31–40 of 366 posts
Is this tariffs working as intended?
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 lifes…
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART Labor Force Participation Rate
These are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sh…
Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.
There are small outlier countries like Singapore that have extremely well but at scale democratic countries have greatly outperformed other systems
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 lifes…
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 lifes…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Important: "[payroll processing firm] ADP's report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
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 lifes…
> 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. T…
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.
> 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?
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.