25 ms·

April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%

230 points by ericmay 7y ago

treyfitty 7y ago
I posted the official numbers and report from the BLS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063) but it never caught traction. Same goes for other times I post from the proper source. However, it seems like HN has a bias for WSJ and NYT articles. In my opinion, the BLS report is more enlightening and breaks down sectors. Is there a reason why official government reports never catch traction?
- david-gpu 7y ago
  Link for the lazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063
- ericmay 7y ago
  I'm not sure why the WSJ isn't a "proper source". But I think that people want more of a story so they tend to favor news articles over official sources. If you look at the BLS report, it's hard to even read because of the font. I believe both are of value, but that's why I figure people favor the other formats.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >I'm not sure why the WSJ isn't a "proper source". The paywall I hit on this article could be one reason.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Paywall, incentives to increase clicks, and so forth.
  - ecocentrik 7y ago
    I canceled my subscription last year because of the soft-core Fox News style "opinion" pieces and fact wrangling they engage in. It is a News Corp publication now. I miss the old WSJ.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
      There is an argument to be made that the opinion pieces are just there to spark sufficient amount of outrage to direct clicks to your website. WSJ, Marketwatch and multiple others follow that principle. Regular reporting still appears to happen.
      - wpietri 7y ago
        The WSJ has had a... unique... opinion section long before clicks were an issue. I think their purpose is, as with a lot of opinion writing, to make the readers feel good (smart, righteous, wise, important, justified, etc). But the WSJ has a subscriber base unusually dedicated to a) getting money, and b) keeping it. And a lot of Wall Street as an entity is less focused on value creation than cash extraction, which is a particular mindset. So the opinion section is going to reflect what's important to the key audiences. My understanding is that pre-Murdoch, the news and opinion sides were thoroughly separate. Hopefully that isn't getting lost.
        mrscottson 7y ago
        Marketwatch, Barron's, WSJ, etc... all down the Murdoch tube of no editorial integrity. Had to stop following those news sources when they started the downhill slide.
      - dahfizz 7y ago
        Would you put up with this in any other industry? "It's okay that mega-million corporation X misleads and manipulates people in order to take money from them, because sometimes it uses that money in a meagerly beneficial way"
        A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
        I am confused. I am not sure this is an accurate rephrasing of what I said. Could you elaborate a little bit?
  - anoraca 7y ago
    It is largely owned and directed by Rupert Murdoch who is infamous for inflammatory tabloid journalism (New York Post, Fox News, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
- webninja 7y ago
  Link to the your primary source post for bls.gov? I’ll upvote it.
  - treyfitty 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063
- paulcole 7y ago
  What specifically differs between the BLS report and this WSJ article?
  - sojournerc 7y ago
    One is the actual primary source.
    - paulcole 7y ago
      Sorry didn't realize that. I wonder why the US government is just paraphrasing WSJ articles though??
- jasode 7y ago
  >I posted the official numbers and report from the BLS but it never caught traction. Same goes for other times I post from the proper source. However, it seems like HN has a bias for WSJ and NYT articles. [...] Is there a reason why official government reports never catch traction? Just a theory but titles of threads do matter. I'm not claiming it's the reason in your case but it might be. - Your previous title with no activity: "BLS Reports 14.7% Unemployment Rate" - This title that attracted upvotes: "April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%" Your title's matter-of-fact tone is clinical and missing the impact of the 14.7%? Hmmm... the 14.7%... so... is that a lot or a little? The phrase "rose to a record" is immediate spoonfeeding of the impact to potential readers. Good newspapers like WSJ, NYT, Buzzfeed, etc know how to craft titles to get readers to click on them. This is often abused and thus disparaged as SEO/clickbait. In this case, providing a little bit of a statistic's impact could be helpful.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    The problem is when a submitter wants to follow the site guidelines, as OP did.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - gameswithgo 7y ago
      You can be correct, or you can get traction. I think a lot of technical people don't understand this. They get mad at people like say, Greta Thunberg, for not being purely clinical, accurate, scientific and dispassionate. But, meanwhile the people working to make the world believe climate change is fake are emotional, manipulative, and actually get traction against pure, reasoned, calm argument. So do we want to be correct, or do we want to win?
      - emeerson 7y ago
        Interesting to present it as a binary tradeoff. I want to win, but I want to make sure that the thesis has some modeling diligence =)
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Eric Weinstein posits that the purpose of news organizations isnt to relay raw information to the public, but rather, it has the sole purpose of telling you how to feel about the information. They provide you with narrative. Exposing a person to a dataset without a narrative puts the burden on the person to have to parse through and construct their own narrative. This may be just too much for the average person and hence why they prefer their data to come bundled with a narrative - it is a time saving and bias confirming heuristic. I am not saying that this is true, but it certainly is an interesting idea to consider and think about. Eric´s take on this is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_-qV-9hMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_-qV-9hMo Wiki link to the phenomenon in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > This may be just too much for the average person Having to construct your own narrative all the time is most certainly too much for any single person. If I had to come up with my own interpretation of everything, I'd be sitting here crunching data all day long until I go crazy. One always has to choose their fights, and for everything else you have to find someone else to trust.
