Actually, I have a point I will make. It's one I like to make a lot:
In America, all nationwide statistics representing social welfare are meaningless.
Why? Well, I have to be careful where I make this joke, but, the joke illustrates the point: The average human has one ball and one tit.
This is, in some sense obvious and mundane, but I think it's more meaningful than people realize.
For another example: the murder rate in the United States is about 7/100k people. But if you were to read this and conclude that that represented your risk of being murdered, you'd be wrong. If you live in an inner city ghetto, your chance of being murdered is about 100x that. If you live in a suburb, your chance is statistically indistinguishable from zero. You average over all of these situations, you get 7/100k. But that average doesn't actually represent any realistic scenario in this country.
The United States is a gigantic place full of half a billion people whose lives are radically different from each others. When you average over half a billion people and synthesize a single data point out of it, that data point is meaningless. Unemployment statistics are actually a good example of this, as democrats liked to point out fifteen years ago for some reason. There are so many arbitrary decisions made in the computation of that singular number that we might as well ignore it.
Hell, for a fun example (and by fun I mean likely to piss off most of the readers here): I used to live in Oakland, California. Oakland, California, is widely known throughout the Bay Area (and, I assume, the rest of the country), as being an impoverished, ghetto-ass shithole. It mostly is. But the average household income in that city is almost 30% higher than the natiojnal average. If you went off of national statistics, those people are some of the richest people in the country. But trust me, they are not rich. So too with San Francisco. San Francisco has more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country (at least it did ten years ago). But, a million dollars a year in San Francisco buys a lower quality of life than $100k/yr in a sane part of the country does. By federal statistics, the people in SF have much much better lives than the people in Bumfuck, Midwesternstan. But, having lived in both places, I can tell you that the reality is the opposite.
I started skimming the Politico article and I immediately have problems with it. For the first example that stood out:
> Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. ... Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income.
I don't think those are egregious examples. I think both of those are reasonable decisions. If you have a job, but it's not the job you want, that sucks, and it's representative of social decline, but it's not unemployment. If you have a job, but it pays shit, that sucks, and it's representative of social decline but it's not unemployment.
I don't say this to say "suck it up". I say this to illustrate that the entire concept of an "unemployment rate" is kind of abstract and arbitrary and meaningless. It doesn't matter what the statistical unemployment rate of the USA as a whole is. One's individual situation will be so heavily dominated by local factors that you might as well ignore that number.
NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY THAT EVERYTHING IS OK. Everything is quite obviously not ok. Everything is clearly and obviously worse than five years ago. What I'm saying is more the two following points:
1) We don't need an official unemployment statistic to know that things are bad; and
2) The badness of things is not correlated enough with the badness of the statistic for the statistic to meaningfully communicate information.
So when I hear that the government was juicing the numbers to make them sound less bad, I don't even care. The numbers are fake. They always were. It's not possible for those numbers to be real. When you distill half a billion human lives down to a single number, that single number cannot meaningfully represent anything.
I have a lot of problems with social scientists, managerialism, and the idea that number go up means peoples lives are better. But the biggest problem is that the numbers are fake. They're always fake. They always will be fake. They cannot not be fake, because for them to be real, you'd need more numbers.
For a simplified take-home: the more important question isn't "what is the US unemployment rate?". It's "What is the unemployment rate in your city?". That's still gonna be misleading, and oversimplifying, but it will be much closer to a true representation of what the life of a typical person is, wherever you happen to live.
This is generally true of almost every single statistic you have ever heard reported on a national level.
For an example that might be more actually-fun for the readers of this blog, one of my favourite statistics, courtesy of Scott Alexander (I'm going from memory, too lazy to look up the specific post):
If you exclude the ten most violent zip codes in America, the rate of gun violence in the US is lower than in Canada.
Now, that might sound like cheating, until I ask you: do you live in one of the 10 most violent zip codes in America? Probably not.
In a very real sense, if you're not a black person, and if you make more than 30k a year, you are actually safer from gun violence in the US than you are in Canada. But if you only look at national aggregate statistics, you would walk away thinking the opposite
(note: when you exclude those 10 zip codes, the gun violence rate in the US and Canada are both within each others' margins of error, and the absolute number, I forget what it was, but it was ridiculously low. Not quite "zero is within the margin of error" low, but pretty close to it)
----
Incidentally, and this one is probably preaching to the choir round these parts:
If you have two countries, one in which guns are more legal than anywhere else on earth, and one in which all semi-automatic firearms are illegal, and (when you exclude violent inner city ghettos) the gun violence rate between the two countries is nearly indistinguishable, then that tells us two things with very strong confidence:
Lies, damn lies and statistics. You're not wrong in that there are a lot of ways to look at this. At the same time... 1 in 4 is a hell of a number. It simplifies for making a point. In this case: things are about 5x worse than the media was making them out to be for the last 4 years. Those of us paying attention generally assumed 3x worse... I'm impressed by how brazen they are.
