As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released
This should have nothing to do with data science but basic math literacy. Quantities without context are meaningless. Reporters should know better but if when headlines have to catchy day in day out … shrugs. Stock market reporters are the worst: a 1000 point drop in the Dow meant a lot more when it was 7000 than it does at 40,000.
If honest, the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless. Certainly, both jobs growth and jobs loss are within the CI.
What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the delta from previous years -- which, conditioning on the same collection methodology etc -- is more reliable.
Something the best data scientist I ever worked with was adamant about... there is almost never an inherent "speed bump" at 0. If error bounds expand on both sides of 0, we have no idea if the true sign is positive or negative. There is no "directional" read in that case. There are some areas where 0 has a special meaning, but that's rare and the cause of that needs to be understood before assuming that's the case. Everywhere else, 0 is just another point on the number line.
> the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless
That is often the case, and being truly data based requires acknowledging that. We can then act based on other data, or admit that we're falling back to intuition and abandoning data based decision making for now.
As a physicist, I always shed a tear when looking at data without error bars.
As a data scientist/generic programmer now, I don't really see them anywhere. I remember a colleague during my postdoc saying 'don't worry, no error bars in industry' when I asked about regression with ML lol
Our fake economy needs even more fake certainty now. They are all hiding from the obvious issue of stagflation because it is the most difficult economic problem to solve. The Fed know this which is why they did nothing with rates.
Not in their primary news release. A footnote says it is "generally conducted at the 90% interval", but the individual numbers do not have their actual computed error bars.
Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.
It’s common in scientific/stats publishing to have the headline state the avg/median, the main text plot the errors, and the supplementary give the explicit numbers. They have a big page about std errors.
Yes! I am aware of this and they are really great. Problem is nobody will ever read that, but they WILL watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never even point out that there are errorbars/uncertainty. Then I hear things like outrage when BLS revises numbers up or down (facepalm).
The numbers are as good as they can get with hard manual work that goes into compiling them.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
I would say the initial numbers should be embargoed until the number is reliable. People don’t understand error bars and reporting can more easily manipulate the current situation without outright lying.
Error bars would be misleading, because this isn't a sampling error. These start with actual counts. The more important errors are systematic: the definitions of terms, the reporting mechanisms, etc.
Except that those things are constant from month to month, so deltas largely cancel them out.
The problem isn't in the size of the possible errors, but in understanding what those numbers mean and how they are gathered. That requires far more background reading.
That’s what I meant. There should be error bars to reflect uncertainty of the inherent data, but they should wait until all the data that could change things comes in rather than using projections which always drastically change
What decisions are so important and time sensitive they depend on these numbers right after a month is over? And also we at one point were making decisions without these numbers yet the quality of the decision making isn’t clearly improved.
A few months of extra no data won’t impact the stock investments if no one has that data. Startup funding is similarly not so time sensitive.
As for businesses hiring, they should hire based on their own growth. Using an external signal that itself gets adjusted drastically is similarly problematic; I don’t hire because I think no one else is hiring and the numbers get majorly adjusted up. Similarly I hire a bunch of people and it turns out no one else hired.
No one benefits from faster numbers that are majorly shifted in a few months anyway. You wouldn’t make any different decision if no one had the numbers. The only thing you’re doing differently is when the numbers come out your gambling whether or not you think the true number will be revised in some major way in a few months. That’s not helpful for the economy writ large.
> If the error bars are large, that is important information to know.
The data is available. If it were important to the causal reader, however, then those casual readers would have already demanded its presence. But they don't care. What difference does it make to Hilary Homemaker? She just wants to get to say "Did you hear about the bad economic news?" when gossiping with her friends.
Those who need to understand the uncertainty will already be looking at more than a news headline anyway.
Ah yes, lie to them and withold information because the public is too stupid to understand. Then, when they don't trust you anymore, throw up your hands and say it's not your fault.
That's true for the establishment survey, but the population survey, where they contact individuals, is what is actually used to calculate these numbers.
It is literally calling/writing 60,000 people and asking "are you employed? did you look for a job? Etc."
"How the government calculates unemployment" [0]
| Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm?
| Last week, did you do any work for (either) pay (or profit)?
| If the answer to question 1 is "yes" and the answer to question 2 is "no," the next question is:
| Last week, did you do any unpaid work in the family business or farm?
| For those who reply "no" to both questions 2 and 3, the next key questions used to determine employment status are:
| Last week, (in addition to the business) did you have a job, either full or part time? Include any job from which you were temporarily absent.
| Last week, were you on layoff from a job?
| What was the main reason you were absent from work last week?
| For those who respond "yes" to question 5 about being on layoff, the following questions are asked:
You have to wonder, since they are doing two different surveys trying to measure the same reality, which one more accurately measures the facts on the ground? Asking businesses how many people they are employing, or asking households whether or not their folks are working? The numbers don't really match up between the two.
GDP too. That's how you can get more accurate information, and you have actual numbers on the discrepencies.
They rely on the household data more because it doesn't have as much systemic error, even though it does have more sampling error. Asking businesses gives you a more complete picture, but it has much more bias.
Hell, this is why even in accounting, you have double-entry bookkeeping, and even there, the numbers don't always match up.
Or "my bank account doesn't match up with my cashflow statement".
It's not that one is better and you should use that, calculating multiple ways is central to accounting so you can detect errors.
What makes you think it's small businesses? I would assume most businesses doing any reporting at all are using a payroll system. Mine handles the reporting automatically. The kinds of payroll systems used by small businesses can be set up in a day. If anything, small businesses that make even a small effort to stay on top of things have an easier time than big ones with complicated systems and processes.
I think you say “as good as they can get with [the] hard manual work that goes into compiling them” as a way to respect the challenge of the BLS and say they’re doing the best with their resources, but it’s worth pointing out they could be better with more resources.
DOGE hurt them pretty hard: "The Bureau of Labor Statistics posted a notice on Wednesday stating that it stopped collecting data in three not-so-small cities (Lincoln, Nebraska; Buffalo, New York; and Provo, Utah) and increased “imputations” for certain items"
Oh I’m well aware the BLS knows what they’re doing and publish error bars, they are great. The problem is news articles, no one ever reads BLS reports but they do watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never ever get into uncertainty.
The actual source this comes from has a 90% confidence interval in the published number. When people talk about the economy gaining or losing jobs they are talking about the bureau of labor statistics "nonfarm payroll" number. The methodology and a lot more are on the bls website
Exactly. I'm somewhat surprised someone's give-a-damn wasn't broken enough to do a cursory filter. Not like it isn't plainly obvious in other statistics, however.
> The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break.
This is not entirely accurate. AFAIK, teachers usually remain on payroll throughout the summer. This stat _might_ be talking about contractual teaching roles, like adjuncts or subs, but it's hard to say from that BLS category.
Not to mention, if it's seasonal for any reason then it's something that should be baked into the cyclical expectations already.
It's like reporting that Spirit of Halloween employees accounted for the biggest retailer layoffs in November. It's a totally useless statistic that tells you nothing about what might really be going on that month that's abnormal compared to baseline.
> teachers usually remain on payroll throughout the summer.
That is not exactly accurate. When I was teaching, my salary was for 9 months only. I was paid in 12 monthly installments to smooth out my income, but technically I was not on the University's payroll during the summer months. That allowed me to seek full-time employment elsewhere (e.g. consulting) during the summer which was not allowed during the other 9 months.
This is correct, teachers don't just stop getting paid and lose all benefits every summer (my best friend is a teacher and so is his brother), but at the same time it seems tons of schools now prefer (or are only able to find positions for) short contracts, more subs and temporary positions etc.
The cost to municipalities/towns for medical insurance has skyrocketed which I think is a contributor (not to mention pension obligations for retirees).
I haven't heard it phrased like that before hah. The truth is when a school district is bad enough the state comes in and takes it over to try and get things back on their feet. Fort Worth is just embarrassed because FWISD is so bad the state had to take it over.
My wife is a HS teacher in Richardson and one of her friends was hired as a new principal at one of the FWISD schools. She said the situation is pretty bleak and most teachers should be fired but they likely won't be able to get rid of all the bad ones. That's pretty typical unfortunately in public education.
> Superintendent Peter Licata acknowledged that the takeover and instructional changes played a role in some educators’ decisions to leave the district.
> ...But he said he believes employees watched the transformation of Houston ISD under state control and grew wary as Fort Worth introduced standardized lessons and reorganized schools and departments.
Apparently there were healthcare strikes in February that depressed the numbers there, which were resolved by March. Also maybe data center and World Cup hospitality hiring. But hard to say. As others have noted, there are big error bands on these numbers.
It's tough to trust job openings. It is a fact that some number of job postings are ghost jobs that don't exist. Either they're scams from impersonators or the companies are trying to keep a good public face, but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer
Some of these offers may be part of visa or green card processes. Some require a labor market test in the form of a job ad and recorded response to it. If a suitable candidate applies, the visa/immigration process fails. Still, most companies don't intend to actually hire in this case as far as I understand it.
> but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer
Neither of these things are evidence of “ghost jobs”.
When I was doing a lot of hiring it would often take months to find qualified candidates for basic roles. I would get 100s of applicants per month but only about 20% of the resumes I received were even close to qualified. I’d try to schedule intro and screening calls with the qualified ones who would actually respond, but you wouldn’t believe how many applicants would have unreliable communication skills. Some times I wouldn’t get a response from someone for weeks or more, but many just don’t respond to contact after applying to your company. If we’re using the lingo I think a lot are “ghost candidates”.
There’s further fallout through the interview pipelines as you discover how many people have lied on their resume or otherwise aren’t qualified. That self-styled C++ expert who can’t give an example of RAII or the self-proclaimed TypeScript expert who doesn’t know anything outside of vanilla JavaScript. It’s weird.
Then there are negotiations. Some candidates want to collect offers from multiple companies and will ask for delays in hiring so they can continue interviewing and getting other offers. It can take weeks for some candidates to accept or decline your offer. If they decline you have to go to the next candidate, which can take more weeks, and then on to the next. If there’s relocation involved it takes longer to decide and get it done.
Then some times we’re hiring multiple people for a row, so we leave the listing up and open to continue hiring. This really angers the “ghost jobs” people because they assume 1 listing == 1 hire, as if the company needs to close the listing and then copy/paste to a new URL for the next hire.
So job openings that exist for “MONTHS” are not evidence of ghost jobs.
The people going 12 months without an interview are almost always doing something wrong. You wouldn’t believe how inexcusably bad many of the resumes out there can be. Some people are hung up on applying only to jobs they aren’t qualified for and then wonder why they’re not getting interviews.
maybe, but ghost listings have to be posted at some point, and who knows how long the companies want to let them go (and sometimes they expire and someone needs to refresh them)
they're not all ghost jobs, and there is probably a base level of noise there you can ignore, but the variability doesn't mean the data is great and perfect
Yup, and my data only captures a part of professional job market which itself is small part of labor market. I'd use this as additional data point to other sources to correlate etc. However, the experiment is mostly to test my own thesis that unless there is a major event like covid, these trends are really hard to spot.
Healthcare has consistently been one of the biggest drivers of US GDP and job growth numbers for years now.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
So perhaps we'll never get to a better healthcare+insurance market (nee "Free") through government, but eventually we will just all work in healthcare, and barter our nursing and dental skills in secret away from the insurance coders.
You can move to Singapore, if you want a better healthcare sector.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
I wish the US could also use migrant labour like Singapore instead of the current system of turning a blind eye to illegal immigration out of necessity
Singapore is the beneficiary of a neighboring impoverished itinerant workforce to supplement its own collapsing demographics with artificially cheap services. It’s hardly replicable most places.
How so? What's hard to replicate here? Many rich places could let in more migrant workers. It's good for the workers, and good for the receiving country.
