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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

#141

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #42
ajmurmann wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.

That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.

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

#142

Post by csallen »

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.

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.

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

#143

Post by vaidhy »

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…

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.

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

#144

Post by WillPostForFood »

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 reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.

Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.

source: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250702107/be-...

ADP has always been out of sync with BLS numbers. Here is an article in the Atlantic all the way back in 2011 talking about it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-o...

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

#146

Post by jacobr1 »

HPsquared wrote: post #108
ajmurmann wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.

Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.

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

#147

Post by jacobr1 »

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.

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.

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

#148

Post by ghaff »

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.

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.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

ajmurmann wrote: post #25
psunavy03 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture. This is what I'm getting at. I recognize there are more detailed measures, but they also never seem to inform the public discourse.

Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media sh…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

t_mann wrote: post #129
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…

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 the…

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.

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