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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 wa

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.

ivape 1y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > if there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more? …yes. > problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter We track these. And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. Not to the quality most people want. But to a degree that will sustain you.
  - ivape 1y ago
    And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. I’m speaking about mass scale unemployment and underemployment. Our homeless infrastructure cannot even handle our homeless. The underemployed and underpaid are basically 6 months removed from homelessness without work, so call a duck a duck. How long can you keep food/shelter without a job? Six months for the average American? If we are going to artificially create jobs, then I recommend we artificially house and food people instead because that’s the core issue. Your average American is freaking scared of everything if they go 6 months without a job, and that’s a problem. If the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created them at any price, no price would be too low or too high. The reason the market doesn’t conjure up food and shelter for people is because that’s not what it’s for, so it’s best we decouple. I’m suggesting that a large percentage of Americans are functionally homeless and basically on a weekly food-shelter lease program in our society that can be cut off to them at any time (sorry, capitalism). In America we call this a career, gig, a livelihood.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > How long can you keep it without a job? Forever. That’s how free works. If you can get to an American city, which most American towns will happily help you out with, you can access free food and shelter virtually limitlessly. > if the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created at any price , no price would be too low or too high Market failure is real. Rates, regulations and barriers to entry can and do inhibit labour demand formation.
      - 1y ago
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
That's why unemployment is one of many metrics, and we don't put all our weight into a single metric...
stego-tech 1y ago
This has been a critique of the figures for decades, but the current numbers are too convenient for the powers-that-be to change into something more reflective of reality. Trust me, spending fifteen months unemployed in the middle of nowhere and with access to raw data helped me understand a lot about the deliberately engineered shortcomings of our current datasets. It’s in the vested interest of leaders to control the narrative. That’s why we have/had so many regulations that prevent them from doing so.
thehoff 1y ago
The linked article is talking about ADP. "To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily." The BLS does do several measures. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... Their (BLS) news release also provides more detail.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-reliability-trump-howard-lutnick https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r... > The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data. > At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated. > Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
kasey_junk 1y ago
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.
- 1123581321 1y ago
  Which metric(s) capture what he is talking about?
  - ipogrjegiorejkf 1y ago
    Take a look at the St. Louis FRED website and search for wages and wage growth.
    - 1123581321 1y ago
      FRED is a good resource. Do you know if there's a wage growth dataset that only analyzes job changes between companies?
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    > It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique. Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6. The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).
ajmurmann 1y ago
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, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad. IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  > 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.
  - ajmurmann 1y ago
    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 should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are. It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
    - mathiaspoint 1y ago
      Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.
blitzar 1y ago
> and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same Of course it would, the percentage of people unemployed would be the same. > six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change. > doesn't include those not actively looking for work Participation rate section of the jobs report. > Either way ... Savings rate, hours worked, consumer credit, default rates etc cover all of this.
- thayne 1y ago
  > Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change. Not if someone else at the top got paid more.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    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.
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      Perhaps we need better metrics actually tracking income inequality, because tracking employment rate without that seems pretty disingenuous as a metric of aggregate economic health. Or rather, we should be reporting such metrics that we surely must track already together.
      - blitzar 1y ago
        This is akin to saying that we need a better metric than CPU temperature to track internet download speed.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
        I don't follow at all. Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"? The problem is that unemployment, particularly U-3, is a bad signal for aggregate economic health by itself. As is GDP. You need an signal for wealth distribution to get a sense of how a given person can interpret to understand how well the economy is serving them. At the very least. EDIT: Of course, the ultimate issue is people wanting to cherry-pick metrics to push their polemic. If you have any solutions to that I'm all ears. We've been able to articulate an accurate understanding all along, but that doesn't make for easy headlines or simplistic campaign platforms.
marcosdumay 1y ago
You seem to want better reporting of economic news. I would say to vote on it with your pocket and pick a better selection of news sources, but I'm not sure those better sources still exist. Either way, nearly nobody uses the numbers you see on the headlines for any serious decision.
rexer 1y ago
Some of the unemployment metrics do include folks not actively looking for work: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm > We really need better ways of measuring economic health. What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.
satiated_grue 1y ago
There are a number of other metrics compiled and reported that answer some of your questions, e.g.: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART Labor Force Participation Rate These are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ces/ https://www.bls.gov/ces/
deleted 1y ago
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mywittyname 1y ago
> 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. This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. The thing is, at a large scale, these events don't matter. They are rare enough to be noise in the grand scheme of things. The reason the U-3 is the canonical "unemployment rate" is because that is where the core signal is. The bulk of the change in all of the other more inclusive rates is the change in the U-3 scaled by some factor. But really, your complaint has nothing to do with actual employment, but instead with earnings. Wages are also a metric captured and reported by the BLS and better serve your message.
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  >This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. I always wonder how this is captured. For U-3, you could go with the number getting unemployment benefits. For U-6, you'd have to literally call people and ask them, and I've literally never been called to ask if I'm working in my field and I'd guess most of us haven't either. I have to think if they are sampling, it's a very narrow sample likely biased by geography, industry, age, etc.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    The models are pretty complicated and incorporate several data sources, sampling is just one part of it. I've seen (very dry) documents that go into the methodology in detail. The model does introduce some obvious biases through assumptions of representativeness but how those interact with the headline numbers is not straightforward.
  - jordanb 1y ago
    U-6 mostly comes from the BLS Occupational Employment Survey. I don't think the original poster would be considered as part of U-6 unless his new job is defined as "marginally attached to the workforce or part-time for economic reasons." Simply getting a job with less pay doesn't put you in U-6.
jimt1234 1y ago
I think it's even worse, because that single metric, unemployment, is highly manipulatable. Administrations have been known to redefine "employment" in order to make the number look more favorable.
pkaye 1y ago