No it isn’t. Malaysians commute across the river daily and then return at night, having provided their services in exchange for compensation. Singapore gets the work without many of the associated problems with housing those people long term. As a result, there are some ridiculously niche jobs in Singapore that would not exist in another rich country, such as widespread domestic servitude and manual street sweeping
Because unless you really just want to prop up only Manhattan’s statistics at the expense of NJ’s, it’s irrelevant to a discussion about US labor statistics.
New Jersey and Manhattan are both a part of the same country last I checked.
Malaysia and Singapore are two different countries. Despite being right next to each other they have vastly different GDPs, standards of living, government benefits, etc.
New Jersey and Manhattan are in different states. But in any case, why so xenophobic? Borders are an administrative hassle, but they have no moral weight.
I didn't realize acknowledging NY and NJ are in the same country is a xenophobic take.
Borders are a lot more than just a bit of paperwork or "administrative hassle". Central America is a very different place from US & Canada in many ways. Malaysia is quite a bit different from Singapore in a lot of ways despite such intertwined history.
I'm not passing any moral judgement here, I'm just acknowledging current reality. Singapore and Malaysia are different countries. NY and NJ are two states in the same country. The relationship is very different. Even with "Imperium in imperio" in the US.
To have a similar kind of comparison one would look at the cyclical migrant labor between the Southwestern US and Mexico.
Health outcomes in the US are affected by higher levels of obesity. If anything, the higher health spending keeps that from being worse. I expect Ozempic and the like to have a significant impact on this.
Europe is also excellent in my experience, specifically Portugal and Spain. My health insurance cost for a family of four in Spain is ~$2k/year as someone on a visa. In the US on an employer plan, it was ~$20k/year (premiums, copays, etc).
I think the commenter you responded to filtered first for countries with outcomes better or exceeding the US? Though I’m not sure Portugal and Spain automatically fall into that category
Oh, I picked Singapore, because I moved here. I picked US because that was the topic under discussion. And Britain because the parent comment talked about 'free' healthcare.
I can only n=1, but most, if not all, experiences we've had obtaining medical care were better in Europe. Care specialist for my autistic kids, primary care, etc. From my unofficial surveys, many folks I know in the US are having a hard time finding various care providers, even if they have insurance. More data on this is always welcome.
It seems fairly common in the US to have a hard time finding a doctor that will take your insurance, especially so if you are on Medicaid. Even with good insurance, a lot are just not seeing new patients. More and more tasks are being pushed off onto nurse practitioners and physician's assistants. And the number of residencies is still limited by the AMA, so you aren't getting enough new doctors.
I can believe this; it's my personal and anecdotal evidence (and that which is believed by family) that the maximum quality of US medical care is quite incredible, but any perceived median (accounting for accessibility and cost) is really quite shit
While interesting facts, this is typically not the primary criteria which people use to decide where to expat to, versus availability and affordability. I cannot speak to the residency requirements of Singapore, but those of western Europe are very generous, as some who has helped folks leave the US for there. If you are in Spain on a tourist visa, and apply for the equivalent of a digital nomad visa while in country, you get three years as a temporary resident. At three years, you re-apply for another two years, and after those five years you can apply for permanent residency. 80% of your income must come from outside of Spain. They’ll even take a letter from a US W2 employer as income verification.
If you have any resources you can recommend on immigrating to Singapore that would be helpful and relevant for folks considering it as an option (whether on an employment, student, or pension/non lucrative visa), I welcome them to add to my resources for distribution to those seeking an exit strategy. Thank you in advance.
Oh, I was purely talking about what healthcare costs society.
I love it in Singapore, but if you don't want to live in a steam sauna, there are better countries for you. And if you are an American, I guess you don't even benefit from our more enlightened tax system anyway.
> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation. In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.
So there are mechanisms by which to avoid paying income tax to the US as as someone with a potential US tax liability living and working abroad, although it can be a facts intensive situation. Think like a Hacker, this is just another system and set of rules to hack ("How can I live outside the US, maximize my quality of life, pay the taxes due to my residency jurisdiction, while avoiding paying as much US federal income tax as possible?").
(For the 2026 tax year, the maximum Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) is $132,900 per qualifying person, an increase from $130,000 for 2025. Married couples where both spouses work abroad and qualify can exclude up to a combined $265,800; the contents of this comment are for educational purposes only, and are not financial or tax advice, speak with a professional)
> Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.
healthcare is not for health. Its for sickness. Going to hospital doesnt make you "healthy" . We dont have any medicines to restore health to ppl suffering for diseases majority of healthcare spend goes to.
Maybe those countries dont have sickly population in the first palce like usa where a majority have metabolic diseases.
The people who make the laws are the wealthy who pay their think tanks and lobbyists to write them. Nobody gets elected without being owned by a puppet master.
There will never be a better healthcare because the true cost of fixing a body more often than not far exceeds the value that body produces.
People run to dismiss this with "well we need a different system then", but the problem is a fundamental one on par with "eating your cake and having it too".
The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket.
"The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket."
This isn't possible. Healthcare is a finite resource and having universal, government care not only puts your life into the hands of the government (see the UK for an example where parents are not allowed to take their children out of the hospital) but offers worse outcomes.
When you are young and healthy, it's great. As you age, life-or-death surgeries have long wait times. This can be seen in any country with universal care. My aging relatives in Canada are going through this right now and have been forced to come to the US to get surgery in months rather than waiting years.
MAID has been great for healthcare costs in Canada. Many people that would otherwise have been costing the system money, are now a benefit. The sad realization is that government-run programs need MAID to cut down on costs.
I know lots of expats living in Asia that are now getting older. They have to go elsewhere to get any surgeries done, because of this exact reason.
To make it better, we should only have insurance for surgeries that can't benefit from the free market and are relatively rare. Common surgeries and procedures should have no insurance. The prices would eventually fall to levels that were affordable.
The masses don't want plans like this. They like easy solutions that sound good when you say them and don't take a whole lot of thought besides an elementary school level of thinking.
It turns out that when you make a massive profit motive to sell expensive fancy interventions, health outcomes suffer.
You see this to an even more extreme degree amongst the ultra rich and powerful, who are often using cutting edge, experimental treatments, and often reaping the downsides of being on that edge (though of course also the upsides).
They are looking at the outcomes of specific procedures because they are interested in the health care system quality. Looking at things like life expectancy would make it impossible to disentangle them from other factors like lifestyle or environment.
Sure, but it's only six (6) specific illnesses. There are tens of thousands of illnesses. I'm almost 100% confident you could cherry pick any six illenses to get any outcome you want.
Edit: Seems the lead author is also a vocal supporter of universal healthcare, being a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. So yeah, probably why it's such a strange setup, and what compelled me to check since this kind of thing is super common for "activist research".
I guess the takeaway is to always take a study for what it is, rather than what it paints itself to be.
No, I didn't make the argument they were obscure, in fact they all are from a set of common illnesses that....also contains thousands of illnesses. Again, this is the kind of stuff you see with "activist research". Why would they only do 6 instead of hundreds or thousands? I'm sure you see my point.
There are also other oddities like using median county wealth rather than household wealth. In many wealthy counties there are still poor areas, I know more than a few. In fact if you look at the appendix, most of the households in the study are, well, average or poor. They also don't include absolute numbers or definitions for the illnesses.
All in all, it's a bad study, and clearly made to color in an agenda.
There will never be a perfect healthcare system, sure, but the US healthcare system is just bad, and can be improved. We pay more for worse outcomes on average compared to most developed countries. Obviously it's just not working, I think it's indisputable at this point.
> the true cost of fixing a body more often than not far exceeds the value that body produces
i softly agree but also think that a body does not need to generate value to pay for the costs in order for the whole process to sustain itself. Monitoring the stars for asteroids heading towards earth provides no market value, for example, but we can still afford to do it. so it's a matter of cost and available expenditure. the market is not net 0, so its possible to generate enough value to have enough to afford healthcare as an expense as a society
what are the costs of fixing a body? The residency pipeline is a bottleneck on labor, but assuming that gets sorted out and AI is capable of guiding any reasonable person through the process, why cant the cost of labor for a doctor drop dramatically?
i would guess limited resources are the biggest blockage, but i dont know how to break down a $20k hospital bill for giving birth into its actual costs. its hard to believe that really needs to be $20k.
I actually think its the opposite. there is so much friction with healthcare and the process of healing is slow enough that costs are inflated because the overall operating cost for the entire facility including rent, ER, having people on standby, who knows what else, all need to be recovered through whatever volume they process and they arent processing as quickly as the resources are able.
healthcare needs do not subscribe to a neat work schedule, and so we have to pay a lot of market prices to have the right availability at all times. but thats not a true cost, it is a result of accounting and underutilization
I've seen on youtube how people said a major reason housing is a big employer and housing has not fallen in price is due to their industry's attitude and resistance to introducing technological advancements.
in fairness also regulation makes it hard when it specificies the solutions not the parameters (just to illustrate the idea not an actual rule: you must have X thickness of PVC versus your pipe must withstand X pressure)
Demonstrating the waste of time that 99.9% of Youtube videos offer. Construction has seen tremendous technological advances, from materials to tools, even down to software that monitors workplace events.
All of these have led to conditions where it is expected for an entire house to go from start to finish in 100 days. A house with very high standards of plumbing, electrical, hvac, insulation, and other essentials compared to previous generations.
Because stick built is superior to manufactured for 95% of situations and buyers. There is a reason why it’s so ubiquitous. The US is blessed to have access to cheap sticks.
You can’t reform it because of the immense job loss that would result from an efficiently run public healthcare system. Think about all the useless paper pushers that are allowed to vote
This has been the case in several recent reports. It really ought to put to bed the idea that Trump was somehow going to be "good for business" and bring back manufacturing. At best all he's done is create a ton of uncertainty, at worst he's actively harmed massive swaths of American businesses with tariffs, war, and gutting the federal workforce and programs that indirectly supported a ton of businesses.
Based on their July 2026 report, there were tiny increases in several sectors. The big declines were in service providing, leisure and hospitality, and government (bc of a summer decline in local gov education).
This isn’t surprising. The population overall is aging. Millenials are now the largest cohort and are approaching middle age. Until recently we’ve seen the number of insured individuals rise consistently and our medicine continues to advance. More older adults have access and need more healthcare
No, I mean on an age-corrected basis, throughout the spectrum of ages.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
There is a lot more to spend it on. I'm gen-X, ADHD wasn't even heard of by most people until I was in college, and then it was only diagnosed/treated in the worst cases. Today most kids I know are on some medication for ADHD. A few years ago a friend of mine was told "too bad you are not 25 - I know what treatment you need but we can't give it to someone over 25" - he went to the Mayo clinic for his condition at 23 but the treatment didn't even exist yet so it was a waste of time.
In 1860 someone who went to a doctor would have worse outcomes than someone who stayed home. As medicine gets better over time there is more and more value in seeing a doctor. In turn more an more people are talking to their doctor about things that they would have just ignored a few generations ago. Sometimes this results in unnecessary treatment, but it also results in catching and fixing a lot of real problems that would have made life worse before we could treat it.
Sure, this is of course true, but there's also a reason that Americans spend way way more on their healthcare than any other developed nation, and it's not that they have better healthcare, or more healthcare options.
Americans are spending a lot more on quality-of-life medical interventions, many of which are outside the normal standard of care that would be covered by healthcare systems. It is a booming business in the US and many people seem to have no trouble paying for it.
It's like the hydration revolution, wealthy Americans (or those who aspire to be) are very conscious about their health/career/investments/childcare/looks. Many of them seem quite neurotic, maybe it's a consequence of individualism and social media. I don't think it's something which is unique to the US but they're just ahead/rich compared to other countries.
Just as an anecdote, I’m an older Millennial (1982) and since my late 30s I’ve been spending my HDHP cap in health services that my parents wouldn’t have bothered with, such as allergy shots and niche diagnostic blood tests based on the latest science, some of which have been covered here such as HSCRP. I’ve also had LASIK and had laser skin treatments done. I’m not a health nut, I just realized I don’t have to look and feel like crap in my 40s like my progenitors.
