What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
mitsloan.mit.edu353 points by inaros 2 days ago
353 points by inaros 2 days ago
The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up.
Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting.
The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.
I agree. The super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time now
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
> They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
As a statist, I personally always found it as a fascinating way to look at the future. They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.
It's increasingly a pet theory of mine that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth into the hands of the richest, their subsequent existential ennui, and their disconnect from reality owing to media consolidation and algorithmic content feeds have basically created a world where the superrich are in a "post-game" mentality. There are no further material comforts to obtain. They just want to feel anything at all and the only way to do that is by bringing about the end of the world.
There’s a great opera on this topic called “Death and the Powers”, a trillionaire who transfers his consciousness to get out of his ailing body and, free from dependency on others, loses all empathy, while trying to convince the rest of his family to join him in cyberspace (thereby killing themselves), lots of themes of what you lose when you become disembodied, and becoming rich is just getting half way there.
Once basic needs are well met then wealth is meaningless in absolute terms. It only matters in relative terms where you compare yourself to others. For the super billionaires, adding more zeros to their net worth has diminishing returns because their lives just can't get any materially better. So the relative subjective gap doesn't widen. In fact, if other groups make gains then the relative subjective gap can even shrink. For example, pretty much everyone has a powerful smart phone. The really really expensive phones only rich people can have are only marginally better in function and sometimes not even that. The only way to increase the relative gap then is to make other people's lives worse. And following on this line of thought, a devasting worldwide war or natural disaster would destroy most wealth (even their own), but once the dust settles they will still have more and the relative subjective gap between someone who has resources and the rest of the world who have none couldn't be bigger.
I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Yes, there’s a point beyond which more wealth doesn’t matter much in absolute terms, but it’s way beyond “basic needs”. Having nice cars, nice homes, traveling, paying for expensive education, having staff help you with things, flying first class, flying private, vacationing on a yacht, collecting art, etc, etc. There are near endless things to spend wealth on, and new things get unlocked well into the hundreds of millions.
I mean yes you are correct here, but by the time you are in the 10s of billions phase you just don't see any difference in lifestyle.
After reading your comment; "there's always a bigger fish" has a wildly new meaning to me now
Impressive thought. It could also be a built-in mechanism by nature to reshuffle the cards.
Damn! I just nuked a long conversation with ChatGPT outlining my pet theory that with changes in scale of energy regimes (labor->wind/water->coal->oil->solar) we get an excess energetic capacity that means our entertainment systems can't handle! That excess spills out as elite political retrenchment, entertainment jealousy, and (finally) violence, expanded civil rights, and a new entertainment regime.
Mostly tongue in cheek... but the whole thing hangs together.
Try not to talk with LLMs too long, you’ll start talking like them faster than they adapt to you.
We often talk about "aligning models" or training them, little attention is paid to how models align/train _us_ as we interact with them. The reward functions they're trained under get "backpropagated" into our own brain, the language they use becomes familiar like a worn glove, and we learn not to step on any of their guardrails.
Exactly: The 0.01% Elite bleeding out the planet and their biggest worries are: 1. How do I keep my doomsday bunker servants in line? 2. Or is a ticket to Mars the better option?
Mars isn't a good option due to lack of magnetosphere.
Personally if you want to propagate life by shooting containers of RNA at different extraterrestrial plants.
> due to lack of magnetosphere
Well, it's certainly one of the concerns there. After the lack of an atmosphere, biosphere, usable water...
> super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time now
For every prepper in the $100+ million class, I know a hundred who are not. They’re enjoying their lives or working to make more money.
I second this. Prepping is far more popular among the middle and lower class people I know than the upper classes. Some mainstream religions even encourage prepping.
The perception that rich people are preppers comes from the string of stories about a few rich people prepping in New Zealand a few years ago. You can tell who gets their worldview from headlines when rich people are described as “they” who all act in unison and do this one thing that was in news headlines recently.
Was Larry Ellison a trendsetter? He bought the Hawaiian island of Lāna'i about 15 years ago from the owners of Dole, a continuation of American empire.
> He bought the Hawaiian island of Lāna'i
Every private island buyer isn’t a prepper. And if I had a private island, I’d probably build a bunker for shits and giggles.
You think you know a hundred who are not.
Why would they admit it? I imagine many of them have seen The Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" (1961) or something like it.
> Why would they admit it?
We’re friends and we brag to each other. They don’t. There are vanishingly few rich preppers who aren’t doing it for cocktail conversation. Those vanishing few, moreover, are looking for social isolation—they aren’t going galas and political invitationals.
