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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

#151
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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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.

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

#152
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.

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.

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.

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

#153

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…

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.

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

#154
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.

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).

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#156
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#157
post #143

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.

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.

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

#158

> 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?

As a way to shift labour into less productive, lower paying industries? Yes.

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

#159

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.

> 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.

Active aggression is looked down upon in this forum

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

#160

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…

Or more education.
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