Worse, the average person has about 1.02 tits and 0.98 balls, as Robert Anton Wilson noted while advocating for the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal (CSICON).
Economists have known since Bernoulli solved the St. Petersburg paradox in the early 1700s that the utility of money is logarithmic, that the percentage increase or decrease in wealth, income or consumption is what is felt, not the absolute amount. The aggregate statistics should therefore sum the logarithms of individual wealth, income or consumption. Doing this would lead to near-equality, though, with $10B in one person's hands having a utility of 10, while in 100M hands it would have a utility of 200M.
Economists -- mere toadies
to their rentier masters -- construct statistics that have multiple layers of fraud to serve the frauds of those masters.
I also reject the entire concept of utilitarianism. I could get into that at length, but the really short version is
1) There is no such thing as objective utility, in an Einsteinian General Relativity sense. There is no reason to believe that any two randomly selected people would agree on the utility of something, so how can you optimize it? For a trivial example: Alice gets an abortion. A pro-choice person thinks this is a very large positive utility. A pro-life person thinks this is a very large negative utility. They do not agree on the utility of this action. Which brings us to
2) If your priority is "optimize utility" then whoever gets to decide what utility is, has arbitrary unchecked power. Because (1), utility is not something that's objectively measureable. Therefore, if we're optimizing it, someone has to be the one who decides what it is. Whoever gets that power will abuse it, and you cannot, not even in principle, push back on them. You can't say "you're wrong, you did it wrong", you can only say "I don't like the way you did it". And finally
3) I don't give a fuck about optimizing other peoples' utility. To be blunt and honest, I've heard a lot of effective altruism-style utilitarianism telling me that for only $80 or whatever, you can save the life of one african with a mosquito net, so paying for my cell phone is like killing someone once a month. And, I don't care. I would kill every person in Africa if that's what it took to have a cell phone. My cell phone is more important than the lives of people I'll never interact with, at least to me. Or, for a more recent and nearby example: covid lockdowns. The way they justified them was 'saving lives'. In other words, by locking me down, you _ruin_ my life (but I don't die) to save 12 grandmas or whatever. Well, fuck grandmas, they already had a life. I don't care if it's more 'utilitarian' to save their lives at my expense, it's at _my_ expense. They should die, so I may live. I don't care what utilitarianism has to say about it.
1/3 of the male population isn't working at all (this is a different number from unemployment, it's labor participation ie people who have stopped looking for any reason.) So you combine these two and half the population isn't really economically participating.
Which is pretty close to what the world actually looks like anecdotally/intuitively.
The only shortage we have in the US is a shortage of collaboration.
1 in 4 is more realistic in my region of the country based on anecdotal experience... but not even I thought it was actually that bad. Evidently it is. God damn. This is like bottom of the soviet union level quality of life and the media was lying to people about it for years. Remember: however much you hate journalists, you don't hate them enough.
For most of 2024 I was working a full time commission-based job that generated a sub-poverty income. Because it was W-2 it still would have been counted by the DoL as a job like any other. Happy to report that shortly after Trump's election I got a proper job.
That whole article is eye opening. Not just the unemployment rate, but the inflation rate and the GDP get exposed as not being a relevant measure of the health of the US economy anymore.
Factor in the working age people who have falsely filed for SSDI, those who have simply given up and dropped out of the workforce by ceasing to actively look for a job, job openings filled by illegal aliens and thereby lost to citizens, etc and the figure is even grimmer - well above 35%.
It's a testament to the power of the system's propaganda & banking machine that we've been in a depression since 2008 or so yet much of the populace still thinks everything is fine.
Fair enough: https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/federal-poverty-guidelines/ official federal poverty line is 15k/year for one person. 25k/year is for 3 people. I'll edit the article to say 'in poverty' because I find it difficult to believe even a single individual with an income of 15k/year is able to make ends meet. Note, that's 15k/year before taxes.
After reading this, I am of two minds.
The first is: Of course they're lying. They're always lying. It's always worse than they say
The second is: All unemployment stats are fake and gay, and just because this one confirms my biases, doesn't mean I think it's any less fake and gay.
I don't have a point. I'm just sharing my gut check
Actually, I have a point I will make. It's one I like to make a lot:
In America, all nationwide statistics representing social welfare are meaningless.
