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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Exactly: The 0.01% Elite bleeding out the planet and their biggest worries are: 1. How do I keep my doomsday bunker servants in line? 2. Or is a ticket to Mars the better option?

Mars isn't a good option due to lack of magnetosphere.

Personally if you want to propagate life by shooting containers of RNA at different extraterrestrial plants.

> due to lack of magnetosphere

Well, it's certainly one of the concerns there. After the lack of an atmosphere, biosphere, usable water...

Low gravity is another at only 0.39 Earth gravity.

It's an excellent option if you want to secure an incredible amount capital investment in a non-nonsensical pig of an idea - with visionary animations doing the heavy lifting as the most alluring lipstick known to man.

I recently saw “Mountainhead”. Apropos.

Had to look it up. Added to the list.

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.

Damn! I just nuked a long conversation with ChatGPT outlining my pet theory that with changes in scale of energy regimes (labor->wind/water->coal->oil->solar) we get an excess energetic capacity that means our entertainment systems can't handle! That excess spills out as elite political retrenchment, entertainment jealousy, and (finally) violence, expanded civil rights, and a new entertainment regime.

Mostly tongue in cheek... but the whole thing hangs together.

Try not to talk with LLMs too long, you’ll start talking like them faster than they adapt to you.

We often talk about "aligning models" or training them, little attention is paid to how models align/train _us_ as we interact with them. The reward functions they're trained under get "backpropagated" into our own brain, the language they use becomes familiar like a worn glove, and we learn not to step on any of their guardrails.

We shape the buildings that in turn shape us.

Sounds like Fallout

There’s a great opera on this topic called “Death and the Powers”, a trillionaire who transfers his consciousness to get out of his ailing body and, free from dependency on others, loses all empathy, while trying to convince the rest of his family to join him in cyberspace (thereby killing themselves), lots of themes of what you lose when you become disembodied, and becoming rich is just getting half way there.

After reading your comment; "there's always a bigger fish" has a wildly new meaning to me now

Once basic needs are well met then wealth is meaningless in absolute terms. It only matters in relative terms where you compare yourself to others. For the super billionaires, adding more zeros to their net worth has diminishing returns because their lives just can't get any materially better. So the relative subjective gap doesn't widen. In fact, if other groups make gains then the relative subjective gap can even shrink. For example, pretty much everyone has a powerful smart phone. The really really expensive phones only rich people can have are only marginally better in function and sometimes not even that. The only way to increase the relative gap then is to make other people's lives worse. And following on this line of thought, a devasting worldwide war or natural disaster would destroy most wealth (even their own), but once the dust settles they will still have more and the relative subjective gap between someone who has resources and the rest of the world who have none couldn't be bigger.

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Yes, there’s a point beyond which more wealth doesn’t matter much in absolute terms, but it’s way beyond “basic needs”. Having nice cars, nice homes, traveling, paying for expensive education, having staff help you with things, flying first class, flying private, vacationing on a yacht, collecting art, etc, etc. There are near endless things to spend wealth on, and new things get unlocked well into the hundreds of millions.

I mean yes you are correct here, but by the time you are in the 10s of billions phase you just don't see any difference in lifestyle.

Obviously, but again, that has nothing at all to do with being “beyond basic needs”.

Which is the very motivation of the villains in the old movie Hudson Hawk (1991 - Bruce Willis, Andie McDowell, Danny Aiello)

>They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.

Practically that's the best kind of collapse to prepare for. At least you know it's coming - and you have the power to shape it's direction.

Working class prepers on the other hand are naive.

I've never heard the term "statist" as a self-identified label. I've only ever heard anarchists use it pejoratively. Can I ask what you've read or what influenced you to take up that identity?

> 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?

(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.

> Or a hundred more $100+ millionaires who aren't preppers?

This.

I live in Wyoming and frequent the Bay Area, New York and some places in Europe and India. The rich preppers are rare. (And mostly techies or oil men.) It’s mostly a middle-class pursuit, the singler and older and maler the person, the more likely they own clothing in camo. If they’ve spent any time in a military or intelligence service, their “prepping” is basic emergency preparedness, not bunker lunacy. (Though one retired special ops guy who started military contracting kept a map of the bunkers. I think as a joke. The saying being a well-stocked bunker owned by an asshole is a good target for a group of guys with guns.)

