I can believe it. Speaking as a SWE working in a finance-related space in NYC the quantity of recruiter spam on linkedin has decreased _notably_ over the last 2 months.
I think people way underestimate just how badly the US fucked themselves with the tariff regimes, amongst other reasons.
The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade.
People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
I can't say if it is true, but I know of some small businesses who were essentially put out of business / had it all dry up when tariffs hit. They're not dead as an org, but they're not working / not paying anyone ...
My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about. I think generally it's also a good thing that Americans are buying less - statistically, more stuff is made overseas than domestically. Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
> My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about.
This is a massive hand-wave and only applies to companies that have an in with the administration. If you're a small/medium-size business that doesn't have a budget for "government relations," or you're in a field like renewable energy or EVs where the admin doesn't like the vibes? Too bad for you.
> Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
Yes they will, and aggregate output will decrease because producers are now spending more money on worse domestic substitutes for foreign products. Also, you're now shoveling corporate welfare to those new domestic producers, so they have no incentive to step up their game and innovate. (If you want an example of this look at the consistent failure of US automakers to compete globally, because tariffs incentivize them to optimize for building pickup trucks domestically.)
Import substitution has been tried many times before, it doesn't work.
Can you help me understand your last point? As far as I'm aware the end goal is Americans producing for Americans. To reference your point, smaller European cars aren't built for the unique, rugged American terrain, as well as the massive distances that Americans drive every day. I'm not sure where innovation could come from by building towards a European market.
Customs has detailed processes that track cars etc that travel back and forth a few times as parts are added that tracks the value add/country made in this production process - it adds cost and often the new tariffs are quite large and must be paid on the spot and brokerage process is far more detailed = adds fees$$
Indeed. With the future of the tariffs in some question with the upcoming SCOTUS case, why would any business choose to invest in manufacturing here when the barriers might be gone in a few months (or mid-next year if SCOTUS slow rolls a decision until the end of their session)?
I'm in the Midwest and your friends don't know what they're talking about. Hazarding a guess, they assume things will just work because their team is in power. Most people on both sides are in denial about the situation, frankly.
But hey, maybe 30 years from now, your friends will be right about America producing more.
Tariffs are all political bluster and theater anyway. The more I researched the realities of tariffs on the ground, the more I realized that international trade is a giant grift for everyone.
No one is honest about what is in those shipping containers (and no one wants to check). The longshoremen and their unions are corrupt AF and shouldn't even exist, let alone make more than google engineers. No one is honest about reporting what their goods are on customs forms. As of last time I checked, effective tariffs on GPUs and other important semis was actually slightly lower than under Biden. Not defending Trump but saying that what the executive says and what actually happens are different universes in regards to trade.
Oh and BTW, there's a whole parallel court system related to trade in the USA which does all the boring work of adjudication related to implementation of trade. No normie knows these guys exist and they are the reason that you can safely ignore whatever nonsense percentage trump says outloud next.
Also I buy a lot of clothes which are "made overseas" (Bronsen, soso, unbranded brand) which seems to have dodged the tariffs (Bronsen prices didn't even go up and they're made in china!!!) or made in the USA/Canada but with overseas material, i.e. Naked and Famous. In theory my clothes prices should have doubled or more. In practice almost nothing happened.
Assuming you mean: how do estimates and previous monthly turn out to be wrong and need correction?
After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions.
The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data.
As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
Our estimates are not keeping up with modern trends.
for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting.
In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently.
If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
Things are far worse then expected/ can be hidden. That's why they are firing the people who put statistics together and appointing yes men to make the numbers look good.
Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? And what does it say about the Washington Post and their selection of economists?
> Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect?
Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual?
There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
Yes, utterly. having number off by an order of magnitude in the complete opposite direction tells us at best that we are in unusual times and at worst that our estimates no longer work in this job market.
Even without that when you fire tens of thousands of civil servants and cancel billions in grants that’s a lot of money which was supposed to flow through the economy and does not.
>I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it
I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
It’d be okay ish if the president was just inebriated, but we are looking at dementia, an aged mind that seems to have trouble telling real from fake (as evident by the flurry of AI generated videos posted on his page).
It would be okay-ish if the president were just inebriated (Grant), or had dementia (Reagan). What we have is a president who is a narcissistic psychopath (closet parallel in American history is Joseph McCarthy, although if you want a real comparison you have to go to Europe or South America).
> If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
> In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
Trump is threatening [and/or has tried to fire] people who report accurate numbers to the government?
As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...
The entire stock market and economy is being held up on the back of a massive AI bubble. Everywhere else you look, performance is down, people are struggling, jobs are vanishing and consumer confidence is disappearing. The most inept people you can imagine are in control of the only levers that can fix things and they've decided to instead strip it and sell it for parts after slamming the self-destruct button.
If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators.
Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
If you're hiring and firing you'd better get the data into ADP ASAP or you're going to be paying people who no longer work for you or not paying people who do. This should be about as close to real-time (neither leading or lagging) as you're going to get.
Nit: the ADP numbers are not survey based. They come directly from adp’s payroll data set which is immense but biased. So you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor. The more murky part of their numbers is how they calibrate to the bls numbers.
Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
Next major crisis (like worst-case scenario AI bubble crash) could cause US economy to shed 3 million jobs. Unemployment rate reached 9% in 2010, now it is just 4%. 32k is a fairly insignificant number compared with 160 million employed overall.
The US policy is dragging many countries down, not just itself. The tarrifs and the huge uncertainty is really hitting companies that export to the US.
In short order there will be a speech about how ADP has "very nasty people" who need to stop saying like this or there will be "serious consequences".
After that, it's not that ADP will fabricate the numbers, they'll just stop making them public, and when e.g. analysts buy them the contract will come with a term forbidding public disclosure.
And if ADP did get the wild idea to resist any government action, the law firm representing them would be targeted as well. Like we've seen this year already.
1. Claim it is Biden's economy and his job numbers.
2. Claim the lost jobs are actually indian immigrants going back.
3. Your point about ADP.
4. Threaten any media that reports these numbers.
I am signing a beautiful Executive Order firing Maria Black, the radical left-wing CEO of ADP. As the President I can do that, you know. She was appointed by Joe Biden. She has said some very nasty things lately - I've been told by very nice people that she is very, very bad. The order is effective immediately. Failure to comply will trigger retaliatory tariffs on ADP. Some very smart people - I'm very smart myself, but there are some other smart people around me - have even suggested labeling ADP a terrorist organisation, and I'm thinking about that. I think its a beautiful idea.
Powell said explicitly a year or two ago that it was his goal to bump unemployment numbers to tame inflation. Kinda sick to think about, but, here we are I guess.
When unemployment rates were back down to the pre-covid 2020 levels, only time they were even lower was before the 1969 recession. When inflation was at the highest it's been since the 80s.
The statement & monetary policy decision was entirely appropriate at the time.
I actually tried a brief search to get a more accurate time, but all the results were skewed heavily to the last few months so I gave up. I'm impressed you found it.
That's the inherent nature of the interest rate. Both unemployment and inflation have bad consequences, so the role of the central bank is to balance rates to target a specific inflation rate.
and inflation can continue forever! no problems with that at all, the economy is definitely built on money and not a finite supply of resources constrained by entropy.