It's my hypothesis that boomers passing away + GLPs largely ending obesity will result in a sharp drop in total healthcare spending in the next decade or two
My main caveat / counter point is that preventative care may actually increase as more and more people jump on the live for ever, dont die, longevity hacking trend.
there's a massive wave of elderly coming (boomer generation) so it makes sense health care is going to becoming an even bigger economic force than it already is.
Not strange. All the money and wealth is in the hands of the olds and olds need much more health care than the young. So it's a gold rush to get their juicy dollars.
I know i'm just one guy but I'm 50 and the old people i know are very poor and supported entirely by their children. It would be interesting to see the median and mean wealth for people >70 and compare the two.
It's not. 23,000 jobs is 0.01% of the workforce, so it's negligible in terms of lost sales (probably hurts consumer confidence more). But it is a signal that the economy isn't running too hot, so the company's much larger borrowing costs aren't going up.
Maybe we can finally reach communism by first getting together and all agreeing "the economy" isn't a science and if we all just believe really hard, numbers can go up forever, then we won't even need money!
It only works until people try to withdraw money that doesn't exist. The less people believe the earlier that happens, but it will happen sooner or later.
Yesterday they were expecting the report to show 80k+ jobs added. So, this is much, much worse than expected. The market is up because they expect this will keep the fed from raising interest rates, and also because the market is increasingly detached from reality.
For a selloff to happen, investors have to believe there is a better place for them to go. At worst, any bad news right now is making everything look equally bad, so there is no advantage to running away from Wall Street in particular.
skill issue. Solved by having the correct model of the world and forces acting on it given (appropriately weighted) current context and your usual variance.
It's usually people who don't understand the context or assign appropriate weights to events and allow randomness that complain about not understanding markets.
The market is going up because the market (AI) thinks it means there will be a rate cut. Which is good for stocks.
But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.
One of the saddest parts of the current era is the wedge that has been driven in the US/Canada relationship. Canada is in the process of removing as many dependencies on the US as possible, because the US has destroyed trust in it, resulting in the need to turn to countries like China to be bigger trading partners. I'd say there's a possibility (as in > 30% chance) that Canada and European nations enter a post-NATO defense organization that excludes the US, something that seemed absolutely ludicrous even two years ago.
Sadly, the people responsible for this in the US have no clue it's happening, no clue of the negative consequences they will face because of it, and show a general disregard for understanding things or relationships in general. The information environment in the US has been rewarding ignorant selfishness for too long, shifting the entire nature of about 30%-50% of the population in negative way.
It's incredibly sad. It's such a lose-lose situation we're all in. We have enormous natural resources to share with an enormous industrial partner, we share an enormous land border, and are two of the culturally closest nations on the planet. China being the more palatable power to partner with is a horrifyingly bad sign that there's something deeply broken and in need of repair in the U.S.
Ah, so the class of people least impacted by the chaos happening down here. The class of people who couldn't care less about things like "civil rights" and "social safety nets" for the poor as long as they get their tax cuts.
somehow it seems like you're implying that canada is doing better than the usa. just look at the last 10 years of real gdp growth and it couldn't be any worse for canada.
since you seem to know better, id like to know on which dimensions you think canada is doing any better than usa in the past 10-15 years as whole, or even versus other g7.
general employment? youth employment? labor participation? happiness index? gdp per capita? patents per capita? skilled migration? housing affordability? general inflation? stock market performance? real wages? housing burden? life satisfaction? growth of small business? startup echo system?
How about I sell you a dollar? My price will be one dollar. Then you can sell it back, and we'll have three GDP-dollars in total! On the basis of this remarkable profit, we can probably convince others to sell their dollars to us as well, because we can turn those dollars into similar profits faster than whatever the employees might've done with them. Economics is great. We're going to have such large numbers!
%Debt to GDP ratio is not a subject either country likes to focus on.
The magnificent 7 formed a large portion of the US growth numbers, but many have legally hidden >$1.6Tn in "AI" debt deep in the pages of their reports.
That looking at monthly numbers is stupid? The US has had significantly more job growth in 2026 than Canada has. The July numbers are convergence to a roughly common mean.
It is stupid. But the connection is that the Americans do international politics in an abusive way now. There is a very real possibility that their leader will see domestic bad number and foreign good number and throw a fit and look for something or someone to beat on. By all means, someone please tell him that looking at the numbers is stupid.
In particular, the Americans have been throwing endless tantrums Canada's way. This week we're "nasty people" because we refuse to become an ecnomimc vassal state. I'm sure we'll hear more tariff sabre rattling from the Americans soon.
I really need more Americans to understand that to the other 95% of the world you are a single entity. We don't get to do diplomacy or trade deals with the Democrats or the good Republicans or specific states. The tariffs and threats are American tariffs and American threats.
And the rest of the world has it's thumb on what's actually important: it doesn't really matter what conservatives believe, or liberals believe, or leftists believe, or even what the general US believes, when complete control of the government has been handed over to a single individual and his whims.
Supposed values of conservatives don't matter at all when value #1 is to be obedient to the one person they want to put in charge of all branches of the US government.
The US has emptied its warehouses of precision munitions to fight a war/non-war that nobody inside the US understands, wants, or could even explain in a half rational way. Yet it still happened! So the US is not behaving like a democracy in any functional sense any more. It's an autocracy, where the autocrat does what he wants, no matter what the rest of the nation wants.
Looking beyond the monthly numbers, it came out today that the prior "good" numbers in the US were a mirage, and actually very very low.
So if you think looking at monthly numbers is "stupid", the only thing more stupid would be to take past good monthly numbers at face value, but then disregard the corrections that come later.
over half of that was increase in part-time in retail/services/food industry yet youth unemployment is all time high so who are these "Canadians" working these jobs that traditionally went to the youth?
They don’t. They aren’t faking the BLS numbers as an electoral strategy. No one at WH or NRCC or CLF are rubbing their hands together as if this is all according to plan.
if the government was able to lie on the jobs report, why wouldn't they just continuously pretend that jobs are up from now all the way through the election? (all the way through to the presidential election, for that matter)
The 2026 midterm election date is November 3rd, the jobs numbers are released on the first Friday of the month, November 6th. Intentionally trending numbers down in August, with only two more jobs reports before the election, would be risky (and stupid, and extremely unlikely). The Trump Administration just doesn't look ahead like that either, they live in the perpetual now.
These jobs lost/gained and unemployment statistics, especially on a monthly basis, and when the numbers are so small, are just noise. Seasonal adjustments alone (baseline assumptions on how many people should be employed) make them meaningless, as does the government definition of being unemployed or looking for work.
As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.
And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.
There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.
So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.
—
The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.
You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.
>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.
> The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break
Are most teachers considered and counted as unemployed during summner break? All the teachers I know are paid 12 months a year. 10-month appointments are seen in colleges and universities but even there professors often have grants that pay for their research in the summer and even if not I don't think I'd consider them "unemployed" in the summer.
I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.
They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.
>As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
> ...
>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.
>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
> You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
Sorry, is OP the POTUS, speaking with Presidential authority and threatening federal employees with termination of employment for their political beliefs? The fact you think they're wrong is not a reason to equate their comment to Trump's actions.
At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.
> over the past year so many [federal employees] have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output
This is the most obvious point in favor of this perspective, especially as it being an escalation by the current president and his administration. It hardly even seems to be a cynical take. At least, the cynicism is being used appropriately, as a tool to guide one's thoughts rather than being the entire argument.
One can look at the DOGE cuts, tally up the numbers, and see for themself that the stated reason (desired reduction of spending that is orders of magnitude higher than what they've actually cut) can't be the actual reason for these cuts. Coupled with the... less than candid statements from this administration about anything and everything the past 17 months (hey, has anyone heard about these "Epstein files"?), the most logical conclusion is that they are deceptive whenever it suits them. And yes, even the nominally-objective numbers need to come attached with a reason to be trusted; we already know a litany of ways they can be manipulated (meaning they are indeed "nominally" objective, and have been for a long time); they can't be reasonably taken at face value.
And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).
And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
> We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.
> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).
I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.
But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.
Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs or the stupid Iran war. They wouldn't have passed anything like the BBB. Nor would they have tried to scare all the immigrants out of the country.
> Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs
They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.
The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO
Sure they have an effect but are they economic policies? If you want to take the approach that everything is an economic policy I guess we could do that, but I think it's a bit limiting.
I guess also, what's the goal of economic policy? Does your economy matter much if you can't defend it, for example? If you have no industrial base does that matter?
Under sequential administrations all the way up and until at least the end of Mr. Obama's second term we had, broadly speaking, the same economic policy and we lost a lot of jobs under that regime, lost manufacturing capabilities, and more. People were really unhappy with that scheme which was supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe we should examine our policies even if there are temporary changes that are unfavorable. Should we be long-term oriented or short-term oriented?
It's a very complicated topic of course, but I think just "grr mad at Trump" is not only immature but just wrong and leads to no meaningful analysis of what our economic policies have been, the results, and what changes may produce.
Immigration is clearly economic policy. It was partially justified on immigrants taking American's jobs.
The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
Sure but it's not strictly an economic policy. If you want to just talk about the economics of immigration I'd be happy to discuss that. I think there are pros and cons to many different approaches.
> The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
Similarly Europe and the United States could have been economically smart and unsanctioned Russian gas and let them take over Ukraine. Sometimes economic policy is trumped by other considerations.
> In yet another troubling sign for the labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it revised down the prior two months by a combined 103,000. May’s jobs total was cut by 66,000 to 129,000 total jobs added, while June’s total was lowered by 37,000 to a total gain of 57,000.
It looks to me like a failure of the American media landscape, that such constant revisal trends are not called out in the reporting of new numbers.
That just makes them a mouthpiece of the government.
One of the reaction threads I saw elsewhere on social media pointed out the response rates for the surveys that come up with these numbers is plummeting--about a decade ago, we had ~85% response rate, now we're done to ~65% response rate. So the initial quality of these numbers is probably getting a lot worse.
No wait required; click the link I gave and you'll see the answer is "yes, definitely". Anything over the zero mark on the Y axis is an upwards revision.
The title of the chart is "Nonfarm Payroll Employment Percent Revisions", with subheading indicating the statistic shown is the final number minus the first released number. The trendline shows the magnitude of the revisions decreasing over time; i.e. that the predictions get more accurate.
> In addition to the strong jobs numbers for May, revisions for prior months also presented an even better picture. The April tally represented an upward revision of 64,000, while March got a boost up to 214,000, a gain of 29,000.
This is how bls data has always worked. And the reason is that they don’t always have the full picture every month and need to account for new data in the stats.
Honest ask because I’ve not generally paid attention…
Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?
> They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving
And for good reason! These are surveys. The easiest respondents are those saying “no change.” The latest responses, the ones who had the biggest change. In a booming economy, the biggest changes will be hires. In a troubled one, the biggest changes will be those doing lay-offs.
Add to that: the BLS tries to correct for this effect. Which means at the moment the economy turns, its corrections skew the wrong way. (On the whole, per the above chart, the figures are getting better over time.)
If you can do economics without revision, that is, find the real number of jobs lost or gained or workplace participation in real time, you could make a lot of money. Probably win some prizes, too.
It has nothing to do with economics being an imperfect science and all to do with the nature of collecting real time data. Anyone who can collect accurate real time data can make $$$.
I have been very critical of the Federal gov (less so under Carney) and I will admit this job report actually was very good as it wasn't just majority public sector hirings which was very common under Trudeau:
Private-sector jobs: +58,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Government/public-sector jobs:-27,000 jobs (a decline) [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Self-employed: +44,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Part-time jobs: +36,600 jobs [money.usnews.com], [ca.finance.yahoo.com]
I suspect that even his proponents knew better, they just didn't care as much about the economy as they did culture wars nonsense and religious woo-woo.