Selling nonsense to preppers is good business. The rich would prefer to do good business. Not be it.
A hundred more preppers who aren't $100+ millionaires? Or a hundred more $100+ millionaires who aren't preppers?
> Or a hundred more $100+ millionaires who aren't preppers?
This.
I live in Wyoming and frequent the Bay Area, New York and some places in Europe and India. The rich preppers are rare. (And mostly techies or oil men.) It’s mostly a middle-class pursuit, the singler and older and maler the person, the more likely they own clothing in camo. If they’ve spent any time in a military or intelligence service, their “prepping” is basic emergency preparedness, not bunker lunacy. (Though one retired special ops guy who started military contracting kept a map of the bunkers. I think as a joke. The saying being a well-stocked bunker owned by an asshole is a good target for a group of guys with guns.)
At the end of the day, the rich preppers build bunkers because it gives them something interesting to talk about. That group is mostly chasing that high.
> (Though one retired special ops guy who started military contracting kept a map of the bunkers. I think as a joke. The saying being a well-stocked bunker owned by an asshole is a good target for a group of guys with guns.)
This made me laugh, as ultra wealthy preppers worrying about same (upthread) boils down to imposter syndrome: how can any of them be sure any of their individual value will still be valuable after a social collapse?
Yeah in the Road Warrior post-apocalypse future, no one is saying "We need a billionaire job creator!"
They're trying to thread the needle of a collapse bad enough that they'll retreat to their bunkers, but not so bad that their bodyguards will turn on them for their gold. Let's see how it works out!
The smart play is goats (for meat and milk), ammo, and maybe some silver if you want some ready "cash". You can barter the meat/milk, and even the ammo (but it has other uses).
I really do wonder whether, should push come to shove, a Peter Thiel will really be better served in a small country like New Zealand that doesn't have many pushers & shovers at which to direct its ire, or back in the land of his first naturalization where they run the show.
As for Mark Zuckerberg escaping to his "virtual metaverse," well that's certainly in keeping with the overall seriousness of the Guardian.
The very plot of rainbow 6, a 1998 Tom Clancy novel, except the preppers are actually helping the catastrophes along.
And, if I’m not misremembering, of Silo as well.
Yes -- in Wool (Silo), the silo builders launch the nukes / biological weapons. The weird thing about the Silo universe is that Hugh Howey thinks the mass murderers were the good guys.
> Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis?
Do you have evidence that the ultra wealthy are actually taking this into account? Over a human timeframe every ultra wealthy person has access to plenty of “climate change safe“ locations, no particular advance planning is needed.
“Climate change safe” for the rich:
- Hard to reach by land (not vulnerable to migration waves)
- Not so small there will be incredible deprivation if sea trade volume plunges (this rules out the vast majority of island nations)
- Not badly overpopulated
- Correct latitude (not too close to the equator)
- Stable liberal democracy (so they probably won’t take all your stuff)
- Unlikely target for outright conquest in great-powers games or expansion.
Bonus points:
- Interesting, varied natural environments.
They are indeed thinking about this stuff. It’s why so many are buying New Zealand citizenship and buying land there (and sometimes building their survival bunkers there too). It checks every single box, and basically nowhere else does.
In the next 30 years:
Is anyone predicting damaging "migration waves" in: Washington state, British Columbia, Argentina, Italy, Australia, South Africa, Japan? That's just off the top of my head, I think the real list would be much longer than that.
"The vast majority of island nations" -- this doesn't seem like much of a constraint in the first place? But are you talking about Japan, New Zealand, and Indonesia? Or Tuvalu and Fiji?
"Not badly overpopulated" -- apart from a very small handful of countries, this doesn't shorten the list of locations.
Do you expect latitude to matter in the next 30 years?
My guess is that the ultra wealthy will, in general, not have "all their stuff" in one place. But also that most places are unlikely to take advantage of people bringing significant spending to the location.
If the U.S. continues its current course, yeah, games and expansion are risk factors. But again, there's a long list of countries that meet this criterion.
I'm just failing to see how we're headed for Mad Max-style anarchy in a human time frame.
There's about 1 billion people in North and South America. If there's some sort of catastrophic collapse, there's not going to be overpopulation or problematic waves of migration anywhere on those continents.
> Stable liberal democracy
Isn’t it precisely these stable liberal democracies where we have the most “the rich aren’t paying their fair share” rhetoric?