    - wesammikhail 7y ago
      That is indeed the point he makes. That rejecting the institutions isnt a viable strategy. Fixing the institutions however, in order for them not to hijack your emotional state, is probably the right way to go.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      To take something especially apropos to the WSJ... In earnings releases, companies will generally try to spin their earnings in the best possible light by focusing on the positives. Maybe claim extenuating circumstances outside of their control like foreign exchange headwinds. The casual reader probably doesn't have any way to tell whether it's mostly BS or not without doing a bunch of their own research.
- ddevault 7y ago
  In this case I recommend writing to hn@ycombinator.com and asking them to merge the threads and swap out the URL in this post.
- freepor 7y ago
  There are very few people who want to wade through primary source data. I don't -- doing that is what journalists are paid for.
- hi41 7y ago
  I think government and scholarly articles are very hard for common man to understand because they use terms and abbreviations which can be understood only by practitioners of that field. For example BBC carried an article about a black hole discovered near our solar system and at the end included a link to the paper published by the researchers. I understood the BBC article but the scholarly article was super hard to understand and I couldn't go beyond the first paragraph. Similarly the comedy shows on TV also have laugh tracks to tell people when to laugh otherwise some of jokes are too complicated to be understood in short duration. Here is the BBC article. You will find the link to the scholarly article at the end. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812 edit: grammar
- OrgNet 7y ago
  The main reason might be because the current government is republican and this forum is mainly democrat but that is just a guess... The admins also manipulate posts, votes and front page visibility so it is hard to say for sure.
- RivieraKid 7y ago
  Original source isn't necessarily the best place to consume the information for many people. (In general, I have no opinion in this specific case) I feel like HN has an original source fetish. I remember there was an IPO and the HN submission was some weirdly formatted document submitted to the SEC, it took me a while to understand what it is about. It would be better to simply link to some article which would contain a link to the document for the 1% of people who are interested in reading it.
  - poulsbohemian 7y ago
    > I feel like HN has an original source fetish It’s the search for veritas. We are a bunch of scientists, engineers, and thinking people. We want to go straight to the source and understand from first principles.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nick_urban 7y ago
  Perhaps it's that most people have never heard of "BLS", but they trust WSJ / NYT. Newspapers provide context and interpretation. And they are designed to be read. A big block of monospace text is not inviting for most people.
- TickleMeTrumpmo 7y ago
  The site favors leftist rags, not really surprising.
- demadog 7y ago
  You may think hackers are purely data-driven rational beings, but they are in fact humans too, and prefer an enticing headline.
- ryuukk_ 7y ago
  just like rust/mozilla news, you need link proper source to get mass upvoted by their bots ;)
ryanwaggoner 7y ago
And yet market futures are green, just like they always are after horrible news. How high does unemployment have to get before investor sentiment shifts and the market tanks? 20%? 50%? Was the market severely undervalued a few months ago, when we were previously at these levels? It’s hard to see how this pandemic is anything other than a huge drag on the economy over the next few years, at least.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Looks like you posted as I was typing my comment responding to the inevitable "why are the markets up" comment haha. This news is better than the market expected. They had priced in an expected unemployment rate of 16%[0]. Traders dont wait for the bad news to make buy sell decisions, they traded off of what they believed the report would be and had forecasts made, sending stocks down on average. They were wrong, so the markets will adjust for whatever the new impacts are. Even if the actual unemployment rate was exactly the forecast, the markets will have gone up because the uncertainty in that part of the forecast will have gone away, and lower uncertainty means higher valuations, all else being equal. [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-show-highest-unemployment-rate-on-record-11588514401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-sho...
  - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
    That only makes sense for an explanation of why the market is up today, not why it's hanging around the levels it was in the fall of 2019. Not everything is priced in. Given the collapse of consumer demand, the depression-era surge in unemployment, the loss of GDP, and the dim prospects of a rapid recovery in 2020, the market was either severely undervalued in 2019 or is severely overvalued right now. Or both.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      > Given the collapse of consumer demand Consumer demand has generally shifted, online commerce is seeing a boom. It's reasonable to theorize there will be a brick and mortar consumer boom once things normalize. > the depression-era surge in unemployment Unemployment includes the losses the market has already accounted for, temporary unemployment and reduced hours that will go back towards normal, and the initial numbers aren't as bad as theorized (but those numbers are suspect). > the loss of GDP Yeah but everyone else is losing GDP too generally. > the dim prospects of a rapid recovery in 2020 Maybe. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how effective we've flattened the curve and the overall trajectory figures are much better than initial estimates pegged them at. Many places outside of the eastcoast have done massively better than predicted, and even NYC is doing a good job of staying within hospital capacity. Remember when this first happened we had no data, and the market corrected assuming the absolute worse. Now we're finding out that things are not as bad as the initial models showed they would be - and the initial models suggested crazy numbers - so while the current situation isn't all roses, it's generally better than anyone honestly predicted.
