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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
(Joke)
I thought it was obvious that it was referring to 100 people who are preppers who are not $100+ millionaires, but I looked at the profile of the GP and wasn't so sure.
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!
Calculating unemployment seems like it is always going to be a challenge no matter how it is done. For example, the current system in the US does not track unemployed graduates, as they have not been laid off and are not filing for unemployment benefits.
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?":
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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 is a reasonable position, however the assumption that it is the administration that is gaming them vs other motivated parties is open for discussion.
It is in fact not at all reasonable. They are saying that the BLS stats can't be trusted because they totally misunderstand the survey methodology. That isn't a reason!
> It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down.
There have been revisions since the forever, and this is because they depend in part of surveys, and if companies (and the people with-in them) don't bother responding in a timely or accurate manner then that's going to throw the sampling off.
> CES estimates are considered preliminary when first published each month because not all respondents report their payroll data by the initial release of employment, hours, and earnings. BLS continues to collect payroll data and revises estimates twice before the annual benchmark update (see benchmark revisions section below).
Post-COVID surveying seems to have become more difficult (and BLS budget stagnation/cuts haven't helped). This has been a known issue for a while; see Odd Lots episode "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
I don't say stuff like this very often, but are you actually blaming a victim for dealing with the reality of government bsing its own stats instead of the government that allowed this bs to continue? BLS had only one thing going for it and it is mostly that it was used for long enough time that changing methodology would prevent us from being able to compare it prior time ranges. That is it. Otherwise, the methodology itself is seriously flawed ( and likely was from get go, but these days, it is absolutely the worst possible mix of options ).
Honestly, your comment made me mildly angry. That said, can you say why you believe parent's comment is misleading?
I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Not once. If their methodology is built on that + unemployment data from State Unemployment agencies + data from payroll processors, anyone not collecting state unemployment benefits is invisible to the system, and half of the payroll is actually not even consituted of U.S. Citizens.
Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism. There's still be the other distortions in the data to account for, but I'd at least have an instance proving that yeah, there is somebody filling out these surveys and it isn't just something they say they do to make their magic unemployment number sound legit.
Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment. Last decade has burned my optimism hard. So when it comes to my ability to assume benevolent intent right now, there's a heavy bias against doing it, and a heavier bias in the direction of "what would be the easiest way to keep the System limping along?" The answer to that is "say you do one thing, in reality do another, and as long as no one comes lookin', it's gold." The finance industry runs on Trust moreso than anything else, and there ain't much to be said for Trusting anything you can't verify these days. Not from other humans.
> I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey.
Unless you have introduced yourself with this question to thousands of people, this is a totally meaningless statement. It says more about your social circle, your grasp of descriptive statistics, and the weird online stew you are soaking your brain in than it says about the CPS.
I can't tell if you are serious or not. Lets assume for a moment that there was once a benefit to BLS survey methodology ( I would argue otherwise, but w/e ). Is it a good methodology today?
So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?
Alternative is to build something better. Just about anything is better than the current survey system. What I would propose is something akin to "derived real-data unemployment system". All this data exists now, but is distributed. It can be stitched together, but if one was so inclined.
You made the argument and provided zero supporting evidence. As it stands, it's merely an opinion, and appears to be an uninformed one until you prove otherwise. That's what people are asking you to do.
Sigh, your supporting evidence is a record of someone saying something, which itself is merely an opinion.. men in glass houses and all that. The interesting thing about my opinion is that while it may not be AS informed as yours, it is notably above the average level of knowledge when it comes to BLS.
<< That's what people are asking you to do.
No. What I am being asked to do is: "Show me a better way, but I only accept a better way that is already utilized by someone else". Not a recipe for a thoughtful exchange of ideas.
It's no longer your government. It's run largely by Russia and Israel, using vast array of kompromats and bribes. Republicans and Democrats would rather burn the country to the ground that admit wrongdoing and do the time for it.
If one was to really think about national level bribes then presumably Saudi Arabia would be worthy of mention, given their involvement with the Trump (extended) family.
I'm not following the file disclosures in particular detail; I haven't yet heard any disclosures from the files that are evidence of kompromat. What are you thinking of?
We are tightly integrated with Israel, joined at the hip, but you realize we are at war with Russia right? If we were controlled by Russia, we would not be at war with them.
What does "best" means? Which population size would you consider comparable to the US (i assume you don't meant it in a way in which Germany would be the best 83,6 mil population country in the World)?
The collapse of the Soviet Union was ahistorical in many ways. It's rare that collapse of an empire can be pinpointed to a single day. And what you saw was a result of shock therapy imposed from the outside. I doubt that would happen to the US.
It's unlikely collapse will be felt as a singular, apocalyptic event. More like a slow, steady loss of influence and excess wealth. Countries on the periphery stop considering the empire's perspectives before making their own decisions. Other trading partners emerge. Bridges stop getting maintained until they're no longer usable.
And soft power declines. Imagine a day when the biggest pop star in the US, someone on the scale of Michael Jackson or Madonna nationally, is virtually unknown outside of its borders.
There are reasons to believe the American empire is in decline, but I maintain this will look more like Britain. It could take 50 years before American fully realize it.
Thankfully, that means there's plenty of time to reverse or mitigate the trends, or to make a decision to strengthen the Republic over the Empire.
The situations are not comparable at all. That was the collapse of an authoritarian (wasn’t totalitarian anymore by the time it’d collapse) system running (badly) on command economy. Most of the points you mention are therefore just really off.
Say, the Baltics flipping. Where the hell are we supposed to flip to? Russia? Where ethnic minorities are sent to die in expansionist wars in disproportionate numbers?
It's the incredible level of interwoven left/right, progressive/conservative, urban/rural populations in more or less every state.
More people voted for the current president in CA than in more or less any other state. Yet it is viewed as a "blue" state. The millions of Democratic voters in large cities like Houston or Atlanta may not control their state legislatures, but they are not going to sit by as those legislatures attempt to secede. Rural voters across most states are not going to sit by while their urban-controlled legislatures attempt to secede.
We don't have "peripheral" states here, and we don't have "red or blue" states. We have a mostly urban/rural divide that does not follow state boundaries in any sense at all.
You do not have a left / right system in the US. It's far-right vs center-right. If you'd have an actual left alternative you might have not re-elected Trump.
Remember Bernie? Got pushed out of the way by another rich spoiled brat called Hillary. That's not a coincidence.
So you're quite homogenous and belligerent, that doesn't make for a good mixing of opinions, I'm afraid.
It won't change until states nominally considered "red" or "blue" actually lose the vast majority of their nominally opposed population (e.g. Atlanta's current population migrates out of GA). Until then, just about every state is a complex mixture of populations with different political alignments and sufficient sizes to make secession extremely difficult if not impossible.
Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading
Excerpts:
“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”
Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.
“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.
That will lead to serious problems, as in the case of China, underestimating threats lead to losing edge, from EV to robots and other vital tech, and without experts to ground policy in reality, the country risks making erratic market moves and failing to spot risks from adversaries like China or Russia.Add to that inexperienced staff in the administration who makes the U.S. easier to manipulate.
the answer is reliable money. how much money would you pick up a verified 1 minute survey from the real u.s. government for? I'd do it for $5. (=$300 per hour) and hope for as many calls as possible.
For comparison purposes the U.S. budget is about $20,000 per person ($7t budget, a bit under 350m people), so the government could definitely pay you to answer their "spam" calls. (While mandating that first parties show that it is the real U.S. government and not a spammer.)
So it would be your actual first party telephone showing "Answer this real call from the U.S. government for $5 instantly, 1 minute average call time."
I think that would be a good way to get good data fast. What do you think? (At the same time, impersonating the U.S. government would remain illegal, and the first party would ensure the payment is real.)
The headline should read “what happens when US economic data is calculated differently.” Love it or hate it, that’s political perspective, but it’s been bad and wrong for a long time. Would you rather have consistency or accuracy? I’m not taking sides, it was already broken is all I’m saying.
The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.
This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.
Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.
"The change may cause policymakers to misjudge the economy’s health, investors to lose confidence in the reliability of the data, and the public to disengage from participating in official measures altogether."
Many neoliberal Western countries with good data have completely fumbled their economies post-GFC and post-Covid, just look at Canada's disastrous GDP per capita growth.
Canada’s population has increased at an astonishing rate, I wonder if that affects the per capita numbers. If you have the same industry in 2011 and 2026 but population went from 35 million to 42 million, per capita the numbers look terrible
According to OECD [1], population growth outran capital, housing, and infrastructure. So it's kind of like they didn't have enough "slots" to plug all of these additional people into.
They don't claim this is to only or even primary cause of Canada's weak per-capita GDP growth though. As you would expect, there are many, many causes.