Why? Well, I have to be careful where I make this joke, but, the joke illustrates the point: The average human has one ball and one tit.
This is, in some sense obvious and mundane, but I think it's more meaningful than people realize.
For another example: the murder rate in the United States is about 7/100k people. But if you were to read this and conclude that that represented your risk of being murdered, you'd be wrong. If you live in an inner city ghetto, your chance of being murdered is about 100x that. If you live in a suburb, your chance is statistically indistinguishable from zero. You average over all of these situations, you get 7/100k. But that average doesn't actually represent any realistic scenario in this country.
The United States is a gigantic place full of half a billion people whose lives are radically different from each others. When you average over half a billion people and synthesize a single data point out of it, that data point is meaningless. Unemployment statistics are actually a good example of this, as democrats liked to point out fifteen years ago for some reason. There are so many arbitrary decisions made in the computation of that singular number that we might as well ignore it.
Hell, for a fun example (and by fun I mean likely to piss off most of the readers here): I used to live in Oakland, California. Oakland, California, is widely known throughout the Bay Area (and, I assume, the rest of the country), as being an impoverished, ghetto-ass shithole. It mostly is. But the average household income in that city is almost 30% higher than the natiojnal average. If you went off of national statistics, those people are some of the richest people in the country. But trust me, they are not rich. So too with San Francisco. San Francisco has more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country (at least it did ten years ago). But, a million dollars a year in San Francisco buys a lower quality of life than $100k/yr in a sane part of the country does. By federal statistics, the people in SF have much much better lives than the people in Bumfuck, Midwesternstan. But, having lived in both places, I can tell you that the reality is the opposite.
I started skimming the Politico article and I immediately have problems with it. For the first example that stood out:
> Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. ... Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income.
I don't think those are egregious examples. I think both of those are reasonable decisions. If you have a job, but it's not the job you want, that sucks, and it's representative of social decline, but it's not unemployment. If you have a job, but it pays shit, that sucks, and it's representative of social decline but it's not unemployment.
I don't say this to say "suck it up". I say this to illustrate that the entire concept of an "unemployment rate" is kind of abstract and arbitrary and meaningless. It doesn't matter what the statistical unemployment rate of the USA as a whole is. One's individual situation will be so heavily dominated by local factors that you might as well ignore that number.
NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY THAT EVERYTHING IS OK. Everything is quite obviously not ok. Everything is clearly and obviously worse than five years ago. What I'm saying is more the two following points:
1) We don't need an official unemployment statistic to know that things are bad; and
2) The badness of things is not correlated enough with the badness of the statistic for the statistic to meaningfully communicate information.
So when I hear that the government was juicing the numbers to make them sound less bad, I don't even care. The numbers are fake. They always were. It's not possible for those numbers to be real. When you distill half a billion human lives down to a single number, that single number cannot meaningfully represent anything.
I have a lot of problems with social scientists, managerialism, and the idea that number go up means peoples lives are better. But the biggest problem is that the numbers are fake. They're always fake. They always will be fake. They cannot not be fake, because for them to be real, you'd need more numbers.
For a simplified take-home: the more important question isn't "what is the US unemployment rate?". It's "What is the unemployment rate in your city?". That's still gonna be misleading, and oversimplifying, but it will be much closer to a true representation of what the life of a typical person is, wherever you happen to live.
This is generally true of almost every single statistic you have ever heard reported on a national level.
For an example that might be more actually-fun for the readers of this blog, one of my favourite statistics, courtesy of Scott Alexander (I'm going from memory, too lazy to look up the specific post):
If you exclude the ten most violent zip codes in America, the rate of gun violence in the US is lower than in Canada.
Now, that might sound like cheating, until I ask you: do you live in one of the 10 most violent zip codes in America? Probably not.
In a very real sense, if you're not a black person, and if you make more than 30k a year, you are actually safer from gun violence in the US than you are in Canada. But if you only look at national aggregate statistics, you would walk away thinking the opposite
(note: when you exclude those 10 zip codes, the gun violence rate in the US and Canada are both within each others' margins of error, and the absolute number, I forget what it was, but it was ridiculously low. Not quite "zero is within the margin of error" low, but pretty close to it)
----
Incidentally, and this one is probably preaching to the choir round these parts:
If you have two countries, one in which guns are more legal than anywhere else on earth, and one in which all semi-automatic firearms are illegal, and (when you exclude violent inner city ghettos) the gun violence rate between the two countries is nearly indistinguishable, then that tells us two things with very strong confidence:
1) Gun laws don't do shit to stop gun crime; and
2) It's not a _gun_ problem that the US has
Lies, damn lies and statistics. You're not wrong in that there are a lot of ways to look at this. At the same time... 1 in 4 is a hell of a number. It simplifies for making a point. In this case: things are about 5x worse than the media was making them out to be for the last 4 years. Those of us paying attention generally assumed 3x worse... I'm impressed by how brazen they are.
