US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide
ft.com
ft.com
Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic. It also never recovered from a major drop after the 2008 recession.
The first stages of a worldwide recession is what it looks like to me.
There are way more retired people as a percentage.
Immigration has always been used as leverage against the native workers, and now it’s more efficiently corrupt than ever.
I suppose that makes me a second-class citizen?
I can’t help but think talks of denaturalization are more than just fringe.
Or perhaps the numbers are starkly different, and for the best?
Boris Johnson was born in New York. "He wasn't born in this country" probably wasn't even on anybody's top-100 problems with Boris as Prime Minister.
While the rules of being a natural born citizen is more complicated if born outside of the US, you can generally become one if one of your parents is a US citizen.
How are the normal unemployment rates (U-3, U-6, etc.) "gamed" exactly? Or, put another way: what would you do differently?
https://www.lisep.org has alternate measures that try accounting for take home wages as well as seasonal variability (construction is noted as being volatile but relatively well paying).
Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.
That seems fine? It's the unemployment rate, after all, not "likes how much money they're making" rate.
Moreover if you compare these alternate measures, they more or less match the same trend as U-3. For instance:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...
So if the alternate measures mostly follow the same trend as U-3, and the numbers are only higher because they use a looser criteria, what's the point of bringing them up, other than as a cheap rhetorical device?
Suppose we had some way of objectively determining happiness on a 1-10 scale. The government puts out a metric called the "sad rate", which is people who are 2 or less on the scale. What's the point in coming along and declaring "the real sad rate is not actually 5%. If we change the cutoff to 3, it's actually 10%!"? Heck, why stop at 3? Why not declare everyone under 5 sad? Then the sad rate would be even bigger, great for doomposting!
* It would indicate more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives
* It would suggest more stay-at-home parents to rear children, which is only possible in a safe and stable economic environment
* It’d also suggest a higher amount of community engagement, rather than mere working and resting.
* A rise in successful single-income households would also suggest improvements in cost of living affordability
In our current world, where we expect both parents to work full-time jobs to survive (because the cost of everything assumes a married couple employed full-time, especially in cities), this number is bad; in a healthier society, it might be a good thing.
I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
Edit: my CEO owns ~125 houses.
It's funny you bring that up, given the statistics on this shows that it's been trending down, but nowhere close to the amount you'd expect from the popular discourse.
* From the social angle, we have got to address this notion of gender roles being a prerequisite for such a societal outcome. It's not a "women are homemakers and men are breadwinners" type bullshit, and it's not penalizing the homemaker by robbing them of personal growth. It's acknowledging that some of us - for whatever reason at all - may prefer contributing to the success of the home and community rather than the success of a business, and that's a perfectly valid path to follow in life with its own societal rewards and benefits that cannot be directly captured in terms of GDP or wealth. If a woman wants to have a high-growth career while the husband stays at home to raise the kids, we shouldn't be shaming or humiliating either participant for their decisions since both are valid not just to themselves, but to society as a whole.
* From a business perspective, we also need to figure out the right balance of regulations and reforms that prohibit (and meaningfully punish) discrimination based on these sorts of choices. Women shouldn't be penalized for having kids, men shouldn't be penalized for choosing to be a homemaker (full or part-time), and vice versa. It's acknowledging that gaps are normal because life is chaos, and rebuilding work around the flexibility to adapt to life rather than jamming everything into fixed blocks of time or location. COVID showed us this is possible, but the whiplash after shows that those in power refuse to change willingly; changes must come from external actors and forces because power refuses to acquiesce otherwise.
* From a government point of view, it's a lot of social safety nets and reforms. It's fixing healthcare, it's making childcare affordable, it's raising minimum wages; it's also raising taxes on multi-income households proportionate to earned income (higher taxes on higher incomes), expanding affordability programs into higher income tiers (such that unorthodox households aren't punished - this mainly targets immigrant and queer multi-family households), prioritizing "right-size" homeownership (taxing 2nd+ homes at higher rates, or large homes/land plots in dense urban areas at higher rates than multi-family or smaller-plot homes), expanding transit options to reduce costs of vehicle ownership and improve job opportunities, the list goes on for miles. The overarching goal is one of intentional vision rather than piecemeal band-aids: building the legal structures and safety nets needed to not merely "promote" this outcome, but all but mandate it via incentives and punishments. It's as much about reassuring people that their choice is valid and will result in a long and prosperous life as much as it is handcuffing Capital from squeezing blood from stones for shareholder value.
