The fun part is when it's revised down 60,000 in two months.
[deleted]
Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
201–210 of 366 posts
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#202We 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’s called under-employment. It has been widely discussed in the literature but it’s very difficult to measure. Economic statistics do suffer somewhat from a lamplight effect.
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps the Gini coefficient would be a better metric to capture this?
Certainly not in isolation. It measures inequality. If everyone has nothing you get a perfect Gini score. Pakistan, Ukraine, Belarus and Algeria have a lower (better) Gini score than all of the Americas and most of western Europe and Japan. Want to move?
The Gini coefficients published for deeply corrupt countries like Pakistan and Ukraine are almost certainly a total fiction. Much of the real wealth held by the elites in those countries is hidden from official statistics.
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy. Isn't the media incentivized to keep you watching or reading? The common criticism of media is they like to exaggerate a minor issue to get you to click on a headline.
except when it affects the economy thus their investment (be it 401k or something else)
A more likely explanation is that outside of a few specialized publications, most members of the media are just as financially and economically illiterate as the average person. I mean how many finance and economics courses do you have to pass to get a degree in journalism or communications? There's no deep media conspiracy here.
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#205Earlier 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 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…
[deleted]
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#206The actual report: https://adp-ri-nrip-static.adp.com/artifacts/us_ner/20250702...
Goods-producing companies were net hirers (+32,000). Services lost 66,000 jobs, with losses concentrated in professional/business services (-56,000) and education/health services (-52,000).
Regionally, losses were concentrated in the West North Central Midwest (-28,000), South Atlantic (-21,000) and Mountain states (-20,000). (Map with old data [2].)
Firms with 1 to 50 employees and 250 to 499 employees laid people off while smaller mid-size and large companies were net hirers.
“Year-over-year pay growth for job-stayers was little changed for June at 4.4 percent compared to 4.5 percent in May. Pay growth for job-changers was 6.8 percent in June, down slightly from 7.0 percent last month.” (Pay growth was highest in finance, +5.2%, and lowest in information services, +4.1%.)
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The old “number of dudes on a street corner” metric works perfectly fine by itself. Folks at the bottom of the pile are perfect economic bellwethers.
You're right but this would require caring about the poorest in society which the US seems to have a problem with.
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even better one: real wages, and income and wealth inequality.
Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off. I think we are using inequality as a very bad proxy for poverty but we have much better metrics for that. I suspect people just dislike it for emotional reasons. I want to point out that Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US. Yet everyone is fine with…
Wealth inequality matters a lot when rich people can spend unlimited amounts of money buying influence in politics and then use that influence to enact policies that favor the rich over the poor.
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#209Earlier 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…
[deleted]
Re: Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
#210Earlier 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.
> that's a very different scenario from people getting laid off to reduce labor costs. Not necessarily. People could be laid off to reduce labor costs, in order to distribute more wealth to those at the top. And since the average is national, it doesn't even have to be at the same company. People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays th…
> People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.
This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment, this is a sign of firm B outcompeting firm A. It might be interesting in its own right, but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.
> Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.
Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time. No one feels the need to compare the unemployment rates when it's mentioned CEO to employee pay has increased from 20:1 to 290:1 since 1960. Everyone understands that the economy is a complex, multifaceted thing and the fact it may be doing well or poorly by one metric has no bearing on a discussion of a different aspect.
People care about employment rate because work is critical to our culture - we spend most of our lives working, we identify ourselves by our professions, we rely on income for both survival and social status, most of us would find it extremely unpleasant to be without a job for an extended period of time, and most of us would be delighted if our skills were in high demand at the moment such that we could confidently secure better pay. Regardless of wealth inequality, the overwhelming majority of us want unemployment to be low, and primarily frictional. An unexpected spike in unemployment is well correlated with various bad things which we would love to avoid or at least prepare for. It is a useful metric for economic health, like resting heartrate is a useful metric for bodily health. A good resting heart rate doesn't mean you have nothing else to be concerned about, but a bad resting heart rate is a concern regardless of whatever else is going on.