At the end of the day, the rich preppers build bunkers because it gives them something interesting to talk about. That group is mostly chasing that high.

> (Though one retired special ops guy who started military contracting kept a map of the bunkers. I think as a joke. The saying being a well-stocked bunker owned by an asshole is a good target for a group of guys with guns.)

This made me laugh, as ultra wealthy preppers worrying about same (upthread) boils down to imposter syndrome: how can any of them be sure any of their individual value will still be valuable after a social collapse?

Yeah in the Road Warrior post-apocalypse future, no one is saying "We need a billionaire job creator!"

I second this. Prepping is far more popular among the middle and lower class people I know than the upper classes. Some mainstream religions even encourage prepping.

The perception that rich people are preppers comes from the string of stories about a few rich people prepping in New Zealand a few years ago. You can tell who gets their worldview from headlines when rich people are described as “they” who all act in unison and do this one thing that was in news headlines recently.

Was Larry Ellison a trendsetter? He bought the Hawaiian island of Lāna'i about 15 years ago from the owners of Dole, a continuation of American empire.

> He bought the Hawaiian island of Lāna'i

Every private island buyer isn’t a prepper. And if I had a private island, I’d probably build a bunker for shits and giggles.

You think you know a hundred who are not.

Why would they admit it? I imagine many of them have seen The Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" (1961) or something like it.

> Why would they admit it?

We’re friends and we brag to each other. They don’t. There are vanishingly few rich preppers who aren’t doing it for cocktail conversation. Those vanishing few, moreover, are looking for social isolation—they aren’t going galas and political invitationals.

Selling nonsense to preppers is good business. The rich would prefer to do good business. Not be it.

They're trying to thread the needle of a collapse bad enough that they'll retreat to their bunkers, but not so bad that their bodyguards will turn on them for their gold. Let's see how it works out!

The smart play is goats (for meat and milk), ammo, and maybe some silver if you want some ready "cash". You can barter the meat/milk, and even the ammo (but it has other uses).

I would bury a bunch of gold coins and act like it's my last one from the family heirlooms anytime I spent one. Shaving off chunks of a gold bar makes it pretty obvious there's more at the source. But yeah, ammo will be the new currency.

Definitely, "usable thing" such as ammo will be the currency.

After all, if it is societal collapse, that means no society, hence no bartering for shiny bits of metal. Why would anyone care about gold, or silver? There's no merchants. No social cohesion. What will you do with the gold? Look at it? Hope someone will trade stored food for it?

Why would anyone?

The unfortunate part is that it is far harder to move or carry or hide your wealth. It's quite tangible. Where do you store a million rounds of ammo, or maybe water filters, or even MREs or canned food? It all takes space, and in the end?

No person will horde such wealth if anyone knows they have it. It will be taken.

That's why prepping really only makes sense for temporary disasters in your region.

The very plot of rainbow 6, a 1998 Tom Clancy novel, except the preppers are actually helping the catastrophes along.

And, if I’m not misremembering, of Silo as well.

Helping the catastrophes along is Fallout.

Yes -- in Wool (Silo), the silo builders launch the nukes / biological weapons. The weird thing about the Silo universe is that Hugh Howey thinks the mass murderers were the good guys.

I really do wonder whether, should push come to shove, a Peter Thiel will really be better served in a small country like New Zealand that doesn't have many pushers & shovers at which to direct its ire, or back in the land of his first naturalization where they run the show.

As for Mark Zuckerberg escaping to his "virtual metaverse," well that's certainly in keeping with the overall seriousness of the Guardian.

> Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis?

Do you have evidence that the ultra wealthy are actually taking this into account? Over a human timeframe every ultra wealthy person has access to plenty of “climate change safe“ locations, no particular advance planning is needed.

Getting citizenship requires planning.

Only if the local government is still intact, which in this scenario is unlikely. At the very least they could bribe their way in.

Not even that. I doubt there are many governments that would not find ways to naturalize a billionaire, if they are willing to invest.