Worse, the average person has about 1.02 tits and 0.98 balls, as Robert Anton Wilson noted while advocating for the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal (CSICON).
Economists have known since Bernoulli solved the St. Petersburg paradox in the early 1700s that the utility of money is logarithmic, that the percentage increase or decrease in wealth, income or consumption is what is felt, not the absolute amount. The aggregate statistics should therefore sum the logarithms of individual wealth, income or consumption. Doing this would lead to near-equality, though, with $10B in one person's hands having a utility of 10, while in 100M hands it would have a utility of 200M.
Economists -- mere toadies
to their rentier masters -- construct statistics that have multiple layers of fraud to serve the frauds of those masters.
> the utility of money is logarithmic,
I reject this axiomatically.
I also reject the entire concept of utilitarianism. I could get into that at length, but the really short version is
1) There is no such thing as objective utility, in an Einsteinian General Relativity sense. There is no reason to believe that any two randomly selected people would agree on the utility of something, so how can you optimize it? For a trivial example: Alice gets an abortion. A pro-choice person thinks this is a very large positive utility. A pro-life person thinks this is a very large negative utility. They do not agree on the utility of this action. Which brings us to
2) If your priority is "optimize utility" then whoever gets to decide what utility is, has arbitrary unchecked power. Because (1), utility is not something that's objectively measureable. Therefore, if we're optimizing it, someone has to be the one who decides what it is. Whoever gets that power will abuse it, and you cannot, not even in principle, push back on them. You can't say "you're wrong, you did it wrong", you can only say "I don't like the way you did it". And finally
3) I don't give a fuck about optimizing other peoples' utility. To be blunt and honest, I've heard a lot of effective altruism-style utilitarianism telling me that for only $80 or whatever, you can save the life of one african with a mosquito net, so paying for my cell phone is like killing someone once a month. And, I don't care. I would kill every person in Africa if that's what it took to have a cell phone. My cell phone is more important than the lives of people I'll never interact with, at least to me. Or, for a more recent and nearby example: covid lockdowns. The way they justified them was 'saving lives'. In other words, by locking me down, you _ruin_ my life (but I don't die) to save 12 grandmas or whatever. Well, fuck grandmas, they already had a life. I don't care if it's more 'utilitarian' to save their lives at my expense, it's at _my_ expense. They should die, so I may live. I don't care what utilitarianism has to say about it.
1/3 of the male population isn't working at all (this is a different number from unemployment, it's labor participation ie people who have stopped looking for any reason.) So you combine these two and half the population isn't really economically participating.
Which is pretty close to what the world actually looks like anecdotally/intuitively.
The only shortage we have in the US is a shortage of collaboration.
1 in 4 is more realistic in my region of the country based on anecdotal experience... but not even I thought it was actually that bad. Evidently it is. God damn. This is like bottom of the soviet union level quality of life and the media was lying to people about it for years. Remember: however much you hate journalists, you don't hate them enough.
The manufactured narratives can drive one insane.
For most of 2024 I was working a full time commission-based job that generated a sub-poverty income. Because it was W-2 it still would have been counted by the DoL as a job like any other. Happy to report that shortly after Trump's election I got a proper job.
Hoping to get one of those shortly after. Good for you!
Thanks; good luck to you also!
So I guess I might not be a unicorn of a lazy ass bum for not being able to find work for over a year.
If you think this is bad, wait until we find out how many illegal aliens are actually in the country.
That whole article is eye opening. Not just the unemployment rate, but the inflation rate and the GDP get exposed as not being a relevant measure of the health of the US economy anymore.
Factor in the working age people who have falsely filed for SSDI, those who have simply given up and dropped out of the workforce by ceasing to actively look for a job, job openings filled by illegal aliens and thereby lost to citizens, etc and the figure is even grimmer - well above 35%.
It's a testament to the power of the system's propaganda & banking machine that we've been in a depression since 2008 or so yet much of the populace still thinks everything is fine.
Source for the Federal poverty threshold being $25k?
Fair enough: https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/federal-poverty-guidelines/ official federal poverty line is 15k/year for one person. 25k/year is for 3 people. I'll edit the article to say 'in poverty' because I find it difficult to believe even a single individual with an income of 15k/year is able to make ends meet. Note, that's 15k/year before taxes.
That's why I went with what the article said (cited in my aritcle above) at 25,000 a year being a poverty wage.