* EDIT: One thing Government could be doing to improve things now, that seems incredibly counter-intuitive on its face, is to stop means-testing benefits. We need to stop caring who is acceptable enough to get social benefits, and instead focus on ensuring benefits are used effectively regardless of who gets them - directly paying landlords instead of handing out vouchers, for instance, or curtailing SNAP/EBT uses away from ultra-processed foods, or just extending Medicare to everybody. Yes, there's a lot of questions around sustainability of these programs, but that's all the more reason to maximize their pool of users, cut out middlemen, and raise taxes to specifically cover costs of services instead of printing money to cover deficits. Patrick Boyle's latest video actually touches on this in the UK, where even high earners aren't motivated to do more work or earn more pay because losing means-tested benefits will cost them more than they would earn.
And that's just the high-level stuff. It's a lot to think about because it requires us to collectively fight for an intended future instead of just one-offing problems individually. That's a lot of work that not a lot of folks have ever had to do outside of minority spaces, and those muscles are going to need to be trained back into use over time. It's not impossible, but it is incredibly hard.
Unfortunately people will never divest themselves of this notion.
The only reason people "left money on the table" prior to the recent-ish past was incomplete information and a slow feedback loop, but with modern tech they have all the information they need to squeeze out every last dollar.
Algorithmic large database systems (like RealPage for apartments) were already causing this problem pre-AI and now it is going to get supercharged.
The only thing that would stop it is government regulation, and... good luck with that, at least in the US. The government here is well and fully captured by the same people vacuuming up all the wealth.
Likewise, nobody said the higher unemployment is combined with higher wages (it's combined with worse jobs and inflation), or that it indicates "more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives" (rather, family households live hand to mounth, and single with no kids still have troubles financially).
And of course there's absolutely no indication or real possibility that this will be the case.
>I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
Why not also give everybody a free pony while at it? So they can spend all that quality time they gain from not having a job in 2026.
It's pretty obvious the declining native born rate is just mirroring the overall decline in labor participation, probably from demographic changes. Old people retire and stop working, after all.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
If you look at prime age labor force participation rate, it tells a completely different story:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
It's ironic that you talk of "ungameable statistics", implying that others are misleading people with the statistics, when you're seemingly trying to do the same thing by selectively presenting that statistic to imply that immigrants are stealing native-born's jobs.
Why would it be "ungameable"?
1. Kaiser Permanente healthcare strike sidelined 28,000 workers. The strike ended on February 23rd.
2. The severe weather resulting in two major snow storms made it so that lots of businesses were simply closed for a few days. This meant they couldn’t be properly surveyed.
It still is not good, but the magnitude of how not good is worsened by specific one-time circumstances. Make of that what you will.
I can’t see the FT article but this one. Talks a bit about these circumstances: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/06/february-2026-jobs-report.ht...
Not sure why this source was used. There are plenty of other sources that are more accessible/available (that are already shared and discussed here).
US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February (bbc.com)
524 points | 23 hours ago | 733 comments
HN being a tech forum that now increasingly skews East and Midwest (heck, it's not even 7am yet in the West, but look at the degree of engagement on here) means most HNers are impacted by a slowdown in tech hiring, which exacerbates the sense of pessimism.
And tbf, if you aren't working in a tech hub like the Bay or NYC, you are going to be screwed if you are laid off - employers increasingly restrict remote work to those employees who have proven internal track records, and inshoring hubs like in RTP, Denver, Atlanta, etc are on the chopping block.
None of those are tech
No job means no healthcare or reduced coverage for many people for example, so it is a bigger deal to have unemployment.
Which means a Finnish or Spanish level unemployment would be much more catastrophic, however anyone expecting the demise of USA will have to keep waiting as the country is very rich and developed and as a result they will re-group and be fine - eventually.
There's also a stagnation of salaries relative to inflation and a slow hiring market that has people locked into a job when they'd like to find something better. The K-shaped recoveries have people slipping out of the middle class. Combine with housing increasing faster than inflation, future generations having a lower quality of life than their parents.
The wealthy are doing what they can to try to direct the narrative elsewhere, by controlling media sources, blaming immigrants, blaming China, and blaming the government. But we really have far too much wealth concentration to be sustainable, not unlike the ending of a game of monopoly. If a more stable solution isn't found soon, I fear things will get much worse than they already are.
It shows nearly 20% unemployment rates.
I think this is a better number, personally, than the 4.4% one that conveniently skips out on so many. It's always felt like an "optics" number to me. Like asking themselves how much can they possibly massage the data to look as good as possible.
I think it's meaningful to consider the amount of people who are unemployed even if they're not looking for work or can't work. It better highlights that there are societal level problems that are preventing a lot of these people from working when I imagine most of them would like to be - they just can't because of childcare needs, disability, incarceration, lack of access to opportunities, domestic abuse, etc.
"gold standard"... according to whom? Economists? Internet commentators? White nationalists?
For what? "labor participation rate" or "labor participation rate of white men over 20"? The former is regularly cited, but the latter seems like a contrived statistic to make a point.