[HN Gopher] Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectat...
___________________________________________________________________
Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k
increase
Author : ceejayoz
Score : 334 points
Date : 2025-07-02 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://wellsfargo.bluematrix.com/docs/html/c42ca8a8-178f-40... |
| https://archive.today/BhC0n
| tomrod wrote:
| What in the bad-URL-looks-like-phishing-but-appears-legit heck
| is this?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Content management system guid I presume, versus a title slug
| that can drift during editing and publishing. Archive.today
| link added for the cautious.
| genter wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Research portal SaaS for financial services firms. Missed
| opportunity to use a `research.` subdomain CNAME.
| hliyan wrote:
| Important: "[payroll processing firm] ADP's report has a spotty
| track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report"
| adrr wrote:
| 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
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| k4shm0n3y wrote:
| This isn't a recent phenomena
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| That's why unemployment is one of many metrics, and we don't
| put all our weight into a single metric...
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| thehoff wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Which metric(s) capture what he is talking about?
| ipogrjegiorejkf wrote:
| Take a look at the St. Louis FRED website and search for
| wages and wage growth.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > 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).
| tqi wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| This is also a sign that communication of the semantics
| in understandable terms is pretty bad.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they 're reading the mainstream reporting on the BLS
| stats, which is extremely lossily-compressed_
|
| Would add that there is a massive difference in how these
| data are treated and qualified in paid versus ad media.
| CNBC misses the nuance. The _FT_ , _Wall Street Journal_
| , _New York Times_ , _et cetera_ do not.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| 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.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| 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?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| About the US specifically, your government reports
| underemployment numbers, as do almost every country report
| salaries distribution.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| 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/
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| For the second one I was hoping there was something like
| employment satisfaction, but thank you!
| kasey_junk wrote:
| 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.
| twoodfin wrote:
| That real weekly wage data is basically why Trump almost
| and then did get reelected in one chart.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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/
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > 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.
| deciduously wrote:
| You of course know that "you of course know _____, right"
| is the preferred HN rebuttal format, right?
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| Neck and neck with "Got an example of X?"
| lovich wrote:
| Active aggression is looked down upon in this forum
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day
| this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms.
| Generally each level is sustained by some kind of
| grudging consent from the levels above and below.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| >You say Democracies have a short track record.
|
| I actually said the exact opposite.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| loudmax wrote:
| 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?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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
| triceratops wrote:
| milquetoast, not milk toast
| bena wrote:
| 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
| triceratops wrote:
| TIL
| loudmax wrote:
| > 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Are the metrics not reported? Everything I mentioned can
| be found and it's discussed. Just with more niche
| audiences or piecemeal
| antman wrote:
| One just needs a couple of hours per important subject
| with proper mentorship. Then most mews is repeated
| patterns or red herrings
| earnestinger wrote:
| Or more education.
| thayne wrote:
| > 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| Even better one: real wages, and income and wealth
| inequality.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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).
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| gman83 wrote:
| 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.
| jampekka wrote:
| 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.
| NickC25 wrote:
| 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.
| spacemadness wrote:
| In this episode of how economists lie to us all...
| HPsquared wrote:
| I mean it's basically their job.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > 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.
| hx8 wrote:
| 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.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| hx8 wrote:
| 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| frontfor wrote:
| 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.
| hx8 wrote:
| Exactly my point. Rent and mortgage debt is functionally
| very similar and total household debt wouldn't capture
| rent obligations.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A home dweller is paying "rent" to the government as
| property taxes, possibly indirectly through a mortgage.
| jljljl wrote:
| 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
| relaxing wrote:
| No, you don't understand.
|
| As nerds we possess unique capacity for generating
| insights via thinkin real hard about stuff, and everyone
| else is a great big dummy who could not possibly have
| thought of it already.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| ctoll wrote:
| 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.
| acchow wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| We all need to be concerned when they're doing _too well_
| lawlessone wrote:
| >I don't really care how well rich people are doing.
|
| ahem "people of wealth"
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| thayne wrote:
| 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.
| jampekka wrote:
| 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...
