Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase • Hacker News Board

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#111

Post by MangoToupe » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #107

MangoToupe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#112

Post by hx8 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

frontfor wrote: post #95

hx8 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly my point. Rent and mortgage debt is functionally very similar and total household debt wouldn't capture rent obligations.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#113

Post by jakubadamw » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #45

ajmurmann wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

“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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#114

Post by jjk166 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #101

jjk166 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#115

Post by danans » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #90

danans wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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 prof…

> 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

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#116

Post by chasd00 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

chc4 wrote: post #61

analyte123 wrote: post #52

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 differ…

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 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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#117

Post by MangoToupe » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:12 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #114

MangoToupe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 e…

> 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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#118

Post by yourapostasy » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #15

kasey_junk wrote: post #10

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.

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…

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.

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#119

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #40

jimbokun wrote: post #31

> 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 m…

[deleted]

Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase

#120

Post by observationist » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

psunavy03 wrote: post #6

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…

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.