lettergram 7y ago
My prediction is we hit (or in reality, have already hit) 48 million unemployed (~30%) in the U.S. It’s just many aren’t filing for unemployment because they can’t get through OR they decided not to apply (due to receiving stimulus / severance). Full predictions / data here: https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-u-s-fatalities-economic-predictions/ https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-u-s-fatalities-economic-... The gist is that retailers are going bankrupt (see J. Crew & Neiman Marcus) and places like Macy’s are furloughing most of the staff. Airlines are similarly hit, and I can go on (it’s linked above). If retail and hospitality (and similar sectors) shrink by 80% for 6 months that’s a massive number of unemployed - 33 million. Further, recruiting and marketing has cut staff at most non-FAANG places (see Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc), This will start to impact the tech industry. Banking is going to see massive defaults in the next 3-6 months... the list goes on. Easy to see unemployment hitting 30% in the next 2 months.
- k__ 7y ago
  Do you think this will be their downfall in the long run?
  - generalpass 7y ago
    Who are "they"?
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    It's not good for the now unemployed people but hopefully they'll get back on their feet!
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this analysis.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > It’s just many aren’t filing for unemployment because they can’t get through OR they decided not to apply (due to receiving stimulus / severance). The BLS numbers have nothing to do with unemployment filings. They base their unemployment numbers off two surveys: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm People not looking could skew the numbers, but since the vast majority of the job losses in the report are considered temporary layoffs, and since the BLS always counts temporarily laid off people as "unemployed" regardless of other criteria, I don't expect it to be a significant factor.
vikramkr 7y ago
To preempt the apparently inevitable "wow stocks went up on this news why wall street be like that" posts : the reason futures are up currently and the market will be up when they open in a but is because this is better than expected. Wall street was expecting unemployment to rise to over 16% [0]. Therefore, the markets were pricing in an expected 16% unemployment rate. The real number today is lower, meaning the markets are going to adjust up to meet the difference. That's why it might look like the markets are cheered by the unemployment news. They kind of are, it's better than they expected. Edit: Updated the link to a non AMP link. [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-show-highest-unemployment-rate-on-record-11588514401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-sho...
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  To me this indicates that the financial markets are a terrible measure for the economic experience of most citizens. They are their own system that’s not connected to most people’s economic reality. I have no problem with that but for national policies we should stop looking at financial markets or GDP but try to optimize for average income or purchasing power.
  - michaelborromeo 7y ago
    The market reflects, rightly, that while the situation doesn’t look good for many certain fundamentals haven’t changed drastically YET. For example, infrastructure is still intact, demand is theoretically still there just suppressed, capacity to produce is still theoretically there. Unemployment is based on employers short to medium term outlook. I.e. Can I pay this person for a month and will the person be a net positive? So the two measures differ and in weird situations like now we see how much they differ.
    - pcmaffey 7y ago
      Or rather, it reflects that this what people believe.
    - bradleyjg 7y ago
Pfhreak 7y ago
With numbers like that, nearly everyone in the states knows someone impacted. The optimist in me hopes to see people demand universal healthcare, social housing, food benefits, and more so that everyone at least has a baseline level of stability. The pessimist in me believes that this number will be used to prematurely force workers back to work, causing more illness and loss of work for those who choose not to return.
- michaelborromeo 7y ago
  The pandemic is being used by both parties to push their agenda. Your pessimism is another persons optimistic outcome.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I'm not sure how more disease, death, and long-term health conditions is someone else's optimistic outcome, but it seems to be inevitable.
    - save_ferris 7y ago
      It’s not that more disease and death is desired by one side, rather there’s political momentum behind not believing that it’s as severe as it’s being reported. We no longer live in a world with shared truths, and this is the most remarkable manifestation of this new reality.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        I'm reminded of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. It's difficult to report even a very high number of deaths in a saturated disinformation environment.
        commandlinefan 7y ago
        > the 1932 Pulitzer Prize Ok, I googled it and I still don't get it... are you talking about the cartoon?
lquist 7y ago
What is the unemployment rate for software engineers? Can't seem to find this in the BLS data
- SloopJon 7y ago
  "Information" is probably the most representative category, which shows an unemployment rate of 11% in table A-14, compared to 3.5% a year ago.
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