The U6 unemployment rate is supposed to cover those who are underemployed. What is usually reported is the U3 unemployment rate which is closest to that used internationally as defined by ILO. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  Supposed to, but doesn't. The U6 rate includes two new things: part-time workers, and a very strangely-defined category: people who are NOT working at ALL, AND were looking for work previously, AND have stopped looking for 4+ weeks. It doesn't capture the common on-the-street definition of the word "underemployment", such as a tech worker flipping burgers at mcdonald's. Perhaps that category is simply to hard or expensive to measure, or it's specifically being avoided. Either/or really.
  - wnc3141 1y ago
    the only signal I can think of is returns on student debt to measure "employment quality" - i.e how well is my education capital being deployed, but any realistic evaluation of the labor market will be complex and include qualitative data.
  - pkaye 1y ago
    Seems like its studied and there are many types of underemployment and they each have difference causes. Its probably tracked somewhere by economists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underemployment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underemployment
    - phendrenad2 1y ago
      Heh, "it's probably tracked somewhere by economists". The more I learn about economics as a "science" the more I balk at the idea of giving them the benefit of the doubt, which people seem really willing to do for some reason. I know, it's scary that the economy might be a complex system that nobody understands, and it's easier to have "faith" that there is some shadowy economic cabal of god-kings who are keeping a watchful eye on it. But,.. yeah, that doesn't seem to be true, honestly.
bilsbie 1y ago
It sounds silly but we should take it one step further and look at life satisfaction. Who cares about jobs if people are unhappy? Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not. You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
- missedthecue 1y ago
  What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate. I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.
- ikmckenz 1y ago
  I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Not at you personally, but your post being top and active, while not really relevant to the story presented always makes me wonder do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic? No, they upvote because they agree with it. Just as some people flaunt their incompetence with basic math or civic involvement as a point of pride, it’s somewhat common in tech for folks to hold their lack of familiarity with economics, particularly econometrics, as a point of pride. (If you wanted to bury it, you’d flag it.)
RC_ITR 1y ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196 We do - People employed part time for Economic Reasons. If what your looking for is 'People with salaries below the highest they've ever earned', then you're just going to get a very noisy metric of sales people on bad commission years, etc.
ipogrjegiorejkf 1y ago
This is like looking at your revenue numbers and choosing to focus on the number of units sold and disregarding price per unit. The government releases TONS of analysis on wages and wage growth (e.g. the "price per unit"). The St. Louis FRED is a great resource. I don't blame you. I blame the media for bad reporting. If you dig deeper, I can think of a few reasons why the media would choose to focus on some metrics and not others but I'll leave my conspiracy theories for another discussion.
skipants 1y ago
If every ex-6-figure worker has to work at Applebee's to make ends meet... then who's eating at Applebee's?
- virgildotcodes 1y ago
  Applebees drops prices to enable their employees to eat at Applebees. Margins fall, wages universally clamped to minimum wage, layoffs hit. Fewer Applebees workers with lower wages means a shrinking demand side of the Applebees ouroboros, resulting in a spiral of Applebees price cuts, revenue drops, layoffs. The end state of humanity is a desolate Applebees parking lot strewn with desiccated human corpses and the last person alive is the largest shareholder of Applebees, inside the store, consuming their own flesh.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
observationist 1y ago
A big tech company firing a few thousand current employees and hiring twice as many H1B workers shows a net gain for jobs health, when this represents wages dropping, more people unemployed, and has a very negative impact on the economy. Many big companies game the metrics being Goodharted by regulators and watchdogs, and people guilelessly buy into the headlines, without inspecting the reality underneath.
BunsanSpace 1y ago
There's also labour participation and underemployment to look at. In your case underemployment would go up. You need to look at all metrics together to get a bigger picture. Example is unemployment is down, but so is labour participation. That doesn't mean there was job growth, it means people stopped looking. Or if unemployment is down, but underemployment is up. Similar picture emerges.
Spooky23 1y ago
We know about all of those things and BLS publishes (or at least used to) reliable stats on them. The unemployment rate as reported is probably the best way to report objectively on employment and the ebb and flow of layoffs and hiring. A more qualitative assessment requires more adjustments and interpretation.
fHr 1y ago
Same with the stock market completly decoupled from the real economy. It's a wealthy index, there could be a real recession and the stock market still would go up.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  Stock market measures two things, 1) the performance of firms within their economic environments. 2) the level of savings to be invested in the stock market. Both are tied to the labor-share of income. That is, how much income is generated through yield on capital (firm profits returned to shareholders, rents, financial services) compared to earned through labor. This chart inversely correlates nicely with the stock market. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
vaidhy 1y ago
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.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  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.
SlightlyLeftPad 1y ago
I may be one of those statistics soon. My company refuses to lay people off but they are sending people out via wildly unrealistic expectations (move the goal post). The job market for six figure salaries is weak and I imagine many companies are doing this very same thing.
ed_elliott_asc 1y ago
Total wage $ would cover it.
mr_toad 1y ago
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.
RayVR 1y ago
BLS reports breakdown changes in employment by sector. This is obviously watched closely by investors.
whatareyouon 1y ago
There are six kinds of unemployment stats the US tracks (below). Nothing sounds specific to underemployment by skills specifically (maybe u-6?). That would probably come from other metrics, like quintile income distributions shifting downwards? You didn't ask, but just in case (from an internet search): U-1: Long-term unemployed * Definition: People unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percentage of the civilian labor force. * Purpose: Measures persistent unemployment. U-2: Job losers and temporary workers * Definition: People who lost jobs or completed temporary jobs, as a percentage of the labor force. * Purpose: Captures recent layoffs and temp contract ends. U-3: Official unemployment rate (headline rate) * Definition: Total unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force. * Purpose: This is the standard "unemployment rate" reported in news and economic discussions. * Limitations: Doesn’t count discouraged workers or part-time workers wanting full-time jobs. U-4: Unemployed + Discouraged workers * Definition: U-3 plus discouraged workers (those who want a job but stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available). * Purpose: Adds a layer of marginal attachment to the labor force. U-5: Unemployed + All marginally attached workers * Definition: U-4 plus all others marginally attached to the labor force, not just discouraged workers. * Marginally attached workers: People not currently working or looking for work but who want a job and have looked in the past 12 months (but not the past 4 weeks). U-6: Broadest measure * Definition: U-5 plus part-time workers who want full-time jobs (i.e., involuntary part-time workers). * Purpose: The most comprehensive measure of labor underutilization, including: Discouraged workers, Marginally attached workers, and Underemployed part-timers
hopelite 1y ago
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.
duncangh 1y ago
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).
vitorgrs 1y ago
Unemployment might say the same, but there's also data about wages, so, not sure what do you mean.
intended 1y ago
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.
mrangle 1y ago
Full employment transitioning to mean middle class job, or replacement income, would be wild. Point the way to the line for rigid economic class assignments.
wnc3141 1y ago
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. Author Eugine Ludwig wrote this great article for political a few months ago. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-eco 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-inflation-fishing-knitting/682497/ 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-ocasio-cortez-politics-interview 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.
creer 1y ago
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.