It's not a "suspect" thing, it has been widely reported up and down the chain there is basically no support for tariffs, especially when the economic reality hit. The only supporter is trump, and he can do whatever he wants as king baby.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
It doesn't mention the right to make a buck, though it's probably implicit.
I think a large number of people don't "believe" things in the same way that the typical commenter here would understand it.
Your average rationalist techie would consider a "belief" to be some factual statement about the world, backed up with some justification, with some confidence level. "Tariffs help the economy" would mean some probabilities about likely outcomes for different actions, based on some kind of economic theory that explains why those actions make those outcomes more likely. We'd put this statement in the same category as something like "Joe works at Acme, Inc."
(And yes, I know that rationalist techies will still have plenty of irrational beliefs. But this is what we typically consider a belief to be, even if we don't always live up to it.)
But for a lot of people, it's something different. It's more of a pronouncement of faith, or a declaration of allegiance, or an expression of will. It's almost like a prayer. Pronouncing a belief like "tariffs help the economy" isn't a factual statement about likely outcomes, but more of an attempt to sway reality through faith.
This statement seems to align with the world the way I've observed it to be, and I'd never considered it this way before. It really would explain a lot if true.
So is the theory that they don't say it because they actually believe it, they say it because they want YOU to believe it? Or is it that they believe it just because they wish it were true?
It's more subtle than that, to the point that I have some trouble putting it into words.
It's a real belief, but it's a different kind of belief. A rationalist belief has structure behind it, even if only implied. There's a whole framework of, you believe X, what would it look like if X were true, or what would it look like if X were false? What's the basis for thinking that X true? How confident are you? What would change your mind? But for the kind of belief I'm talking about, none of that is there. It's not that it hasn't been done or that it's not sufficiently rigorous, but that it's just not even a consideration. It's not part of the concept of believing something.
I think I get it? A belief is something that some people do, to other it is something that was done to them.
I remember it being like that was I was a child and one day realizing that it didn't have to be, that I could decide for myself what I believed in. Maybe some folks never have that realization?
Interesting, this article doesn't seem to mention the layoffs from the tech industry. Which, if you look at the numbers, sort of make up the bulk of it.
Tech sector is not the bulk of it, many sectors doing worse and that is why they got the headlines. "Financial Activities" supersector was terrible this month. Another reason is there is not an umbrella "tech" sector in the NAICS, so it's harder to report on.
No, this is wrong. If you read the report, the bulk of the job contraction was in industries entirely divorced from the tech sector. I don’t understand why you would make this comment without even reading the article, let alone the report itself.
I began rapidly recalling the hundreds of sources foreseeing this well in advance, citing it, raising alarm, and being ignored.
I guess we are supposed to take numbers at face value, disregard what generated them and why, accept what they imply as presented, and never question it.
Then we must patiently withhold intelligence, wait for sanctioned admission, then finally consider what we already knew.
Suddenly, Rome collapsed.
Edit: Don't take the flagging to heart. If you dig, you will find a thousand exceptions made where the single-word comment fit the narrative and endured. This comment will be flagged too.
Just look at a graph from the last few years. It bounces up and down a lot, but there's a pretty clear downward trend line, and it's been around zero for over a year, with many individual months slightly above or slightly below. https://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers...
Meanwhile, Canada adds 75k jobs in the same month.
> Gains were focused on the private sector, with strength in wholesale and retail trade, finance and insurance, and professional and scientific services. Public sector jobs fell by 14,500 amid an official bid to cut government spending.
Yeah, our unemployment rate is still higher though with basically no productivity growth since 2015 (see link). Maybe 2 years straight of these job gains and then we can talk.
Thanks you for your kind reply.
Calling it nitpicking doesn't make it untrue and payrolls are not public.
To come up with factual data, one needs do some investigative journalism, and nbcnews' not one of them.
As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released
This should have nothing to do with data science but basic math literacy. Quantities without context are meaningless. Reporters should know better but if when headlines have to catchy day in day out … shrugs. Stock market reporters are the worst: a 1000 point drop in the Dow meant a lot more when it was 7000 than it does at 40,000.
Oh my god do not trigger me about the news reporting “points” for the DOW or the S&P, I have seriously considered calling news stations about this.
Or not providing inflation adjusted values when referring to historical financial reference points.
I have to go find a happy place now
If honest, the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless. Certainly, both jobs growth and jobs loss are within the CI.
What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the delta from previous years -- which, conditioning on the same collection methodology etc -- is more reliable.
The actionable piece of info is sign(delta)
Something the best data scientist I ever worked with was adamant about... there is almost never an inherent "speed bump" at 0. If error bounds expand on both sides of 0, we have no idea if the true sign is positive or negative. There is no "directional" read in that case. There are some areas where 0 has a special meaning, but that's rare and the cause of that needs to be understood before assuming that's the case. Everywhere else, 0 is just another point on the number line.
> the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless
That is often the case, and being truly data based requires acknowledging that. We can then act based on other data, or admit that we're falling back to intuition and abandoning data based decision making for now.
As a physicist, I always shed a tear when looking at data without error bars.
As a data scientist/generic programmer now, I don't really see them anywhere. I remember a colleague during my postdoc saying 'don't worry, no error bars in industry' when I asked about regression with ML lol
hah. it's true. no interest in uncertainty except when forced.
Our fake economy needs even more fake certainty now. They are all hiding from the obvious issue of stagflation because it is the most difficult economic problem to solve. The Fed know this which is why they did nothing with rates.
The bureau of labor statistics publishes confidence intervals in their reports
Not in their primary news release. A footnote says it is "generally conducted at the 90% interval", but the individual numbers do not have their actual computed error bars.
Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
It’s common in scientific/stats publishing to have the headline state the avg/median, the main text plot the errors, and the supplementary give the explicit numbers. They have a big page about std errors.
The main text doesn't plot the error bars, and the full data tables in their release don't have error bars either.
You have to really dig into their website to find their std errors.
bls.gov/ces is the main page for this survey and has a plot.
The error updates annually. Their handbook has a Reliability section where they detail sampling/nonsampling error.
NBC wouldn't know how to navigate bls.gov if you put a gun to their head. And it's all downhill from there
Based on the discussions in this thread, they aren’t alone
I don't think most of the people in this thread are journalists
God help us if they ever become one
Yes! I am aware of this and they are really great. Problem is nobody will ever read that, but they WILL watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never even point out that there are errorbars/uncertainty. Then I hear things like outrage when BLS revises numbers up or down (facepalm).
The numbers are as good as they can get with hard manual work that goes into compiling them.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
> The numbers are as good as they can get
That doesn't mean they don't warrant error bars.
Error bars aren't there to show that you didn't do a good job collecting the data, they're there to show your level of uncertainty.
I would say the initial numbers should be embargoed until the number is reliable. People don’t understand error bars and reporting can more easily manipulate the current situation without outright lying.
No, just report them with error bars. We know the 95th percentile revision size of the distribution.
Moot point as the people who actually act on the data understand how to roll their own anyway.
Error bars would be misleading, because this isn't a sampling error. These start with actual counts. The more important errors are systematic: the definitions of terms, the reporting mechanisms, etc.
Except that those things are constant from month to month, so deltas largely cancel them out.
The problem isn't in the size of the possible errors, but in understanding what those numbers mean and how they are gathered. That requires far more background reading.
Both? I don't think error bars and waiting to release data until more accurate are mutually exclusive.
That’s what I meant. There should be error bars to reflect uncertainty of the inherent data, but they should wait until all the data that could change things comes in rather than using projections which always drastically change
No, they shouldn't. Timely estimates as to the best knowledge of our current situation is extremely important for decision making under uncertainty.
If the error bars are large, that is important information to know.
What decisions are so important and time sensitive they depend on these numbers right after a month is over? And also we at one point were making decisions without these numbers yet the quality of the decision making isn’t clearly improved.
"What kind of stocks should my mutual fund invest in?"
"What sort of startups should I fund?"
"Should my business aggressively hire this quarter anticipating growth, or hold out for a possible recession?"
A few months of extra no data won’t impact the stock investments if no one has that data. Startup funding is similarly not so time sensitive.
As for businesses hiring, they should hire based on their own growth. Using an external signal that itself gets adjusted drastically is similarly problematic; I don’t hire because I think no one else is hiring and the numbers get majorly adjusted up. Similarly I hire a bunch of people and it turns out no one else hired.
No one benefits from faster numbers that are majorly shifted in a few months anyway. You wouldn’t make any different decision if no one had the numbers. The only thing you’re doing differently is when the numbers come out your gambling whether or not you think the true number will be revised in some major way in a few months. That’s not helpful for the economy writ large.
> If the error bars are large, that is important information to know.
The data is available. If it were important to the causal reader, however, then those casual readers would have already demanded its presence. But they don't care. What difference does it make to Hilary Homemaker? She just wants to get to say "Did you hear about the bad economic news?" when gossiping with her friends.
Those who need to understand the uncertainty will already be looking at more than a news headline anyway.
Ah yes, lie to them and withold information because the public is too stupid to understand. Then, when they don't trust you anymore, throw up your hands and say it's not your fault.
That's true for the establishment survey, but the population survey, where they contact individuals, is what is actually used to calculate these numbers.
It is literally calling/writing 60,000 people and asking "are you employed? did you look for a job? Etc."
"How the government calculates unemployment" [0]
| Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm? | Last week, did you do any work for (either) pay (or profit)? | If the answer to question 1 is "yes" and the answer to question 2 is "no," the next question is: | Last week, did you do any unpaid work in the family business or farm? | For those who reply "no" to both questions 2 and 3, the next key questions used to determine employment status are: | Last week, (in addition to the business) did you have a job, either full or part time? Include any job from which you were temporarily absent. | Last week, were you on layoff from a job? | What was the main reason you were absent from work last week? | For those who respond "yes" to question 5 about being on layoff, the following questions are asked:
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
You have to wonder, since they are doing two different surveys trying to measure the same reality, which one more accurately measures the facts on the ground? Asking businesses how many people they are employing, or asking households whether or not their folks are working? The numbers don't really match up between the two.
This is very common for economic statistics.
GDP too. That's how you can get more accurate information, and you have actual numbers on the discrepencies.
They rely on the household data more because it doesn't have as much systemic error, even though it does have more sampling error. Asking businesses gives you a more complete picture, but it has much more bias.
Hell, this is why even in accounting, you have double-entry bookkeeping, and even there, the numbers don't always match up.
Or "my bank account doesn't match up with my cashflow statement".
It's not that one is better and you should use that, calculating multiple ways is central to accounting so you can detect errors.
What makes you think it's small businesses? I would assume most businesses doing any reporting at all are using a payroll system. Mine handles the reporting automatically. The kinds of payroll systems used by small businesses can be set up in a day. If anything, small businesses that make even a small effort to stay on top of things have an easier time than big ones with complicated systems and processes.
I think you say “as good as they can get with [the] hard manual work that goes into compiling them” as a way to respect the challenge of the BLS and say they’re doing the best with their resources, but it’s worth pointing out they could be better with more resources.
DOGE hurt them pretty hard: "The Bureau of Labor Statistics posted a notice on Wednesday stating that it stopped collecting data in three not-so-small cities (Lincoln, Nebraska; Buffalo, New York; and Provo, Utah) and increased “imputations” for certain items"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/05/economy/cpi-data-bls-reductio...
https://www.bls.gov/jlt/jltreliability.htm Read the docs
Oh I’m well aware the BLS knows what they’re doing and publish error bars, they are great. The problem is news articles, no one ever reads BLS reports but they do watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never ever get into uncertainty.