I actually don't see a problem with that because what is useful information in a price system is the relative price of things, not the absolute price, which is arbitrary.
And either way, voters around the world have made it extremely clear that price inflation annoys them more than high unemployment. So if Powell's options are to cause unemployment or allow continued inflation, I can see why he'd pick the former.
An astute and accurate observation. However, there is no numeric target set in the mandate you allude to:
"The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more
flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. In 1977, Congress amended the Federal
Reserve Act (FRA) to provide greater clarity about the goals of monetary policy. The amended FRA
directs the Board of Governors and the FOMC to conduct monetary policy “so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” [https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/files/the-fed-exp...]
What he is doing is counter to the Fed charter, but if you're pro-Capital, you like some unemployment because it disciplines Labor.
> The chair's main responsibility is to carry out the mandate of the Fed, which is to promote the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
> The chair's main responsibility is to carry out the mandate of the Fed, which is to promote the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates
You’re correctly quoting your source. But this is crap, as their source [1] makes no reference to “moderate long-term interest rates”.
The Fed is mandated to promote “maximum employment” and “stable prices” [2]. (It defines the former as “the highest level of employment or lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain while maintaining a stable inflation rate.”) If inflation is unstable, the economy is above maximum employment.
Isn't the idea that maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates are somewhat in tension with each other though? Which would mean the mandate is to balance those three things – e.g. maximize employment to the extent possible while maintaining stable prices and moderate interest rates.
> Powell said explicitly a year or two ago that it was his goal to bump unemployment numbers to tame inflation. Kinda sick to think about, but, here we are I guess.
This is basic monetary economics via the Phillips curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve). There's a strong relationship between unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Of course, that is based on historical data in normal times, and, since 2010s and the financial crisis with years of ZIRP, we are now in very unnormal times with Trump's tariffs and general fuckery of the economic system.
The genesis of high house prices lay in the low interest rates and nimby base home construction codes driven by owners who were deathly afraid of lower priced homes making their piles of brick decline in value. This regime ended with Covid and rates went from ~~2.5% to 5-6%. A few had 30 year mortgages at 2.5-3.5% but a huge number had corporate money market paper at 1-2% - this is great while it lasts, but it is short term, ranging from 30 days to 1-2 years, with the 30 day rates at the bottom.
With low rates and efficient property managers and the shortage, these managers were able to keep occupancy rates in the high 90%'s, with aggressive vetting rules and retentive deposit procedures(deny full deposit return for trivial reasons = hoping the tenant will not create a long fight over a small bone - which often needed a small claims court battle, when at a new job far away, some managers got over 100% rent via this overlapped dual rent. Overlay this with AirBNB taking 5-20% of rental off the market where similar closely monitored management with cleaning staff kept occupancy in the 90% area in some places at 3x the apartment rent rate and greatly undercutting hotel rates at 5-10x apartment rates. A great squealing of the stuck pigs(Hotels) and the similarly stuck city tax pigs created insurance pigs and laws that shut down many of these AirBNB's = the worms all turned at once. Places that earned well became losing money pits, and large numbers were soon sold to capture the high prices of their low price circa 1999-2001 purchases. There was also the surf side condo collapse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KNwMSuwQ8w) where Florida forced condos that were tall/old/salty footed into huge engineering inspections and catch-up reserve rules that made many condos worth less than the paper that was written to finance them. People walked and lost everything = thousands of horror stories on utube...
Then AI mediated job losses.... 32,000 under reports this, as many companies have large internal payroll processing that is not reflected in that 32,000.
as dyauspitr says = It’s a wasteland out there.
This is a man speeding at 100 MPH into a blizzard with a 1000 car pileup 2 miles ahead!
I don't know what's the end game here, you read news like this, another that thousands of government workers aren't paid, at this rate everyone will be homeless in a few months.
In another news, you read someone like Musk hit a net worth of half a trillion dollars, if the economy is bad and people are losing jobs, why are others getting richer?
The adage "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets" advises a contrarian investment strategy of acquiring property or other assets during periods of extreme economic or market turmoil. The saying is attributed to 19th-century British banker Baron Rothschild, who is said to have profited significantly by purchasing assets during the panic that followed the Battle of Waterloo.
This makes as much sense as the notion of "crony communism," which is to say, it doesn't. Ignoring the harmful side effects of an economic system makes one an ideologue.
Satirical IG post I saw from a college professor: "In 2050, I'll be getting emails from high school students about research opportunities, because the average college will require 2 publications to get in and will cost $500k." Fertility rates are plummeting globally for this reason in addition to housing, and earth has reached its carrying capacity. There are no entry-level jobs, because "entry level" now requires years of experience: https://www.zippia.com/advice/entry-level-jobs-pay-experienc....
If you decide to have kids today, you should factor in the cost that they may significant require financial support into their 30s. I know a couple of guys over 40, including a laid-off SWE, living with their parents again.
> "In 2050, I'll be getting emails from high school students about research opportunities, because the average college will require 2 publications to get in and will cost $500k."
From my general understanding, those are already the numbers for elite colleges.
I hear complaints about kids that have published research, have started local charities, and have completed most of an undergrad degree already, that they are still getting rejected from top colleges.
If they are that enterprising and go-getters, I paid some guy almost $10k to roof my house, and he gave me an invoice showing the price of materials were only about $3500 of that. He did it with a few friends in two days, maybe 60 man-hours of work. All they had was a few ladders, harnesses, an ancient truck, and they didn't look like the sort to have wasted much of it on insurance or overhead.
> and they didn't look like the sort to have wasted much of it on insurance or overhead
This is in general a really bad idea. Not only can you be on the hook if they make a mistake with the install, or mess something up like venting that ends up damaging appliances or plumbing, but if one of them falls off your roof, depending on the circumstances you could be personally liable for their possibly life long medical treatment (or end up in an extended lawsuit as they try to claim that you personally directed their work). Make sure your contractors have insurance.
Insurance and overhead (eg. safety harass) exist for a reason other than to drain your wallet. Roofing is also a physically difficult job. You won't find many 50+ year old to couch on a rooftop all day, regardless of pays.
I would expect kiddos who are all-in on going to college won't be able to see any other opportunity as acceptable. They've spent almost their entire lives trying to get into a good college. No college may not seem like even an option.
> How are children supposed to know the adults in authority positions around them are full of shit?
I think that was my underlying point. It isn't blame, its just that they don't know any better. They've been sold the One True Path To Adulthood and Success and Happiness and it is a false bill of goods.
Yeah it's extraordinary how prepared today's elite undergrads are. Population demand has outpaced spots in these colleges, and so that's why I don't believe "grade inflation" is a thing. The kids are just way, way smarter and more productive than 60 years ago, just as workers are.
Kids cheat today massively more and get parents to demand changes to grades which is something you wouldn't see 60 years ago. It's not higher productively its lower morals and less buy-in from teachers who give in to pressure or look the other way because their authority has lowered. Plus they can't hit students anymore.
Sure but labor only accounts for a fraction of the cost of housing and that only goes down as we automate more of the process. Even traditional house are now frequently assembled out of prefabricated sections.
