The worker shortage continues today. We have record low unemployment, all my friends are working jobs (and some multiple jobs) because their boss doesn’t care enough to check in on them because there’s too much work to do.
The economy today is rather strong. But there’s some headwinds that I’m seeing (ex: a somewhat isolated freight recession that’s playing into this decline of gasoline prices). Some items in our economy can change rather quickly, so I’m not going to confidently state that everything’s okay. There’s a lot of shakiness here. But nothing suggests yet that we’ve entered a general recession (like say, China has, or some other countries).
Even my buddy at WeWork hasn’t been fired yet, lol. I know there’s been a lot of tech layoffs, but it seems like there’s so much programming work everywhere, that everyone basically gets rehired instantly.
There’s troubling signs in some sectors. I’m worried that spreads to the rest of the economy. But those numbers just aren’t there for the “general economy” yet.
Lmao. Life is okay for you so fuck the statistics. That’s why we can’t get any economic reform in this country and y’all are going to be left wondering why the bottom fell out one of these days.
Gotchya, it’s all a conspiracy and every time some economics grad student checks the publicly available data for a standard project they are inducted into the ever growing secret conspiracy. It’s obvious!
Don’t ask a grad student. You’ll stop believing in the economy. It’s the news doing stupid shit. Just a few days ago CNBC brazenly printed a headline proclaiming the end of the cost of living crisis and that wages beat the inflation from the pandemic.
Turns out they meant the actual pandemic, as in the less than 1 percent inflation in 2020. 2021-2023 is still fucked at record levels though. And the actual data they did manage to print was backwards to the headline.
Then there’s the actual data we can easily access. Like the unemployment number. If you don’t get a job in the next 6 months it just stops counting you. Most measures of wealth distribution available stop at 100,000. Effectively grouping the middle class with billionaires. (Even researchers at Rand have complained about that one) The further you look, the more shenanigans you find. For example go pull the median household income for the last 30 years from BLS. (The agency cited all over the Internet for those numbers in articles.) I can tell you exactly how many teenagers died by slipping in the bath tub with like ten clicks. But finding the most basic economic data from the government is like pulling teeth.
Yes, free online news that relies on clicks isn’t the most reliable. That’s why you don’t see that nonsense in most respectable journalism.
As for the 6months not counted, you’re misunderstanding. Typically, folks have to have looked for a job in the last 6 months. (Once they pass that, they are considered a discouraged worker.) Which seems a pretty fair measure, you don’t want tp include people not looking for work, what you want out of the unemployment numbers is “of those working or looking for work, how many are currently unemployed.”
Here it is by worker, broken down however you’d like. It took a minute and a half of googling and meandering through the website:
While household income is less of a good measure (do you only count married folks as people, how about households where one partner doesn’t have to work as the house is already owned etc) you can similarly find that with a quick google.
Here’s where your link leads. Now go look at CDC Wisqars and tell me with a straight face BLS is good. And while general median household income is a very broad measure, it’s the most accurate because it accounts for single people, couples with a single income, and multiple income households. Also individual median income is reliably about half of the household median.
Edit- I forgot to add, the six month limit is an arbitrary number. Just because they don’t get a job, does not mean they aren’t looking. We have effective surveying tools, we can absolutely ask people what they’re trying to do instead of relying on arbitrary time lengths and records.
What do you dislike about that link? Are you literally complaining because the labour statistics aren’t in pretty infographics? The BLS is designed for those who most commonly use it and we need access to data sliced well, which it is.
And for the six month, I recommend you look at the actual definition, which can be found here:
No I’m angry they’ve put arbitrary limits on how they collect and give data. And over specifying is a form of obfuscation. You say you like tiny little slices pre made but any competent database query system will create any slice you want in seconds. Instead you’re reduced to searching for the basic information among thousands of these slices. Or trying to put each slice together to stitch the data together.