One of the things I do like about the US, and that I think is a reason for America's ability to meet the challenges this country faces is that it has good data collection and aggregation mechanisms: from the seemingly-banal surveys and so on to satellite remote-sensing.
There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.
I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.
We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.
This ratchet effect of partially righting the ship every four years followed by drunken sailors YOLOing further into a reef because the ‘responsible party’ didn’t fix things fast enough is unsustainable. No clue how it ends but it’s so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage.
> so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage
Tangentially related, there was a local property nearby that had these large, aesthetic trees in the yard. The house was sold, a developer cut them all and flipped the house for sale.
I really have a hard time understanding the analogy of the "responsible party" existing, when it was objectively the Biden administration that did the most damage to the average American.
COVID damaged the average American. The Biden administration (and the preceding Trump administration) did not perform perfectly by any means, but US inflation was below that of most other OECD countries. Real wages took a serious hit and I understand people being mad about that, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the supply chain disruptions don’t cause real living standards to fall at least a little bit.
The establishment has been replaced by MAGA and The Heritage Foundation extremists. The "data collection", surveys, remote-sensing etc are things they all want to get rid of and are doing so.
Here's one article from last year about climate datasets being disappeared,
> just a matter of switching the admin, which we should be able to
I wish I shared your optimism. Being unable to change the admin has been the default state. The recent few centuries have been an exception. It's a big ship that we need to turn here. Might take longer than we think if we can manage it at all.
It's important to be realistic and honest about the short term, but optimistic about the long term. If you give in to doom and get cynical, you won't accomplish anything, and you're just doing their work for them.
No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.
People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests.
I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.
We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.
A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.
Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.
Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.
>They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus
That was fake news:
In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated.
In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions.
Citing Rebekah Jones in your argument is the opposite of convincing. She forged documents related to her firing to make her appear more sympathetic. She has been adjudicated guilty of cyberstalking and misuse of the state’s emergency notification system, and I haven’t seen a credible defense against those accusations. She’s a fraud, and many in the media uncritically boosted her claims because they shared her political aims. That people still cite her is proof of the old adage that a lie can travel across the world before the truth can lace its boots.
Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders? I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.
That’s 122,000 out of a labor force size of 170 million!!
Yes, month to month you have large absolute error bars vs. the monthly delta, but being an imperfect monthly barometer of labor force momentum is only the headline use of the establishment report.
While we're on the topic, why is it that we love to point the finger at other countries' corruption and we completely ignore the very obvious, rampant corruption in our own government? And I mean on both sides - Democrat and Republican. Insider trading, revolving door policies, etc. That's not even mentioning why we have people like Luigi Mangione. That's a whole separate elephant in the room.
Please don't "both side" this. As much as there is corruption in any administration, R or D, the levels we are seeing now are completely unprecedent and blunt. EG: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/trump-fundraise-emai... (from earlier this morning on the HN frontpage)
On that topic, how many presidents in the past have had merch stores after elected? I can understand fundraising during a campaign, but after winning or losing, the fundraising usually stops.
Merch. NFTs. Playing cards. Crypto coins. A phone. It's like we have Dennis Duffy as POTUS. If it were 40 years ago it would be like Reagan starting his own MLM.
And the worst part is, I don't think we will ever close this door. Even if the Democrats are in charge of the next presidency, the temptation of easy money will be too strong to resist. It wasn't done in the past, because it was assumed that the people would push back severely, but now that it is clear that they won't, it is full speed ahead.
This is a lot of similar-sounding-but-different problems.
EDIT:
For those not realizing that China has a long history of less-trustworthy stats, along with Iran and some other governments, here is some reading you can consider
On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.
On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.
It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
Europe won't be able to catch that. They're too busy regulating ahead of the tech. They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either. In a runaway takeoff scenario, they replace all their factory workers with robots and quickly scale and cost optimize. If America is smart, we might be able to do that too.
Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.
America needs to start pumping out new energy projects. It needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
And we do need factories and raw inputs. The robots will take over for humans within a decade. If we stick the landing, we could be the new China right here at home.
Edit: rate limited on replies, so updating my comment instead.
Edit 2: Europe supplies the EUV lithography, but intelligence manifests higher up the stack. If we're talking rate limits, lots of countries supply critical inputs.
I'm saying that Europe hasn't made strides towards developing their own models and infra, and it doesn't look like it's even close to starting to attack this problem. I want it to.
Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.
America needs to double down on investing in energy and factories now. It looks like it will pay off in a big way.
Edit 4:
> You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code
I would be extremely geopolitically anxious to rely on another country's tech in a take off scenario. Those tokens might be diverted to US businesses and factories. Or the US might strong arm concessions out of Europe. Europe needs domestic capability for this now.
It's not just Europe and sovereign nations. Workers and labor capital will be effectively frozen out of participation if there aren't open source equivalents.
> This is an downright evil take on the current situation.
It's just reality. Multipolarity means we're going to see a lot more of this type of framing, because it's what's happening on the ground.
This is an downright evil take on the current situation. The supply chains are so complex that no single country is capable of replicating them entirely. It starts with the fact that the required natural resources are distributed around the globe in a way that no country has access to all of them. The production chains from resources to finished machines are downright byzantine. And this becomes recursive with the need for specialized tools and their own production chains along the way. You need trains amd trucks and ships to be able to build semiconductors, for example. Except for maybe China pr India, there is no country that has the manpower to cover all of this domestically. The supply of workers and training falls far too short.
Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.
The result is either a silent collapse of that country's economy or the start of an ill-conceived war of conquest to gain by force what the country cannot supply itself.
> Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.
The problem is that Europe does not have a choice here. The Greenland steal crisis is on hold, but not fixed. America clearly shown it will abuse any ties there are - it will lock accounts to tech to bully and get what they want. It will use tariffs to bully countries to make laws, release presidents friends criminals from prisons, you name it.
Meanwhile, America seems to take Russian side in Russian expansion. Meanwhile, America is just cause major oil issue and potentially triggered next refugees crisis. Meanwhile, America clearly shown it does not even pretend to care bout war crimes and international law at all. It is sponsoring afd and other fascist parties all around the Europe while openly insulting Europe. Maybe it is too late for disconnect, but not trying would basically be a suicide for Europe.
It would be great if it was not "us vs them". But it is "us vs them". Trust toward American made Europe super vulnerable.
The US isn't the navel of the world. It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific community.
The European Union has many friendly trading partners left in the world and is also receiving an influx of previously US based talent. The trade decisions of the US aren't forcing the EU into isolationism. This is where your argument goes wrong IMO.
The US government has announced that it plans to actively support extreme right wing parties in the EU. If this comes to pass, it is a direct attack on political freedom in those countries, separate from any economic policy decisions. I don't know how well EU countries can defend themselves against this in the short amd medium term. Some counties have better defenses than others. But I see virtually all of them struggling.
> They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
42 European here.
I've heard my whole adult life that Europe is ten years behind USA.
That doesn't feel that bad though. Being bleeding edge comes with the thrill of the avant garde prestige. But it does also mean you take the downsides of navigating the unexplored unknown in your face with no one to help with turn key solution when it happens.
If it means 10 years buffer on big social seismic troubles, that doesn't sound too bad if there is indeed an efficient shelve. That's not necessarily the case on every matter though, like global climate change is going to impact everyone, no matter the political isolation, and if a direct military aggression happens, it can be hurtful no matter how prepared is the society.
> The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example
The US, not Europe.
ASML's EUV and High NA EUV production is all done in California via US DoE joint ventures (specifically Cymer LLC [0]). Additionally, their metrology IP is Taiwanese [1] as part of ASML's acquisition of HMI back in 2016 with Taiwanese approval [2].
ASML is the capital partner because in the early 2000s, the US government wanted to prevent a duopoly forming between Nikon and Canon for photolithography as part of an antitrust battle.
And the next generation of lithography tooling coming into Taiwan is being funded and developed by Japan [3] due to MUFG, Mitsui, Mizuho, and SoftBank becoming the primary capital partners for Taiwan's electronics industry [4]. This is also why TSMC is expanding in Japan and Taiwanese players are transferring IP to Rapidus.
Additonally, all the packaging, testing, and design work - especially leading edge nodes - is done in Asia, the US, and even Israel but not Europe.
---
Personally, I think Europe is too far behind at this point for the EUV and High NA EUV boom - Taiwan, the US, Japan, South Korea, China, and others deployed significant amounts of capital and subsidizes in the late 2010s and early 2020s and worked to build IP partnerships for front-end work with players like TSMC (US, Japan), UMC (China until 2019), PSMC (Japan, India), and Samsung (US).