Mass self deportation is a fairly easy solution too. It’d cause an immediate glut of homes and jobs. It would also cause economic shock, but that would by and large hurt the capital class. We are in for pain either way, might as well ensure the next generations have ample opportunity.
Cut back/tax on legal immigration, tax remittances harder, and penalize those employing illegal immigrants. None of this ICE kabuki theatre is needed (and frankly is cruel and immoral).
Obviously this won’t happen because both left & right want immigration.
> What inventory of housing do you think you will unlock when migrants leave?
For legal migrants, many of them are in respectable homes. For the illegal yes it’s lower quality, but regardless supply and demand will hold true. Safety in many of these lower quality homes will increase as well.
> The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
Because we’ve allowed capital to increase their bottom line at the expense of labor. The conditions and pay today are only what they are because we let capital play by different rules. We should not structure America to benefit the few.
That's not how it works. Housing prices are not allowed to go down, because a massive chunk of Boomer equity is bound up in them. If there's ever a danger of housing prices going down, bailouts will be issued and supply tightened until the "natural" state of things is restored and they go up again.
All the shitty covenants they put in much/most of even the shittiest of wasteland around me still exist though.
There was one piece of absolute shithole land I looked at because I was in the process of building a house.
Some dead guy decided to encumber it by requiring me to build a gigantic house if I wanted live there. Reversing it would require something as onerous roughly as getting all people in a 10 mile radius to stand on one foot while reciting the entire bible from memory. Technically possible so it holds up in court as not being a perpetual covenant, but for all intent in purposes was.
You would not believe how much land boomers basically ruined forever when they mindlessly engaged in some wack covenants back around the 80s.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... - Look at the 60 and older groupings. Those are boomers and older generations. The youngest boomers are about 60, so 15 years average remaining for them but potentially 20-30 more years of boomers as a significant percentage of the population.
Not in California unfortunately, where Prop 13 has strong tax incentives to keep retirees in their existing home until death, even if it's far larger than what they need.
I feel like this view suffers from https://xkcd.com/605/. The future is not a linear progression from the present; as linear (or exponential!) extrapolations become progressively more absurd, they get replaced by qualitatively different systems that fit peoples' needs as they exist now.
I have young kids. I don't worry too much about how they're going to afford college education or get a job or afford to retire, because I don't believe college or jobs or retirement will exist in the form it does today. They'll be replaced by systems that actually work in the world that they'll grow up in. My job is to help them survive, and ideally to keep them fed and clothed and housed in the meantime. I'm training them to be adaptable, to think and act for themselves, and to have a good grounding in fundamental skills like reading/writing/rithmetic that I don't think will go anywhere. But the specifics of today's world will definitely be going away, because today's world doesn't work.
I'm not sure why you think that. From what I can see, the undergraduate college experience of today is basically the same as it was in the 1980s. And since then we've had the entire rise of the internet, mobile tech, social media, and all the rest of it. Kids still live in dorms and sit in lecture halls and listen to professors lecture. Why do you think it's going to be much different 15-20 years from now?
Sure there is a lot that can be done online, but that hasn't really impacted the fundamental experience of "going to college" for most young adults who decide to do that.
The cost and benefits have fallen way out of whack. The average college tuition has tripled (after inflation-adjusting) since 1980 [1]. Meanwhile, an increasing number of college graduates are unemployed, and the wage premium for a college education is declining.
The college experience hasn't changed much (indeed, if anything it's improved) because colleges are sinking large amounts of money into providing a good experience. That, after all, is what a lot of students base their purchase decisions on. But the point of college isn't to be a 4-year party & vacation, it's to get an education that will help you the rest of your life. Increasingly a college education doesn't help you lead a better life.
i think weve already moved too slowly in the US to prepare the societal changes were facing and culture is not adapting, but clinging harder to old expectations. i hope US culture shifts, even if its long overdue, but i dont think it will before many more dramatic economic events
I went and lived overseas in Asia for a while, and at this point back in America, I keep thinking of comparisons to Mao's "Great Leap Forward".
Directly equating them remains hyperbole due to the death-toll, but... it's not a joke anymore, or at least not a funny one.
____
[Edit] In brief, a disastrous attempt in 1958-1962 to quickly force China into an industrial powerhouse, with a lot of weird autocratic commands. It backfired with a severe economic recession, the killing/exile of subject matter experts, officials lying about how well it was going to avoid being punished, and tens of millions of peasants dying from famine.
The people who are lighting up the country actually enjoy and fire and smoke and they don't own (or they think they don't) anything that is worth protecting.
When England created high tariffs on The Netherlands, it started wars, and relations took almost 100 years to repair.
Trump basically did what Britain did, but against the entire world.
… it might be more than a generation for the whole world to trust any trade agreement with the US if every 4-8 years agreements can be torn up so easily
> the rest of the world is broke and needs US markets
The rest of the world is disorganised. If India, China, Iran, Russia and the E.U. implemented sanctions on America, not only would our economy crumble but our ability to fight even a single war of attrition would fail.
Oh absolutely. I don’t think we’re seeing Behemoth rising [1].
I’m just pointing out that the structural source of American power is our unity across a continent. Nobody else has that hegemony. Our markets are rich because they’re big, and they’re big because they’re unified.
That bigness also reduces the incentives for others to unify, given they can gain our economies of scale through trade and without the pesky reconciliation (or annihilation) unification would require.
I’m not arguing that Eurasian unification is probable. Just that it’s more likely now than it was before, and that’s a real diminishment of American power irrespective of what the accountants say. (I’d also argue that the aforementioned economies enacting a break with America wouldn’t require long-term unification, just a short-term alliance of the power-balancing types that put America and the USSR on the same side of a war.)
This is becoming less and less true. Trading with the US is unappealing because it is expensive (tariffs) and fraught with uncertainty. New trade deals are being forged as we speak between countries that were not even considering each other before Trump took office.
Nations realign slowly but there is no question they've all begun pivoting away from the US to various degrees, and they're unlikely to go back any time soon.
We just cut a $20 billion check to Argentina. So that they could then undercut our soybean sales even further.
Edit: Guess I should add, now that China will not buy our soybeans, we are propping up a different country’s agricultural market, and are quite likely to soon cut a check to farmers who are struggling because of administration decisions.
Russia doesn't have the demographics to win, and they're throwing what young workers they have into a Ukranian meat grinder. (Or a war-focused economy that's going to leave them uncompetitive in any other industry)
Normally yes. However, it's worth noting that the last major economic legislation passed by the prior administration took effect over 3 years ago. Further, there is not a reading of that law that would predict a negative overall effect on hiring.
However, tariffs have been extensively studied in a number of countries around the world. What we are observing in the labor market is more or less what economists would predict given the magnitude of the tax increase and the uncertainty around its application.
Further, data[1] shows a rapid deterioration in the labor market corresponding to the initial tariff announcement.
That's generally true. Presidents are routinely credited and blamed for things outside of their control, including things done by their predecessors. It's something you have to accept with the job.
In this case, though, the President is taking actions designed to have quick effects. Presidents (of both parties) generally try not to do anything radical. (They promise to, then blame inaction on Congress.) This President is actually fulfilling his campaign promises, for once.