The french economy has been hit harder than many other countries, probably due very generous short-time working relief measures, where the state pays 90% of the former salary: "Could there be a connection between the deep recession - in no other eurozone country did economic output in the corona crisis collapse as sharply as in France - and the generous short-time working arrangements?" https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesschau.de%2Fausland%2Ffrankreich-gehaelter-coronavirus-101.html https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%... Tl;Dr: France once again becomes socialist, discovers that incentives are powerful.
- jeltz 7y ago
  So France became socialist because they did the most generous handouts to companies?
  - MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
    Yes.
dayofthedaleks 7y ago
The U6 number from the report is 22.8%. U6 being folks who are out of a job but not properly on the dole. I would expect that number to be north of 25% in the upcoming May report.
- zeusly 7y ago
  Definition of on the dole: Unemployed and in receipt of state benefit. Origin of on the dole: In the UK, Unemployment Benefit has been known by the slang term 'the dole' since WWI. This derives from the 'doling out', that is, 'handing out' of charitable gifts of food or money.
  - hackissimo123 7y ago
    Wow, I'm British and I never made that connection before between "the dole" and the verb "to dole out". TIL.
bwb 7y ago
Am I the only one who looked at all the graphs and thought, man this is going to make it really hard to make good graphs during the next recession :)?
aazaa 7y ago
For comparison, the BLS reports an all-time high for unemployment (one-year period) in the US was about 25%. It was 1933, deep into the Great Depression. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LFU21000100&series_id=LFU22000100&from_year=1929&to_year=1939&periods_option=specific_periods&periods=Annual+Data https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LFU21000100&series_id=LFU220... Markets really don't care about this number because it occurred in the past. Everyone knew the number would be very, very bad and it was. What markets care about now is what happens next. For their part, US stock markets are saying everything will be Ok. The S&P 500 is trading 16% from its all-time high. Unexpectedly (for me at least), everything is riding on how well the Fed can butcher the raging US dollar bull. It seems impossible, but there's a substantial shortage of US dollars, which has been wreaking havoc on the world economy for some time now, triggering negative yielding sovereign debt and other imbalances. If the Fed succeeds, the debts for this crisis will be eliminated through a weaker dollar (dollar holders will pay in purchasing power), and things can go on more or less as normal. If, however, the Fed is unable to bring the dollar down and hold it there for a long time, the ballooning debt will begin to choke the real economy. We'll see it first in interest payments to finance the federal government rising and eventually forcing cuts to entitlements and defense spending. This would appear to set up a situation in which the Fed will try to err on the side of "caution" - adding too much rather than too little liquidity into the economy. It's worth remembering that the Fed always gets what it wants in the end. See: https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/ https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
yumraj 7y ago
And Dow Jones is up by almost 400 points. Go figure..
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  High unemployment means higher likelihood of Fed support. Equities markets have largely decoupled from the state of the economy.
knolax 7y ago
IIRC anyone looking at the unemployment rate has to look at some factors that could inflate or deflate the rate. The unemployment rate is a proportion of those seeking employment that do not have a job. This means that as time goes on, people who would like to have a job stop seeking and therefore stop contributing to the unemployment rate (eg. someone going homeless actually makes the unemployment rate go down). On the converse side, seasonal workers and those in between jobs also inflate unemployment numbers to a small extent. In addition, the employment rate does not measure underemployment, which is important as the gig economy becomes more and more common (although perhaps not as much during quarantine).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 7y ago
Unemployment numbers are not the only issue at hand, from reduced hours to outright cuts in salary; we just took ten percent for two months and it can get to be more, an I have seen others reporting greater than ten percent for regular salaried employees. Unemployment is horrible but don't discount salary cuts either, for some single earner families to include those only recently forced into single earner it can be very stress inducing
- myth_drannon 7y ago
  Tesla had 20% salary reduction.
bawana 7y ago
And the stock market is unfazed. So now you know where most of that money (trillions of relief for Covid) trickled to. The financial markets. We basically printed money to assuage the fear and anxiety of the speculators to whom the world is beholden
- three_seagrass 7y ago
  Markets were expected worse (~16%), and strong Q1 earnings coupled with Fed pumping is why you have the uptick.
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    Serious question: How do you know that markets were expecting 16%? Where do you read that?
    - three_seagrass 7y ago
      My wife has CNBC on in the background during the day while we WFH, which is where I saw them talking about it.
  - treyfitty 7y ago
    Your position sounds valid, but i also want to point out that we're at a point where "expectations" matter. For one, you can see from the past that initial claims reports every thursday were often far in exceed above expectations, yet all but one Thursday had stock market rallies. Furthermore, stocks who missed Q1 earnings and provided or retracted guidance had their stocks increase the next trading day. So, to say the stock market jump today was a result of 14.7% unemployment rate vs the expected 16% is an unfounded assertion. Could it be that it's because US-China tensions have allegedly eased? Could it be that oil jumped 4.5% today and is likely to have given investors faith that demand for oil is increasing? Or could it be a bunch of other things at once? I don't think it's fair to distill the stock market to just one outcome anymore. There's too much going on at once.
    - 7y ago
lihaciudaniel 7y ago
This is just like the great depression a hundred years ago