The EU had a shot but Intel rolled back their Germany expansion plan in order to double down on 18A in Arizona, and TSMC decided to double down on Japan. Additonally, all the backend work is done in Taiwan, South Korea, China, ASEAN (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), Japan, the US, and even India now because Micron, Samsung, Amkor, and others transferred their IP there, and design is primarily concentrated in Taiwan, the US, China, Israel, and India and with Malaysia and Vietnam likely to become much more prominent in the next few years due to Arm and Marvell respectively.
What the EU can instead do is concentrate on power electronics (already a strong suite) and compound semiconductors (already a strong suite) and target a leapfrog technology like 2D semiconductor design and fabrication which is still in it's infancy and also has applications for quantum computing. The EU already has the capacity for "legacy" (but still critical) semiconductors but is too late to the game for sub-14nm fabrication.
And based on the kind of fundamental research and funding I've been seeing in the EU, this is the strategy that appears to be increasingly adopted within the EU - but this is something the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, the UK, Singapore, Canada, and even Vietnam and India are doing as well, and both French and German initiatives risk being misaligned due to mutual industrial competition. The fact that French players in the space would rather collaborate with Singaporean [5], Korean [6], American [7], Israeli [8], and Canadian [9] partners to develop IP instead of with other partners within Europe, it shows issues around misalignment.
The metrology is coming from Taiwan and California (HMI) as well. The Veldhoven campus "only" does final assembly (which should not be underestimated either - it's complex and high precision work).
But it's the light source and the metrology that is the blocker.
Edit: can't reply
> And mirrors from Carl Zeiss
Absolutely! But note how Zeiss/Trumpf is not ASML. If the US DoE changes the terms of the Cymer partnership and pressures Taiwan (who have just purchased $8B in US military equipment and whom the EU logistically speaking cannot protect) to revert the HMI acquisition, ASML is over.
Additonally, a lot of the muscle around Zeiss/Trumpf's mirrors is also at the Zeiss office in the Tri-Valley because of their partnership with LLNL.
And both China [0] and Japan [1] are in the process of building an Ex-ASML supply chain for EUV, NA EUV, and DUV, and will likely reach that point by the late 2020s to early 2030s.
> The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.
Yeah, the EUV photolithography machine, but not much else. American companies like Lam Research and Applied Materials are the leaders in thin film deposition and etch, KLA Tencor is the leader in metrology, and Synopsys and Cadance are the leaders in EDA (though there's also Germany's Mentor Graphics).
> It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
> Europe won't be able to catch that.
You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code? If Claude Code is the one reaping the majority of the benefits of "spit[ing] out a week's worth of business automation tasks", then it's not worth much to the business. If Claude Code isn't the one reaping the majority of those benefits, then...Europe can use Claude Code too and reap the benefits for their business as well.
Weird how all the American social media companies continue to try to operate in Europe in spit of the massive fines they keep on racking up in court. They can't help themselves, if there is money to be made they got to get in there.
The US government and software industry do not want Europe using Chinese AI for similar soft power reasons. A 1-billion strong market acclimating to Chinese *aaS is a net-loss for the US - see the panic about Canada allowing a few thousand Chinese cars
Open models are, at worst, a few months behind SOTA closed models. This has been the case since 2024, and there's no indication that it's going to change.
You don't need anybody to permit you access.
You can, in all seriousness, thank Meta and the Chinese for this.
I have been a nay sayer on LLMs/GPTs in general having tried many, but recently Ive been shepherding a fairly complex code build through the latest opus model and its quite impressive.
It still gets things wrong occasionally but the time its saved me has been substantial. Im starting to enjoy it.
I recently built a reasonably-complex embedded controls project using codex and an esp32.
Starting with systems stuff like "Set up vscode with whatever it needs to work with codex and talk to an esp32," and ending with "Now add a web interface with persistent tunables that always runs in both AP and station modes," my prompt inputs were very terse.
And it'd just kind of go forth and just do it. It'd even design and run its own tests.
I never once looked at the code. For all I know, the code doesn't even exist.
And it works. I'll be using it in the field (in the proverbial middle of nowhere) all next week. I have every expectation that it will behave itself.
(I did spend a lot of time defining and refining some ground rules with AGENTS.md, but in theory I get to re-use that effort for the next go.)
Arguably the greatest threats to the US's future is ourselves. If we fundamentally corrupt who we are as a nation we've already lost before the competition with rivals has even begun.
Our significant tech advances could become tools of our own downfall if they violate our values or undermine the social mobility of the American dream.
Frankly I think the people pushing this competitive mindset (particularly against the EU) are trying to mislead otherwise intelligent builder-sorts to not pay attention to the looting & destruction of American values.
>>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.
My immediate thought is - why is it a race. Like holy shit imagine if we could actually work together instead of having this mentality of "if we work hard the other countries won't catch that". As someone who grew up in the golden age of globalization and rise of the information superhighway, the way countries are just siloing themselves and treating everything as a zero sum game is both sad and scary - that's exactly how you lead the world on a path to another world war - telling yourself that you don't need anyone else and in fact you need to beat them to the punch and everyone else is your opponent. If an alien race was looking at us right now they'd be shaking their heads.
People tend to choose extremes. Either a total globalization or zero-sum games only. Everything in between bears risks of a cognitive overload so should be avoided at all costs.
> America [...] needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
America, in the form of the Trump administration and a Trump-subservient Congress, just spent the last year completely destroying trust on these issues and it would take decades of sustained effort to rebuild it.
> The integrity of U.S. statistical data is under threat from shrinking agency budgets, low response rates to government surveys, and political interference.
Just as both "sides" are upset about gerrymandering, yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...
So too with this debate. Haven't we heard the exact same arguments made, by the other "side"? I thought we weren't supposed to have flaming political bait on HN?
The solution to all of these problems is at hand, and we are the ones to build it. Let's just build.
There is a valid both sides argument to a lot of these issues IMO, but where the discussion ought to be is at how extreme “one” side has taken it.
Whether it’s executive orders, corruption, pardons, appointments, obstruction, gerrymandering. pedophilia, lying, etc. I don’t think there’s a valid defence of just how far one particular side has gone (and proactively I might add).
Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions?
FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t.
Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.
I’ll reply in good faith even though I detect sarcasm in your comment.
Generally nonpartisan commissions prioritise contiguity and compactness. There is an element of “I know it when I see it” because you’re trying to avoid both packing (packing minority voters from disparate areas into one) and cracking (distributing a minority district like Salt Like City into its 4 neighbouring districts, ensuring the city can’t vote for … whoever cities generally vote for).
So there is a human element involved, but these commissions generally do a reasonable job. You know how we know? States that move from nonpartisan to partisan commissions cause a dramatic change in the results of the next election. If the nonpartisan was biased like you imply with your air quotes, we wouldn’t observe that effect.
Also there are algorithms to draw fair districts without needing human judgement. See this paper[1] that expounds on one such algorithm.
1 - Swamy, R., King, D. M., & Jacobson, S. H. (2022). Multiobjective optimization for politically fair districting: A scalable multilevel approach. Operations Research, 71(2), 536–562. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2311
The economy can get better while life gets worse for most people. After all, an economy where 95% of the work was done by enslaved people might produce amazing profits and a very high GDP....
GDP is a measure of economic activity, and goes up when people are forced to rebuild after natural disasters etc.
%Debt to GDP excluding military pay and allowances indicates how your grandchildren will live. Above >130% they will be poor, and remain poor indefinitely. You may disagree, but it is not like anyone wants this to happen.
The economic conservatives were compromised, and went insane =3
I wish it were easier to measure well-being. Someone who works 20 hours a week and half has as much money may well be enjoying life more than someone working 40 hours a week, but we don't quantify this well.
When I lived in California I was always weirded out by colleagues talking about how they never took vacations. It's like bragging about being poor.
It may be unreliable to you. I see the life of most people around me getting better. Even people that are somewhat poor (not dirt poor, but free lunch poor) have homes, three squares and snacks, PS5, mobile phones with cellular data, and cable tv. The biggest life issues I see are usually strongly related to substance abuse and mental health.
Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.
There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.
EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.
If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
I honestly think that the idea that this is what’s happening is almost entirely propaganda.
I think people have an overly
rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery.
Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party.
Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several
This is overly optimistic and a "it hasn't happened to me yet so who cares" view. World War 3 has started and DHS is killing Americans and rounding up people in the street because one side was able to convince the country that the only thing to do was destroy and hurt a lot of people including themselves. That's not better than my past and it is significantly worse in a lot of ways. I haven't even received a cost of living increase in my salary in the last 5 years, let alone watch things and places I enjoy in life be dismantled so someone can make money off the attainment of bread.