So I think he will deserve a higher fraction of the credit and blame that he would have gotten anyway. The lag is shorter because he's bypassing the usual process for change, and is able to make much more radical changes with shorter term returns.
Unemployment was 5% going into Trumps administration, which is basically fricional levels - US recovered quite well after Covid.
The "both sides" stance is almost worse than just being a conservative at this point. Dems routinely have to fix Republican fuckups, and are judged negatively on the things they don't fix - meanwhile Republicans are judged positively on the things they manage not to fuck up.
For example, the BBB has set Medicaid to expire in 2028. Anyone wanna take a $10k bet that if we have fair elections and Dems somehow win, they are going to get blamed for not fixing that?
> But isn't the lost of jobs also attributable to previous administration policies?
According to Trump, when Biden was in office it was Biden's failing economy that was the problem (despite the fact that Biden took office directly after Trump v1.0).
Also according to Trump, when Trump is in office now it is also Biden's failing economy that is the problem.
Its the same situation with the roles reversed because of Trump's gap of being in office so either the economy is a lagging problem from the last administration or it isn't, but somehow neither situation is "Trump's fault", according to Trump.
The "Biden economy" wasn't as rosy as proclaimed by the Biden government, in large part because run-away wealth inequality is making all of the statistics we historically track very misleading (eg. consumer spending looking good, as long as you ignore the huge red flag that 50% of that spending is being done by the top 10% of wealth holders).
So I'm not fully defending Biden here (both parties are ultimately allowing the economy to unravel because they refuse to deal with wealth inequality, though I do give Biden some credit for [temporarily] getting some things on the right track by, for example, putting Lina Khan in charge of the FTC) but economically things were still fundamentally much better under Biden than Trump, and we haven't even seen the depths of how bad Trump's economy is going to get (but have plenty of leading indicators of things getting much worse) and virtually all of the problems with Trump's economy can be traced pretty clearly to his own actions, such as his wildly irresponsible tariff policies.
Like even if you believe tariffs work the way he thinks they do (they don't) anyone with any understanding of business at all would have to understand that changing the values wildly sometimes from day to day makes doing business impossible for a lot of companies due to a complete inability to plan. Its crazy shit.
They have the lowest growth of their industry (granted, they're ~25% of the market) and every company I've been involved with for the last 20 years either uses a competitor or used to be an ADP customer. ADP is terrible.
Paychex, Workday, etc have been eating at their lunch for years and years now. My perception of companies using ADP is either that they're slow behemoths or they still have some niche issue that's keeping them from switching.
ADP is also incredibly cavalier with your personal data. As a potential employee I would see its use as a strong minus.
I can believe it. Speaking as a SWE working in a finance-related space in NYC the quantity of recruiter spam on linkedin has decreased _notably_ over the last 2 months.
>The U.S. shed 32,000 private-sector jobs in September, payroll-processing giant ADP said on Wednesday.
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Yikes
How does this happen?
I think people way underestimate just how badly the US fucked themselves with the tariff regimes, amongst other reasons.
The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade.
People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
I can't say if it is true, but I know of some small businesses who were essentially put out of business / had it all dry up when tariffs hit. They're not dead as an org, but they're not working / not paying anyone ...
My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about. I think generally it's also a good thing that Americans are buying less - statistically, more stuff is made overseas than domestically. Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
> My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about.
This is a massive hand-wave and only applies to companies that have an in with the administration. If you're a small/medium-size business that doesn't have a budget for "government relations," or you're in a field like renewable energy or EVs where the admin doesn't like the vibes? Too bad for you.
> Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
Yes they will, and aggregate output will decrease because producers are now spending more money on worse domestic substitutes for foreign products. Also, you're now shoveling corporate welfare to those new domestic producers, so they have no incentive to step up their game and innovate. (If you want an example of this look at the consistent failure of US automakers to compete globally, because tariffs incentivize them to optimize for building pickup trucks domestically.)
Import substitution has been tried many times before, it doesn't work.
I really liked Ronald Reagan's comments on tariffs and fair trade from way back. Good reading in these times.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-...
Hell, even the Heritage Foundation thought NAFTA was a good idea instead of tariffs:
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/the-north-american-fre...
There's a lot I read about in 2025, but I do not recall anything about tarriff policy. This one is all on Trump and "Ron Vaara".
Can you help me understand your last point? As far as I'm aware the end goal is Americans producing for Americans. To reference your point, smaller European cars aren't built for the unique, rugged American terrain, as well as the massive distances that Americans drive every day. I'm not sure where innovation could come from by building towards a European market.
Customs has detailed processes that track cars etc that travel back and forth a few times as parts are added that tracks the value add/country made in this production process - it adds cost and often the new tariffs are quite large and must be paid on the spot and brokerage process is far more detailed = adds fees$$
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Big if on that last sentence.
Indeed. With the future of the tariffs in some question with the upcoming SCOTUS case, why would any business choose to invest in manufacturing here when the barriers might be gone in a few months (or mid-next year if SCOTUS slow rolls a decision until the end of their session)?
I'm in the Midwest and your friends don't know what they're talking about. Hazarding a guess, they assume things will just work because their team is in power. Most people on both sides are in denial about the situation, frankly.
But hey, maybe 30 years from now, your friends will be right about America producing more.
Tariffs are all political bluster and theater anyway. The more I researched the realities of tariffs on the ground, the more I realized that international trade is a giant grift for everyone.
No one is honest about what is in those shipping containers (and no one wants to check). The longshoremen and their unions are corrupt AF and shouldn't even exist, let alone make more than google engineers. No one is honest about reporting what their goods are on customs forms. As of last time I checked, effective tariffs on GPUs and other important semis was actually slightly lower than under Biden. Not defending Trump but saying that what the executive says and what actually happens are different universes in regards to trade.
Oh and BTW, there's a whole parallel court system related to trade in the USA which does all the boring work of adjudication related to implementation of trade. No normie knows these guys exist and they are the reason that you can safely ignore whatever nonsense percentage trump says outloud next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Interna...
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_International_Tr...
Also I buy a lot of clothes which are "made overseas" (Bronsen, soso, unbranded brand) which seems to have dodged the tariffs (Bronsen prices didn't even go up and they're made in china!!!) or made in the USA/Canada but with overseas material, i.e. Naked and Famous. In theory my clothes prices should have doubled or more. In practice almost nothing happened.
Assuming you mean: how do estimates and previous monthly turn out to be wrong and need correction?
After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revis...
The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data.
As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
Our estimates are not keeping up with modern trends.
for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting.
In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently.
If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
Things are far worse then expected/ can be hidden. That's why they are firing the people who put statistics together and appointing yes men to make the numbers look good.
Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? And what does it say about the Washington Post and their selection of economists?
> Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect?
Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual?
There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
A different way to think about this is asking why anybody thinks they can be correct about this?
If records surrounding this topic are always correct and require revision maybe that's just how the data presents itself.
You only know the true amount of rainfall that happens after the storm passes.
> be so completely incorrect?
Were they so completely incorrect?
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
Its much worse than that. -3k was for August. The expectation for September was +45k but instead was -30k. So it was actually 75k misprediction.
>Were they so completely incorrect?