230 points by ericmay 7y ago

I posted the official numbers and report from the BLS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063) but it never caught traction. Same goes for other times I post from the proper source. However, it seems like HN has a bias for WSJ and NYT articles. In my opinion, the BLS report is more enlightening and breaks down sectors. Is there a reason why official government reports never catch traction?

david-gpu 7y ago
Link for the lazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063
ericmay 7y ago
I'm not sure why the WSJ isn't a "proper source". But I think that people want more of a story so they tend to favor news articles over official sources. If you look at the BLS report, it's hard to even read because of the font. I believe both are of value, but that's why I figure people favor the other formats.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >I'm not sure why the WSJ isn't a "proper source". The paywall I hit on this article could be one reason.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Paywall, incentives to increase clicks, and so forth.
- ecocentrik 7y ago
  I canceled my subscription last year because of the soft-core Fox News style "opinion" pieces and fact wrangling they engage in. It is a News Corp publication now. I miss the old WSJ.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
    There is an argument to be made that the opinion pieces are just there to spark sufficient amount of outrage to direct clicks to your website. WSJ, Marketwatch and multiple others follow that principle. Regular reporting still appears to happen.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      The WSJ has had a... unique... opinion section long before clicks were an issue. I think their purpose is, as with a lot of opinion writing, to make the readers feel good (smart, righteous, wise, important, justified, etc). But the WSJ has a subscriber base unusually dedicated to a) getting money, and b) keeping it. And a lot of Wall Street as an entity is less focused on value creation than cash extraction, which is a particular mindset. So the opinion section is going to reflect what's important to the key audiences. My understanding is that pre-Murdoch, the news and opinion sides were thoroughly separate. Hopefully that isn't getting lost.
      - mrscottson 7y ago
        Marketwatch, Barron's, WSJ, etc... all down the Murdoch tube of no editorial integrity. Had to stop following those news sources when they started the downhill slide.
    - dahfizz 7y ago
      Would you put up with this in any other industry? "It's okay that mega-million corporation X misleads and manipulates people in order to take money from them, because sometimes it uses that money in a meagerly beneficial way"
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
        I am confused. I am not sure this is an accurate rephrasing of what I said. Could you elaborate a little bit?
- anoraca 7y ago
  It is largely owned and directed by Rupert Murdoch who is infamous for inflammatory tabloid journalism (New York Post, Fox News, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
webninja 7y ago
Link to the your primary source post for bls.gov? I’ll upvote it.
- treyfitty 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114063
paulcole 7y ago
What specifically differs between the BLS report and this WSJ article?
- sojournerc 7y ago
  One is the actual primary source.
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Sorry didn't realize that. I wonder why the US government is just paraphrasing WSJ articles though??
jasode 7y ago
>I posted the official numbers and report from the BLS but it never caught traction. Same goes for other times I post from the proper source. However, it seems like HN has a bias for WSJ and NYT articles. [...] Is there a reason why official government reports never catch traction? Just a theory but titles of threads do matter. I'm not claiming it's the reason in your case but it might be. - Your previous title with no activity: "BLS Reports 14.7% Unemployment Rate" - This title that attracted upvotes: "April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%" Your title's matter-of-fact tone is clinical and missing the impact of the 14.7%? Hmmm... the 14.7%... so... is that a lot or a little? The phrase "rose to a record" is immediate spoonfeeding of the impact to potential readers. Good newspapers like WSJ, NYT, Buzzfeed, etc know how to craft titles to get readers to click on them. This is often abused and thus disparaged as SEO/clickbait. In this case, providing a little bit of a statistic's impact could be helpful.
- generalpass 7y ago
  The problem is when a submitter wants to follow the site guidelines, as OP did.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    You can be correct, or you can get traction. I think a lot of technical people don't understand this. They get mad at people like say, Greta Thunberg, for not being purely clinical, accurate, scientific and dispassionate. But, meanwhile the people working to make the world believe climate change is fake are emotional, manipulative, and actually get traction against pure, reasoned, calm argument. So do we want to be correct, or do we want to win?
    - emeerson 7y ago
      Interesting to present it as a binary tradeoff. I want to win, but I want to make sure that the thesis has some modeling diligence =)
wesammikhail 7y ago
Eric Weinstein posits that the purpose of news organizations isnt to relay raw information to the public, but rather, it has the sole purpose of telling you how to feel about the information. They provide you with narrative. Exposing a person to a dataset without a narrative puts the burden on the person to have to parse through and construct their own narrative. This may be just too much for the average person and hence why they prefer their data to come bundled with a narrative - it is a time saving and bias confirming heuristic. I am not saying that this is true, but it certainly is an interesting idea to consider and think about. Eric´s take on this is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_-qV-9hMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_-qV-9hMo Wiki link to the phenomenon in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
- majewsky 7y ago
  > This may be just too much for the average person Having to construct your own narrative all the time is most certainly too much for any single person. If I had to come up with my own interpretation of everything, I'd be sitting here crunching data all day long until I go crazy. One always has to choose their fights, and for everything else you have to find someone else to trust.
  - wesammikhail 7y ago
    That is indeed the point he makes. That rejecting the institutions isnt a viable strategy. Fixing the institutions however, in order for them not to hijack your emotional state, is probably the right way to go.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    To take something especially apropos to the WSJ... In earnings releases, companies will generally try to spin their earnings in the best possible light by focusing on the positives. Maybe claim extenuating circumstances outside of their control like foreign exchange headwinds. The casual reader probably doesn't have any way to tell whether it's mostly BS or not without doing a bunch of their own research.
ddevault 7y ago
In this case I recommend writing to hn@ycombinator.com and asking them to merge the threads and swap out the URL in this post.
freepor 7y ago
There are very few people who want to wade through primary source data. I don't -- doing that is what journalists are paid for.
hi41 7y ago
I think government and scholarly articles are very hard for common man to understand because they use terms and abbreviations which can be understood only by practitioners of that field. For example BBC carried an article about a black hole discovered near our solar system and at the end included a link to the paper published by the researchers. I understood the BBC article but the scholarly article was super hard to understand and I couldn't go beyond the first paragraph. Similarly the comedy shows on TV also have laugh tracks to tell people when to laugh otherwise some of jokes are too complicated to be understood in short duration. Here is the BBC article. You will find the link to the scholarly article at the end. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812 edit: grammar
OrgNet 7y ago
The main reason might be because the current government is republican and this forum is mainly democrat but that is just a guess... The admins also manipulate posts, votes and front page visibility so it is hard to say for sure.
RivieraKid 7y ago
Original source isn't necessarily the best place to consume the information for many people. (In general, I have no opinion in this specific case) I feel like HN has an original source fetish. I remember there was an IPO and the HN submission was some weirdly formatted document submitted to the SEC, it took me a while to understand what it is about. It would be better to simply link to some article which would contain a link to the document for the 1% of people who are interested in reading it.
- poulsbohemian 7y ago
  > I feel like HN has an original source fetish It’s the search for veritas. We are a bunch of scientists, engineers, and thinking people. We want to go straight to the source and understand from first principles.
deleted 7y ago
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nick_urban 7y ago
Perhaps it's that most people have never heard of "BLS", but they trust WSJ / NYT. Newspapers provide context and interpretation. And they are designed to be read. A big block of monospace text is not inviting for most people.
TickleMeTrumpmo 7y ago
The site favors leftist rags, not really surprising.
demadog 7y ago
You may think hackers are purely data-driven rational beings, but they are in fact humans too, and prefer an enticing headline.
ryuukk_ 7y ago
just like rust/mozilla news, you need link proper source to get mass upvoted by their bots ;)