The actual source this comes from has a 90% confidence interval in the published number. When people talk about the economy gaining or losing jobs they are talking about the bureau of labor statistics "nonfarm payroll" number. The methodology and a lot more are on the bls website
https://www.bls.gov/ces/
Wait until you see the weekly reports for the Strategic Petroleum reserve. Go ahead, try to highlight that text.
https://www.spr.doe.gov/dir/dir.html
Yes they should have said 23.0 * 10^3.
2.30 × 10⁴ or bust
The BLS has been gutted. It's surprising anything negative is escaping in these reports.
Exactly. I'm somewhat surprised someone's give-a-damn wasn't broken enough to do a cursory filter. Not like it isn't plainly obvious in other statistics, however.
> The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break.
This is not entirely accurate. AFAIK, teachers usually remain on payroll throughout the summer. This stat _might_ be talking about contractual teaching roles, like adjuncts or subs, but it's hard to say from that BLS category.
Not to mention, if it's seasonal for any reason then it's something that should be baked into the cyclical expectations already.
It's like reporting that Spirit of Halloween employees accounted for the biggest retailer layoffs in November. It's a totally useless statistic that tells you nothing about what might really be going on that month that's abnormal compared to baseline.
> teachers usually remain on payroll throughout the summer.
That is not exactly accurate. When I was teaching, my salary was for 9 months only. I was paid in 12 monthly installments to smooth out my income, but technically I was not on the University's payroll during the summer months. That allowed me to seek full-time employment elsewhere (e.g. consulting) during the summer which was not allowed during the other 9 months.
This is correct, teachers don't just stop getting paid and lose all benefits every summer (my best friend is a teacher and so is his brother), but at the same time it seems tons of schools now prefer (or are only able to find positions for) short contracts, more subs and temporary positions etc.
Especially if its not in a well funded area.
The cost to municipalities/towns for medical insurance has skyrocketed which I think is a contributor (not to mention pension obligations for retirees).
I don't think it's attributable to summer break. Didn't ~1,100K teachers quit in Fort Worth, TX due (in part) to a rise in political interference?
> ..rise in political interference?
I haven't heard it phrased like that before hah. The truth is when a school district is bad enough the state comes in and takes it over to try and get things back on their feet. Fort Worth is just embarrassed because FWISD is so bad the state had to take it over.
My wife is a HS teacher in Richardson and one of her friends was hired as a new principal at one of the FWISD schools. She said the situation is pretty bleak and most teachers should be fired but they likely won't be able to get rid of all the bad ones. That's pretty typical unfortunately in public education.
https://www.fwisd.org/about/tea
/the same thing happened to a school district in Houston
no they didnt
This article seems to disagree
https://fortworthreport.org/2026/08/06/record-teacher-turnov...
no it doesnt
you're still wrong
> Superintendent Peter Licata acknowledged that the takeover and instructional changes played a role in some educators’ decisions to leave the district.
> ...But he said he believes employees watched the transformation of Houston ISD under state control and grew wary as Fort Worth introduced standardized lessons and reorganized schools and departments.
sure thats 'political interference' .
Please give us your definition of the TEA takeover then.
they obviously know that
I would hardly call it a sudden reversal, looking at the downward trend in the numbers over the last six months or so.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/non-farm-payrolls
Given the trend of revisions, I wouldn't be surprised if the real loss is around 6 figures, May 2026 revision went from 172k to 63k.
What happened between February and March?
Apparently there were healthcare strikes in February that depressed the numbers there, which were resolved by March. Also maybe data center and World Cup hospitality hiring. But hard to say. As others have noted, there are big error bands on these numbers.
I have recently started an experiment tracking a sample of 5000 employers in US and I see a bounce last week after a brief lull in july. I am not sure if there is a strong downward trend. https://corvi.careers/reports/usa-weekly-job-openings-report...
It's tough to trust job openings. It is a fact that some number of job postings are ghost jobs that don't exist. Either they're scams from impersonators or the companies are trying to keep a good public face, but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer
Some of these offers may be part of visa or green card processes. Some require a labor market test in the form of a job ad and recorded response to it. If a suitable candidate applies, the visa/immigration process fails. Still, most companies don't intend to actually hire in this case as far as I understand it.
> but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer
Neither of these things are evidence of “ghost jobs”.
When I was doing a lot of hiring it would often take months to find qualified candidates for basic roles. I would get 100s of applicants per month but only about 20% of the resumes I received were even close to qualified. I’d try to schedule intro and screening calls with the qualified ones who would actually respond, but you wouldn’t believe how many applicants would have unreliable communication skills. Some times I wouldn’t get a response from someone for weeks or more, but many just don’t respond to contact after applying to your company. If we’re using the lingo I think a lot are “ghost candidates”.
There’s further fallout through the interview pipelines as you discover how many people have lied on their resume or otherwise aren’t qualified. That self-styled C++ expert who can’t give an example of RAII or the self-proclaimed TypeScript expert who doesn’t know anything outside of vanilla JavaScript. It’s weird.
Then there are negotiations. Some candidates want to collect offers from multiple companies and will ask for delays in hiring so they can continue interviewing and getting other offers. It can take weeks for some candidates to accept or decline your offer. If they decline you have to go to the next candidate, which can take more weeks, and then on to the next. If there’s relocation involved it takes longer to decide and get it done.
Then some times we’re hiring multiple people for a row, so we leave the listing up and open to continue hiring. This really angers the “ghost jobs” people because they assume 1 listing == 1 hire, as if the company needs to close the listing and then copy/paste to a new URL for the next hire.
So job openings that exist for “MONTHS” are not evidence of ghost jobs.
The people going 12 months without an interview are almost always doing something wrong. You wouldn’t believe how inexcusably bad many of the resumes out there can be. Some people are hung up on applying only to jobs they aren’t qualified for and then wonder why they’re not getting interviews.
I think that is slightly blunted by this person looking at the week over week delta.
maybe, but ghost listings have to be posted at some point, and who knows how long the companies want to let them go (and sometimes they expire and someone needs to refresh them)
they're not all ghost jobs, and there is probably a base level of noise there you can ignore, but the variability doesn't mean the data is great and perfect
True, but is there any reason to think this dishonesty varies over time? The trend could be informative even if the raw numbers are nonsense
Yup, and my data only captures a part of professional job market which itself is small part of labor market. I'd use this as additional data point to other sources to correlate etc. However, the experiment is mostly to test my own thesis that unless there is a major event like covid, these trends are really hard to spot.
Google will put one job posting per PA per level regardless of one team hiring or twenty.
I have to assume they aren't the only employer to do this, so I think job openings are meaningless here.
What is also interesting is that the only sector thad added jobs was health care.
Healthcare has consistently been one of the biggest drivers of US GDP and job growth numbers for years now.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
So perhaps we'll never get to a better healthcare+insurance market (nee "Free") through government, but eventually we will just all work in healthcare, and barter our nursing and dental skills in secret away from the insurance coders.
You can move to Singapore, if you want a better healthcare sector.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
Singapore numbers ignore their underclass, which is significant. But you're right, if you're a westerner, Singapore's great.
Any 'underclass' also contributes to GDP and consumes healthcare. How is any of this ignored?
But yes, I agree that the US should let in more migrant workers. Good for the workers and good for the target country: cheap infrastructure is great!
I wish the US could also use migrant labour like Singapore instead of the current system of turning a blind eye to illegal immigration out of necessity
Singapore is the beneficiary of a neighboring impoverished itinerant workforce to supplement its own collapsing demographics with artificially cheap services. It’s hardly replicable most places.
> It’s hardly replicable most places.
How so? What's hard to replicate here? Many rich places could let in more migrant workers. It's good for the workers, and good for the receiving country.
So is the USA...
No it isn’t. Malaysians commute across the river daily and then return at night, having provided their services in exchange for compensation. Singapore gets the work without many of the associated problems with housing those people long term. As a result, there are some ridiculously niche jobs in Singapore that would not exist in another rich country, such as widespread domestic servitude and manual street sweeping
How is that different from people living in New Jersey and commuting to Manhattan?
Because unless you really just want to prop up only Manhattan’s statistics at the expense of NJ’s, it’s irrelevant to a discussion about US labor statistics.
New Jersey and Manhattan are both a part of the same country last I checked.
Malaysia and Singapore are two different countries. Despite being right next to each other they have vastly different GDPs, standards of living, government benefits, etc.
Malaysia and Singapore used to be one country.
New Jersey and Manhattan are in different states. But in any case, why so xenophobic? Borders are an administrative hassle, but they have no moral weight.
I didn't realize acknowledging NY and NJ are in the same country is a xenophobic take.
Borders are a lot more than just a bit of paperwork or "administrative hassle". Central America is a very different place from US & Canada in many ways. Malaysia is quite a bit different from Singapore in a lot of ways despite such intertwined history.
I'm not passing any moral judgement here, I'm just acknowledging current reality. Singapore and Malaysia are different countries. NY and NJ are two states in the same country. The relationship is very different. Even with "Imperium in imperio" in the US.
To have a similar kind of comparison one would look at the cyclical migrant labor between the Southwestern US and Mexico.
The US could achieve the same thing with a proper migrant labour program
Health outcomes in the US are affected by higher levels of obesity. If anything, the higher health spending keeps that from being worse. I expect Ozempic and the like to have a significant impact on this.
Your statement prompted me to look at immigration options in Singapore. It seems it is pretty reasonable to get a visa as a foreign technologist.
Yes, if you are into tech, they really want you to come.
Another benefit: they tell you pretty quickly whether your application is approved or not.
Europe is also excellent in my experience, specifically Portugal and Spain. My health insurance cost for a family of four in Spain is ~$2k/year as someone on a visa. In the US on an employer plan, it was ~$20k/year (premiums, copays, etc).
I think the commenter you responded to filtered first for countries with outcomes better or exceeding the US? Though I’m not sure Portugal and Spain automatically fall into that category
Oh, I picked Singapore, because I moved here. I picked US because that was the topic under discussion. And Britain because the parent comment talked about 'free' healthcare.
complete misreading between the lines on my part then apologies
Oh, no worries at all.
I can only n=1, but most, if not all, experiences we've had obtaining medical care were better in Europe. Care specialist for my autistic kids, primary care, etc. From my unofficial surveys, many folks I know in the US are having a hard time finding various care providers, even if they have insurance. More data on this is always welcome.
It seems fairly common in the US to have a hard time finding a doctor that will take your insurance, especially so if you are on Medicaid. Even with good insurance, a lot are just not seeing new patients. More and more tasks are being pushed off onto nurse practitioners and physician's assistants. And the number of residencies is still limited by the AMA, so you aren't getting enough new doctors.
I can believe this; it's my personal and anecdotal evidence (and that which is believed by family) that the maximum quality of US medical care is quite incredible, but any perceived median (accounting for accessibility and cost) is really quite shit
A quick search suggests that Spain spends around 9.3% of gdp on healthcare. The UK spends around 10.9%. Singapore is around 5.5%.
While interesting facts, this is typically not the primary criteria which people use to decide where to expat to, versus availability and affordability. I cannot speak to the residency requirements of Singapore, but those of western Europe are very generous, as some who has helped folks leave the US for there. If you are in Spain on a tourist visa, and apply for the equivalent of a digital nomad visa while in country, you get three years as a temporary resident. At three years, you re-apply for another two years, and after those five years you can apply for permanent residency. 80% of your income must come from outside of Spain. They’ll even take a letter from a US W2 employer as income verification.
If you have any resources you can recommend on immigrating to Singapore that would be helpful and relevant for folks considering it as an option (whether on an employment, student, or pension/non lucrative visa), I welcome them to add to my resources for distribution to those seeking an exit strategy. Thank you in advance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161587 (resources)
Oh, I was purely talking about what healthcare costs society.
I love it in Singapore, but if you don't want to live in a steam sauna, there are better countries for you. And if you are an American, I guess you don't even benefit from our more enlightened tax system anyway.
> And if you are an American, I guess you don't even benefit from our more enlightened tax system anyway.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation. In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.