| jakubadamw wrote:
| "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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Perhaps the Gini coefficient would be a better metric to
| capture this?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| csallen wrote:
| 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.
| gopher_space wrote:
| 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.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You're right but this would require caring about the
| poorest in society which the US seems to have a problem
| with.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| SR2Z wrote:
| 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.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Not if those are replaced by automation, offshoring, or
| outsourcing.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| 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)
| NickC25 wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's the incentive. There is a reason the media focuses on
| easily juiced metrics.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Add in that most media companies these days are a branch of
| large corporations and it's easy to see where their
| incentives lie.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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?lo
| cat...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| pkaye wrote:
| > 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.
| bentt wrote:
| 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.
| pedroma wrote:
| >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.
| hello_moto wrote:
| except when it affects the economy thus their investment
| (be it 401k or something else)
| pedroma wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Yet, for the last few years the media has been poopooing
| and economy that's by pretty much all measures was very
| strong.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| > 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.
| thayne wrote:
| > Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this
| change.
|
| Not if someone else at the top got paid more.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| This is akin to saying that we need a better metric than
| CPU temperature to track internet download speed.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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.
| kentm wrote:
| > 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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.
| kentm wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| thayne wrote:
| > 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| rexer wrote:
| 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.
| satiated_grue wrote:
| 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/
| mywittyname wrote:
| > 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| jordanb wrote:
| 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.
| jordanb wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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.
| pkaye wrote:
| 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
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.)
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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.
| ipogrjegiorejkf wrote:
| 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.
| skipants wrote:
| If every ex-6-figure worker has to work at Applebee's to make
| ends meet... then who's eating at Applebee's?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| 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.
| observationist wrote:
| 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.
| BunsanSpace wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| fHr wrote:
| 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.
| vaidhy wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| ivape wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| ivape wrote:
| _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 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).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| ivape wrote:
| I edited.
|
| I'll edit this again if you have a response.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| 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.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Total wage $ would cover it.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > 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?
| danans wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Okay, but what is happening in reality?
| elcritch wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > 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
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if more goods are made locally then it seems rather that
| unions would have more leverage_
|
| On the other hand, you'd have a protected market for
| launching non-union competitors. When the bogeyman is a
| foreign firm, it's easier to justify favouritism.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > 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.
| danans wrote:
| > 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| 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 you'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.
| InkCanon wrote:
| As a way to shift labour into less productive, lower paying
| industries? Yes.
| krapp wrote:
| Americans yearn for the mines.
| analyte123 wrote:
| 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.
| chc4 wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| ADP is predominant in large companies and has little hold in
| startups. It skews the stats.
| hx8 wrote:
| 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.
| weaksauce wrote:
| two small companies i used to work for used adp.
| danaris wrote:
| ...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?
| shkkmo wrote:
| > 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?
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| No, but if I had 1000 people to interview and interviewed
| 200 of them at random then absolutely yes.
|
| I know right. Statistics.
| protonbob wrote:
| The key is "at random". Businesses are not randomly
| assigned to use ADP
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _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/20250702
| 107/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.
| ..
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| It depends on how randomly representative it is. If it is close
| to random, then it's better than most poll data.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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/
| realo wrote:
| 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?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _would suppose those are USA jobs_
|
| American private-sector jobs, and a sample thereof.
| quantum_state wrote:
| When the government is robbing all consumers with tariffs, more
| bad news will come ...
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm about to lose my job too. The job market looks terrible.
| underlipton wrote:
| The fun part is when it's revised down 60,000 in two months.
| programmertote wrote:
| 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).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the small firm (~150 ppl) I 'm currently working at_
|
| According to the ADP report [1], firms with 1 to 49 employees
| laid off tens of thousands, as did those with 250 to 499. Firms
| with 50 to 249 employees and enterprises with 500+ employees
| were net hirers. Job losses, moreover, were concentrated in
| finance, professional and business services, and education and
| health services.
|
| TL; DR These data do not support job hazards for 50 to
| 250-person tech companies.
|
| [1] https://adpemploymentreport.com/
| darqis wrote:
| THANKS TRUMP
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This administration will drag this country into the gutter.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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
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