ryanwaggoner 7y ago

And yet market futures are green, just like they always are after horrible news. How high does unemployment have to get before investor sentiment shifts and the market tanks? 20%? 50%? Was the market severely undervalued a few months ago, when we were previously at these levels? It’s hard to see how this pandemic is anything other than a huge drag on the economy over the next few years, at least.

vikramkr 7y ago
Looks like you posted as I was typing my comment responding to the inevitable "why are the markets up" comment haha. This news is better than the market expected. They had priced in an expected unemployment rate of 16%[0]. Traders dont wait for the bad news to make buy sell decisions, they traded off of what they believed the report would be and had forecasts made, sending stocks down on average. They were wrong, so the markets will adjust for whatever the new impacts are. Even if the actual unemployment rate was exactly the forecast, the markets will have gone up because the uncertainty in that part of the forecast will have gone away, and lower uncertainty means higher valuations, all else being equal. [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-show-highest-unemployment-rate-on-record-11588514401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-sho...
- ryanwaggoner 7y ago
  That only makes sense for an explanation of why the market is up today, not why it's hanging around the levels it was in the fall of 2019. Not everything is priced in. Given the collapse of consumer demand, the depression-era surge in unemployment, the loss of GDP, and the dim prospects of a rapid recovery in 2020, the market was either severely undervalued in 2019 or is severely overvalued right now. Or both.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    > Given the collapse of consumer demand Consumer demand has generally shifted, online commerce is seeing a boom. It's reasonable to theorize there will be a brick and mortar consumer boom once things normalize. > the depression-era surge in unemployment Unemployment includes the losses the market has already accounted for, temporary unemployment and reduced hours that will go back towards normal, and the initial numbers aren't as bad as theorized (but those numbers are suspect). > the loss of GDP Yeah but everyone else is losing GDP too generally. > the dim prospects of a rapid recovery in 2020 Maybe. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how effective we've flattened the curve and the overall trajectory figures are much better than initial estimates pegged them at. Many places outside of the eastcoast have done massively better than predicted, and even NYC is doing a good job of staying within hospital capacity. Remember when this first happened we had no data, and the market corrected assuming the absolute worse. Now we're finding out that things are not as bad as the initial models showed they would be - and the initial models suggested crazy numbers - so while the current situation isn't all roses, it's generally better than anyone honestly predicted.

