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Comment by noslenwerdna | Hacker News Reader

This response is a bit less than helpful. Could you provide an example of a metric from this diverse set that fits what the OP is asking for? I feel like there are at least two use cases from their post:

* a metric that measures if people's jobs are paying enough to put food on the table

* a metric that measures whether people's employment matches their education?

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Your first query is simply real wages. There are several real wage metrics in the bls data set. Here is a commonly referenced one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Your second query is more subjective. Most people would probably point you at the U6 underemployment number as that’s the most famous one. I like the employment projections series for this kind of question though https://www.bls.gov/emp/

For the second one I was hoping there was something like employment satisfaction, but thank you!

https://www.bls.gov/nls/ The longitudinal survey asks some job satisfaction questions though I’ve never tried to look for it by education level.

That real weekly wage data is basically why Trump almost and then did get reelected in one chart.

The more I look at that chart the stranger it gets. It feels like a good case for concluding CPI isn’t calculated properly

Why?

If you're talking about the spike in Q1 2020, there's nothing weird going on. That's from all the service workers getting laid off, which bumps up the average because they're typically lower paid, and no longer drag down the "employed" average.

Also, does it count the COVID checks?

>The usual weekly earnings data reflect only wage and salary earnings from work, not gross income from all sources. These data do not include the cash value of benefits such as employer-provided health insurance.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#earnings

About the US specifically, your government reports underemployment numbers, as do almost every country report salaries distribution.

This is all extremely well-known public information gathered and distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which they compile for free.

Here are all (6) unemployment measurements that the BLS makes(U1 thru U6): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

The BLS tracks damn near everything you could ever dream up economically: https://www.bls.gov/

Here you can browse every metric that the Federal Reserve Bank tracks: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/

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