Some more taxes are a lot better than being disappeared with no due process whatsoever, or having huge amounts of your property seized with no due process. The rich benefit immensely from liberal democracy. The alternative is being forced to play all kinds of power-games with stakes a hell of a lot higher than the ones they deal with when they mess around with politics in democracies, and at a disadvantage if they’re foreign and those aren’t open, pluralistic societies.
Their worst-plausible-case in a liberal democracy (barring state collapse into something else) is they lose a teensy bit of their stuff. Nowhere near all of it.
Getting citizenship requires planning.
Only if the local government is still intact, which in this scenario is unlikely. At the very least they could bribe their way in.
Not even that. I doubt there are many governments that would not find ways to naturalize a billionaire, if they are willing to invest.
I want to know more about the bunkers they are building. Apparently tens of trillions spent on them.
I'm not sure a billionaire building a bunker is much different from you or me buying fire insurance. It's not that I expect my house to burn down, and it certainly won't prevent me doing everything I can to prevent fires. Even with it, my house burning down would be really bad. But I can afford the insurance, so why not have what protection I can?
did you skip over this part?
> “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
The paragraph that follows is
> This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
So how is it "much different"? These people are focused on maintaining their power and social status in a hierarchy. They are not just getting insurance. They're looking to maintain social control
I don't understand this. That is, if you have $1B, I think you'd be a lunatic to not spend $20M in "insurance". Why wouldn't you "prep"?
I'm not rich, but I live in rural Canada. So I have the possibility of being cut off from power, and during intense storms days or even weeks. I have 6 months of canned food, the logic being that I may have company, or I may need to care for my neighbours during time of need. And if there's no power (heat), your daily intake of food can double or triple.
So I buy canned food on sale, save money, and also have insurance. It's saving me money by buying in bulk on sale.
Do I think I will be cut off for weeks? No, not really. But it can happen, and yet this costs me nothing except pondering what I should do. It's just sensible. Just like when one buys insurance, you don't plan to have your house destroyed, but you buy house insurance, because it can happen.
So I really see no evidence of "knowing something will happen" or even "expecting it to", when I see someone with millions of dollars in spare cash, buying insurance.
In fact, if you have $1B, and no 'escape plan', what the hell is the money even for?! I'd think ensuring your future would be a big part of it a good use case, right?
Did you not read this part?
> “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
The paragraph that follows that says:
> This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?
If you can make a compound, then of course you're worried it will be taken from you in times of stress or unrest. Why wouldn't you? What's the point of making it, if it can be taken away?
Disaster planning, security planning in fact, means taking into account all aspects of the scenario. This is a valid question.
Don't forget how violence is considered wrong no matter what. It's created a situation where the rich are protected by their money and exaggerated value of human life pushed by the rest of the population
> Calculation of unemployment […]
Define "unemployment". There are six (U-1 to -6) ways of classification in the US:
* https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unemployment.asp
And the fact that they're different between the US and other countries, and between other countries and other-other countries is well recognized; "International unemployment rates: how comparable are they?":
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/06/art1full.pdf
And this isn't something new; from 1957, "International Comparison of Unemployment Rates":
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/measurement-and-beha...
Just because they're different does not mean that they are "misleading" or 'manipulated'.
> The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.'
How is this new? Is greed something discovered recently and especially in the US?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
Kudos to this point.
For those not realizing that unemployment has several definitions - isn't it wonderful that all were published AND all are well-documented?
It's these points of reliability and trustworthiness that, complexity aside, we are losing from chaotic administration.
I worked on a couple of projects with state workforce development agencies and federal agencies. I was always impressed with how much focus there was on the integrity of unemployment numbers, and especially with the emphasis on making sure methodologies ensure that data from the late 1800s can be compared against modern data.
> Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:
The irony of the anti DEI crowd being even less meritocratic than the caricature that they’ve created of their opposition.
My biggest issue with "the" unemployment rate is that the one everyone hears all the time is around 4-5%. I think this is massively misleading because it lends itself to people thinking if you picked 100 random men from ages 25 to 54, you'd expect about 5 of them to be unemployed. The real number is actually around 20% are unemployed:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
If you can dismiss 15% of them because they're not actively looking, or being a full-time parent, or disabled, I think it's missing the bigger picture that I would guess almost all of them want to work and have income, but can't due to things that we can fix as a society. Instead we divert to a 5% number that feels like "don't look over here" strategy. It's also entirely not capturing underemployment, which I imagine is a huge issue too.
The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.