lettergram 7y ago

My prediction is we hit (or in reality, have already hit) 48 million unemployed (~30%) in the U.S. It’s just many aren’t filing for unemployment because they can’t get through OR they decided not to apply (due to receiving stimulus / severance). Full predictions / data here: https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-u-s-fatalities-economic-predictions/ https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-u-s-fatalities-economic-... The gist is that retailers are going bankrupt (see J. Crew & Neiman Marcus) and places like Macy’s are furloughing most of the staff. Airlines are similarly hit, and I can go on (it’s linked above). If retail and hospitality (and similar sectors) shrink by 80% for 6 months that’s a massive number of unemployed - 33 million. Further, recruiting and marketing has cut staff at most non-FAANG places (see Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc), This will start to impact the tech industry. Banking is going to see massive defaults in the next 3-6 months... the list goes on. Easy to see unemployment hitting 30% in the next 2 months.

k__ 7y ago
Do you think this will be their downfall in the long run?
- generalpass 7y ago
  Who are "they"?
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  It's not good for the now unemployed people but hopefully they'll get back on their feet!
toomuchtodo 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this analysis.
vonmoltke 7y ago
> It’s just many aren’t filing for unemployment because they can’t get through OR they decided not to apply (due to receiving stimulus / severance). The BLS numbers have nothing to do with unemployment filings. They base their unemployment numbers off two surveys: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm People not looking could skew the numbers, but since the vast majority of the job losses in the report are considered temporary layoffs, and since the BLS always counts temporarily laid off people as "unemployed" regardless of other criteria, I don't expect it to be a significant factor.

vikramkr 7y ago

To preempt the apparently inevitable "wow stocks went up on this news why wall street be like that" posts : the reason futures are up currently and the market will be up when they open in a but is because this is better than expected. Wall street was expecting unemployment to rise to over 16% [0]. Therefore, the markets were pricing in an expected 16% unemployment rate. The real number today is lower, meaning the markets are going to adjust up to meet the difference. That's why it might look like the markets are cheered by the unemployment news. They kind of are, it's better than they expected. Edit: Updated the link to a non AMP link. [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-show-highest-unemployment-rate-on-record-11588514401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/april-jobs-report-likely-to-sho...

Ididntdothis 7y ago
To me this indicates that the financial markets are a terrible measure for the economic experience of most citizens. They are their own system that’s not connected to most people’s economic reality. I have no problem with that but for national policies we should stop looking at financial markets or GDP but try to optimize for average income or purchasing power.
- michaelborromeo 7y ago
  The market reflects, rightly, that while the situation doesn’t look good for many certain fundamentals haven’t changed drastically YET. For example, infrastructure is still intact, demand is theoretically still there just suppressed, capacity to produce is still theoretically there. Unemployment is based on employers short to medium term outlook. I.e. Can I pay this person for a month and will the person be a net positive? So the two measures differ and in weird situations like now we see how much they differ.
  - pcmaffey 7y ago
    Or rather, it reflects that this what people believe.
  - bradleyjg 7y ago

Pfhreak 7y ago

With numbers like that, nearly everyone in the states knows someone impacted. The optimist in me hopes to see people demand universal healthcare, social housing, food benefits, and more so that everyone at least has a baseline level of stability. The pessimist in me believes that this number will be used to prematurely force workers back to work, causing more illness and loss of work for those who choose not to return.

michaelborromeo 7y ago
The pandemic is being used by both parties to push their agenda. Your pessimism is another persons optimistic outcome.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I'm not sure how more disease, death, and long-term health conditions is someone else's optimistic outcome, but it seems to be inevitable.
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    It’s not that more disease and death is desired by one side, rather there’s political momentum behind not believing that it’s as severe as it’s being reported. We no longer live in a world with shared truths, and this is the most remarkable manifestation of this new reality.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      I'm reminded of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. It's difficult to report even a very high number of deaths in a saturated disinformation environment.
      - commandlinefan 7y ago
        > the 1932 Pulitzer Prize Ok, I googled it and I still don't get it... are you talking about the cartoon?

lquist 7y ago

What is the unemployment rate for software engineers? Can't seem to find this in the BLS data

SloopJon 7y ago
"Information" is probably the most representative category, which shows an unemployment rate of 11% in table A-14, compared to 3.5% a year ago.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

The french economy has been hit harder than many other countries, probably due very generous short-time working relief measures, where the state pays 90% of the former salary: "Could there be a connection between the deep recession - in no other eurozone country did economic output in the corona crisis collapse as sharply as in France - and the generous short-time working arrangements?" https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesschau.de%2Fausland%2Ffrankreich-gehaelter-coronavirus-101.html https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%... Tl;Dr: France once again becomes socialist, discovers that incentives are powerful.

