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 lifestyle or are burning the candle at both ends just to put food on the table. One of these enables folks to buy nonessentials and fund all those sectors of the economy, the other doesn't.
I agree, among the many things that need way better measurements, chief among them besides unemployment, being economic preference, is an alternative to the nonsensical GDP.
But regarding unemployment, another absolutely bizarre fact of that measure of whether people have a means of producing in order to be compensated and become consumers, is the fact that is an American citizen loses his job and cannot find one after 90 days… poof, he’s not counted and therefore the unemployment rate increased. Furthermore, if now a foreign person comes into the USA, whether legally or internally, and is employed, the unemployment rate decreases, and it is not really captured that the lower wage the foreigners are willing to take, also further undermines all other wages.
Frankly, we should really be assessing why the heck we are even allowing ourselves to be managed as a vector in a database of numbers like some widget. The only real reason the ruling class cares about the “unemployment rate” is primarily to gauge whether they need to put more bodies on the fire to suppress wages and keep the anxiety and stress of the peasants competing high enough to keep profits maximized.
If it was actually “we need high skilled workers, the ruling class would have done things a long time ago to foster developing high skilled workers over the last 30+ years that they’ve been complaining about that while just using it as an excuse to fall back onto their old ways of importing brown people to suppress wages and to serve them and their decadent lives. “Who will cut our grass and raise our children” they cry out, just like when their slaves we’re taken from them.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently as well and think there is a really simple answer and fix and am frustrated I haven’t seen it meaningfully attempted or discussed anywhere (passively consuming message boards etc)
Cash flow per person (per household) just like the IRS does (except also including money from loans).
This is a citizenry education problem, a media problem but not a metrics problem.
These metrics are built and used by people who do apply multiple measures - every day. If you are in a trading or macro oriented role, you will not be using just one figure. You will make the effort because your incentives and training encourage you to do so.
The non-specialist, which is most people, is never going to have a set of metrics which make it easy, because no metric can overcome all the practical and technical issues strewn across the path to producing it.
Of course we have alternative measures of unemployment but they're harder to measure and read.
There's something about the so-called "vibecession" - that people might be better at measuring their own circumstances than macroeconomic data provides. In hindsight this is sort of an obvious take.
Real wages and high quality full-time employment have declined, but more importantly wthat people use to measure well being such as career outlook and price of "joy" expenses (concert tickets, hobbies, travel etc.) has significantly contracted or outpaced inflation.
Lastly, rep. Ocasio-Cortez struck me with a description of this socio-economic climate on NPR's morning edition a while back. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5306406/alexandria-ocas...
In short, she noticed that "everything feels like a scam" - that is, digital distribution has enabled more complex fees, price discrimination, offerings are better optimized for profitability etc.
These are statistics. 1. It's not a problem if one of them does not reflect you specifically. 2. You never use just one. It is a problem if the measure needs ongoing adjustment to keep some kind of meaning and if this adjustment is partisan. It's also a problem if someone reads one number just to make a point.
> 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.
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 different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
I hope you have saving to draw on. It’s been very bad for folks AB’s it’s only going to get worse from here.
I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
Just one data point to add -- the small firm (~150 ppl) I'm currently working at recently laid off 25 people. The reasoning was there are dark clouds in the horizon in the housing market (the company is related to real estate btw).
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%.)
I've applied casually to around 30 listings(I'm EU based) throughout last 2-3 months, all of which I was almost a perfect candidate for(9 years total exp). I received 2 automatic 'no's and 1 phone call + assignment for which I'm still waiting for a response. Everything else straight up ghosted me, not even confirmation emails of received resumes. Some of those companies even re-newed their listings afterwards. I feel like 80% of job listings are just straight up fake to keep VC's believing.
33 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadEither way, "full employment" doesn't mean much unless you take into account whether people are actually able to live a stable lifestyle or are burning the candle at both ends just to put food on the table. One of these enables folks to buy nonessentials and fund all those sectors of the economy, the other doesn't.
But regarding unemployment, another absolutely bizarre fact of that measure of whether people have a means of producing in order to be compensated and become consumers, is the fact that is an American citizen loses his job and cannot find one after 90 days… poof, he’s not counted and therefore the unemployment rate increased. Furthermore, if now a foreign person comes into the USA, whether legally or internally, and is employed, the unemployment rate decreases, and it is not really captured that the lower wage the foreigners are willing to take, also further undermines all other wages.
Frankly, we should really be assessing why the heck we are even allowing ourselves to be managed as a vector in a database of numbers like some widget. The only real reason the ruling class cares about the “unemployment rate” is primarily to gauge whether they need to put more bodies on the fire to suppress wages and keep the anxiety and stress of the peasants competing high enough to keep profits maximized.
If it was actually “we need high skilled workers, the ruling class would have done things a long time ago to foster developing high skilled workers over the last 30+ years that they’ve been complaining about that while just using it as an excuse to fall back onto their old ways of importing brown people to suppress wages and to serve them and their decadent lives. “Who will cut our grass and raise our children” they cry out, just like when their slaves we’re taken from them.
Cash flow per person (per household) just like the IRS does (except also including money from loans).
These metrics are built and used by people who do apply multiple measures - every day. If you are in a trading or macro oriented role, you will not be using just one figure. You will make the effort because your incentives and training encourage you to do so.
The non-specialist, which is most people, is never going to have a set of metrics which make it easy, because no metric can overcome all the practical and technical issues strewn across the path to producing it.
Point the way to the line for rigid economic class assignments.
There's something about the so-called "vibecession" - that people might be better at measuring their own circumstances than macroeconomic data provides. In hindsight this is sort of an obvious take.
Real wages and high quality full-time employment have declined, but more importantly wthat people use to measure well being such as career outlook and price of "joy" expenses (concert tickets, hobbies, travel etc.) has significantly contracted or outpaced inflation.
Author Eugine Ludwig wrote this great article for political a few months ago. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-...
Another article on what it means to be priced out of a hobby. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/04/hobby-inf...
Lastly, rep. Ocasio-Cortez struck me with a description of this socio-economic climate on NPR's morning edition a while back. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5306406/alexandria-ocas... In short, she noticed that "everything feels like a scam" - that is, digital distribution has enabled more complex fees, price discrimination, offerings are better optimized for profitability etc.
Is this tariffs working as intended?
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?
I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
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%.)
[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtCw0itWYAQSzri.png
And this was for multiple years.
That hasn't been the case for the last 3 or 4 months.
None of this surprises me and it shouldn't for others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/business/what-to-know-abo...