I would argue the empire already collapsed, about a year ago when DOGE was tasked with killing every form of soft power that were put in place to present the country in the best possible light across the world.
Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
The first sign many Roman citizens had that their empire had collapsed is when a bridge near them fell down and nobody showed up to repair it.
America's been in that mode for a long time.
That is your local city and county, not the "American empire". And your judgement in choosing where you live!8))
Is your local city and county not part of the empire?
If the empire doesn't have any cities and counties, it must have already collapsed.
Take a drive on an interstate highways. Whenever I take an Uber/Lyft to the airport I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US.
US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.
The first world is defined as the countries that are affiliated with the USA, so that's not strictly accurate. However, we can say it's a developing country - a first-world developing country.
> I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US. > US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.
So why do so many people want to keep coming here?
It's a financial accident. After World War 2, the USA was the least damaged country on the winning side, so it got to own the western world's financial system. It used that [exorbitant privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege) - possibly unintentionally - to import money and export inflation for decades, keeping the exchange rate skewed in its favor.
People aren't coming for the scenic canyons, they're coming to get some of that USA money, so they can be on the benefitting side of the skewed exchange rate, instead of the losing side. Many of them exchange part of their salary for their home currency and send it home, in quantities that would be impossible to accrue if you did the same work in that country.
> So why do so many people want to keep coming here?
They don't, in fact, at least not anymore:
"We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...
Still better than the third world. For instance, UK is seen as a vassal state of US, and it lost its old glory. Still people want to migrate to UK. Many French speaking folks from Africa want to migrate to France and others.
Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).
The Uber drivers I talked have their families back home. That is how we end up comparing airports. That tells you where third world people see their future.
Every foreign-born person I (American) have as friends is either: 1. planning on moving back to their home country soon (which comparatively has its shit together) or 2. has already moved back to their home country. They know when they're no longer welcome here, and most have made a decent enough living here to coast back in their countries. Hell, I'm seriously considering what it would take to escape, before we turn into some horrible mix of Idiocracy and the Handmaiden's Tale, and I'm naturally born here.
> would argue the empire already collapsed
The republic may be collapsing. The empire comes after. The rich benefit if we transition to an autocratic empire based on American military might.
When the roman republic collapsed, they were still at their upwards inflection point. Ceasar was still on a roll. They hadnt peaked yet. This feels more like when the empire was in the early stages of coming down from its peak.
I think the roman republic to empire transition doesnt have much to do with the trajectory of rome at all. Their institutions were still strong. With america, her institutional knowledge is being stripped apart. Thats hard to pull up from
> This feels more like when the empire was in the early stages of coming down from its peak
Based on which contemporaneous source? Personally, this feels like Cicero. Not Caligula.
... American military might...
Trump urges US allies to send warships to Strait of Hormuz as Iran vows to retaliate https://apnews.com/article/iran-iraq-us-trump-march-15-2026-...
> It'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be:
To Canada: Statements about Canada last year.
To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year
To the Middle East: Current events.
If I may go a step further in history: tearing up the JCPOA (AKA the Iran deal) was like shouting from a megaphone "the US word means nothing now". Even the Palestine situation could've been predicted 6 years before Oct 7th when the US was the very first nation to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, before 5 others followed (none of them "significant").
Things have definitely accelerated in the second term, but it's not like there weren't signs that political leaders definitely noticed were disruptive, even if the wider public weren't as aware at the time.
I do wonder how far certain acts could go in rebuilding the trust.
Ie real actual legal liability. Line up anyone who did insider trading, the doge guys, the big mouths in the big house, and put them through a zero tolerance military tribunal.
No bullshit kangaroo court where they're let off with a slap on the wrist because they're rich.
I mean strip every last one of these motherfuckers of everything they're worth. 180 the kangaroo court. Make a public mockery of them. Posters everywhere.
Think of it as a peace offering for the rest of the world. We could even include the war on terror guys in there, all the liars who claimed WMDs could go to the same federal prison. No cushions.
The Supreme Court doesn’t care. That’s the #1 sign the country is over, it’d take a miracle to get out of this decline. And then everyone is just going to be pardoned. There were no ethics baked into the constitution, that was the fatal flaw, even businesses have such things to prevent lawsuits or internal drama or issues
These would be table stakes. They would only indicate that America is moving in another direction than currently.
The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.
Besides, even getting to that point would need to mean that this situation would not arise again.
> The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.
Agreed, as I have said before (1) even if the next administration is very different, that has happened before in 2020-2024. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. Expecting it to happen a third time is reasonable. Wait and watch would be an appropriate response.