What time frame are you considering? You seriously think the world will cease to have functioning governments in the next thirty years?

“Climate change safe” for the rich:

- Hard to reach by land (not vulnerable to migration waves)

- Not so small there will be incredible deprivation if sea trade volume plunges (this rules out the vast majority of island nations)

- Not badly overpopulated

- Correct latitude (not too close to the equator)

- Stable liberal democracy (so they probably won’t take all your stuff)

- Unlikely target for outright conquest in great-powers games or expansion.

Bonus points:

- Interesting, varied natural environments.

They are indeed thinking about this stuff. It’s why so many are buying New Zealand citizenship and buying land there (and sometimes building their survival bunkers there too). It checks every single box, and basically nowhere else does.

> Stable liberal democracy

Isn’t it precisely these stable liberal democracies where we have the most “the rich aren’t paying their fair share” rhetoric?

Some more taxes are a lot better than being disappeared with no due process whatsoever, or having huge amounts of your property seized with no due process. The rich benefit immensely from liberal democracy. The alternative is being forced to play all kinds of power-games with stakes a hell of a lot higher than the ones they deal with when they mess around with politics in democracies, and at a disadvantage if they’re foreign and those aren’t open, pluralistic societies.

Their worst-plausible-case in a liberal democracy (barring state collapse into something else) is they lose a teensy bit of their stuff. Nowhere near all of it.

There's about 1 billion people in North and South America. If there's some sort of catastrophic collapse, there's not going to be overpopulation or problematic waves of migration anywhere on those continents.

In the next 30 years:

Is anyone predicting damaging "migration waves" in: Washington state, British Columbia, Argentina, Italy, Australia, South Africa, Japan? That's just off the top of my head, I think the real list would be much longer than that.

"The vast majority of island nations" -- this doesn't seem like much of a constraint in the first place? But are you talking about Japan, New Zealand, and Indonesia? Or Tuvalu and Fiji?

"Not badly overpopulated" -- apart from a very small handful of countries, this doesn't shorten the list of locations.

Do you expect latitude to matter in the next 30 years?

My guess is that the ultra wealthy will, in general, not have "all their stuff" in one place. But also that most places are unlikely to take advantage of people bringing significant spending to the location.

If the U.S. continues its current course, yeah, games and expansion are risk factors. But again, there's a long list of countries that meet this criterion.

I'm just failing to see how we're headed for Mad Max-style anarchy in a human time frame.

I'm not sure a billionaire building a bunker is much different from you or me buying fire insurance. It's not that I expect my house to burn down, and it certainly won't prevent me doing everything I can to prevent fires. Even with it, my house burning down would be really bad. But I can afford the insurance, so why not have what protection I can?

did you skip over this part?

> “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The paragraph that follows is

> This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

So how is it "much different"? These people are focused on maintaining their power and social status in a hierarchy. They are not just getting insurance. They're looking to maintain social control

Don't forget how violence is considered wrong no matter what. It's created a situation where the rich are protected by their money and exaggerated value of human life pushed by the rest of the population

I don't understand this. That is, if you have $1B, I think you'd be a lunatic to not spend $20M in "insurance". Why wouldn't you "prep"?

I'm not rich, but I live in rural Canada. So I have the possibility of being cut off from power, and during intense storms days or even weeks. I have 6 months of canned food, the logic being that I may have company, or I may need to care for my neighbours during time of need. And if there's no power (heat), your daily intake of food can double or triple.

So I buy canned food on sale, save money, and also have insurance. It's saving me money by buying in bulk on sale.

Do I think I will be cut off for weeks? No, not really. But it can happen, and yet this costs me nothing except pondering what I should do. It's just sensible. Just like when one buys insurance, you don't plan to have your house destroyed, but you buy house insurance, because it can happen.

So I really see no evidence of "knowing something will happen" or even "expecting it to", when I see someone with millions of dollars in spare cash, buying insurance.

In fact, if you have $1B, and no 'escape plan', what the hell is the money even for?! I'd think ensuring your future would be a big part of it a good use case, right?

Did you not read this part?

> “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The paragraph that follows that says:

Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?

If you can make a compound, then of course you're worried it will be taken from you in times of stress or unrest. Why wouldn't you? What's the point of making it, if it can be taken away?