Yes, utterly. having number off by an order of magnitude in the complete opposite direction tells us at best that we are in unusual times and at worst that our estimates no longer work in this job market.
Every single day at 2:30 in the morning the inebriated President radically reconfigures federal trade policy.
Even without that when you fire tens of thousands of civil servants and cancel billions in grants that’s a lot of money which was supposed to flow through the economy and does not.
for all his failings, I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it
that said, he has no problem putting drunkards in charge of national security...
>I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it
I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
It’d be okay ish if the president was just inebriated, but we are looking at dementia, an aged mind that seems to have trouble telling real from fake (as evident by the flurry of AI generated videos posted on his page).
It would be okay-ish if the president were just inebriated (Grant), or had dementia (Reagan). What we have is a president who is a narcissistic psychopath (closet parallel in American history is Joseph McCarthy, although if you want a real comparison you have to go to Europe or South America).
It's common knowledge he doesn't drink.
Alcohol isn't the only way to get inebriated.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
> If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
> In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
Trump is threatening [and/or has tried to fire] people who report accurate numbers to the government?
As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...
The entire stock market and economy is being held up on the back of a massive AI bubble. Everywhere else you look, performance is down, people are struggling, jobs are vanishing and consumer confidence is disappearing. The most inept people you can imagine are in control of the only levers that can fix things and they've decided to instead strip it and sell it for parts after slamming the self-destruct button.
Survey response times creating trend bias.
If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators.
Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
If you're hiring and firing you'd better get the data into ADP ASAP or you're going to be paying people who no longer work for you or not paying people who do. This should be about as close to real-time (neither leading or lagging) as you're going to get.
Nit: the ADP numbers are not survey based. They come directly from adp’s payroll data set which is immense but biased. So you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor. The more murky part of their numbers is how they calibrate to the bls numbers.
> the ADP numbers are not survey based
Correct, why I said “BLS surveys and payroll data.”
> you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor
True.
Also biased by being only the customers of ADP.
Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
Just for reference, Canada, with an economy less than 1/10 the US lost 66k jobs in August. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canadian-economy-bled-66-00...
My first reaction to 32k for the US is that it's obviously negative but a pretty modest decline.
Next major crisis (like worst-case scenario AI bubble crash) could cause US economy to shed 3 million jobs. Unemployment rate reached 9% in 2010, now it is just 4%. 32k is a fairly insignificant number compared with 160 million employed overall.
Well, they were hit with import tarrifs...
The US policy is dragging many countries down, not just itself. The tarrifs and the huge uncertainty is really hitting companies that export to the US.
In short order there will be a speech about how ADP has "very nasty people" who need to stop saying like this or there will be "serious consequences".
After that, it's not that ADP will fabricate the numbers, they'll just stop making them public, and when e.g. analysts buy them the contract will come with a term forbidding public disclosure.
And if ADP did get the wild idea to resist any government action, the law firm representing them would be targeted as well. Like we've seen this year already.
There are multiple excellent policy choices.
1. Claim it is Biden's economy and his job numbers. 2. Claim the lost jobs are actually indian immigrants going back. 3. Your point about ADP. 4. Threaten any media that reports these numbers.
I am signing a beautiful Executive Order firing Maria Black, the radical left-wing CEO of ADP. As the President I can do that, you know. She was appointed by Joe Biden. She has said some very nasty things lately - I've been told by very nice people that she is very, very bad. The order is effective immediately. Failure to comply will trigger retaliatory tariffs on ADP. Some very smart people - I'm very smart myself, but there are some other smart people around me - have even suggested labeling ADP a terrorist organisation, and I'm thinking about that. I think its a beautiful idea.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Not quite enough random capital letters for me.
also the reference to Joe Biden contains no slur. Feels fake.
And where's the sentence about how the greatest presidency in the history of the United States has CREATED MORE JOBS than ever before in history?
That's one way to lower the interest rate.
If nobody can borrow money for anything it doesn't matter what the interest rate is.
I'm very smart!
Powell said explicitly a year or two ago that it was his goal to bump unemployment numbers to tame inflation. Kinda sick to think about, but, here we are I guess.
> a year or two ago
3 years ago. September 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/23/economy/powell-fed-labor-...
When unemployment rates were back down to the pre-covid 2020 levels, only time they were even lower was before the 1969 recession. When inflation was at the highest it's been since the 80s.
The statement & monetary policy decision was entirely appropriate at the time.
Thanks!
I actually tried a brief search to get a more accurate time, but all the results were skewed heavily to the last few months so I gave up. I'm impressed you found it.
That's the inherent nature of the interest rate. Both unemployment and inflation have bad consequences, so the role of the central bank is to balance rates to target a specific inflation rate.
and inflation can continue forever! no problems with that at all, the economy is definitely built on money and not a finite supply of resources constrained by entropy.
I actually don't see a problem with that because what is useful information in a price system is the relative price of things, not the absolute price, which is arbitrary.
Yes lets blame Powell he pushed Trump into putting tariffs on everything and gutted the remaining manufacturing jobs.
And either way, voters around the world have made it extremely clear that price inflation annoys them more than high unemployment. So if Powell's options are to cause unemployment or allow continued inflation, I can see why he'd pick the former.
Powell doesn't decide or control the unemployment rate. His job is simply to react to it.
Isn’t that the charge of the federal reserve? I think this is what he is required to do statutorily.
An astute and accurate observation. However, there is no numeric target set in the mandate you allude to: "The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. In 1977, Congress amended the Federal Reserve Act (FRA) to provide greater clarity about the goals of monetary policy. The amended FRA directs the Board of Governors and the FOMC to conduct monetary policy “so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” [https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/files/the-fed-exp...]
What he is doing is counter to the Fed charter, but if you're pro-Capital, you like some unemployment because it disciplines Labor.
> The chair's main responsibility is to carry out the mandate of the Fed, which is to promote the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
(per Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/082415/what-...)
> The chair's main responsibility is to carry out the mandate of the Fed, which is to promote the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates
You’re correctly quoting your source. But this is crap, as their source [1] makes no reference to “moderate long-term interest rates”.
The Fed is mandated to promote “maximum employment” and “stable prices” [2]. (It defines the former as “the highest level of employment or lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain while maintaining a stable inflation rate.”) If inflation is unstable, the economy is above maximum employment.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_about.htm
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fedexplained/mone...
Isn't the idea that maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates are somewhat in tension with each other though? Which would mean the mandate is to balance those three things – e.g. maximize employment to the extent possible while maintaining stable prices and moderate interest rates.
> Powell said explicitly a year or two ago that it was his goal to bump unemployment numbers to tame inflation. Kinda sick to think about, but, here we are I guess.
This is basic monetary economics via the Phillips curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve). There's a strong relationship between unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Of course, that is based on historical data in normal times, and, since 2010s and the financial crisis with years of ZIRP, we are now in very unnormal times with Trump's tariffs and general fuckery of the economic system.