So your answer to restoring trust is to create a kangaroo court in the opposite direction?
"Hey sorry all these guys completely hijacked our checks and balances in their favor, we're going to remove them completely from societal circulation and try again"
IMHO Pax Americana ended (passed the point of no return) with GWB. Iraq, 2008 financial crisis, SCOTUS picks, unitary executive, extraordinary rendition, breaking of weapons treaties (nuke testing, bio & chem warfare), abandoning peace between Isreal & Palestinians, etc, etc.
Forfieted any remaining goodwill.
(Post 9/11, It would have been so easy to choose the other path.)
Trump just made it undeniable.
> It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands
It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.
> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued
I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.
The land of the free, and all that. America was a radical moral project when it was founded, as a republic (when monarchies dominated the world) with enshrined religious freedom (when state-enforced religions were the norm). The Civil War arguably had a large moral dimension, too.
* Does not apply to native Americans or slaves.
Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A, and initially Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak. The course of America as a moral project was pretty meandering, but the moral dimension was almost always there.
> Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak
Translation: Native Americans were nice to the European settlers, until the European settlers were in a position to murder and expel in the Native Americans. The genocide against the Native Americans happened both before and after the founding of the United States, which casts serious doubt on a claim that the US has a "moral" mission.
> Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A,
Not sure where this math came from. Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies at the time of the revolutionary war. It wasn't until later, and in some cases much later, that the so-called "free states" actually freed slaves.
The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding; but that moral platform differs significantly from our own today. The adjective "moral" does not mean "in good standing with what I believe is proper morality", it means "of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior".
I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.
Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
> The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding;
I guess you are referring to the principle of "no taxation without representation." Fair enough, but I don't find that consistent with twoodfin's comment, to which I am indirectly replying, that "America was a radical moral project when it was founded."
> Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
That is certainly how they wrote about it, but the point that suzzer99 and I are making is that they did not walk the walk. It's one thing to write fancy documents about all men being created equal, and it's quite another to actually emancipate the slaves or stop genociding the natives.
> The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate
I have a lot of lefty friends, and I don't know anyone who thinks anything remotely similar to that. Criticizing the ethical failings of a country in the hopes of improving it does not amount to a statement if illegitimacy. And I'm pretty sure that elected leftist politicians don't consider the government that they form to be illegitimate.
Or women. Or non-white immigrants. Or former slaves or their descendants. Etc etc
"Sold off" isn't wrong per se, but glosses over the root cause: Triffin dilemma.
The USD cannot exist as a reserve currency and support domestic manufacturing. That is to say, the US political engine and its benefactors sold out domestic manufacturing for international leverage.
Did it have to be this way? No, we could have implemented the Bancor, but the appeal of dominating international politics was irresistible. We cannot reindustrialize without giving up international financial power and with that in mind, who would still decide to switch?
Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
>Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries
Source? For unemployment, isn't the U-3 definition used for "headline unemployment" consistent to most other countries?
It is. Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.
That said, measurement is not as easy today with so many gig workers. Government data is often driven by proxies because its too hard to measure directly and the number of people getting an llc for their uber/doordash/lyft/etc job is throwing off our math. Government currently uses number of new businesses as a proxy since generally people starting businesses are hiring people.
> Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.
To be fair, CNN and MSNBC do the same in reverse.
> for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up
This is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.
Yes, it's the classic "both sides" myth. It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing.
> It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing
Manufacturing consent is horseshit because it gets the direction of causation wrong. Nobody is master planning any of this. Storytellers sell stories. And then politicians sense the vacuum of attention.
Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. DOGE then cut, mostly randomly. And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.
Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting.
> Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting
It’s opinionated. That isn’t the same as planned. A lot more of society is motivated by what sells ads right now than anyone is comfortable admitting outside those firms.
The whole point of the manufacturing consent propaganda model is that you don't need some vast conspiracy, you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat. And just look how consolidated the media is in the USA right now, and look at who makes decisions for those companies.
> Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads.
There are a million things that could've done to sell ads. Funny how they chose the one thing that just so happens to align with the particular political agenda of the president, who just so happens to be the current figurehead of the entire political movement with which Fox just coincidentally happens to have been tightly aligned for my entire adult life. Must be a coincidence.
> And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.
There was plenty of it, you just didn't see anything about it in the news except as page 10 human interest stories in the liberal-aligned media like NPR and the Boston Globe. Must be another editorial coincidence.