Disaster planning, security planning in fact, means taking into account all aspects of the scenario. This is a valid question.

I want to know more about the bunkers they are building. Apparently tens of trillions spent on them.

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.

> It'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.

There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be:

To Canada: Statements about Canada last year.

To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year

To the Middle East: Current events.

If I may go a step further in history: tearing up the JCPOA (AKA the Iran deal) was like shouting from a megaphone "the US word means nothing now". Even the Palestine situation could've been predicted 6 years before Oct 7th when the US was the very first nation to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, before 5 others followed (none of them "significant").

Things have definitely accelerated in the second term, but it's not like there weren't signs that political leaders definitely noticed were disruptive, even if the wider public weren't as aware at the time.

I do wonder how far certain acts could go in rebuilding the trust.

Ie real actual legal liability. Line up anyone who did insider trading, the doge guys, the big mouths in the big house, and put them through a zero tolerance military tribunal.

No bullshit kangaroo court where they're let off with a slap on the wrist because they're rich.

I mean strip every last one of these motherfuckers of everything they're worth. 180 the kangaroo court. Make a public mockery of them. Posters everywhere.

Think of it as a peace offering for the rest of the world. We could even include the war on terror guys in there, all the liars who claimed WMDs could go to the same federal prison. No cushions.

The Supreme Court doesn’t care. That’s the #1 sign the country is over, it’d take a miracle to get out of this decline. And then everyone is just going to be pardoned. There were no ethics baked into the constitution, that was the fatal flaw, even businesses have such things to prevent lawsuits or internal drama or issues

So your answer to restoring trust is to create a kangaroo court in the opposite direction?

"Hey sorry all these guys completely hijacked our checks and balances in their favor, we're going to remove them completely from societal circulation and try again"

These would be table stakes. They would only indicate that America is moving in another direction than currently.

The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.

Besides, even getting to that point would need to mean that this situation would not arise again.

> The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.

Agreed, as I have said before (1) even if the next administration is very different, that has happened before in 2020-2024. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. Expecting it to happen a third time is reasonable. Wait and watch would be an appropriate response.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217131

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837147

The first sign many Roman citizens had that their empire had collapsed is when a bridge near them fell down and nobody showed up to repair it.

America's been in that mode for a long time.

That is your local city and county, not the "American empire". And your judgement in choosing where you live!8))

Is your local city and county not part of the empire?

If the empire doesn't have any cities and counties, it must have already collapsed.

Take a drive on an interstate highways. Whenever I take an Uber/Lyft to the airport I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US.

US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.

> I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US. > US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.

So why do so many people want to keep coming here?

The Uber drivers I talked have their families back home. That is how we end up comparing airports. That tells you where third world people see their future.

Every foreign-born person I (American) have as friends is either: 1. planning on moving back to their home country soon (which comparatively has its shit together) or 2. has already moved back to their home country. They know when they're no longer welcome here, and most have made a decent enough living here to coast back in their countries. Hell, I'm seriously considering what it would take to escape, before we turn into some horrible mix of Idiocracy and the Handmaiden's Tale, and I'm naturally born here.

It's a financial accident. After World War 2, the USA was the least damaged country on the winning side, so it got to own the western world's financial system. It used that [exorbitant privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege) - possibly unintentionally - to import money and export inflation for decades, keeping the exchange rate skewed in its favor.

People aren't coming for the scenic canyons, they're coming to get some of that USA money, so they can be on the benefitting side of the skewed exchange rate, instead of the losing side. Many of them exchange part of their salary for their home currency and send it home, in quantities that would be impossible to accrue if you did the same work in that country.

> So why do so many people want to keep coming here?

They don't, in fact, at least not anymore:

"We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...

Still better than the third world. For instance, UK is seen as a vassal state of US, and it lost its old glory. Still people want to migrate to UK. Many French speaking folks from Africa want to migrate to France and others.

Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).

The first world is defined as the countries that are affiliated with the USA, so that's not strictly accurate. However, we can say it's a developing country - a first-world developing country.

It's probably time to sit down, drink a cold one (or whatever relaxes you) and admit to yourself that the semantics have drifted.