ivape 1y ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> if there are not enough jobs, then what are we going to do? Create more? …yes. > problem isn't employment. It's food and shelter We track these. And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. Not to the quality most people want. But to a degree that will sustain you.
- ivape 1y ago
  And in most places in America, you can get to a place where you can get both for free. I’m speaking about mass scale unemployment and underemployment. Our homeless infrastructure cannot even handle our homeless. The underemployed and underpaid are basically 6 months removed from homelessness without work, so call a duck a duck. How long can you keep food/shelter without a job? Six months for the average American? If we are going to artificially create jobs, then I recommend we artificially house and food people instead because that’s the core issue. Your average American is freaking scared of everything if they go 6 months without a job, and that’s a problem. If the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created them at any price, no price would be too low or too high. The reason the market doesn’t conjure up food and shelter for people is because that’s not what it’s for, so it’s best we decouple. I’m suggesting that a large percentage of Americans are functionally homeless and basically on a weekly food-shelter lease program in our society that can be cut off to them at any time (sorry, capitalism). In America we call this a career, gig, a livelihood.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > How long can you keep it without a job? Forever. That’s how free works. If you can get to an American city, which most American towns will happily help you out with, you can access free food and shelter virtually limitlessly. > if the market needed those workers and jobs it would have created at any price , no price would be too low or too high Market failure is real. Rates, regulations and barriers to entry can and do inhibit labour demand formation.
    - 1y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

