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Well, that explains some things. It explains why the employment statistics look good, but so many people are not making it.

• toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  On a recent APM Marketplace episode, they talked to several people who have been unemployed for over a year and that this metric isn’t captured anywhere. The metrics are not reflecting reality, while being used to justify not using aggressive intervention to improve.
  • OgsyedIE 2mo ago
    Krugman famously claimed that the CPI becomes more useful when you remove food, energy, cars and fuel from it. There seems to be some foundational philosophical issues with deciding what the field of economics is supposed to accomplish.
    • AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
      That's not the cost of living, then. It's the "cost of starving and/or freezing to death while not going anywhere". Like that's a number we care about. But I suspect that Krugman's point (even if he expressed it badly) is that food, energy, and fuel are more noisy - more seasonal, but also have more noise in other ways. Well, if you want an early warning of which direction the economy is going, you don't want the noise, because if you mistake it for signal, you're going to be misled. So an economist may well find such a number more useful.