jeltz 7y ago
So France became socialist because they did the most generous handouts to companies?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  Yes.

dayofthedaleks 7y ago

The U6 number from the report is 22.8%. U6 being folks who are out of a job but not properly on the dole. I would expect that number to be north of 25% in the upcoming May report.

zeusly 7y ago
Definition of on the dole: Unemployed and in receipt of state benefit. Origin of on the dole: In the UK, Unemployment Benefit has been known by the slang term 'the dole' since WWI. This derives from the 'doling out', that is, 'handing out' of charitable gifts of food or money.
- hackissimo123 7y ago
  Wow, I'm British and I never made that connection before between "the dole" and the verb "to dole out". TIL.

bwb 7y ago

Am I the only one who looked at all the graphs and thought, man this is going to make it really hard to make good graphs during the next recession :)?

aazaa 7y ago

For comparison, the BLS reports an all-time high for unemployment (one-year period) in the US was about 25%. It was 1933, deep into the Great Depression. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LFU21000100&series_id=LFU22000100&from_year=1929&to_year=1939&periods_option=specific_periods&periods=Annual+Data https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LFU21000100&series_id=LFU220... Markets really don't care about this number because it occurred in the past. Everyone knew the number would be very, very bad and it was. What markets care about now is what happens next. For their part, US stock markets are saying everything will be Ok. The S&P 500 is trading 16% from its all-time high. Unexpectedly (for me at least), everything is riding on how well the Fed can butcher the raging US dollar bull. It seems impossible, but there's a substantial shortage of US dollars, which has been wreaking havoc on the world economy for some time now, triggering negative yielding sovereign debt and other imbalances. If the Fed succeeds, the debts for this crisis will be eliminated through a weaker dollar (dollar holders will pay in purchasing power), and things can go on more or less as normal. If, however, the Fed is unable to bring the dollar down and hold it there for a long time, the ballooning debt will begin to choke the real economy. We'll see it first in interest payments to finance the federal government rising and eventually forcing cuts to entitlements and defense spending. This would appear to set up a situation in which the Fed will try to err on the side of "caution" - adding too much rather than too little liquidity into the economy. It's worth remembering that the Fed always gets what it wants in the end. See: https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/ https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/

yumraj 7y ago

And Dow Jones is up by almost 400 points. Go figure..

TAForObvReasons 7y ago
High unemployment means higher likelihood of Fed support. Equities markets have largely decoupled from the state of the economy.

knolax 7y ago

IIRC anyone looking at the unemployment rate has to look at some factors that could inflate or deflate the rate. The unemployment rate is a proportion of those seeking employment that do not have a job. This means that as time goes on, people who would like to have a job stop seeking and therefore stop contributing to the unemployment rate (eg. someone going homeless actually makes the unemployment rate go down). On the converse side, seasonal workers and those in between jobs also inflate unemployment numbers to a small extent. In addition, the employment rate does not measure underemployment, which is important as the gig economy becomes more and more common (although perhaps not as much during quarantine).

deleted 7y ago

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Shivetya 7y ago

Unemployment numbers are not the only issue at hand, from reduced hours to outright cuts in salary; we just took ten percent for two months and it can get to be more, an I have seen others reporting greater than ten percent for regular salaried employees. Unemployment is horrible but don't discount salary cuts either, for some single earner families to include those only recently forced into single earner it can be very stress inducing

myth_drannon 7y ago
Tesla had 20% salary reduction.

bawana 7y ago

And the stock market is unfazed. So now you know where most of that money (trillions of relief for Covid) trickled to. The financial markets. We basically printed money to assuage the fear and anxiety of the speculators to whom the world is beholden

three_seagrass 7y ago
Markets were expected worse (~16%), and strong Q1 earnings coupled with Fed pumping is why you have the uptick.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  Serious question: How do you know that markets were expecting 16%? Where do you read that?
  - three_seagrass 7y ago
    My wife has CNBC on in the background during the day while we WFH, which is where I saw them talking about it.
- treyfitty 7y ago
  Your position sounds valid, but i also want to point out that we're at a point where "expectations" matter. For one, you can see from the past that initial claims reports every thursday were often far in exceed above expectations, yet all but one Thursday had stock market rallies. Furthermore, stocks who missed Q1 earnings and provided or retracted guidance had their stocks increase the next trading day. So, to say the stock market jump today was a result of 14.7% unemployment rate vs the expected 16% is an unfounded assertion. Could it be that it's because US-China tensions have allegedly eased? Could it be that oil jumped 4.5% today and is likely to have given investors faith that demand for oil is increasing? Or could it be a bunch of other things at once? I don't think it's fair to distill the stock market to just one outcome anymore. There's too much going on at once.
  - 7y ago

lihaciudaniel 7y ago

This is just like the great depression a hundred years ago