This is not neglect, that would look like an abandoned data set or a data set with nothing but a 90’s query. This is not benevolence, that would look like the CDCs query system. This is by design. Someone made the system shitty for anyone who wants to work outside their pre-made crumbs of data. What you’re seeing isn’t someone who wants pretty little graphs. It’s someone who wants a million lines of data in a hundred tables with a query system that’s worth a damn.
I’ve never had cause to play with the cdc data but from what I’m looking st in wisqars, it seems lile you’re limited to a si goes query at a time and to .csv output, so are you manually putting those hundred tables together or is there another site or…?
For the bls, as with most organizations that do this sort of thing, there’s a handy API so you** can easily** pull all the data and tables you’d like. Also, of course, they have most of their data available in large, admittedly flat, data files for the odd cross section of people who want to get down and dirty with the data but don’t have the skills to pull JSON requests. Simply follow the original link I gave you, select all the groups/data of interest and to format options.
It really seems like you’re just searching for a reason to be angry. At first you were railing because as far as I can tell, you blamed the BLS for free news sites being clickbaity. Then were raging about the unemployment number because you didn’t understand how people were counted. Then got angry about having trouble finding the most basic info and when it was shown, are now angry it doesn’t come in database format???
You don’t need to put one together, they let you query theirs. That’s the point. And “program a front end for our API” isn’t an answer either. That’s literally the opposite of making data easily available.
And then you suggest clicking hundreds of slices, requiring me to effectively create my own database. So now we’re at create the back end and front end. You’re getting less accessible, not more.
I never blamed BLS for CNBC’s shittiness. Those were two separate things. And yes the arbitrary cut offs in data collection is a giant fucking problem. Not counting the bad thing so you can ignore it is one of the oldest ways governments use to ignore things. Such as the way we count unemployment, the 100,000 cap in income baskets, “core” inflation instead of real inflation, household median instead of individual median, etc, etc.
We’re not going to have a clear picture of the real economy until we get rid of these diet statistics that serve to paint a false picture.
If you don’t think the data hasn’t been “massaged” for a decade, to make it seem better than it actually is, you haven’t been paying attention.
On top of the classic “you can prove anything with statistics” it’s a bit of a joke.
The worker shortage continues today. We have record low unemployment, all my friends are working jobs (and some multiple jobs) because their boss doesn’t care enough to check in on them because there’s too much work to do.
The economy today is rather strong. But there’s some headwinds that I’m seeing (ex: a somewhat isolated freight recession that’s playing into this decline of gasoline prices). Some items in our economy can change rather quickly, so I’m not going to confidently state that everything’s okay. There’s a lot of shakiness here. But nothing suggests yet that we’ve entered a general recession (like say, China has, or some other countries).
Even my buddy at WeWork hasn’t been fired yet, lol. I know there’s been a lot of tech layoffs, but it seems like there’s so much programming work everywhere, that everyone basically gets rehired instantly.
There’s troubling signs in some sectors. I’m worried that spreads to the rest of the economy. But those numbers just aren’t there for the “general economy” yet.
Try getting a third job, maybe that will help.
Lmao. Life is okay for you so fuck the statistics. That’s why we can’t get any economic reform in this country and y’all are going to be left wondering why the bottom fell out one of these days.
Gotchya, it’s all a conspiracy and every time some economics grad student checks the publicly available data for a standard project they are inducted into the ever growing secret conspiracy. It’s obvious!
Don’t ask a grad student. You’ll stop believing in the economy. It’s the news doing stupid shit. Just a few days ago CNBC brazenly printed a headline proclaiming the end of the cost of living crisis and that wages beat the inflation from the pandemic.
Turns out they meant the actual pandemic, as in the less than 1 percent inflation in 2020. 2021-2023 is still fucked at record levels though. And the actual data they did manage to print was backwards to the headline.
Then there’s the actual data we can easily access. Like the unemployment number. If you don’t get a job in the next 6 months it just stops counting you. Most measures of wealth distribution available stop at 100,000. Effectively grouping the middle class with billionaires. (Even researchers at Rand have complained about that one) The further you look, the more shenanigans you find. For example go pull the median household income for the last 30 years from BLS. (The agency cited all over the Internet for those numbers in articles.) I can tell you exactly how many teenagers died by slipping in the bath tub with like ten clicks. But finding the most basic economic data from the government is like pulling teeth.
