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

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

#121

Post by IshKebab »

chasd00 wrote: post #116
chc4 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but if I had 1000 people to interview and interviewed 200 of them at random then absolutely yes.

I know right. Statistics.

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

#123

Post by Henchman21 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #81
BurningFrog wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is fairly easy to measure, and since a society normally consumes as much as it produces, it's a pretty good measure of average economic health. You're right that there is more nuance you'd wish to see, but it's harder to measure, and I don't know how much it's normally worth.

> it's a pretty good measure of average economic health Median economic health strikes me as far more interesting than mean. I don't really care how well rich people are doing.

We all need to be concerned when they’re doing too well

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

MangoToupe wrote: post #96
mywittyname wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by missedthecue »

bilsbie wrote: post #68
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…

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.

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.

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

#126

Post by bena »

triceratops wrote: post #84
ajmurmann wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chan…

milquetoast, not milk toast

Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast. Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food

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

#127

Post by BunsanSpace »

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…

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.

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

#128

Post by Analemma_ »

MangoToupe wrote: post #100
tqi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a sign of intense hubris - the idea that thousands of labor economists have never considered something they thought of after 30 seconds of reading means that either a) the economists are all idiots or b) the reader is orders of magnitude smarter than them.

This is also a sign that communication of the semantics in understandable terms is pretty bad.

The communications from the BLS are quite good and easily understandable. The problem is that the people making these complaints aren't reading those, they're reading the mainstream reporting on the BLS stats, which is extremely lossily-compressed, and then assuming this makes them qualified to criticize the underlying stats. Journalists deserve some flak here for the superficial way they report on the numbers, but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.

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

#129

Post by t_mann »

ajmurmann wrote: post #12
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…

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…

I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.

One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.

Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

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

#130

Post by virgildotcodes »

skipants wrote: post #106
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…

If every ex-6-figure worker has to work at Applebee's to make ends meet... then who's eating at Applebee's?

Applebees drops prices to enable their employees to eat at Applebees. Margins fall, wages universally clamped to minimum wage, layoffs hit. Fewer Applebees workers with lower wages means a shrinking demand side of the Applebees ouroboros, resulting in a spiral of Applebees price cuts, revenue drops, layoffs. The end state of humanity is a desolate Applebees parking lot strewn with desiccated human corpses and the last person alive is the largest shareholder of Applebees, inside the store, consuming their own flesh.
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