The genesis of high house prices lay in the low interest rates and nimby base home construction codes driven by owners who were deathly afraid of lower priced homes making their piles of brick decline in value. This regime ended with Covid and rates went from ~~2.5% to 5-6%. A few had 30 year mortgages at 2.5-3.5% but a huge number had corporate money market paper at 1-2% - this is great while it lasts, but it is short term, ranging from 30 days to 1-2 years, with the 30 day rates at the bottom. With low rates and efficient property managers and the shortage, these managers were able to keep occupancy rates in the high 90%'s, with aggressive vetting rules and retentive deposit procedures(deny full deposit return for trivial reasons = hoping the tenant will not create a long fight over a small bone - which often needed a small claims court battle, when at a new job far away, some managers got over 100% rent via this overlapped dual rent. Overlay this with AirBNB taking 5-20% of rental off the market where similar closely monitored management with cleaning staff kept occupancy in the 90% area in some places at 3x the apartment rent rate and greatly undercutting hotel rates at 5-10x apartment rates. A great squealing of the stuck pigs(Hotels) and the similarly stuck city tax pigs created insurance pigs and laws that shut down many of these AirBNB's = the worms all turned at once. Places that earned well became losing money pits, and large numbers were soon sold to capture the high prices of their low price circa 1999-2001 purchases. There was also the surf side condo collapse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KNwMSuwQ8w) where Florida forced condos that were tall/old/salty footed into huge engineering inspections and catch-up reserve rules that made many condos worth less than the paper that was written to finance them. People walked and lost everything = thousands of horror stories on utube... Then AI mediated job losses.... 32,000 under reports this, as many companies have large internal payroll processing that is not reflected in that 32,000. as dyauspitr says = It’s a wasteland out there.
This is a man speeding at 100 MPH into a blizzard with a 1000 car pileup 2 miles ahead!
I don't know what's the end game here, you read news like this, another that thousands of government workers aren't paid, at this rate everyone will be homeless in a few months. In another news, you read someone like Musk hit a net worth of half a trillion dollars, if the economy is bad and people are losing jobs, why are others getting richer?
You mean you don't see how both things can be true ( or have a kernel of truth at least, don't know about mass homelessness) and related?
Because it is becoming more like a zero sum game?
When you consider the free market an unimpeachable ideal, being able to manipulate the system to hoard resources is a feature, not a bug.
The adage "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets" advises a contrarian investment strategy of acquiring property or other assets during periods of extreme economic or market turmoil. The saying is attributed to 19th-century British banker Baron Rothschild, who is said to have profited significantly by purchasing assets during the panic that followed the Battle of Waterloo.
The phrase "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" was coined for a reason.
Because increasingly the top percentages are doing most spending and compensate for those who lose their jobs.
If this is a genuine question, my only answer would be "It's because this is poorly run capitalism" (aka "crony capitalism")
This makes as much sense as the notion of "crony communism," which is to say, it doesn't. Ignoring the harmful side effects of an economic system makes one an ideologue.
Based on policy over the last decade, it seems America would rather have every rich person own an electric vehicle than every poor person eat dinner.
We really should do more tax credit for solar panels and EV credits, I know a doctor that has really struggled to buy his 3rd AirBnB rental.
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I predict ADP's CEO isn't going to last another 6 months on the job.
It’s a wasteland out there.
Satirical IG post I saw from a college professor: "In 2050, I'll be getting emails from high school students about research opportunities, because the average college will require 2 publications to get in and will cost $500k." Fertility rates are plummeting globally for this reason in addition to housing, and earth has reached its carrying capacity. There are no entry-level jobs, because "entry level" now requires years of experience: https://www.zippia.com/advice/entry-level-jobs-pay-experienc....
If you decide to have kids today, you should factor in the cost that they may significant require financial support into their 30s. I know a couple of guys over 40, including a laid-off SWE, living with their parents again.
> "In 2050, I'll be getting emails from high school students about research opportunities, because the average college will require 2 publications to get in and will cost $500k."
From my general understanding, those are already the numbers for elite colleges.
I hear complaints about kids that have published research, have started local charities, and have completed most of an undergrad degree already, that they are still getting rejected from top colleges.
Harvard costs about $350k all in for 4 years.
But if you make under $200k a year they wave tuition, and over that you start paying a prorated rate until assistance phases out.
If they are that enterprising and go-getters, I paid some guy almost $10k to roof my house, and he gave me an invoice showing the price of materials were only about $3500 of that. He did it with a few friends in two days, maybe 60 man-hours of work. All they had was a few ladders, harnesses, an ancient truck, and they didn't look like the sort to have wasted much of it on insurance or overhead.
> and they didn't look like the sort to have wasted much of it on insurance or overhead
This is in general a really bad idea. Not only can you be on the hook if they make a mistake with the install, or mess something up like venting that ends up damaging appliances or plumbing, but if one of them falls off your roof, depending on the circumstances you could be personally liable for their possibly life long medical treatment (or end up in an extended lawsuit as they try to claim that you personally directed their work). Make sure your contractors have insurance.
>wasted much of it on insurance or overhead.
Insurance and overhead (eg. safety harass) exist for a reason other than to drain your wallet. Roofing is also a physically difficult job. You won't find many 50+ year old to couch on a rooftop all day, regardless of pays.
I would expect kiddos who are all-in on going to college won't be able to see any other opportunity as acceptable. They've spent almost their entire lives trying to get into a good college. No college may not seem like even an option.
You sound like you are blaming them personally, instead of the teachers and guidance counselors who pushed them in that direction.
How are children supposed to know the adults in authority positions around them are full of shit?
> How are children supposed to know the adults in authority positions around them are full of shit?
I think that was my underlying point. It isn't blame, its just that they don't know any better. They've been sold the One True Path To Adulthood and Success and Happiness and it is a false bill of goods.
That’s 108 dollars per hour. That seem reasonable?
Yeah it's extraordinary how prepared today's elite undergrads are. Population demand has outpaced spots in these colleges, and so that's why I don't believe "grade inflation" is a thing. The kids are just way, way smarter and more productive than 60 years ago, just as workers are.
This is obviously selection bias, because as a hiring manager, I generally see the most motivated students.
But holy smokes, there are some A-game kids out there that are prepared and willing to put in the work for an opportunity.
I don't remember it being this competitive when I was a student. Maybe I wasn't in that top echelon like they are, but still.
Kids cheat today massively more and get parents to demand changes to grades which is something you wouldn't see 60 years ago. It's not higher productively its lower morals and less buy-in from teachers who give in to pressure or look the other way because their authority has lowered. Plus they can't hit students anymore.
And thus smart and talented high school students are working twice as hard these days with nothing to show for it.
Well yeah if they've completed most of the degree already why admit them /s
The problems that you’re highlighting are self correcting. If the fertility rate drops, houses and spots at colleges become more available.
First-home buyers aren't the ones causing prices to go up.
New households absolutely are. Whether they choose to rent or buy is secondary.
It's REITs buying up housing for rental that drives up the pricing. There are serious social consequences to financializing basic needs.
Agree with both, and you can see this in prep school admissions in the UK, but that adjustment might take a generation.
Definitely might take time. But a generation is 15 years. The timeline the OP was talking about was 30-40 years from now.
Houses are made and maintained by workers. Fewer workers, less building and maintance.
Sure but labor only accounts for a fraction of the cost of housing and that only goes down as we automate more of the process. Even traditional house are now frequently assembled out of prefabricated sections.
