211–220 of 366 posts
For completeness, I would suppose those are USA jobs... Not Canadian or EU or South America or SouthEast Asia etc etc jobs. Is it too early to link that bad economic performance with the catastrophic management style of their current administration?
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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…
> imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs? Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy like the US. > seeking lower cost Well they certainly aren't supporting increased tariffs if that's what they want.
Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
> Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy
Last I heard, software engineering done overseas is not subject to tariffs.
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Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out earlier.
I think a better measure would be household income divided by number of adults in the household. Possibly with some consideration for the number of children in the household.
> Household income is adjusted for differences in the needs of households of different sizes with an equivalence scale that divides household income by the square root of household size. The adjusted income is then attributed to every person in the household.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
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It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient. You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders. The only thing that actually works is…
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…
I actually said the exact opposite.
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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…
And the point of unemployment statistics is not to give any sense of economic equality.
> Sure, but the issue is that the reporting treats the metric as meaningfully representative of accessibility of employment
Because it is a pretty good proxy for this. When unemployment is high, wages tend to stagnate and it takes longer on average for people to find new employment. When unemployment is low, wages go up and people tend to have a much easier time finding a job quickly. There is a remarkable correlation between people seeking unemployment benefits and accessibility of employment. Sure there are people who would rather take a low paying job than the benefits, but there have always been such people, and the proportion doesn't quickly change, so within reason you can compare the situation at time A with the situation at time B based on the metric which is measured the same way at both times and get a pretty good sense of what the difference is.
It is not the end all be all, but nothing ever could be. It is one of countless metrics, all of which have their appropriate uses.
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> 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.
If a software engineer starts working at Applebees, GDP will decrease. If lots of software engineers do it, GDP decreases more. If corporate revenue increases and is spent (as most revenue is), then the workers will be better off in the most bland "raising all boats" sense of the word - there will be more competition for their labor and more opportunities for them to jump ship. GDP gets a bad rap but if I had to pick…
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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.
Your argument is the exact reason why the media focus on a single metric is bad - because some but-whataboutism will always pop up and use it as pretext to debate an unrelated issue not covered by the metric.
It's also the exact reason why we shouldn't measure economic health as a single metric at all - it's not that to whom value accrues doesn't matter, it's that it's a different metric than how much value is generated in the first place.
It also explains why there isn't a single best economic policy - the absence of a single metric means there is no strict ordering.
(You can easily construe a counter-argument why median disposable household income isn't the best metric, either: "Median wage is stagnant, everybody needs to take a second job so disposable income goes up". And you can do that for every single metric in isolation)
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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…
At consumption money level at least inequality is also inefficient allocation of resources due to the diminishing marginal utility of money.
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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.
If GDP goes up and the velocity of money drops, it means that real economic gains are not being realized by those who actually spend the majority of their income versus saving it.
Not that there's anything wrong with saving money - it's just that the more money that is being spent regularly, the healthier the entire economy is. Generally.
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> 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.
Even better one: real wages, and income and wealth inequality.
A healthy economy is one where money is made via wages, and spent via economic activity.
The more active a given dollar is in terms of circulation through the economy, the healthier the economy usually is.
Economies tend to stagnate when a small group of people hoard the vast majority of the money, and don't circulate it back into the economy.