We can't be a developing country when we're doing the opposite of developing.

> would argue the empire already collapsed

The republic may be collapsing. The empire comes after. The rich benefit if we transition to an autocratic empire based on American military might.

When the roman republic collapsed, they were still at their upwards inflection point. Ceasar was still on a roll. They hadnt peaked yet. This feels more like when the empire was in the early stages of coming down from its peak.

I think the roman republic to empire transition doesnt have much to do with the trajectory of rome at all. Their institutions were still strong. With america, her institutional knowledge is being stripped apart. Thats hard to pull up from

> This feels more like when the empire was in the early stages of coming down from its peak

Based on which contemporaneous source? Personally, this feels like Cicero. Not Caligula.

... American military might...

Trump urges US allies to send warships to Strait of Hormuz as Iran vows to retaliate https://apnews.com/article/iran-iraq-us-trump-march-15-2026-...

IMHO Pax Americana ended (passed the point of no return) with GWB. Iraq, 2008 financial crisis, SCOTUS picks, unitary executive, extraordinary rendition, breaking of weapons treaties (nuke testing, bio & chem warfare), abandoning peace between Isreal & Palestinians, etc, etc.

Forfieted any remaining goodwill.

(Post 9/11, It would have been so easy to choose the other path.)

Trump just made it undeniable.

> It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands

It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.

> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued

I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.

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

Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A, and initially Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak. The course of America as a moral project was pretty meandering, but the moral dimension was almost always there.

> Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak

Translation: Native Americans were nice to the European settlers, until the European settlers were in a position to murder and expel in the Native Americans. The genocide against the Native Americans happened both before and after the founding of the United States, which casts serious doubt on a claim that the US has a "moral" mission.

> Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A,

Not sure where this math came from. Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies at the time of the revolutionary war. It wasn't until later, and in some cases much later, that the so-called "free states" actually freed slaves.

The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding; but that moral platform differs significantly from our own today. The adjective "moral" does not mean "in good standing with what I believe is proper morality", it means "of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior".

I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.

Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.

> The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding;

I guess you are referring to the principle of "no taxation without representation." Fair enough, but I don't find that consistent with twoodfin's comment, to which I am indirectly replying, that "America was a radical moral project when it was founded."

> Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.

That is certainly how they wrote about it, but the point that suzzer99 and I are making is that they did not walk the walk. It's one thing to write fancy documents about all men being created equal, and it's quite another to actually emancipate the slaves or stop genociding the natives.

> The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate

I have a lot of lefty friends, and I don't know anyone who thinks anything remotely similar to that. Criticizing the ethical failings of a country in the hopes of improving it does not amount to a statement if illegitimacy. And I'm pretty sure that elected leftist politicians don't consider the government that they form to be illegitimate.

Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.

Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.

> Calculation of unemployment […]

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.

My biggest issue with "the" unemployment rate is that the one everyone hears all the time is around 4-5%. I think this is massively misleading because it lends itself to people thinking if you picked 100 random men from ages 25 to 54, you'd expect about 5 of them to be unemployed. The real number is actually around 20% are unemployed:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

If you can dismiss 15% of them because they're not actively looking, or being a full-time parent, or disabled, I think it's missing the bigger picture that I would guess almost all of them want to work and have income, but can't due to things that we can fix as a society. Instead we divert to a 5% number that feels like "don't look over here" strategy. It's also entirely not capturing underemployment, which I imagine is a huge issue too.

> Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:

The irony of the anti DEI crowd being even less meritocratic than the caricature that they’ve created of their opposition.

>Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries

Source? For unemployment, isn't the U-3 definition used for "headline unemployment" consistent to most other countries?

It is. Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.

That said, measurement is not as easy today with so many gig workers. Government data is often driven by proxies because its too hard to measure directly and the number of people getting an llc for their uber/doordash/lyft/etc job is throwing off our math. Government currently uses number of new businesses as a proxy since generally people starting businesses are hiring people.

> Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.

To be fair, CNN and MSNBC do the same in reverse.

CNN and MSNBC are not propaganda networks in the way that Fox is.

Or, you've bought into the propaganda and you have lost your objectivity.

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).