There’s also a large existing housing stock.
It won't be for a long time. World population may increase well into the 2100s.
But US population will likely peak much sooner than that. Especially as we're starting to heavily limit immigration.
After next president election US will be back to 3 million a year new immigrants.
Average age of a home buyer in the us is what? 50-60ish? Should be 20-25.
38 for first-time homebuyers (2024). 56 overall.
Mass self deportation is a fairly easy solution too. It’d cause an immediate glut of homes and jobs. It would also cause economic shock, but that would by and large hurt the capital class. We are in for pain either way, might as well ensure the next generations have ample opportunity.
Cut back/tax on legal immigration, tax remittances harder, and penalize those employing illegal immigrants. None of this ICE kabuki theatre is needed (and frankly is cruel and immoral).
Obviously this won’t happen because both left & right want immigration.
What inventory of housing do you think you will unlock when migrants leave? They are the least likely to own a house.
The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
> What inventory of housing do you think you will unlock when migrants leave?
For legal migrants, many of them are in respectable homes. For the illegal yes it’s lower quality, but regardless supply and demand will hold true. Safety in many of these lower quality homes will increase as well.
> The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
Because we’ve allowed capital to increase their bottom line at the expense of labor. The conditions and pay today are only what they are because we let capital play by different rules. We should not structure America to benefit the few.
True...eventually. But recall the old saw about how long the market can stay irrational.
100%, but the OP is talking about 30-40 years in the future.
Yeah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
More like 70-80 years. Total fertility rate in Africa was 4.02 year ago.
That's not how it works. Housing prices are not allowed to go down, because a massive chunk of Boomer equity is bound up in them. If there's ever a danger of housing prices going down, bailouts will be issued and supply tightened until the "natural" state of things is restored and they go up again.
Bailouts aren't coming this time lol
Boomers won't be alive much longer though?
All the shitty covenants they put in much/most of even the shittiest of wasteland around me still exist though.
There was one piece of absolute shithole land I looked at because I was in the process of building a house.
Some dead guy decided to encumber it by requiring me to build a gigantic house if I wanted live there. Reversing it would require something as onerous roughly as getting all people in a 10 mile radius to stand on one foot while reciting the entire bible from memory. Technically possible so it holds up in court as not being a perpetual covenant, but for all intent in purposes was.
You would not believe how much land boomers basically ruined forever when they mindlessly engaged in some wack covenants back around the 80s.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... - Look at the 60 and older groupings. Those are boomers and older generations. The youngest boomers are about 60, so 15 years average remaining for them but potentially 20-30 more years of boomers as a significant percentage of the population.
But many are are/will be downsizing, moving to retirement communities or otherwise cashing out of their houses well before they die.
Not in California unfortunately, where Prop 13 has strong tax incentives to keep retirees in their existing home until death, even if it's far larger than what they need.
Boomers are 60-80 years old now. They aren’t going to be the problem 30-40 years from now which is the timeline the OP is talking about.
> There are no entry-level jobs, because "entry level" now requires years of experience
This was my experience leaving college in the dot-com bust 25 years ago, and I heard it was similar for graduates around 2008-2012.
The fertility rates thing, is it true everywhere seems poorer countries/people are used to having 4+ children.
At some point we will start paying men/women to have babies for others.
It's true everywhere except for Africa. Poorer countries in Latin America are having wayyy fewer babies.
Tax land value and legalize housing!
I feel like this view suffers from https://xkcd.com/605/. The future is not a linear progression from the present; as linear (or exponential!) extrapolations become progressively more absurd, they get replaced by qualitatively different systems that fit peoples' needs as they exist now.
I have young kids. I don't worry too much about how they're going to afford college education or get a job or afford to retire, because I don't believe college or jobs or retirement will exist in the form it does today. They'll be replaced by systems that actually work in the world that they'll grow up in. My job is to help them survive, and ideally to keep them fed and clothed and housed in the meantime. I'm training them to be adaptable, to think and act for themselves, and to have a good grounding in fundamental skills like reading/writing/rithmetic that I don't think will go anywhere. But the specifics of today's world will definitely be going away, because today's world doesn't work.
I'm not sure why you think that. From what I can see, the undergraduate college experience of today is basically the same as it was in the 1980s. And since then we've had the entire rise of the internet, mobile tech, social media, and all the rest of it. Kids still live in dorms and sit in lecture halls and listen to professors lecture. Why do you think it's going to be much different 15-20 years from now?
Sure there is a lot that can be done online, but that hasn't really impacted the fundamental experience of "going to college" for most young adults who decide to do that.
The cost and benefits have fallen way out of whack. The average college tuition has tripled (after inflation-adjusting) since 1980 [1]. Meanwhile, an increasing number of college graduates are unemployed, and the wage premium for a college education is declining.
The college experience hasn't changed much (indeed, if anything it's improved) because colleges are sinking large amounts of money into providing a good experience. That, after all, is what a lot of students base their purchase decisions on. But the point of college isn't to be a 4-year party & vacation, it's to get an education that will help you the rest of your life. Increasingly a college education doesn't help you lead a better life.
[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-tim...
good plan training your kids to be adaptable
youre also right that todays world doesnt work
i think weve already moved too slowly in the US to prepare the societal changes were facing and culture is not adapting, but clinging harder to old expectations. i hope US culture shifts, even if its long overdue, but i dont think it will before many more dramatic economic events
> and earth has reached its carrying capacity
[citation needed]
Why would a citation be needed for a "satirical IG post" set in 2050? Are you providing the time machine?
Read the comment again. The quotation mark ends one sentence before the part I'm talking about.
We need a war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNG-gYjneeA
Are you enlisting?
Don't worry, it'll revised to +50,000 soon! /s
No it will be revised to +one million. I create the most jobs, tremendous jobs
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I went and lived overseas in Asia for a while, and at this point back in America, I keep thinking of comparisons to Mao's "Great Leap Forward".
Directly equating them remains hyperbole due to the death-toll, but... it's not a joke anymore, or at least not a funny one.
____
[Edit] In brief, a disastrous attempt in 1958-1962 to quickly force China into an industrial powerhouse, with a lot of weird autocratic commands. It backfired with a severe economic recession, the killing/exile of subject matter experts, officials lying about how well it was going to avoid being punished, and tens of millions of peasants dying from famine.
In a way I suppose, but from what I heard lots of people were killed or died due to the "Great Leap Forward".
What's the COVID death toll in America and how many people are going to die from preventable causes when healthcare cuts go into effect next year
> lots of people were killed due to the "Great Leap Forward"
Mostly due to economic mismanagement. I’m not sure we’ll see starvation from Trump’s incompetence. But preventable health-related mortality? Probably.
The people who are lighting up the country actually enjoy and fire and smoke and they don't own (or they think they don't) anything that is worth protecting.
But it feels good, so here we are. (Feels good for now). (To some people)
to people that it feels good now it'll feel good forever :)
true
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=asojiVtJ7F0
When England created high tariffs on The Netherlands, it started wars, and relations took almost 100 years to repair.
Trump basically did what Britain did, but against the entire world.
… it might be more than a generation for the whole world to trust any trade agreement with the US if every 4-8 years agreements can be torn up so easily
Why would relations be repaired with Britain after Brexit?