We were speaking about economics. But I’m sorry anybody who thinks World War III has started has had their brain warped by propaganda even worse. You probably didn’t mean to illustrate my point but you did perfectly.
World wars happened when large numbers of countries had mutual aid agreements that were triggered. Those largely don’t exist anymore outside of NATO. See how literally nobody is putting troops on the ground to defend Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, etc. If world war war risk existed, the nukes would already be flying and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
The propaganda I’m talking about is very clear in your comment, you can’t just say some things suck, and there are things you don’t like, it has to be the most extreme version. We can’t just be involved in a couple wars we shouldn’t, it has to be World War III. Trump can’t just be a terrible president. He has to be Hitler. The DHS has killed three people, which is terrible, but it’s pretty far from the gestapo. That extremeism is exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m sorry your income has not increased in the last five years, but that is not the average Americans experience. The plural of anecdote is not data.
For Iran, China, USSR, for example, you had to back in estimates from observable benchmark information uncontaminated by dictatorships. You didn't have to do that with the US.
The US standard has been to document and standardize approaches -- and identify when things are changed and why. This was not common across all economies. It does give us several similar streams, e.g several versions of unemployment.
its a measurement process of a large and complicated system. some of the things you cite are actually signs that the system was actually kind of working. CPI is a basket of indicators, there is no way that's ever going to capture the whole picture.
the best we can ask for is apolitical appointees whose goal is to improve the process and transparency about how the data was collected, publication of the raw numbers, and publication of the methodology used to synthesize it.
my understanding that the appointment process has been corrupted, but do we know to what degree transparency has?
You can tell just from recent TikToks that the price inflation at the grocery stores is being fudged. Many items have 75-100+% price inflation from just a year ago.
I don't know why I'd trust TikToks when I also shop at multiple grocery stores every week.
Maybe there are a few outliers, but food inflation is definitely nowhere near 75=100+% YoY. The official price inflation numbers are much closer to what I've personally observed irl than what you see in viral TikToks.
TikToks get attention for being outlandish/exceptional, not for being an accurate representation of the norm.
The issue is that this isn't really supply constrained inflation. This is price discovery and discrimination by major retailers. The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. I have paid rather intense attention to the price of groceries since 2015 when I started purchasing for my business kitchen as we started providing prepared meals. In general, prices are very close to 2015 levels for the important goods.
I have some basic guidelines for an acceptable range that are from when I started in 2015.
Milk: $2.50 / g
Frozen Fruit $2/ lb
Cheese $3 / lb
Wheat $3 / 5lb
Oats $3 / 40 40 oz
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast $2 / lb
These are all prices that I am still able to routinely meet or exceed in 2026.
The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed.
This is a Bad Thing. Sure when I do grocery shopping I keep an eye out for bargains, but I also don't want to have my buying choices overly shaped by the retailer so I end up spending money on stuff I don't really want. I especially don't want to deal with coupons and buy-this-get-that offers. Planning out what to eat and remembering to get what I need is enough mental effort without having to spend time on discountmaxxing which is really just another kind of advertising.
acceptable range [...] Cheese $3 / lb
I don't know what kind of cheese you're getting for $3/lb but I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you.
I track my grocery spend and even with three growing kids it's gone up 18% the last 6 years. It's not scientific but I don't see how your statement can be true unless by "many items" you're not talking about the bulk of what my family spends
I regularly buy whole chickens (locally raised free range) for $1/lb. With individual cuts comparably cheap (and often BOGO). I live in an above-average, CoL area too.
I remember seeing a lot of social media posts during the Biden admin about grocery prices... Turns out a lot of folks were just comparing the same cart, not taking into account discontinued items that were being auto-replaced with more expensive goods, or things like that. It wasn't always an accurate representation.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.
But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.
In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.
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.
Impressive thought. It could also be a built-in mechanism by nature to reshuffle the cards.
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?
I recently saw “Mountainhead”. Apropos.
Had to look it up. Added to the list.
> 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.
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.
(Joke) I thought it was obvious that it was referring to 100 people who are preppers who are not $100+ millionaires, but I looked at the profile of the GP and wasn't so sure.
> karma: 178634
> about: Ski. Fly. Growth equity VC.
Yeah I think it might be the other way.
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!
Calculating unemployment seems like it is always going to be a challenge no matter how it is done. For example, the current system in the US does not track unemployed graduates, as they have not been laid off and are not filing for unemployment benefits.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
We are also still manufacturing more in constant-$ value than we ever have, we just use a lot fewer person-hours/$ to do it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANRGSP
"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?
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.
Or women. Or non-white immigrants. Or former slaves or their descendants. Etc etc
>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.
> 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.
> Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries.
This is a big claim. What other countries? What are their methods and how do they differ?
"for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up"
That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.
We’ve never doubted the BLS numbers before until this admin. Think about how that screws things.
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 is a reasonable position, however the assumption that it is the administration that is gaming them vs other motivated parties is open for discussion.
It is in fact not at all reasonable. They are saying that the BLS stats can't be trusted because they totally misunderstand the survey methodology. That isn't a reason!
> It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down.
There have been revisions since the forever, and this is because they depend in part of surveys, and if companies (and the people with-in them) don't bother responding in a timely or accurate manner then that's going to throw the sampling off.
> CES estimates are considered preliminary when first published each month because not all respondents report their payroll data by the initial release of employment, hours, and earnings. BLS continues to collect payroll data and revises estimates twice before the annual benchmark update (see benchmark revisions section below).
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ces/presentation.htm#revisions
Post-COVID surveying seems to have become more difficult (and BLS budget stagnation/cuts haven't helped). This has been a known issue for a while; see Odd Lots episode "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw
I don't say stuff like this very often, but are you actually blaming a victim for dealing with the reality of government bsing its own stats instead of the government that allowed this bs to continue? BLS had only one thing going for it and it is mostly that it was used for long enough time that changing methodology would prevent us from being able to compare it prior time ranges. That is it. Otherwise, the methodology itself is seriously flawed ( and likely was from get go, but these days, it is absolutely the worst possible mix of options ).
Honestly, your comment made me mildly angry. That said, can you say why you believe parent's comment is misleading?
Do you have a substantive complaint to make about the BLS methodology? So far all I see in your remark is shadowstats vibes.
I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Not once. If their methodology is built on that + unemployment data from State Unemployment agencies + data from payroll processors, anyone not collecting state unemployment benefits is invisible to the system, and half of the payroll is actually not even consituted of U.S. Citizens.
Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism. There's still be the other distortions in the data to account for, but I'd at least have an instance proving that yeah, there is somebody filling out these surveys and it isn't just something they say they do to make their magic unemployment number sound legit.
Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment. Last decade has burned my optimism hard. So when it comes to my ability to assume benevolent intent right now, there's a heavy bias against doing it, and a heavier bias in the direction of "what would be the easiest way to keep the System limping along?" The answer to that is "say you do one thing, in reality do another, and as long as no one comes lookin', it's gold." The finance industry runs on Trust moreso than anything else, and there ain't much to be said for Trusting anything you can't verify these days. Not from other humans.
> I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey
I’ve never met a single chicken farmer. Does that mean I should be sceptical about them existing? Like, what sort of metric is this for truth finding?
> to assume benevolent intent
No need. Markets move on these data. The rich and powerful bet their money on what they say.
> I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey.
Unless you have introduced yourself with this question to thousands of people, this is a totally meaningless statement. It says more about your social circle, your grasp of descriptive statistics, and the weird online stew you are soaking your brain in than it says about the CPS.
I can't tell if you are serious or not. Lets assume for a moment that there was once a benefit to BLS survey methodology ( I would argue otherwise, but w/e ). Is it a good methodology today?
So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?
What are the alternatives, and do other countries labor statistics agencies use them?
Alternative is to build something better. Just about anything is better than the current survey system. What I would propose is something akin to "derived real-data unemployment system". All this data exists now, but is distributed. It can be stitched together, but if one was so inclined.
<< do other countries
No, it doesn't mean I am wrong.
"BLS CPS is worse than a hypothetical better thing" is tautological, void, and without meaning.
You made the argument and provided zero supporting evidence. As it stands, it's merely an opinion, and appears to be an uninformed one until you prove otherwise. That's what people are asking you to do.
Sigh, your supporting evidence is a record of someone saying something, which itself is merely an opinion.. men in glass houses and all that. The interesting thing about my opinion is that while it may not be AS informed as yours, it is notably above the average level of knowledge when it comes to BLS.
<< That's what people are asking you to do.
No. What I am being asked to do is: "Show me a better way, but I only accept a better way that is already utilized by someone else". Not a recipe for a thoughtful exchange of ideas.
Sure, but thetes a sizeable diffetence when skewed data becomes no-data.
Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.
I say removing skewed data forces people to confront reality as it actually is.
Instead of "This economy sucks!" "Yeah, but look at the data, it's getting better..."
Now we just have "This economy sucks!" "Yeah"
> our government could do a better job
It's no longer your government. It's run largely by Russia and Israel, using vast array of kompromats and bribes. Republicans and Democrats would rather burn the country to the ground that admit wrongdoing and do the time for it.
Actual evidence of kompromats?
Israel? Bribes? We pay them ...
If one was to really think about national level bribes then presumably Saudi Arabia would be worthy of mention, given their involvement with the Trump (extended) family.
You pay Israel because AIPAC paid your politicians?
> Actual evidence of kompromats?
Epstein.
I'm not following the file disclosures in particular detail; I haven't yet heard any disclosures from the files that are evidence of kompromat. What are you thinking of?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/12/trump-jeffrey-epstein-ghisla...
We are tightly integrated with Israel, joined at the hip, but you realize we are at war with Russia right? If we were controlled by Russia, we would not be at war with them.
Are you? You're about to remove sanctions on them, not because they agreed to peace, because you destroyed your own other options (the Persian Gulf).
Many parents that nominally "control" their children might take issue with this claim.
I don't have a particular position on the actual "controlled by Russia" claim.
You would think...
Depending upon which party controls the White House, numbers seem to be released to support a predictable narrative, then adjusted later.
But that's probably just my lying' eyes.
this admin is different
Now they just stop releasing. Thats a sizeable change. Even if you have a known bias, we can adjusy for that bias.
But if you just stop collecting data? No, these are not your father's red versus blue stats.
Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden?
Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.
It’s amazing and terrifying watching an empire die
You should see it from the inside!
Nope, thanks!
The US is the best 400 mil population country in the world
Well, it's certainly not the "best" if you remove that population stipulation.
A bit like saying that Walmart is the best 4000 store grocery store in the USA.
What does "best" means? Which population size would you consider comparable to the US (i assume you don't meant it in a way in which Germany would be the best 83,6 mil population country in the World)?
> i assume you don't meant it in a way in which Germany would be the best 83,6 mil population country in the World
I think that's exactly what OP meant.
I spent a fair bit of time in the former Soviet Union, what happened there is instructive for what comes next.
I think we will see, across the West broadly, to varying extents:
- peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)
- widespread looting of public assets, a new oligarchal class minted
- total destruction of the middle class, particularly those with ties to government and NGOs (I'm in this camp and miserable for it)
- at least one civil war, lots of territorial disputes kicking off, separatism
- breakdown of law and order, local gangsters as local authorities
- mass ex-migration, ethnic cleansing
- weak governments, coups, demagogues, vassalage
- hyperinflation and scammy get rich quick scams (watch crypto)
The collapse of the Soviet Union was ahistorical in many ways. It's rare that collapse of an empire can be pinpointed to a single day. And what you saw was a result of shock therapy imposed from the outside. I doubt that would happen to the US.
It's unlikely collapse will be felt as a singular, apocalyptic event. More like a slow, steady loss of influence and excess wealth. Countries on the periphery stop considering the empire's perspectives before making their own decisions. Other trading partners emerge. Bridges stop getting maintained until they're no longer usable.
And soft power declines. Imagine a day when the biggest pop star in the US, someone on the scale of Michael Jackson or Madonna nationally, is virtually unknown outside of its borders.
There are reasons to believe the American empire is in decline, but I maintain this will look more like Britain. It could take 50 years before American fully realize it.
Thankfully, that means there's plenty of time to reverse or mitigate the trends, or to make a decision to strengthen the Republic over the Empire.
The situations are not comparable at all. That was the collapse of an authoritarian (wasn’t totalitarian anymore by the time it’d collapse) system running (badly) on command economy. Most of the points you mention are therefore just really off.
Say, the Baltics flipping. Where the hell are we supposed to flip to? Russia? Where ethnic minorities are sent to die in expansionist wars in disproportionate numbers?
> peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)
This is already happening with trade (e.g. soy beans) and with military purchases.
Canada is moving quickly with moving trade elsewhere.
There will be no "peripheral states flipping" in the USA. Secession is not an option here.
This is only true as long as there is money for the military.
When money is gone, the military is gone.
Money goes easily when a country has a large debt and need other countries to continue to buy into that debt.
It's not the military that makes it impossible.
It's the incredible level of interwoven left/right, progressive/conservative, urban/rural populations in more or less every state.
More people voted for the current president in CA than in more or less any other state. Yet it is viewed as a "blue" state. The millions of Democratic voters in large cities like Houston or Atlanta may not control their state legislatures, but they are not going to sit by as those legislatures attempt to secede. Rural voters across most states are not going to sit by while their urban-controlled legislatures attempt to secede.
We don't have "peripheral" states here, and we don't have "red or blue" states. We have a mostly urban/rural divide that does not follow state boundaries in any sense at all.
You do not have a left / right system in the US. It's far-right vs center-right. If you'd have an actual left alternative you might have not re-elected Trump.
Remember Bernie? Got pushed out of the way by another rich spoiled brat called Hillary. That's not a coincidence.
So you're quite homogenous and belligerent, that doesn't make for a good mixing of opinions, I'm afraid.
Under the current understanding of “not an option”. Who knows when this changes.
It won't change until states nominally considered "red" or "blue" actually lose the vast majority of their nominally opposed population (e.g. Atlanta's current population migrates out of GA). Until then, just about every state is a complex mixture of populations with different political alignments and sufficient sizes to make secession extremely difficult if not impossible.
It wasn’t an option in the USSR, either.
The "peripheral" countries mentioned in the GP were nations or at the very least distinct semi-national entities before the USSR.
States in the USA have no effective history before being a part of the USA.
The claim that economic data was ever 'accurate' is flawed. The real signal lies in the variability over time.
Speaking of US economic data reliability:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/economy/inflatio...
Story title:
Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading
Excerpts:
“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”
Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.
“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.
That will lead to serious problems, as in the case of China, underestimating threats lead to losing edge, from EV to robots and other vital tech, and without experts to ground policy in reality, the country risks making erratic market moves and failing to spot risks from adversaries like China or Russia.Add to that inexperienced staff in the administration who makes the U.S. easier to manipulate.
Wouldn't it be funny if they "fixed" spam calling in order to make it so that the government could call people again?
the answer is reliable money. how much money would you pick up a verified 1 minute survey from the real u.s. government for? I'd do it for $5. (=$300 per hour) and hope for as many calls as possible.
For comparison purposes the U.S. budget is about $20,000 per person ($7t budget, a bit under 350m people), so the government could definitely pay you to answer their "spam" calls. (While mandating that first parties show that it is the real U.S. government and not a spammer.)
So it would be your actual first party telephone showing "Answer this real call from the U.S. government for $5 instantly, 1 minute average call time."
I think that would be a good way to get good data fast. What do you think? (At the same time, impersonating the U.S. government would remain illegal, and the first party would ensure the payment is real.)
The headline should read “what happens when US economic data is calculated differently.” Love it or hate it, that’s political perspective, but it’s been bad and wrong for a long time. Would you rather have consistency or accuracy? I’m not taking sides, it was already broken is all I’m saying.
The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.
This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.
Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.
US economy data is not even WORM data anymore, lol. Let alone to be accurate.
"The change may cause policymakers to misjudge the economy’s health, investors to lose confidence in the reliability of the data, and the public to disengage from participating in official measures altogether."
Many neoliberal Western countries with good data have completely fumbled their economies post-GFC and post-Covid, just look at Canada's disastrous GDP per capita growth.
Canada’s population has increased at an astonishing rate, I wonder if that affects the per capita numbers. If you have the same industry in 2011 and 2026 but population went from 35 million to 42 million, per capita the numbers look terrible
According to OECD [1], population growth outran capital, housing, and infrastructure. So it's kind of like they didn't have enough "slots" to plug all of these additional people into.
They don't claim this is to only or even primary cause of Canada's weak per-capita GDP growth though. As you would expect, there are many, many causes.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
One of the things I do like about the US, and that I think is a reason for America's ability to meet the challenges this country faces is that it has good data collection and aggregation mechanisms: from the seemingly-banal surveys and so on to satellite remote-sensing.
There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.
I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.
We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.
This ratchet effect of partially righting the ship every four years followed by drunken sailors YOLOing further into a reef because the ‘responsible party’ didn’t fix things fast enough is unsustainable. No clue how it ends but it’s so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage.
> so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage
Tangentially related, there was a local property nearby that had these large, aesthetic trees in the yard. The house was sold, a developer cut them all and flipped the house for sale.
Probably took 50+ years to grow, gone in an hour.