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 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.

It must be nice to live in a simple binary world.

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.

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.

No one's ever met a Gideon either.

> No one's ever met a Gideon either

I’ve never != nobody has.

It used to be an old Jay Leno late night bit

> 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 never complained about the Current Population Survey. Census Bureau does a great job. I complain about BLS. And yes, I'm the odd fellow who does, in fact, talk about weird niche 'work' minutiae with people because I'm actually curious how the world works, and whether our "authoritative metrics" are actually worth a damn. My grasp of descriptive statistics is just fine, thank you very much, but I also happen to know it doesn't work if you're not actually collecting data, and if the data you're collecting is incomplete, you're doing what is essentially inferential statistics (assuming your whole is entirely represented by what you have collected. If you don't check, you don't bloody know. If you actually are checking, it's not normally that hard to find the population you're checking with.

> 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

It comes from the Census bureau, a letter like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/frederickmd/comments/1p1j1my/did_an...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%22current+population+...

They only reach ~100k unique households per year, so you'd need to survey a few hundred people to find a respondent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Population_Survey#Meth...

> Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment

How might one distinguish such "scepticism" from ignorance?

See, Census letters are one thing. BLS is another. I've actually received Census letters. BLS ones, not so much, and given they claim to be collecting data through surveys all the damn time, I'd expect to have been able to find someone who filled one out. It's weird, to me, that my luck has been so bad in finding someone with context on it. At best I only find someone who knows BLS uses surveys as part of their methodology, usually through reference to the site. No one ever seems to be able to primary vouch for having been the one surveyed.

>How might one distinguish such "scepticism" from ignorance?

Ignorance doesn't seek to invalidate itself. Scepticism does. It does not enrich my life knowing there's a methodology to collect a "high value statistic", but not finding any on the ground proof of people who actually have primary exposure to the methodology. One can't reason around what the system is actually measuring without a sampling of that. I can find screenshots of UI at times. I find papers around low response rates. I never find an actual person who says "Yeah, I get dinged to do those every few months, once every few years..." I sure as hell know when I'm gathering statistical data, that sampling bias evaluation requires foot work, and if you do that footwork, if your methodology works, it shouldn't take you that long to run into someone you've surveyed if you're doing it right. If you're not, and only hitting "the usual suspects", you're not getting a representative sample/measuring what you think you are. So I look for payroll people or people who have done payroll in the U.S. and ask if they've actually ever been directed to provide input. I've been doing it the last few years. Nobody seems to recall ever having been asked to participate in what amounts to billion dollar money movement at stake jury duty.

So yeah. This is kind of a weird tic of mine at the moment. Ranks right up there with the time I felt the inexplicable urge to figure out what the deal with zoning as applied to city planning was and how it worked. Something just doesn't add up. I hate that. Mental equivalent of a thumb detection via hammer.

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

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!

I’d counter that if we were doing a good job gathering data that these structural biases could be compensated for with more conservative initial numbers.

At some point a lack of decision to take compensating action becomes faking the numbers.

> if we were doing a good job gathering data that these structural biases could be compensated for with more conservative initial numbers

There is no more conservative. The data will bias in the direction of trend. The point of the data are, in part, to measure that trend. Fucking with it to make it politically correct to the statistically illiterate is precisely the sort of degradation of data we’re worried about.

(They’re also useless as a time series if the methodology changes quarter to quarter. That’s the job of analysis. Not the data.)

What you wrote suggests the data will bias predictably, which matches my understanding.

Reporting biased data as the default because the bias compensation is already built into the audience seems like a weak argument for not improving.

They can provide for the continuation of data visibility/granularity by releasing the prior numbers as previously calculated and at the same time changing the calculation of the headline number to be better compensated.

The simpler argument is that changing it at all will result in a negative step change in the reporting that no one wants to take accountability for.

> What you wrote suggests the data will bias predictably

Ex post facto. Before the fact, we don’t know.

Imagine you know the weather will be a strong gust regardless of direction. Averaging the models will produce a central estimate. But you know it will be biased away from the center. You just don’t know, until it happens, in which direction.