... it will be at least 700 years before Europe can trust the UK again if it can just leave from the EU any time it wants
>for the whole world to trust any trade agreement with the US
Lucky for the US, the rest of the world is broke and needs US markets.
> the rest of the world is broke and needs US markets
The rest of the world is disorganised. If India, China, Iran, Russia and the E.U. implemented sanctions on America, not only would our economy crumble but our ability to fight even a single war of attrition would fail.
JumpCrisscoss, love you dawg but "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Oh absolutely. I don’t think we’re seeing Behemoth rising [1].
I’m just pointing out that the structural source of American power is our unity across a continent. Nobody else has that hegemony. Our markets are rich because they’re big, and they’re big because they’re unified.
That bigness also reduces the incentives for others to unify, given they can gain our economies of scale through trade and without the pesky reconciliation (or annihilation) unification would require.
I’m not arguing that Eurasian unification is probable. Just that it’s more likely now than it was before, and that’s a real diminishment of American power irrespective of what the accountants say. (I’d also argue that the aforementioned economies enacting a break with America wouldn’t require long-term unification, just a short-term alliance of the power-balancing types that put America and the USSR on the same side of a war.)
[1] https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-world-ocean-versus-the-c...
All very good points and something to think about. Especially short term vs long term unity.
This is becoming less and less true. Trading with the US is unappealing because it is expensive (tariffs) and fraught with uncertainty. New trade deals are being forged as we speak between countries that were not even considering each other before Trump took office.
Nations realign slowly but there is no question they've all begun pivoting away from the US to various degrees, and they're unlikely to go back any time soon.
India is gaining massively on this. China zeems to be the real winner. Russia cant stop to celebrate this development.
The rest of the world is dealing among themselves, including Argentina who sells to China.
We just cut a $20 billion check to Argentina. So that they could then undercut our soybean sales even further.
Edit: Guess I should add, now that China will not buy our soybeans, we are propping up a different country’s agricultural market, and are quite likely to soon cut a check to farmers who are struggling because of administration decisions.
> Russia cant stop to celebrate this development
China is winning. India is pivoting. Russia is still losing.
Russia doesn't have the demographics to win, and they're throwing what young workers they have into a Ukranian meat grinder. (Or a war-focused economy that's going to leave them uncompetitive in any other industry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/...
The longer the Russian-Ukranian war drags on, the more likely Russia becomes a third-world resource extraction state on the other side of it.
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Who's paying for our Marshall Plan? That'll be nice.
Is this when the asshat oligarchs rush in to "save" us at the low low cost of our privacy and dignity?
Maybe there's a crypto for that.
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But isn't the lost of jobs also attributable to previous administration policies?
This isn't in any way an opinion about the current government but an observation of lags between decisions and measurable metrics.
Normally yes. However, it's worth noting that the last major economic legislation passed by the prior administration took effect over 3 years ago. Further, there is not a reading of that law that would predict a negative overall effect on hiring.
However, tariffs have been extensively studied in a number of countries around the world. What we are observing in the labor market is more or less what economists would predict given the magnitude of the tax increase and the uncertainty around its application.
Further, data[1] shows a rapid deterioration in the labor market corresponding to the initial tariff announcement.
1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
That's generally true. Presidents are routinely credited and blamed for things outside of their control, including things done by their predecessors. It's something you have to accept with the job.
In this case, though, the President is taking actions designed to have quick effects. Presidents (of both parties) generally try not to do anything radical. (They promise to, then blame inaction on Congress.) This President is actually fulfilling his campaign promises, for once.
So I think he will deserve a higher fraction of the credit and blame that he would have gotten anyway. The lag is shorter because he's bypassing the usual process for change, and is able to make much more radical changes with shorter term returns.
Unemployment was 5% going into Trumps administration, which is basically fricional levels - US recovered quite well after Covid.
The "both sides" stance is almost worse than just being a conservative at this point. Dems routinely have to fix Republican fuckups, and are judged negatively on the things they don't fix - meanwhile Republicans are judged positively on the things they manage not to fuck up.
For example, the BBB has set Medicaid to expire in 2028. Anyone wanna take a $10k bet that if we have fair elections and Dems somehow win, they are going to get blamed for not fixing that?
> Unemployment was 5% going into Trumps administration
More like 4.3%. Historically, that's a really low unemployment number.
Rest assured that they would take full credit of any gains.
I mean usually it is pretty hard to determine fault since most presidents don't make gigantic changes early in their presidency.
Tarrifs on the whole world is a pretty large smoking gun.
> But isn't the lost of jobs also attributable to previous administration policies?
According to Trump, when Biden was in office it was Biden's failing economy that was the problem (despite the fact that Biden took office directly after Trump v1.0).
Also according to Trump, when Trump is in office now it is also Biden's failing economy that is the problem.
Its the same situation with the roles reversed because of Trump's gap of being in office so either the economy is a lagging problem from the last administration or it isn't, but somehow neither situation is "Trump's fault", according to Trump.
The "Biden economy" wasn't as rosy as proclaimed by the Biden government, in large part because run-away wealth inequality is making all of the statistics we historically track very misleading (eg. consumer spending looking good, as long as you ignore the huge red flag that 50% of that spending is being done by the top 10% of wealth holders).
So I'm not fully defending Biden here (both parties are ultimately allowing the economy to unravel because they refuse to deal with wealth inequality, though I do give Biden some credit for [temporarily] getting some things on the right track by, for example, putting Lina Khan in charge of the FTC) but economically things were still fundamentally much better under Biden than Trump, and we haven't even seen the depths of how bad Trump's economy is going to get (but have plenty of leading indicators of things getting much worse) and virtually all of the problems with Trump's economy can be traced pretty clearly to his own actions, such as his wildly irresponsible tariff policies.
Like even if you believe tariffs work the way he thinks they do (they don't) anyone with any understanding of business at all would have to understand that changing the values wildly sometimes from day to day makes doing business impossible for a lot of companies due to a complete inability to plan. Its crazy shit.
If my employer were using ADP in 2025, I'd have a grim outlook on my job's future.
Every job I’ve ever had has used ADP for payroll.
The radical left are everywhere!
1 in every 5 employees works at such a company.
And?
It's a statistically significant sample size. If you think 20% of employers are doomed let's see your puts.
ADP is essentially the only reliable payroll processor I've ever used (and we've tried a half-dozen now).
Every. single. "startup" we tried screwed up at least one payroll. Gusto ruined three.
ADP don't miss.
Also have one of the worst business websites I've ever been forced to use.
They have the lowest growth of their industry (granted, they're ~25% of the market) and every company I've been involved with for the last 20 years either uses a competitor or used to be an ADP customer. ADP is terrible.
Paychex, Workday, etc have been eating at their lunch for years and years now. My perception of companies using ADP is either that they're slow behemoths or they still have some niche issue that's keeping them from switching.
ADP is also incredibly cavalier with your personal data. As a potential employee I would see its use as a strong minus.
As someone who has used ADP for the better part of 15 years, off-and-on obviously,"ADP is terrible" has not been my experience.
My experience has been that they're 25% of the market for a reason.
They work.
starts sweating