I really have a hard time understanding the analogy of the "responsible party" existing, when it was objectively the Biden administration that did the most damage to the average American.
COVID damaged the average American. The Biden administration (and the preceding Trump administration) did not perform perfectly by any means, but US inflation was below that of most other OECD countries. Real wages took a serious hit and I understand people being mad about that, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the supply chain disruptions don’t cause real living standards to fall at least a little bit.
> The establishment folks are mostly sensible.
The establishment has been replaced by MAGA and The Heritage Foundation extremists. The "data collection", surveys, remote-sensing etc are things they all want to get rid of and are doing so.
Here's one article from last year about climate datasets being disappeared,
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250422-usa-scientists-r...
This is going to take a generation or two to fix. If we're lucky and work hard at it.
...and don't vote in more wreckers the whole time
> just a matter of switching the admin, which we should be able to
I wish I shared your optimism. Being unable to change the admin has been the default state. The recent few centuries have been an exception. It's a big ship that we need to turn here. Might take longer than we think if we can manage it at all.
It's important to be realistic and honest about the short term, but optimistic about the long term. If you give in to doom and get cynical, you won't accomplish anything, and you're just doing their work for them.
the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.
No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.
People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests.
I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.
We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.
A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.
Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.
Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.
>They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus
That was fake news:
In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated.
In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_Jones
Citing Rebekah Jones in your argument is the opposite of convincing. She forged documents related to her firing to make her appear more sympathetic. She has been adjudicated guilty of cyberstalking and misuse of the state’s emergency notification system, and I haven’t seen a credible defense against those accusations. She’s a fraud, and many in the media uncritically boosted her claims because they shared her political aims. That people still cite her is proof of the old adage that a lie can travel across the world before the truth can lace its boots.
> It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science.
When all they see is it being used to push narratives, they'd rather not have it at all.
Also, "There Are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" dates to the 1800s. This is nothing new.
Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders? I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.
“Never trust any data you haven’t manipulated yourself”.
The reported economic data has been squirrelly for many years.
For instance, the employment report (establishment survey) has an error rate or +/- 122,000 with 90% confidence--completely swamping the actual value.
It be like I said I was 2m tall on my dating profile and one date is frightened off by my being -0.2m tall and another by me being 4m tall.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm#
That’s 122,000 out of a labor force size of 170 million!!
Yes, month to month you have large absolute error bars vs. the monthly delta, but being an imperfect monthly barometer of labor force momentum is only the headline use of the establishment report.
This is the point #1 in the article, the need for better sampling methods. You do not get that easily.
That dating analogy would work better if America wasn’t messing up every relationship with lunatic behaviour.
Everyone swiped left long ago.
It's what we regularly accuse China of, right?
While we're on the topic, why is it that we love to point the finger at other countries' corruption and we completely ignore the very obvious, rampant corruption in our own government? And I mean on both sides - Democrat and Republican. Insider trading, revolving door policies, etc. That's not even mentioning why we have people like Luigi Mangione. That's a whole separate elephant in the room.
Please don't "both side" this. As much as there is corruption in any administration, R or D, the levels we are seeing now are completely unprecedent and blunt. EG: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/trump-fundraise-emai... (from earlier this morning on the HN frontpage)
On that topic, how many presidents in the past have had merch stores after elected? I can understand fundraising during a campaign, but after winning or losing, the fundraising usually stops.
The fundraising never stops, not even for lame ducks, because the money can always be delivered into related war chests.
But here it is going directly to the President's pockets. That has never happened before.
Merch. NFTs. Playing cards. Crypto coins. A phone. It's like we have Dennis Duffy as POTUS. If it were 40 years ago it would be like Reagan starting his own MLM.
And the worst part is, I don't think we will ever close this door. Even if the Democrats are in charge of the next presidency, the temptation of easy money will be too strong to resist. It wasn't done in the past, because it was assumed that the people would push back severely, but now that it is clear that they won't, it is full speed ahead.
Not accuse. Observed.
This is a lot of similar-sounding-but-different problems.
EDIT:
For those not realizing that China has a long history of less-trustworthy stats, along with Iran and some other governments, here is some reading you can consider
[0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha...
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293...
[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...
[3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9...
[4] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/350051528721174623-0050...
[5] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf
[6] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5140733
[7] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/22/4620
[8] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2022/06/03/mea...
[9] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf
[10] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23323/w233...
[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372649
[12] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15199/w151...
[13] https://www.economic-policy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/S...
[14] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1273505
[15] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...
[16] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10439...
I feel like we're dancing on the razor's edge.
On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.
On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.
It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
Europe won't be able to catch that. They're too busy regulating ahead of the tech. They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either. In a runaway takeoff scenario, they replace all their factory workers with robots and quickly scale and cost optimize. If America is smart, we might be able to do that too.
Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.
America needs to start pumping out new energy projects. It needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
And we do need factories and raw inputs. The robots will take over for humans within a decade. If we stick the landing, we could be the new China right here at home.
Edit: rate limited on replies, so updating my comment instead.
Edit 2: Europe supplies the EUV lithography, but intelligence manifests higher up the stack. If we're talking rate limits, lots of countries supply critical inputs. I'm saying that Europe hasn't made strides towards developing their own models and infra, and it doesn't look like it's even close to starting to attack this problem. I want it to.
Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.
America needs to double down on investing in energy and factories now. It looks like it will pay off in a big way.
Edit 4:
> You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code
I would be extremely geopolitically anxious to rely on another country's tech in a take off scenario. Those tokens might be diverted to US businesses and factories. Or the US might strong arm concessions out of Europe. Europe needs domestic capability for this now.
It's not just Europe and sovereign nations. Workers and labor capital will be effectively frozen out of participation if there aren't open source equivalents.
> This is an downright evil take on the current situation.
It's just reality. Multipolarity means we're going to see a lot more of this type of framing, because it's what's happening on the ground.
This is an downright evil take on the current situation. The supply chains are so complex that no single country is capable of replicating them entirely. It starts with the fact that the required natural resources are distributed around the globe in a way that no country has access to all of them. The production chains from resources to finished machines are downright byzantine. And this becomes recursive with the need for specialized tools and their own production chains along the way. You need trains amd trucks and ships to be able to build semiconductors, for example. Except for maybe China pr India, there is no country that has the manpower to cover all of this domestically. The supply of workers and training falls far too short.
Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.
The result is either a silent collapse of that country's economy or the start of an ill-conceived war of conquest to gain by force what the country cannot supply itself.
> Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.
The problem is that Europe does not have a choice here. The Greenland steal crisis is on hold, but not fixed. America clearly shown it will abuse any ties there are - it will lock accounts to tech to bully and get what they want. It will use tariffs to bully countries to make laws, release presidents friends criminals from prisons, you name it.
Meanwhile, America seems to take Russian side in Russian expansion. Meanwhile, America is just cause major oil issue and potentially triggered next refugees crisis. Meanwhile, America clearly shown it does not even pretend to care bout war crimes and international law at all. It is sponsoring afd and other fascist parties all around the Europe while openly insulting Europe. Maybe it is too late for disconnect, but not trying would basically be a suicide for Europe.
It would be great if it was not "us vs them". But it is "us vs them". Trust toward American made Europe super vulnerable.
The US isn't the navel of the world. It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific community.
The European Union has many friendly trading partners left in the world and is also receiving an influx of previously US based talent. The trade decisions of the US aren't forcing the EU into isolationism. This is where your argument goes wrong IMO.
The US government has announced that it plans to actively support extreme right wing parties in the EU. If this comes to pass, it is a direct attack on political freedom in those countries, separate from any economic policy decisions. I don't know how well EU countries can defend themselves against this in the short amd medium term. Some counties have better defenses than others. But I see virtually all of them struggling.
> It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific community
While asserting itself militarily. This is the Roman Republic —> Empire transition.
> They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
42 European here.
I've heard my whole adult life that Europe is ten years behind USA.
That doesn't feel that bad though. Being bleeding edge comes with the thrill of the avant garde prestige. But it does also mean you take the downsides of navigating the unexplored unknown in your face with no one to help with turn key solution when it happens.
If it means 10 years buffer on big social seismic troubles, that doesn't sound too bad if there is indeed an efficient shelve. That's not necessarily the case on every matter though, like global climate change is going to impact everyone, no matter the political isolation, and if a direct military aggression happens, it can be hurtful no matter how prepared is the society.
You really do not understand how interdependent everyone is. The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.
The US kneecapped itself for no reason.
> The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example
The US, not Europe.
ASML's EUV and High NA EUV production is all done in California via US DoE joint ventures (specifically Cymer LLC [0]). Additionally, their metrology IP is Taiwanese [1] as part of ASML's acquisition of HMI back in 2016 with Taiwanese approval [2].