> They can provide for the continuation of data visibility/granularity by releasing the prior numbers as previously calculated and at the same time changing the calculation of the headline number to be better compensated

They do. These data are all recalculated with each methodological change. They’re just deprecated indices the media don’t report on because they’re of academic, not broad, concern.

> simpler argument is that changing it at all will result in a negative step change in the reporting

Simpler but wrong. Those data would be useless for the same reason we don’t let CEOs smooth revenues.

I’m confused by this discussion. It seems like you said the biases were structural because we know who reports early and that is why the early numbers are always revised down. Structural implies known in advance.

It also seems like you said they shouldn’t revise the numbers but now you are saying they already do.

What am I misunderstanding?

> 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

My argument wasn't that there shouldn't be revisions though, only that recent years have shown consistent negative revisions rather then a roughly even distribution.

If response rates are down or something else is making surveys more difficult, its reasonable that confidence windows would weaken and size of revisions would increase. Its unreasonable that difficulty in surveying would lead to a consistent bias in results though, that's a methodological issue at best.

> My argument wasn't that there shouldn't be revisions though, only that recent years have shown consistent negative revisions rather then a roughly even distribution.

It's been to too many moons since I took a prob/stats course to comment accurately on population sampling, but how valid is the assumption that errors 'should' skew both positive and negative?

If errors are skewed in one direction there would likely have to be a factor forcing it, like sampling and response bias.

That's always possible, though again I question the validity of the measure and results if its getting consistently skewed results. Either the methodology is faulty or the results simply can't be trusted because they can't reliably get good data.

> With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates

This is a valid hypothesis. It’s wrong, and I’ll explain why. (It’s a bad and invalid thing to conclude.)

If measurement errors were iid, you’d be correct. But they’re not. They’re well documented for not being so. Earlier survey results are biased by directional response bias inasmuch as the employers with the lease changes respond first. So the earliest releases tend to match whatever was going on before. Then the employers who had to do paperwork respond. And then, finally, someone gets around to calling the folks who never got back. Some of them aren’t around anymore.

So yeah, the directional tendency in revisions is well documented. And for a long time, the early releases were appreciated. But maybe American statistical and media literacy is such that only final releases should be released, which would mean we’d always be working with data 6 months to a year out of date.

That's all well and good in theory, but job reports data over recent years have noticeably shifted towards downward monthly revisions. Prior to the pandemic response, the graph [1] looks much more balanced with regards to positive and negative decisions.

[1] https://www.apmresearchlab.org/blog/how-abnormal-are-the-rev...

Sure, but it's totally ridiculous to post about that without discussing the survey response rate, which is the cause of that drift. People are attributing it to political meddling, and that is baseless.

Naturally all of this metadata about the BLS surveys is available for free from the BLS, so you can just go look at it.

Interesting that you're claiming this is baseless without providing any sources for your alternative. How do you know that (a) the response rate is down meaningfully and (b) that data shows a strong correlation or causation between the two?

> but job reports data over recent years have noticeably shifted towards downward monthly revisions. Prior to the pandemic response, the graph [1] looks much more balanced with regards to positive and negative decisions

Yes. The reasons for this are well documented. Changing methodology for the preview estimates is rigorous. That means our published estimates lag best estimates, something the primary sources note in every release if one gets past the headlines.

Also, if you have one year of massive job gains and four years of flat and falling, you’ll spend most of your epoch biased one way. Again, not a sign of methodological problems. Just a predictable methodological artifact that folks are supposed to be able to incorporate before using, much less emotionally reacting to, the data.

Why would the shift to a new methodology bias the estimates to one end? I would expect a new methodology to make comparisons of data between the two systems to potentially be unhelpful, but I wouldn't expect a valid methodology to bias one way or another.

Related, I wouldn't expect past data to bias a current estimate. If 6 or 12 months of positive growth biases the next prediction it falls into the hot hands fallacy. It isn't predicting based on current predictions, its predicting based on recent past behavior and extrapolating forward. This only makes sense to do if the data is not yet available, and even then the extrapolation isn't a useful estimate of current conditions.