So there are mechanisms by which to avoid paying income tax to the US as as someone with a potential US tax liability living and working abroad, although it can be a facts intensive situation. Think like a Hacker, this is just another system and set of rules to hack ("How can I live outside the US, maximize my quality of life, pay the taxes due to my residency jurisdiction, while avoiding paying as much US federal income tax as possible?").
(For the 2026 tax year, the maximum Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) is $132,900 per qualifying person, an increase from $130,000 for 2025. Married couples where both spouses work abroad and qualify can exclude up to a combined $265,800; the contents of this comment are for educational purposes only, and are not financial or tax advice, speak with a professional)
Yes and for something rare or complex, you can always fall back on the public health insurance.
I appreciate the collectivism and it is a component of why I am happy to pay Europe any of the taxes they ask for.
The US has around 4x the obesity rate of Singapore, which significantly reduces healthcare costs.
> Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.
healthcare is not for health. Its for sickness. Going to hospital doesnt make you "healthy" . We dont have any medicines to restore health to ppl suffering for diseases majority of healthcare spend goes to.
Maybe those countries dont have sickly population in the first palce like usa where a majority have metabolic diseases.
Singapore has severe consequences for executives who violate the public trust. That makes it hard for sociopaths to rig the system for the elites.
Stoppp, y'all really are making me want to move to Singapore with promises like that.
Maybe. Though Americans are free to vote for politicians who make similar laws, too.
The people who make the laws are the wealthy who pay their think tanks and lobbyists to write them. Nobody gets elected without being owned by a puppet master.
If only!
If rich people had so much influence, Romney and Bloomberg would have been presidents.
There will never be a better healthcare because the true cost of fixing a body more often than not far exceeds the value that body produces.
People run to dismiss this with "well we need a different system then", but the problem is a fundamental one on par with "eating your cake and having it too".
The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket.
"The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket."
This isn't possible. Healthcare is a finite resource and having universal, government care not only puts your life into the hands of the government (see the UK for an example where parents are not allowed to take their children out of the hospital) but offers worse outcomes.
When you are young and healthy, it's great. As you age, life-or-death surgeries have long wait times. This can be seen in any country with universal care. My aging relatives in Canada are going through this right now and have been forced to come to the US to get surgery in months rather than waiting years.
MAID has been great for healthcare costs in Canada. Many people that would otherwise have been costing the system money, are now a benefit. The sad realization is that government-run programs need MAID to cut down on costs.
I know lots of expats living in Asia that are now getting older. They have to go elsewhere to get any surgeries done, because of this exact reason.
To make it better, we should only have insurance for surgeries that can't benefit from the free market and are relatively rare. Common surgeries and procedures should have no insurance. The prices would eventually fall to levels that were affordable.
The masses don't want plans like this. They like easy solutions that sound good when you say them and don't take a whole lot of thought besides an elementary school level of thinking.
There are already better systems of healthcare. The US one is only good if you're wealthy
It’s actually better to be average Western European than white and top 1-5% American: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
It turns out that when you make a massive profit motive to sell expensive fancy interventions, health outcomes suffer.
You see this to an even more extreme degree amongst the ultra rich and powerful, who are often using cutting edge, experimental treatments, and often reaping the downsides of being on that edge (though of course also the upsides).
To be fair, the structure of that study is pretty bizarre. Why only look at 6 specific illnesses rather than something like life expectancy?
They are looking at the outcomes of specific procedures because they are interested in the health care system quality. Looking at things like life expectancy would make it impossible to disentangle them from other factors like lifestyle or environment.
Sure, but it's only six (6) specific illnesses. There are tens of thousands of illnesses. I'm almost 100% confident you could cherry pick any six illenses to get any outcome you want.
Edit: Seems the lead author is also a vocal supporter of universal healthcare, being a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. So yeah, probably why it's such a strange setup, and what compelled me to check since this kind of thing is super common for "activist research".
I guess the takeaway is to always take a study for what it is, rather than what it paints itself to be.
So you are saying that they cherrypicked some obscure illnesses to make Europe look good? They used data for:
- infant mortality
- maternal mortality
- colon and breast cancer survival
- heart attack mortality
- childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (most common childhood cancer)
Those are one of the most common health issues.
Also, here is another recent paper showing how it’s better (health care wise) to be average in EU than wealthy in US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
No, I didn't make the argument they were obscure, in fact they all are from a set of common illnesses that....also contains thousands of illnesses. Again, this is the kind of stuff you see with "activist research". Why would they only do 6 instead of hundreds or thousands? I'm sure you see my point.
There are also other oddities like using median county wealth rather than household wealth. In many wealthy counties there are still poor areas, I know more than a few. In fact if you look at the appendix, most of the households in the study are, well, average or poor. They also don't include absolute numbers or definitions for the illnesses.
All in all, it's a bad study, and clearly made to color in an agenda.
The second study looks more grounded, thanks.
I don't really need to live forever, I just don't want to have to think about whether bleeding out in a cab is a better deal than an ambulance.
Or if that random doctor who just walked in is out of network and going to charge $30,000 for my stitches when $3,000 was already egregious.
There will never be a perfect healthcare system, sure, but the US healthcare system is just bad, and can be improved. We pay more for worse outcomes on average compared to most developed countries. Obviously it's just not working, I think it's indisputable at this point.
> the true cost of fixing a body more often than not far exceeds the value that body produces
i softly agree but also think that a body does not need to generate value to pay for the costs in order for the whole process to sustain itself. Monitoring the stars for asteroids heading towards earth provides no market value, for example, but we can still afford to do it. so it's a matter of cost and available expenditure. the market is not net 0, so its possible to generate enough value to have enough to afford healthcare as an expense as a society
what are the costs of fixing a body? The residency pipeline is a bottleneck on labor, but assuming that gets sorted out and AI is capable of guiding any reasonable person through the process, why cant the cost of labor for a doctor drop dramatically?
i would guess limited resources are the biggest blockage, but i dont know how to break down a $20k hospital bill for giving birth into its actual costs. its hard to believe that really needs to be $20k.
I actually think its the opposite. there is so much friction with healthcare and the process of healing is slow enough that costs are inflated because the overall operating cost for the entire facility including rent, ER, having people on standby, who knows what else, all need to be recovered through whatever volume they process and they arent processing as quickly as the resources are able.
healthcare needs do not subscribe to a neat work schedule, and so we have to pay a lot of market prices to have the right availability at all times. but thats not a true cost, it is a result of accounting and underutilization
Redundancy is robustness is expensive.
If everything but healthcare is completely automated, all employed people will be employed in healthcare.
Growing up, almost every woman I was related to was in education. Principal, office staff, teachers.
Now, almost every woman I'm related to is in health care.
I've been joking for years that eventually everyone will either be in the hospital, or working there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Any sector that's resistant to productivity growth is liable to become bigger and bigger part of the economy.
I've seen on youtube how people said a major reason housing is a big employer and housing has not fallen in price is due to their industry's attitude and resistance to introducing technological advancements.
in fairness also regulation makes it hard when it specificies the solutions not the parameters (just to illustrate the idea not an actual rule: you must have X thickness of PVC versus your pipe must withstand X pressure)
And also when doctors are expected to provide the best treatments or else they can be sued for malpractice.
Demonstrating the waste of time that 99.9% of Youtube videos offer. Construction has seen tremendous technological advances, from materials to tools, even down to software that monitors workplace events.
All of these have led to conditions where it is expected for an entire house to go from start to finish in 100 days. A house with very high standards of plumbing, electrical, hvac, insulation, and other essentials compared to previous generations.
And yet so much stick built instead of manufactured, for example.
And I agree that the standards have been rising such as better R-values, car charging, AC, cat5 etc.
Because stick built is superior to manufactured for 95% of situations and buyers. There is a reason why it’s so ubiquitous. The US is blessed to have access to cheap sticks.
yeah but the size of the us healthcare sector (like 18%) is a policy choice, other developed countries have theirs at 10-12%.
U.S. healthcare is a giant predatory clusterfuck and seems impossible to meaningfully reform.
You can’t reform it because of the immense job loss that would result from an efficiently run public healthcare system. Think about all the useless paper pushers that are allowed to vote
Like the US Justice system, the best advice to give is to avoid the US Healthcare system as much as possible.
Singapore has more like 5.5% or so. (That's total expenditure: public plus private added up.)
i think population pyramids will basically guarantee growth of that sector in almost all first world countries for thenext few decades
Yeah, but then the elderly population will start shrinking, which will cause a myriad of disruptions.
This has been the case in several recent reports. It really ought to put to bed the idea that Trump was somehow going to be "good for business" and bring back manufacturing. At best all he's done is create a ton of uncertainty, at worst he's actively harmed massive swaths of American businesses with tariffs, war, and gutting the federal workforce and programs that indirectly supported a ton of businesses.
Based on their July 2026 report, there were tiny increases in several sectors. The big declines were in service providing, leisure and hospitality, and government (bc of a summer decline in local gov education).
I don't think many of the BBB healthcare cuts have hit yet.
Most of the cuts were scheduled for after the midterms, you can guess why.
I don't call that Heathcare. It call that Heath"Scam" run by Big Pharma and Insurance Mafia.
It was the same in June I think...
That has been the case for most of the year IIRC
Death can't get laid off
Wealthy, aging boomers with increasing need for health care, makes sense.
They're also the target of a lot of campaigning, so politicians promise to give them even more services and fewer taxes.
It's not just boomers (though they are the biggest part of it).
Americans of all ages are spending more on healthcare, and seeking more healthcare interventions than in previous decades.
This isn’t surprising. The population overall is aging. Millenials are now the largest cohort and are approaching middle age. Until recently we’ve seen the number of insured individuals rise consistently and our medicine continues to advance. More older adults have access and need more healthcare
No, I mean on an age-corrected basis, throughout the spectrum of ages.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
There is a lot more to spend it on. I'm gen-X, ADHD wasn't even heard of by most people until I was in college, and then it was only diagnosed/treated in the worst cases. Today most kids I know are on some medication for ADHD. A few years ago a friend of mine was told "too bad you are not 25 - I know what treatment you need but we can't give it to someone over 25" - he went to the Mayo clinic for his condition at 23 but the treatment didn't even exist yet so it was a waste of time.
In 1860 someone who went to a doctor would have worse outcomes than someone who stayed home. As medicine gets better over time there is more and more value in seeing a doctor. In turn more an more people are talking to their doctor about things that they would have just ignored a few generations ago. Sometimes this results in unnecessary treatment, but it also results in catching and fixing a lot of real problems that would have made life worse before we could treat it.
Sure, this is of course true, but there's also a reason that Americans spend way way more on their healthcare than any other developed nation, and it's not that they have better healthcare, or more healthcare options.
Part of the Obamacare mandate was forcing young men into health insurance policies when in the past they had a much higher opt out percentage.
As a young man, can I opt into Medicare since I'm opted in to paying for it?
Sure, but that's not what's driving these increases in costs.
Why not? Higher demand -> Higher prices.
I don't see how that applies to insurance. The demand pays for it's own supply. The insurance company doesn't have to ramp up production somehow.
It isn't just aging.
Americans are spending a lot more on quality-of-life medical interventions, many of which are outside the normal standard of care that would be covered by healthcare systems. It is a booming business in the US and many people seem to have no trouble paying for it.
It's like the hydration revolution, wealthy Americans (or those who aspire to be) are very conscious about their health/career/investments/childcare/looks. Many of them seem quite neurotic, maybe it's a consequence of individualism and social media. I don't think it's something which is unique to the US but they're just ahead/rich compared to other countries.
Just as an anecdote, I’m an older Millennial (1982) and since my late 30s I’ve been spending my HDHP cap in health services that my parents wouldn’t have bothered with, such as allergy shots and niche diagnostic blood tests based on the latest science, some of which have been covered here such as HSCRP. I’ve also had LASIK and had laser skin treatments done. I’m not a health nut, I just realized I don’t have to look and feel like crap in my 40s like my progenitors.