That's why unemployment is one of many metrics, and we don't put all our weight into a single metric...

stego-tech 1y ago

This has been a critique of the figures for decades, but the current numbers are too convenient for the powers-that-be to change into something more reflective of reality. Trust me, spending fifteen months unemployed in the middle of nowhere and with access to raw data helped me understand a lot about the deliberately engineered shortcomings of our current datasets. It’s in the vested interest of leaders to control the narrative. That’s why we have/had so many regulations that prevent them from doing so.

thehoff 1y ago

The linked article is talking about ADP. "To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily." The BLS does do several measures. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... Their (BLS) news release also provides more detail.

ceejayoz 1y ago
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-reliability-trump-howard-lutnick https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r... > The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data. > At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated. > Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.

kasey_junk 1y ago

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.

1123581321 1y ago
Which metric(s) capture what he is talking about?
- ipogrjegiorejkf 1y ago
  Take a look at the St. Louis FRED website and search for wages and wage growth.
  - 1123581321 1y ago
    FRED is a good resource. Do you know if there's a wage growth dataset that only analyzes job changes between companies?
Analemma_ 1y ago
Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  > It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique. Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6. The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).

ajmurmann 1y ago

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, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad. IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.

psunavy03 1y ago
> 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.
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  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 should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are. It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.

blitzar 1y ago

> and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same Of course it would, the percentage of people unemployed would be the same. > six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change. > doesn't include those not actively looking for work Participation rate section of the jobs report. > Either way ... Savings rate, hours worked, consumer credit, default rates etc cover all of this.

thayne 1y ago
> Average wages section of the jobs report would reflect this change. Not if someone else at the top got paid more.
- jjk166 1y ago
  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.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Perhaps we need better metrics actually tracking income inequality, because tracking employment rate without that seems pretty disingenuous as a metric of aggregate economic health. Or rather, we should be reporting such metrics that we surely must track already together.
    - blitzar 1y ago
      This is akin to saying that we need a better metric than CPU temperature to track internet download speed.
      - MangoToupe 1y ago
        I don't follow at all. Which of these is supposed to correspond to "aggregate economic health"? The problem is that unemployment, particularly U-3, is a bad signal for aggregate economic health by itself. As is GDP. You need an signal for wealth distribution to get a sense of how a given person can interpret to understand how well the economy is serving them. At the very least. EDIT: Of course, the ultimate issue is people wanting to cherry-pick metrics to push their polemic. If you have any solutions to that I'm all ears. We've been able to articulate an accurate understanding all along, but that doesn't make for easy headlines or simplistic campaign platforms.

marcosdumay 1y ago

You seem to want better reporting of economic news. I would say to vote on it with your pocket and pick a better selection of news sources, but I'm not sure those better sources still exist. Either way, nearly nobody uses the numbers you see on the headlines for any serious decision.

rexer 1y ago

Some of the unemployment metrics do include folks not actively looking for work: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm > We really need better ways of measuring economic health. What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.

satiated_grue 1y ago

There are a number of other metrics compiled and reported that answer some of your questions, e.g.: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART Labor Force Participation Rate These are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ces/ https://www.bls.gov/ces/