Yes, free online news that relies on clicks isn’t the most reliable. That’s why you don’t see that nonsense in most respectable journalism.
As for the 6months not counted, you’re misunderstanding. Typically, folks have to have looked for a job in the last 6 months. (Once they pass that, they are considered a discouraged worker.) Which seems a pretty fair measure, you don’t want tp include people not looking for work, what you want out of the unemployment numbers is “of those working or looking for work, how many are currently unemployed.”
Here it is by worker, broken down however you’d like. It took a minute and a half of googling and meandering through the website:
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?le
While household income is less of a good measure (do you only count married folks as people, how about households where one partner doesn’t have to work as the house is already owned etc) you can similarly find that with a quick google.
Here’s where your link leads. Now go look at CDC Wisqars and tell me with a straight face BLS is good. And while general median household income is a very broad measure, it’s the most accurate because it accounts for single people, couples with a single income, and multiple income households. Also individual median income is reliably about half of the household median.
Edit- I forgot to add, the six month limit is an arbitrary number. Just because they don’t get a job, does not mean they aren’t looking. We have effective surveying tools, we can absolutely ask people what they’re trying to do instead of relying on arbitrary time lengths and records.
What do you dislike about that link? Are you literally complaining because the labour statistics aren’t in pretty infographics? The BLS is designed for those who most commonly use it and we need access to data sliced well, which it is.
And for the six month, I recommend you look at the actual definition, which can be found here:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#unemployed
It seems like you’re angry about your own misunderstanding of the definitions being used.
No I’m angry they’ve put arbitrary limits on how they collect and give data. And over specifying is a form of obfuscation. You say you like tiny little slices pre made but any competent database query system will create any slice you want in seconds. Instead you’re reduced to searching for the basic information among thousands of these slices. Or trying to put each slice together to stitch the data together.
This is not neglect, that would look like an abandoned data set or a data set with nothing but a 90’s query. This is not benevolence, that would look like the CDCs query system. This is by design. Someone made the system shitty for anyone who wants to work outside their pre-made crumbs of data. What you’re seeing isn’t someone who wants pretty little graphs. It’s someone who wants a million lines of data in a hundred tables with a query system that’s worth a damn.
I’ve never had cause to play with the cdc data but from what I’m looking st in wisqars, it seems lile you’re limited to a si goes query at a time and to .csv output, so are you manually putting those hundred tables together or is there another site or…?
For the bls, as with most organizations that do this sort of thing, there’s a handy API so you** can easily** pull all the data and tables you’d like. Also, of course, they have most of their data available in large, admittedly flat, data files for the odd cross section of people who want to get down and dirty with the data but don’t have the skills to pull JSON requests. Simply follow the original link I gave you, select all the groups/data of interest and to format options.
It really seems like you’re just searching for a reason to be angry. At first you were railing because as far as I can tell, you blamed the BLS for free news sites being clickbaity. Then were raging about the unemployment number because you didn’t understand how people were counted. Then got angry about having trouble finding the most basic info and when it was shown, are now angry it doesn’t come in database format???
You don’t need to put one together, they let you query theirs. That’s the point. And “program a front end for our API” isn’t an answer either. That’s literally the opposite of making data easily available.
And then you suggest clicking hundreds of slices, requiring me to effectively create my own database. So now we’re at create the back end and front end. You’re getting less accessible, not more.
I never blamed BLS for CNBC’s shittiness. Those were two separate things. And yes the arbitrary cut offs in data collection is a giant fucking problem. Not counting the bad thing so you can ignore it is one of the oldest ways governments use to ignore things. Such as the way we count unemployment, the 100,000 cap in income baskets, “core” inflation instead of real inflation, household median instead of individual median, etc, etc.
We’re not going to have a clear picture of the real economy until we get rid of these diet statistics that serve to paint a false picture.