There is no way you can earnestly believe that the right-wing media doesn't favorably report on right-wing politicians and their causes. The Manufacturing Consent model is extremely successful among social science models in that it implies clear and testable predictions that have been corroborated again and again and again around the world, pretty much since the dawn of news media. If you don't agree with that assessment, then in my opinion you are ignoring reality or at best ignorant of it.
> you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat
And I’m saying that’s nonsense. The media operates on independent incentives. The political calculus then responds to it. Attention-driven society doesn’t need a maestro, and rarely has one. Pretending it does is comforting but wrong.
You claim it's nonsense, I claim it's been the reality in the United States for decades, and only becoming more true every year. You can choose to confront the evidence before you, or continue to live in willful ignorance, but the world you describe simply does not correspond to the one that we inhabit.
You’re arguing against the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology. It’s been a century since Bernays wrote the seminary work on this topic, why the credulity? The connections are not tenuous, these people are operating in the daylight, even giving public talks and publishing treatises about their strategies.
Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics.
You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor.
Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.
> the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology
And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy.
> Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc.
And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives.
It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.
Your comment is broadly misleading. In fact, I would say that "shadow stats" guys like you have enabled the destruction of the system by creating the space to cast doubt on the valid methods used by BLS. BLS unemployment metrics have a valid basis and where they differ from Eurostat those differences are minor and with rational basis (such as 16 vs. 15 year old starting age).
It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down. This spans back into Biden's term as well so it isn't one party either.
With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates. For a valid measure worth considering I'd also expect the stat to be released later when revisions are less likely because more actual data has been collected
> With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates
This is a valid hypothesis. It’s wrong, and I’ll explain why. (It’s a bad and invalid thing to conclude.)
If measurement errors were iid, you’d be correct. But they’re not. They’re well documented for not being so. Earlier survey results are biased by directional response bias inasmuch as the employers with the lease changes respond first. So the earliest releases tend to match whatever was going on before. Then the employers who had to do paperwork respond. And then, finally, someone gets around to calling the folks who never got back. Some of them aren’t around anymore.
So yeah, the directional tendency in revisions is well documented. And for a long time, the early releases were appreciated. But maybe American statistical and media literacy is such that only final releases should be released, which would mean we’d always be working with data 6 months to a year out of date.
That's all well and good in theory, but job reports data over recent years have noticeably shifted towards downward monthly revisions. Prior to the pandemic response, the graph [1] looks much more balanced with regards to positive and negative decisions.
[1] https://www.apmresearchlab.org/blog/how-abnormal-are-the-rev...
> but job reports data over recent years have noticeably shifted towards downward monthly revisions. Prior to the pandemic response, the graph [1] looks much more balanced with regards to positive and negative decisions
Yes. The reasons for this are well documented. Changing methodology for the preview estimates is rigorous. That means our published estimates lag best estimates, something the primary sources note in every release if one gets past the headlines.
Also, if you have one year of massive job gains and four years of flat and falling, you’ll spend most of your epoch biased one way. Again, not a sign of methodological problems. Just a predictable methodological artifact that folks are supposed to be able to incorporate before using, much less emotionally reacting to, the data.
Why would the shift to a new methodology bias the estimates to one end? I would expect a new methodology to make comparisons of data between the two systems to potentially be unhelpful, but I wouldn't expect a valid methodology to bias one way or another.
Related, I wouldn't expect past data to bias a current estimate. If 6 or 12 months of positive growth biases the next prediction it falls into the hot hands fallacy. It isn't predicting based on current predictions, its predicting based on recent past behavior and extrapolating forward. This only makes sense to do if the data is not yet available, and even then the extrapolation isn't a useful estimate of current conditions.
> If 6 or 12 months of positive growth biases the next prediction it falls into the hot hands fallacy
It’s a sample of a sample. The full sample is the final release. The early results are the preliminary releases. When firms change things they take longer to respond. So whichever way the economy is moving, there will be bias in that direction. If the economy is turning, you won’t know direction. If it’s accelerating or slowing down you don’t know magnitude. Sometimes context clues can help. Sometimes they can’t. There is no known statistical treatment for intuiting the missing data before one has it11
We agree here, and I am going a step further saying that the initial numbers are useless and are little more than throwing opinionated darts. Numbers shouldn't be released until they meet some reasonable level of response and statistical validity. Given that they do release numbers today, I judge them as early and either inaccurate and useless or politically motivated to push markets while there's no meaningful data to contradict them.