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mywittyname 1y ago

> 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. This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. The thing is, at a large scale, these events don't matter. They are rare enough to be noise in the grand scheme of things. The reason the U-3 is the canonical "unemployment rate" is because that is where the core signal is. The bulk of the change in all of the other more inclusive rates is the change in the U-3 scaled by some factor. But really, your complaint has nothing to do with actual employment, but instead with earnings. Wages are also a metric captured and reported by the BLS and better serve your message.

wing-_-nuts 1y ago
>This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. I always wonder how this is captured. For U-3, you could go with the number getting unemployment benefits. For U-6, you'd have to literally call people and ask them, and I've literally never been called to ask if I'm working in my field and I'd guess most of us haven't either. I have to think if they are sampling, it's a very narrow sample likely biased by geography, industry, age, etc.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The models are pretty complicated and incorporate several data sources, sampling is just one part of it. I've seen (very dry) documents that go into the methodology in detail. The model does introduce some obvious biases through assumptions of representativeness but how those interact with the headline numbers is not straightforward.
- jordanb 1y ago
  U-6 mostly comes from the BLS Occupational Employment Survey. I don't think the original poster would be considered as part of U-6 unless his new job is defined as "marginally attached to the workforce or part-time for economic reasons." Simply getting a job with less pay doesn't put you in U-6.

jimt1234 1y ago

I think it's even worse, because that single metric, unemployment, is highly manipulatable. Administrations have been known to redefine "employment" in order to make the number look more favorable.

pkaye 1y ago

The U6 unemployment rate is supposed to cover those who are underemployed. What is usually reported is the U3 unemployment rate which is closest to that used internationally as defined by ILO. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

phendrenad2 1y ago
Supposed to, but doesn't. The U6 rate includes two new things: part-time workers, and a very strangely-defined category: people who are NOT working at ALL, AND were looking for work previously, AND have stopped looking for 4+ weeks. It doesn't capture the common on-the-street definition of the word "underemployment", such as a tech worker flipping burgers at mcdonald's. Perhaps that category is simply to hard or expensive to measure, or it's specifically being avoided. Either/or really.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  the only signal I can think of is returns on student debt to measure "employment quality" - i.e how well is my education capital being deployed, but any realistic evaluation of the labor market will be complex and include qualitative data.
- pkaye 1y ago
  Seems like its studied and there are many types of underemployment and they each have difference causes. Its probably tracked somewhere by economists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underemployment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underemployment
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    Heh, "it's probably tracked somewhere by economists". The more I learn about economics as a "science" the more I balk at the idea of giving them the benefit of the doubt, which people seem really willing to do for some reason. I know, it's scary that the economy might be a complex system that nobody understands, and it's easier to have "faith" that there is some shadowy economic cabal of god-kings who are keeping a watchful eye on it. But,.. yeah, that doesn't seem to be true, honestly.

bilsbie 1y ago

It sounds silly but we should take it one step further and look at life satisfaction. Who cares about jobs if people are unhappy? Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.

jandrewrogers 1y ago
It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not. You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
missedthecue 1y ago
What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate. I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.
ikmckenz 1y ago
I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

Not at you personally, but your post being top and active, while not really relevant to the story presented always makes me wonder do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> do people upvote these tangents to prevent discussion on the threads original topic? No, they upvote because they agree with it. Just as some people flaunt their incompetence with basic math or civic involvement as a point of pride, it’s somewhat common in tech for folks to hold their lack of familiarity with economics, particularly econometrics, as a point of pride. (If you wanted to bury it, you’d flag it.)

RC_ITR 1y ago

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196 We do - People employed part time for Economic Reasons. If what your looking for is 'People with salaries below the highest they've ever earned', then you're just going to get a very noisy metric of sales people on bad commission years, etc.

ipogrjegiorejkf 1y ago

This is like looking at your revenue numbers and choosing to focus on the number of units sold and disregarding price per unit. The government releases TONS of analysis on wages and wage growth (e.g. the "price per unit"). The St. Louis FRED is a great resource. I don't blame you. I blame the media for bad reporting. If you dig deeper, I can think of a few reasons why the media would choose to focus on some metrics and not others but I'll leave my conspiracy theories for another discussion.

skipants 1y ago

If every ex-6-figure worker has to work at Applebee's to make ends meet... then who's eating at Applebee's?