ASML is the capital partner because in the early 2000s, the US government wanted to prevent a duopoly forming between Nikon and Canon for photolithography as part of an antitrust battle.
And the next generation of lithography tooling coming into Taiwan is being funded and developed by Japan [3] due to MUFG, Mitsui, Mizuho, and SoftBank becoming the primary capital partners for Taiwan's electronics industry [4]. This is also why TSMC is expanding in Japan and Taiwanese players are transferring IP to Rapidus.
Additonally, all the packaging, testing, and design work - especially leading edge nodes - is done in Asia, the US, and even Israel but not Europe.
---
Personally, I think Europe is too far behind at this point for the EUV and High NA EUV boom - Taiwan, the US, Japan, South Korea, China, and others deployed significant amounts of capital and subsidizes in the late 2010s and early 2020s and worked to build IP partnerships for front-end work with players like TSMC (US, Japan), UMC (China until 2019), PSMC (Japan, India), and Samsung (US).
The EU had a shot but Intel rolled back their Germany expansion plan in order to double down on 18A in Arizona, and TSMC decided to double down on Japan. Additonally, all the backend work is done in Taiwan, South Korea, China, ASEAN (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), Japan, the US, and even India now because Micron, Samsung, Amkor, and others transferred their IP there, and design is primarily concentrated in Taiwan, the US, China, Israel, and India and with Malaysia and Vietnam likely to become much more prominent in the next few years due to Arm and Marvell respectively.
What the EU can instead do is concentrate on power electronics (already a strong suite) and compound semiconductors (already a strong suite) and target a leapfrog technology like 2D semiconductor design and fabrication which is still in it's infancy and also has applications for quantum computing. The EU already has the capacity for "legacy" (but still critical) semiconductors but is too late to the game for sub-14nm fabrication.
And based on the kind of fundamental research and funding I've been seeing in the EU, this is the strategy that appears to be increasingly adopted within the EU - but this is something the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, the UK, Singapore, Canada, and even Vietnam and India are doing as well, and both French and German initiatives risk being misaligned due to mutual industrial competition. The fact that French players in the space would rather collaborate with Singaporean [5], Korean [6], American [7], Israeli [8], and Canadian [9] partners to develop IP instead of with other partners within Europe, it shows issues around misalignment.
[0] - https://www.cymer.com/
[1] - https://www.asml.com/en/company/about-asml/hmi
[2] - https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2016/asml-obtain...
[3] - https://www.nikkei.com/nkd/company/us/SNPS/news/?DisplayType...
[4] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors/japan-l...
[5] - https://www.pasqal.com/newsroom/three-new-partnerships-signe...
[6] - https://www.pasqal.com/newsroom/pasqal-expands-into-korea/
[7] - https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/governor-pritzker-a...
[8] - https://www.quantum-machines.co/blog/pushing-the-boundaries-...
[9] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2024/09/25/quebec-...
The laser source, not the rest of the machine.
The US used this agreement to bar ASML from selling the machines to China in 2018.
The machine is a clump of metal without the light source.
The metrology is coming from Taiwan and California (HMI) as well. The Veldhoven campus "only" does final assembly (which should not be underestimated either - it's complex and high precision work).
But it's the light source and the metrology that is the blocker.
Edit: can't reply
> And mirrors from Carl Zeiss
Absolutely! But note how Zeiss/Trumpf is not ASML. If the US DoE changes the terms of the Cymer partnership and pressures Taiwan (who have just purchased $8B in US military equipment and whom the EU logistically speaking cannot protect) to revert the HMI acquisition, ASML is over.
Additonally, a lot of the muscle around Zeiss/Trumpf's mirrors is also at the Zeiss office in the Tri-Valley because of their partnership with LLNL.
And both China [0] and Japan [1] are in the process of building an Ex-ASML supply chain for EUV, NA EUV, and DUV, and will likely reach that point by the late 2020s to early 2030s.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...
[1] - https://www.nikkei.com/nkd/company/us/SNPS/news/?DisplayType...
And mirrors from Carl Zeiss. Heavy lifting on "only".
> The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.
Yeah, the EUV photolithography machine, but not much else. American companies like Lam Research and Applied Materials are the leaders in thin film deposition and etch, KLA Tencor is the leader in metrology, and Synopsys and Cadance are the leaders in EDA (though there's also Germany's Mentor Graphics).
> It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
> Europe won't be able to catch that.
You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code? If Claude Code is the one reaping the majority of the benefits of "spit[ing] out a week's worth of business automation tasks", then it's not worth much to the business. If Claude Code isn't the one reaping the majority of those benefits, then...Europe can use Claude Code too and reap the benefits for their business as well.
Well, if it becomes strategically advantageous to bar Europeans from doing so, why would we (Europeans) be permitted continued access?
Weird how all the American social media companies continue to try to operate in Europe in spit of the massive fines they keep on racking up in court. They can't help themselves, if there is money to be made they got to get in there.
Social media is a tool to shift public opinion and extract cash from the general populous. Claude, however, is actually useful.
The US government and software industry do not want Europe using Chinese AI for similar soft power reasons. A 1-billion strong market acclimating to Chinese *aaS is a net-loss for the US - see the panic about Canada allowing a few thousand Chinese cars
Open models are, at worst, a few months behind SOTA closed models. This has been the case since 2024, and there's no indication that it's going to change.
You don't need anybody to permit you access.
You can, in all seriousness, thank Meta and the Chinese for this.
"A few months" is an incredibly long time when the gap is widening on a daily basis.
I have been a nay sayer on LLMs/GPTs in general having tried many, but recently Ive been shepherding a fairly complex code build through the latest opus model and its quite impressive.
It still gets things wrong occasionally but the time its saved me has been substantial. Im starting to enjoy it.
I recently built a reasonably-complex embedded controls project using codex and an esp32.
Starting with systems stuff like "Set up vscode with whatever it needs to work with codex and talk to an esp32," and ending with "Now add a web interface with persistent tunables that always runs in both AP and station modes," my prompt inputs were very terse.
And it'd just kind of go forth and just do it. It'd even design and run its own tests.
I never once looked at the code. For all I know, the code doesn't even exist.
And it works. I'll be using it in the field (in the proverbial middle of nowhere) all next week. I have every expectation that it will behave itself.
(I did spend a lot of time defining and refining some ground rules with AGENTS.md, but in theory I get to re-use that effort for the next go.)
I'm not a fan of this "us vs. them" framing.
Arguably the greatest threats to the US's future is ourselves. If we fundamentally corrupt who we are as a nation we've already lost before the competition with rivals has even begun.
Our significant tech advances could become tools of our own downfall if they violate our values or undermine the social mobility of the American dream.
Frankly I think the people pushing this competitive mindset (particularly against the EU) are trying to mislead otherwise intelligent builder-sorts to not pay attention to the looting & destruction of American values.
>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.
https://www.asml.com
I would be worried about the US militarily capturing Eindhoven if Europe dared to cut them off.
ASML is under US export control though. Probably because there is US tech in there.
>>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.
My immediate thought is - why is it a race. Like holy shit imagine if we could actually work together instead of having this mentality of "if we work hard the other countries won't catch that". As someone who grew up in the golden age of globalization and rise of the information superhighway, the way countries are just siloing themselves and treating everything as a zero sum game is both sad and scary - that's exactly how you lead the world on a path to another world war - telling yourself that you don't need anyone else and in fact you need to beat them to the punch and everyone else is your opponent. If an alien race was looking at us right now they'd be shaking their heads.
People tend to choose extremes. Either a total globalization or zero-sum games only. Everything in between bears risks of a cognitive overload so should be avoided at all costs.
> People tend to choose extremes.
Corporations, along with greedy, selfish people and also perhaps ignorant people too, tend to choose extremes.
The rest of us are remarkably good at compromising and finding common ground.
I think when Europe failed to handle Ukraine on their own, the optics started looking pretty bad.
They're handling Ukraine better than America is "handling" Iran
> America [...] needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
America, in the form of the Trump administration and a Trump-subservient Congress, just spent the last year completely destroying trust on these issues and it would take decades of sustained effort to rebuild it.
> The integrity of U.S. statistical data is under threat from shrinking agency budgets, low response rates to government surveys, and political interference.
Just as both "sides" are upset about gerrymandering, yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...
So too with this debate. Haven't we heard the exact same arguments made, by the other "side"? I thought we weren't supposed to have flaming political bait on HN?
The solution to all of these problems is at hand, and we are the ones to build it. Let's just build.
There is a valid both sides argument to a lot of these issues IMO, but where the discussion ought to be is at how extreme “one” side has taken it.
