL-looks-like-phishing-but-appears-legit heck is this?
Content management system guid I presume, versus a title slug that can drift during editing and publishing. Archive.today link added for the cautious.
Yeah, but WTF is bluematrix.com? If I see a bank name as a subdomain of a domain I don't recognize, alarm bells go off.
Research portal SaaS for financial services firms. Missed opportunity to use a `research.` subdomain CNAME.
Just one data point to add -- the small firm (~150 ppl) I'm currently working at recently laid off 25 people. The reasoning was there are dark clouds in the horizon in the housing market (the company is related to real estate btw).
This administration will drag this country into the gutter.
So rate cut incoming? :p
The fun part is when it's revised down 60,000 in two months.
For completeness, I would suppose those are USA jobs...
Not Canadian or EU or South America or SouthEast Asia etc etc jobs.
Is it too early to link that bad economic performance with the catastrophic management style of their current administration?
They're US numbers, and they're from a private HR firm, not government numbers. It doesn't mean they're not meaningful, but they are a biased sample towards large companies using the HR software in US employment
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You just have to wait until China pays the tariffs.
Right after Mexico builds the wall.
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