virgildotcodes 1y ago
Applebees drops prices to enable their employees to eat at Applebees. Margins fall, wages universally clamped to minimum wage, layoffs hit. Fewer Applebees workers with lower wages means a shrinking demand side of the Applebees ouroboros, resulting in a spiral of Applebees price cuts, revenue drops, layoffs. The end state of humanity is a desolate Applebees parking lot strewn with desiccated human corpses and the last person alive is the largest shareholder of Applebees, inside the store, consuming their own flesh.
- deleted 1y ago
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observationist 1y ago

A big tech company firing a few thousand current employees and hiring twice as many H1B workers shows a net gain for jobs health, when this represents wages dropping, more people unemployed, and has a very negative impact on the economy. Many big companies game the metrics being Goodharted by regulators and watchdogs, and people guilelessly buy into the headlines, without inspecting the reality underneath.

BunsanSpace 1y ago

There's also labour participation and underemployment to look at. In your case underemployment would go up. You need to look at all metrics together to get a bigger picture. Example is unemployment is down, but so is labour participation. That doesn't mean there was job growth, it means people stopped looking. Or if unemployment is down, but underemployment is up. Similar picture emerges.

Spooky23 1y ago

We know about all of those things and BLS publishes (or at least used to) reliable stats on them. The unemployment rate as reported is probably the best way to report objectively on employment and the ebb and flow of layoffs and hiring. A more qualitative assessment requires more adjustments and interpretation.

fHr 1y ago

Same with the stock market completly decoupled from the real economy. It's a wealthy index, there could be a real recession and the stock market still would go up.

wnc3141 1y ago
Stock market measures two things, 1) the performance of firms within their economic environments. 2) the level of savings to be invested in the stock market. Both are tied to the labor-share of income. That is, how much income is generated through yield on capital (firm profits returned to shareholders, rents, financial services) compared to earned through labor. This chart inversely correlates nicely with the stock market. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

vaidhy 1y ago

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.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago
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.

SlightlyLeftPad 1y ago

I may be one of those statistics soon. My company refuses to lay people off but they are sending people out via wildly unrealistic expectations (move the goal post). The job market for six figure salaries is weak and I imagine many companies are doing this very same thing.

ed_elliott_asc 1y ago

Total wage $ would cover it.

mr_toad 1y ago

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.

RayVR 1y ago

BLS reports breakdown changes in employment by sector. This is obviously watched closely by investors.

whatareyouon 1y ago

There are six kinds of unemployment stats the US tracks (below). Nothing sounds specific to underemployment by skills specifically (maybe u-6?). That would probably come from other metrics, like quintile income distributions shifting downwards? You didn't ask, but just in case (from an internet search): U-1: Long-term unemployed * Definition: People unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percentage of the civilian labor force. * Purpose: Measures persistent unemployment. U-2: Job losers and temporary workers * Definition: People who lost jobs or completed temporary jobs, as a percentage of the labor force. * Purpose: Captures recent layoffs and temp contract ends. U-3: Official unemployment rate (headline rate) * Definition: Total unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force. * Purpose: This is the standard "unemployment rate" reported in news and economic discussions. * Limitations: Doesn’t count discouraged workers or part-time workers wanting full-time jobs. U-4: Unemployed + Discouraged workers * Definition: U-3 plus discouraged workers (those who want a job but stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available). * Purpose: Adds a layer of marginal attachment to the labor force. U-5: Unemployed + All marginally attached workers * Definition: U-4 plus all others marginally attached to the labor force, not just discouraged workers. * Marginally attached workers: People not currently working or looking for work but who want a job and have looked in the past 12 months (but not the past 4 weeks). U-6: Broadest measure * Definition: U-5 plus part-time workers who want full-time jobs (i.e., involuntary part-time workers). * Purpose: The most comprehensive measure of labor underutilization, including: Discouraged workers, Marginally attached workers, and Underemployed part-timers

hopelite 1y ago

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.

duncangh 1y ago

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).

vitorgrs 1y ago

Unemployment might say the same, but there's also data about wages, so, not sure what do you mean.

intended 1y ago

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.

mrangle 1y ago

Full employment transitioning to mean middle class job, or replacement income, would be wild. Point the way to the line for rigid economic class assignments.

wnc3141 1y ago

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. Author Eugine Ludwig wrote this great article for political a few months ago. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-eco 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-inflation-fishing-knitting/682497/ 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-ocasio-cortez-politics-interview 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.

creer 1y ago

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.