I'm sure ADHD medications / antidepressants / GLP-1s are huge drivers.
It's my hypothesis that boomers passing away + GLPs largely ending obesity will result in a sharp drop in total healthcare spending in the next decade or two
My main caveat / counter point is that preventative care may actually increase as more and more people jump on the live for ever, dont die, longevity hacking trend.
there's a massive wave of elderly coming (boomer generation) so it makes sense health care is going to becoming an even bigger economic force than it already is.
Clankers won't replace medical workers as fast. People get older and have less children too.
Not strange. All the money and wealth is in the hands of the olds and olds need much more health care than the young. So it's a gold rush to get their juicy dollars.
I know i'm just one guy but I'm 50 and the old people i know are very poor and supported entirely by their children. It would be interesting to see the median and mean wealth for people >70 and compare the two.
All wealth is held by olds, but that doesn't mean that all olds are rich.
All basketball players are tall, but that doesn't mean that all tall people are basketball players.
And, as a result, the market is ... up?
Unemployment makes it more likely for the fed to lower interest rates, which makes the stock market more attractive, so, yes.
(Unemployment also generally causes lower inflation in general, at least according to the prevailing macroeconomic school of thought.)
The Fed is not going to cut rates. Looking at Fed Rate futures they only predict increases:
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...
Private sector gained jobs. Public sector lost more jobs than the private sector gained. News reports a negative number.
This is why engineers don't make money trading markets
I wonder if this is the evidence of the labor market decoupling from "the economy" in terms of economic productivity?
Folks keep predicting it. Maybe it's starting?
It's not. 23,000 jobs is 0.01% of the workforce, so it's negligible in terms of lost sales (probably hurts consumer confidence more). But it is a signal that the economy isn't running too hot, so the company's much larger borrowing costs aren't going up.
Maybe we can finally reach communism by first getting together and all agreeing "the economy" isn't a science and if we all just believe really hard, numbers can go up forever, then we won't even need money!
It only works until people try to withdraw money that doesn't exist. The less people believe the earlier that happens, but it will happen sooner or later.
Never withdraw money, only take out loans! the survivors will sort it out, or not... we'll be dead so who cares.
Promote this man immediately to the head of our new megacorp Walmart-Exxon-Lockheed-Yum.
Anything you can measure can be a science.
I think we're there already?
If the market expected a worse job loss than 23,000 that would make sense.
I'm not actually suggesting there's a good reason for market swings, just that bad news shouldn't necessarily cause the market to go down.
Yesterday they were expecting the report to show 80k+ jobs added. So, this is much, much worse than expected. The market is up because they expect this will keep the fed from raising interest rates, and also because the market is increasingly detached from reality.
Bad news is good news, leading to possibly fewer rate hikes
There is no good news. This is stagflation. Worst case scenario.
Yeah, I'll never understand the disconnect between Wall Street and the mudslide of diarrhetic bad news that has been rolling in constantly.
Bad news sells. There is always some bad news to print so you hear about it. That doesn't mean things are bad though.
For a selloff to happen, investors have to believe there is a better place for them to go. At worst, any bad news right now is making everything look equally bad, so there is no advantage to running away from Wall Street in particular.
skill issue. Solved by having the correct model of the world and forces acting on it given (appropriately weighted) current context and your usual variance.
It's usually people who don't understand the context or assign appropriate weights to events and allow randomness that complain about not understanding markets.
You're getting downvoted but you're exactly right
Gross dude
That comment should be illegal
Send it back across the Diarrhio Grande
Jobs down, threat of increased interest rates down
Sure why not. Mercury is in retrograde after all
The market is going up because the market (AI) thinks it means there will be a rate cut. Which is good for stocks.
But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.
This is a nothingburger article, 23,000 jobs lost is essentially flat.
Meanwhile Canada is up 75,000 jobs in July. Can't wait to see the next tantrum America throws our way.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-jobs-july-2026-9.729...
One of the saddest parts of the current era is the wedge that has been driven in the US/Canada relationship. Canada is in the process of removing as many dependencies on the US as possible, because the US has destroyed trust in it, resulting in the need to turn to countries like China to be bigger trading partners. I'd say there's a possibility (as in > 30% chance) that Canada and European nations enter a post-NATO defense organization that excludes the US, something that seemed absolutely ludicrous even two years ago.
Sadly, the people responsible for this in the US have no clue it's happening, no clue of the negative consequences they will face because of it, and show a general disregard for understanding things or relationships in general. The information environment in the US has been rewarding ignorant selfishness for too long, shifting the entire nature of about 30%-50% of the population in negative way.
It's incredibly sad. It's such a lose-lose situation we're all in. We have enormous natural resources to share with an enormous industrial partner, we share an enormous land border, and are two of the culturally closest nations on the planet. China being the more palatable power to partner with is a horrifyingly bad sign that there's something deeply broken and in need of repair in the U.S.
Roughly 40 percent of Canadians in the top 1 percent of earners have moved to the US.
https://thehub.ca/2026/04/03/can-anyone-solve-canadas-brain-...
Ah, so the class of people least impacted by the chaos happening down here. The class of people who couldn't care less about things like "civil rights" and "social safety nets" for the poor as long as they get their tax cuts.
How is this related?
somehow it seems like you're implying that canada is doing better than the usa. just look at the last 10 years of real gdp growth and it couldn't be any worse for canada.
As everyone knows, real gdp growth is the only metric of goodness. All other numbers and figures are meaningless, we all down before the might RGDPG
since you seem to know better, id like to know on which dimensions you think canada is doing any better than usa in the past 10-15 years as whole, or even versus other g7.
general employment? youth employment? labor participation? happiness index? gdp per capita? patents per capita? skilled migration? housing affordability? general inflation? stock market performance? real wages? housing burden? life satisfaction? growth of small business? startup echo system?
How about I sell you a dollar? My price will be one dollar. Then you can sell it back, and we'll have three GDP-dollars in total! On the basis of this remarkable profit, we can probably convince others to sell their dollars to us as well, because we can turn those dollars into similar profits faster than whatever the employees might've done with them. Economics is great. We're going to have such large numbers!
%Debt to GDP ratio is not a subject either country likes to focus on.
The magnificent 7 formed a large portion of the US growth numbers, but many have legally hidden >$1.6Tn in "AI" debt deep in the pages of their reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY
The Shrek movie is due out in July 2027, and strangely these often correlated with market corrections in the past. =3
Sorry, what's the connection here?
What’s the connection between the two most intertwined economies on planet earth?
That looking at monthly numbers is stupid? The US has had significantly more job growth in 2026 than Canada has. The July numbers are convergence to a roughly common mean.
It is stupid. But the connection is that the Americans do international politics in an abusive way now. There is a very real possibility that their leader will see domestic bad number and foreign good number and throw a fit and look for something or someone to beat on. By all means, someone please tell him that looking at the numbers is stupid.
In particular, the Americans have been throwing endless tantrums Canada's way. This week we're "nasty people" because we refuse to become an ecnomimc vassal state. I'm sure we'll hear more tariff sabre rattling from the Americans soon.
* American leadership. The president’s only understanding of our brotherly northern neighbor is South Park portrayals.
I haven’t even met a conservative who has ever had any sort of problem with Canada
I really need more Americans to understand that to the other 95% of the world you are a single entity. We don't get to do diplomacy or trade deals with the Democrats or the good Republicans or specific states. The tariffs and threats are American tariffs and American threats.
And the rest of the world has it's thumb on what's actually important: it doesn't really matter what conservatives believe, or liberals believe, or leftists believe, or even what the general US believes, when complete control of the government has been handed over to a single individual and his whims.
Supposed values of conservatives don't matter at all when value #1 is to be obedient to the one person they want to put in charge of all branches of the US government.
The US has emptied its warehouses of precision munitions to fight a war/non-war that nobody inside the US understands, wants, or could even explain in a half rational way. Yet it still happened! So the US is not behaving like a democracy in any functional sense any more. It's an autocracy, where the autocrat does what he wants, no matter what the rest of the nation wants.
That's changing, surveys show American conservative opinions of Canada has been dropping rapidly.
Looking beyond the monthly numbers, it came out today that the prior "good" numbers in the US were a mirage, and actually very very low.
So if you think looking at monthly numbers is "stupid", the only thing more stupid would be to take past good monthly numbers at face value, but then disregard the corrections that come later.
Canada is currently on the short list of countries Trump throws into his usual mad-libs of grievance flavored policy making.
It doesn't need a connection (even tho there are many). The US/Trump is going after Brazil for creating a payment system.
over half of that was increase in part-time in retail/services/food industry yet youth unemployment is all time high so who are these "Canadians" working these jobs that traditionally went to the youth?
govt is resetting the baseline now, so we will see some good numbers in November.
it's all about optics for mid term.
No. Very bad economic numbers in August before a midterm is not a cunning political optics move.
I'm surprised by the conspiratorial comments here like this is some sort of 4D chess move. *It's not.*
This is chickens coming home to roost from US actions in Iran, with tariffs, and other things introducing economic uncertainty.
As you alluded to; this is terrible for Republicans in power. And quite useful for Democrats.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a good move; just whether they think it’s a good move.
They don’t. They aren’t faking the BLS numbers as an electoral strategy. No one at WH or NRCC or CLF are rubbing their hands together as if this is all according to plan.
if the government was able to lie on the jobs report, why wouldn't they just continuously pretend that jobs are up from now all the way through the election? (all the way through to the presidential election, for that matter)
The 2026 midterm election date is November 3rd, the jobs numbers are released on the first Friday of the month, November 6th. Intentionally trending numbers down in August, with only two more jobs reports before the election, would be risky (and stupid, and extremely unlikely). The Trump Administration just doesn't look ahead like that either, they live in the perpetual now.
Maybe. But I think the government could just lie about both quarters and then restate after the election.
The worse Q2 looks the bigger improvement a bogus Q3 will look.
Wish i had your optimism.
These jobs lost/gained and unemployment statistics, especially on a monthly basis, and when the numbers are so small, are just noise. Seasonal adjustments alone (baseline assumptions on how many people should be employed) make them meaningless, as does the government definition of being unemployed or looking for work.
As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.
And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.
There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.
So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.
—
The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.
You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.
>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Also net population loss of working age adults via deportation and self deportation.
The Fed just had an article on the labor force participation rate drops: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/aug/what-is-b...
> The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break
Are most teachers considered and counted as unemployed during summner break? All the teachers I know are paid 12 months a year. 10-month appointments are seen in colleges and universities but even there professors often have grants that pay for their research in the summer and even if not I don't think I'd consider them "unemployed" in the summer.
I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.
They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.
>As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
> ...
>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...
>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
> You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
Sorry, is OP the POTUS, speaking with Presidential authority and threatening federal employees with termination of employment for their political beliefs? The fact you think they're wrong is not a reason to equate their comment to Trump's actions.
At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.
> over the past year so many [federal employees] have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output
This is the most obvious point in favor of this perspective, especially as it being an escalation by the current president and his administration. It hardly even seems to be a cynical take. At least, the cynicism is being used appropriately, as a tool to guide one's thoughts rather than being the entire argument.
One can look at the DOGE cuts, tally up the numbers, and see for themself that the stated reason (desired reduction of spending that is orders of magnitude higher than what they've actually cut) can't be the actual reason for these cuts. Coupled with the... less than candid statements from this administration about anything and everything the past 17 months (hey, has anyone heard about these "Epstein files"?), the most logical conclusion is that they are deceptive whenever it suits them. And yes, even the nominally-objective numbers need to come attached with a reason to be trusted; we already know a litany of ways they can be manipulated (meaning they are indeed "nominally" objective, and have been for a long time); they can't be reasonably taken at face value.