Whether it’s executive orders, corruption, pardons, appointments, obstruction, gerrymandering. pedophilia, lying, etc. I don’t think there’s a valid defence of just how far one particular side has gone (and proactively I might add).
Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions?
FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t.
Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.
Great! So please explain what algorithms are used by these "nonpartisan" commissions?
I’ll reply in good faith even though I detect sarcasm in your comment.
Generally nonpartisan commissions prioritise contiguity and compactness. There is an element of “I know it when I see it” because you’re trying to avoid both packing (packing minority voters from disparate areas into one) and cracking (distributing a minority district like Salt Like City into its 4 neighbouring districts, ensuring the city can’t vote for … whoever cities generally vote for).
So there is a human element involved, but these commissions generally do a reasonable job. You know how we know? States that move from nonpartisan to partisan commissions cause a dramatic change in the results of the next election. If the nonpartisan was biased like you imply with your air quotes, we wouldn’t observe that effect.
Also there are algorithms to draw fair districts without needing human judgement. See this paper[1] that expounds on one such algorithm.
1 - Swamy, R., King, D. M., & Jacobson, S. H. (2022). Multiobjective optimization for politically fair districting: A scalable multilevel approach. Operations Research, 71(2), 536–562. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2311
They're not.
> yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...
Last week there was mention here of a proposal to fix the apportionment of House seats so that they are not capped at 435.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332108
This proposal would make gerrymandering much harder.
Its been unreliable my entire life. Every year the economy gets better but life gets worse. You can't even recognize the country any more.
The economy can get better while life gets worse for most people. After all, an economy where 95% of the work was done by enslaved people might produce amazing profits and a very high GDP....
The use of GDP, or GDP/Population as the primary metric is a real problem.
We need to use a metric that is closer to "total economic benefit for the median person", that would include income, as well as government services.
The Gini coefficient and sometimes its' velocity would be a better alternative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
GDP is a measure of economic activity, and goes up when people are forced to rebuild after natural disasters etc.
%Debt to GDP excluding military pay and allowances indicates how your grandchildren will live. Above >130% they will be poor, and remain poor indefinitely. You may disagree, but it is not like anyone wants this to happen.
The economic conservatives were compromised, and went insane =3
I wish it were easier to measure well-being. Someone who works 20 hours a week and half has as much money may well be enjoying life more than someone working 40 hours a week, but we don't quantify this well.
When I lived in California I was always weirded out by colleagues talking about how they never took vacations. It's like bragging about being poor.
It may be unreliable to you. I see the life of most people around me getting better. Even people that are somewhat poor (not dirt poor, but free lunch poor) have homes, three squares and snacks, PS5, mobile phones with cellular data, and cable tv. The biggest life issues I see are usually strongly related to substance abuse and mental health.
Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.
There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.
EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.
If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
A subjective sample of yourself isn’t representative of the overall economy or the way an economy should be run.
I’m curious how you would respond to the arguments in this video.
https://youtu.be/9KJTWmRrneo?si=I9mvSPfDnhkckb9n
This chart: https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-vs-inflation/
And Case-Shiller is based on price-per-square footage, so the argument that houses are bigger is moot.
I honestly think that the idea that this is what’s happening is almost entirely propaganda.
I think people have an overly rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery.
Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party.
Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several
This is overly optimistic and a "it hasn't happened to me yet so who cares" view. World War 3 has started and DHS is killing Americans and rounding up people in the street because one side was able to convince the country that the only thing to do was destroy and hurt a lot of people including themselves. That's not better than my past and it is significantly worse in a lot of ways. I haven't even received a cost of living increase in my salary in the last 5 years, let alone watch things and places I enjoy in life be dismantled so someone can make money off the attainment of bread.
We were speaking about economics. But I’m sorry anybody who thinks World War III has started has had their brain warped by propaganda even worse. You probably didn’t mean to illustrate my point but you did perfectly.
World wars happened when large numbers of countries had mutual aid agreements that were triggered. Those largely don’t exist anymore outside of NATO. See how literally nobody is putting troops on the ground to defend Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, etc. If world war war risk existed, the nukes would already be flying and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
The propaganda I’m talking about is very clear in your comment, you can’t just say some things suck, and there are things you don’t like, it has to be the most extreme version. We can’t just be involved in a couple wars we shouldn’t, it has to be World War III. Trump can’t just be a terrible president. He has to be Hitler. The DHS has killed three people, which is terrible, but it’s pretty far from the gestapo. That extremeism is exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m sorry your income has not increased in the last five years, but that is not the average Americans experience. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Sorry, did I miss the period when economic data was reliable?
EDIT:
- GDP is a construct
- CPI has been overhauled many times
- Unemployment has always been politicized wrt what to count
- Trade data misses entire segments ie services, transfer pricing, digital
- Job creation is a black box
- The Fed
- The lag between monetary/fiscal/trade/regulatory policy
1900 to 2024 for the US.
For Iran, China, USSR, for example, you had to back in estimates from observable benchmark information uncontaminated by dictatorships. You didn't have to do that with the US.
The US standard has been to document and standardize approaches -- and identify when things are changed and why. This was not common across all economies. It does give us several similar streams, e.g several versions of unemployment.
Can you address any of the points the commenter made instead of retreating into an ideological non sequitur?
My comment was made prior to the parent's edit.Further, familiarity with the subject does not make an informed comment a non-sequitur. Happy reading.
[0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha...
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293...
[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...
[3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9...
[4] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/350051528721174623-0050...
[5] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf
[6] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5140733
[7] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/22/4620
[8] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2022/06/03/mea...
[9] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf
[10] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23323/w233...
[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372649
[12] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15199/w151...
[13] https://www.economic-policy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/S...
[14] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1273505
[15] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...
[16] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10439...
its a measurement process of a large and complicated system. some of the things you cite are actually signs that the system was actually kind of working. CPI is a basket of indicators, there is no way that's ever going to capture the whole picture.
the best we can ask for is apolitical appointees whose goal is to improve the process and transparency about how the data was collected, publication of the raw numbers, and publication of the methodology used to synthesize it.
my understanding that the appointment process has been corrupted, but do we know to what degree transparency has?
You can tell just from recent TikToks that the price inflation at the grocery stores is being fudged. Many items have 75-100+% price inflation from just a year ago.
I don't know why I'd trust TikToks when I also shop at multiple grocery stores every week.
Maybe there are a few outliers, but food inflation is definitely nowhere near 75=100+% YoY. The official price inflation numbers are much closer to what I've personally observed irl than what you see in viral TikToks.
TikToks get attention for being outlandish/exceptional, not for being an accurate representation of the norm.
The issue is that this isn't really supply constrained inflation. This is price discovery and discrimination by major retailers. The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. I have paid rather intense attention to the price of groceries since 2015 when I started purchasing for my business kitchen as we started providing prepared meals. In general, prices are very close to 2015 levels for the important goods.
I have some basic guidelines for an acceptable range that are from when I started in 2015.
Milk: $2.50 / g Frozen Fruit $2/ lb Cheese $3 / lb Wheat $3 / 5lb Oats $3 / 40 40 oz Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast $2 / lb
These are all prices that I am still able to routinely meet or exceed in 2026.
The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed.
This is a Bad Thing. Sure when I do grocery shopping I keep an eye out for bargains, but I also don't want to have my buying choices overly shaped by the retailer so I end up spending money on stuff I don't really want. I especially don't want to deal with coupons and buy-this-get-that offers. Planning out what to eat and remembering to get what I need is enough mental effort without having to spend time on discountmaxxing which is really just another kind of advertising.
acceptable range [...] Cheese $3 / lb
I don't know what kind of cheese you're getting for $3/lb but I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you.
Beef is an outlier though. $20-$30/lb for supermarket quality is quite a lot.
I track my grocery spend and even with three growing kids it's gone up 18% the last 6 years. It's not scientific but I don't see how your statement can be true unless by "many items" you're not talking about the bulk of what my family spends
I regularly buy whole chickens (locally raised free range) for $1/lb. With individual cuts comparably cheap (and often BOGO). I live in an above-average, CoL area too.
Any many items don't.
If you select the biggest changes then sure.
My grocery spending is up about 45% since 2016. CPI in the UK is up 38% in the same time, but then my kids are teenagers and eating more.
I remember seeing a lot of social media posts during the Biden admin about grocery prices... Turns out a lot of folks were just comparing the same cart, not taking into account discontinued items that were being auto-replaced with more expensive goods, or things like that. It wasn't always an accurate representation.
Thankfully, we can totally trust noneconomic data like the census. No biases, design artifacts or legislative meddling there.
Edit: noneconomic not none comic.
Two things come to mind:
- Whatever you measure gets optimized.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.
But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.
In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.