And this is even after Trump fired the previous Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for simply reporting poor jobs growth.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
"And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything…"
And I suspect, sometime in the future, we're going to discover that the numbers were even worse than we thought they were—were covered up.
Maybe, maybe not.
And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).
And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
> thus paying more in taxes
If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
> We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.
> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).
I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.
But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.
Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs or the stupid Iran war. They wouldn't have passed anything like the BBB. Nor would they have tried to scare all the immigrants out of the country.
> Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs
They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.
The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO
Directional alignment but completely different policy. Trying to claim they are the same is nonsense.
You don't think those two things have any effect on the economy?
Sure they have an effect but are they economic policies? If you want to take the approach that everything is an economic policy I guess we could do that, but I think it's a bit limiting.
I guess also, what's the goal of economic policy? Does your economy matter much if you can't defend it, for example? If you have no industrial base does that matter?
Under sequential administrations all the way up and until at least the end of Mr. Obama's second term we had, broadly speaking, the same economic policy and we lost a lot of jobs under that regime, lost manufacturing capabilities, and more. People were really unhappy with that scheme which was supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe we should examine our policies even if there are temporary changes that are unfavorable. Should we be long-term oriented or short-term oriented?
It's a very complicated topic of course, but I think just "grr mad at Trump" is not only immature but just wrong and leads to no meaningful analysis of what our economic policies have been, the results, and what changes may produce.
Immigration is clearly economic policy. It was partially justified on immigrants taking American's jobs.
The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
> Immigration is clearly economic policy.
Sure but it's not strictly an economic policy. If you want to just talk about the economics of immigration I'd be happy to discuss that. I think there are pros and cons to many different approaches.
> The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
Similarly Europe and the United States could have been economically smart and unsanctioned Russian gas and let them take over Ukraine. Sometimes economic policy is trumped by other considerations.
Job numbers have always been reviewed down after being released every single time since 2022.
So you are saying it's even worse than the numbers reported.
I would assume so, but these numbers are so cooked that who knows!
https://archive.is/bsnvr
The deficit is 6% of GDP. Economic growth is 2%, if that. If the Democrats win the House and reduce spending, look out below.
Of the two parties, only one ever even says they want to reduce spending. Neither ever do.
The deficit fell dramatically 2009-2015.
But the debt rose
https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/NationalDebt_v02_DP_16843391...
Yes, that's what a deficit does until it becomes a surplus. Debt cannot go down until the deficit is gone.
Technically yes, but you can clearly see the growth slow to essentially zero during part of the late Clinton years in that chart.
All part of the misanthropic plan?
Note, also:
> In yet another troubling sign for the labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it revised down the prior two months by a combined 103,000. May’s jobs total was cut by 66,000 to 129,000 total jobs added, while June’s total was lowered by 37,000 to a total gain of 57,000.
I'm not an expert at quantifying the magnitude of how bad that is, but revision down is not something "exceptional". The numbers have been revised down consistently since ~2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/business/economy/economy-...
It does make you wonder if the July shedding of jobs could be lowered even further to ~100k+ jobs lost (since they revise down very consistently).
Yeah, that wouldn't be a surprise.
It looks to me like a failure of the American media landscape, that such constant revisal trends are not called out in the reporting of new numbers. That just makes them a mouthpiece of the government.
One of the reaction threads I saw elsewhere on social media pointed out the response rates for the surveys that come up with these numbers is plummeting--about a decade ago, we had ~85% response rate, now we're done to ~65% response rate. So the initial quality of these numbers is probably getting a lot worse.
https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573 indicates they've been getting better over time.
I'd suspect better computing helps a lot here.
Cut that graph to the last decade, and they don't look like they've been getting better.
The COVID era is likely to be an outlier in many things.
These guys are just nonstop liars. Print the headline, revise when no one is looking.
To be fair, revisions are very normal, because the more reliable data (tax filings, for example) comes in later.
https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573
Are they ever revised higher? I'll wait...
No wait required; click the link I gave and you'll see the answer is "yes, definitely". Anything over the zero mark on the Y axis is an upwards revision.
I did, You do not know how to read a graph. That line through the middel is just showing the trend of jobs numbers.
Still waiting. Just find me one article that says "Last months BLS jobs were revised higher".
The title of the chart is "Nonfarm Payroll Employment Percent Revisions", with subheading indicating the statistic shown is the final number minus the first released number. The trendline shows the magnitude of the revisions decreasing over time; i.e. that the predictions get more accurate.
For a concrete example, as you request: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/jobs-report-may-2026.html
> In addition to the strong jobs numbers for May, revisions for prior months also presented an even better picture. The April tally represented an upward revision of 64,000, while March got a boost up to 214,000, a gain of 29,000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/economy/trump-jo...
> What has been unusual during the early months of Mr. Trump’s term is that the revisions have been consistently in the same direction: down.
You do not know how to read a graph, it seems.
The jobs numbers are notoriously laggy. On the way up, lag means constant upwards revisions. On the way down, lag means constant downwards revisions.
ADP Payrolls are a lower latency indicator but not quite as broad.
This is how bls data has always worked. And the reason is that they don’t always have the full picture every month and need to account for new data in the stats.
Honest ask because I’ve not generally paid attention…
Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?
They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving at the time.
Chart: https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573
> They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving
And for good reason! These are surveys. The easiest respondents are those saying “no change.” The latest responses, the ones who had the biggest change. In a booming economy, the biggest changes will be hires. In a troubled one, the biggest changes will be those doing lay-offs.
Add to that: the BLS tries to correct for this effect. Which means at the moment the economy turns, its corrections skew the wrong way. (On the whole, per the above chart, the figures are getting better over time.)
If you can do economics without revision, that is, find the real number of jobs lost or gained or workplace participation in real time, you could make a lot of money. Probably win some prizes, too.
Economics is an imperfect science.
It has nothing to do with economics being an imperfect science and all to do with the nature of collecting real time data. Anyone who can collect accurate real time data can make $$$.
Sudden reversal? It’s been the apocalypse for several years with each year getting worse
Meanwhile Canada added 75,000 new jobs in July. Perhaps Trump's tariff scheme is not working so well after all.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7299225
I have been very critical of the Federal gov (less so under Carney) and I will admit this job report actually was very good as it wasn't just majority public sector hirings which was very common under Trudeau:
Private-sector jobs: +58,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Government/public-sector jobs:-27,000 jobs (a decline) [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Self-employed: +44,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Part-time jobs: +36,600 jobs [money.usnews.com], [ca.finance.yahoo.com]
No one with at least two brain cells to rub together thought the tariffs was going to make anything better.
I suspect that even his proponents knew better, they just didn't care as much about the economy as they did culture wars nonsense and religious woo-woo.
It's not a "suspect" thing, it has been widely reported up and down the chain there is basically no support for tariffs, especially when the economic reality hit. The only supporter is trump, and he can do whatever he wants as king baby.
To be fair, a plurality of voters care more about the culture war than the economy as well.
That goes way back to before the founding.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
It doesn't mention the right to make a buck, though it's probably implicit.
I think a large number of people don't "believe" things in the same way that the typical commenter here would understand it.
Your average rationalist techie would consider a "belief" to be some factual statement about the world, backed up with some justification, with some confidence level. "Tariffs help the economy" would mean some probabilities about likely outcomes for different actions, based on some kind of economic theory that explains why those actions make those outcomes more likely. We'd put this statement in the same category as something like "Joe works at Acme, Inc."
(And yes, I know that rationalist techies will still have plenty of irrational beliefs. But this is what we typically consider a belief to be, even if we don't always live up to it.)
But for a lot of people, it's something different. It's more of a pronouncement of faith, or a declaration of allegiance, or an expression of will. It's almost like a prayer. Pronouncing a belief like "tariffs help the economy" isn't a factual statement about likely outcomes, but more of an attempt to sway reality through faith.
This statement seems to align with the world the way I've observed it to be, and I'd never considered it this way before. It really would explain a lot if true.
So is the theory that they don't say it because they actually believe it, they say it because they want YOU to believe it? Or is it that they believe it just because they wish it were true?
It's more subtle than that, to the point that I have some trouble putting it into words.
It's a real belief, but it's a different kind of belief. A rationalist belief has structure behind it, even if only implied. There's a whole framework of, you believe X, what would it look like if X were true, or what would it look like if X were false? What's the basis for thinking that X true? How confident are you? What would change your mind? But for the kind of belief I'm talking about, none of that is there. It's not that it hasn't been done or that it's not sufficiently rigorous, but that it's just not even a consideration. It's not part of the concept of believing something.
I think I get it? A belief is something that some people do, to other it is something that was done to them.
I remember it being like that was I was a child and one day realizing that it didn't have to be, that I could decide for myself what I believed in. Maybe some folks never have that realization?
Who actually believes these numbers?
weird dejavu because this exact comment was on the last one of these job lost updates i saw
When you line the government with yesmen,they will taylor or they'll get fired, so I would expect HN to catch on that fast
Vertical Thinkers: “Who could’ve seen this coming when all the data looks good?!”
Lateral Thinkers: quietly sipping tea, nursing our wounds from layoffs, lamenting another unheard Cassandra moment.
Basically sums up the mood, I find. Don’t worry, we’re always steeping a fresh pot for the new club members when stories like these hit the wire.
Interesting, this article doesn't seem to mention the layoffs from the tech industry. Which, if you look at the numbers, sort of make up the bulk of it.
Tech sector is not the bulk of it, many sectors doing worse and that is why they got the headlines. "Financial Activities" supersector was terrible this month. Another reason is there is not an umbrella "tech" sector in the NAICS, so it's harder to report on.
No, this is wrong. If you read the report, the bulk of the job contraction was in industries entirely divorced from the tech sector. I don’t understand why you would make this comment without even reading the article, let alone the report itself.
I love how this is immediately used as an excuse to reinflate the AI bubble. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are just begging for backlash.
Tech companies are mired in debt. They need interest rates to go down.
Higher unemployment makes it harder to raise interest rates.
Guess it's time for Trump to fire another BLS director and find one who's better at cooking the books...
"sudden"
My thought exactly.
I began rapidly recalling the hundreds of sources foreseeing this well in advance, citing it, raising alarm, and being ignored.
I guess we are supposed to take numbers at face value, disregard what generated them and why, accept what they imply as presented, and never question it.
Then we must patiently withhold intelligence, wait for sanctioned admission, then finally consider what we already knew.
Suddenly, Rome collapsed.
Edit: Don't take the flagging to heart. If you dig, you will find a thousand exceptions made where the single-word comment fit the narrative and endured. This comment will be flagged too.
Just look at a graph from the last few years. It bounces up and down a lot, but there's a pretty clear downward trend line, and it's been around zero for over a year, with many individual months slightly above or slightly below. https://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers...
I predict the numbers will look good after November. Maybe not reality but the numbers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wow this thread made me realize the level of manipulation in HN discussions. The amount of bots posting comments passing as real is staggering.
Meanwhile, Canada adds 75k jobs in the same month.
> Gains were focused on the private sector, with strength in wholesale and retail trade, finance and insurance, and professional and scientific services. Public sector jobs fell by 14,500 amid an official bid to cut government spending.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-can...
Yeah, our unemployment rate is still higher though with basically no productivity growth since 2015 (see link). Maybe 2 years straight of these job gains and then we can talk.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=361007...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260807/dq260...
Yes, agreed.
The great reversal is happening. It was about time to quell the bubble-sayers.
firstly :: "economy" cannot lose jobs because it doesn't have any. Secondly :: there is absolutely no way for you to know it.
That’s just nitpicking words and yes you can tell from payroll
Thanks you for your kind reply. Calling it nitpicking doesn't make it untrue and payrolls are not public. To come up with factual data, one needs do some investigative journalism, and nbcnews' not one of them.
Which is it, is it unknowable, or is it certain that it can't be?
Still has a long way to go to catch us up on the other side of the pond.