> If 6 or 12 months of positive growth biases the next prediction it falls into the hot hands fallacy

It’s a sample of a sample. The full sample is the final release. The early results are the preliminary releases. When firms change things they take longer to respond. So whichever way the economy is moving, there will be bias in that direction. If the economy is turning, you won’t know direction. If it’s accelerating or slowing down you don’t know magnitude. Sometimes context clues can help. Sometimes they can’t. There is no known statistical treatment for intuiting the missing data before one has it11

We agree here, and I am going a step further saying that the initial numbers are useless and are little more than throwing opinionated darts. Numbers shouldn't be released until they meet some reasonable level of response and statistical validity. Given that they do release numbers today, I judge them as early and either inaccurate and useless or politically motivated to push markets while there's no meaningful data to contradict them.

> the initial numbers are useless and are little more than throwing opinionated darts

You’re still concluding from ignorance. They are not. A better question would be ask to whom they’re useful and how.

Like, if a fire is burning in a neighborhood, every sighting is valuable. You don’t always need to wait for a comprehensive picture before being able to do anything.

> I judge them as early and either inaccurate and useless or politically motivated to push markets while there's no meaningful data to contradict them

That’s wrong. But it seems to be a common error.

Maybe the solution is to make these numbers available only to gatekeep these numbers. Policymakers, academics, enterprises and banks can get a rarefied sheet for a fee. But the public doesn’t get PDFs, much less public reporting.

> while there's no meaningful data to contradict them

There are bajillions of them. ADP. State reports. Private surveys. Fed studies. That said, I’m leaning towards your view—maybe these data aren’t best made broadly public.

> Like, if a fire is burning in a neighborhood, every sighting is valuable. You don’t always need to wait for a comprehensive picture before being able to do anything.

That assumes there are a meaningful number of reliable reports. If I regularly am told there is a fire only to have authorities come back a week later to adjust reports down I wouldn't trust them. If they over estimated the number of fires based on the last 6-12 months of fire data, with little recent data to go on otherwise, I would ignore the reports.

> Maybe the solution is to make these numbers available only to gatekeep these numbers.

This seems more reasonable at least, though I don't see much use in the data still when its released so early that its based primarily on recent historic trends and few survey responses.

> There are bajillions of them.

Those are all anecdotal in this case. If said sources were applicable and reliable the official data would consider those and have more accurate reporting. My point was that said reports depend on survey results, and when they report early results so early that few responses are in yet them there is no official data to contradict the early reporting.

> for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up

This is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.

Yes, it's the classic "both sides" myth. It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing.

> It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing

Manufacturing consent is horseshit because it gets the direction of causation wrong. Nobody is master planning any of this. Storytellers sell stories. And then politicians sense the vacuum of attention.

Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. DOGE then cut, mostly randomly. And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.

Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting.

> Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting

It’s opinionated. That isn’t the same as planned. A lot more of society is motivated by what sells ads right now than anyone is comfortable admitting outside those firms.

The whole point of the manufacturing consent propaganda model is that you don't need some vast conspiracy, you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat. And just look how consolidated the media is in the USA right now, and look at who makes decisions for those companies.

> Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads.

There are a million things that could've done to sell ads. Funny how they chose the one thing that just so happens to align with the particular political agenda of the president, who just so happens to be the current figurehead of the entire political movement with which Fox just coincidentally happens to have been tightly aligned for my entire adult life. Must be a coincidence.

> And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.

There was plenty of it, you just didn't see anything about it in the news except as page 10 human interest stories in the liberal-aligned media like NPR and the Boston Globe. Must be another editorial coincidence.

There is no way you can earnestly believe that the right-wing media doesn't favorably report on right-wing politicians and their causes. The Manufacturing Consent model is extremely successful among social science models in that it implies clear and testable predictions that have been corroborated again and again and again around the world, pretty much since the dawn of news media. If you don't agree with that assessment, then in my opinion you are ignoring reality or at best ignorant of it.

> you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat

And I’m saying that’s nonsense. The media operates on independent incentives. The political calculus then responds to it. Attention-driven society doesn’t need a maestro, and rarely has one. Pretending it does is comforting but wrong.

You’re arguing against the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology. It’s been a century since Bernays wrote the seminary work on this topic, why the credulity? The connections are not tenuous, these people are operating in the daylight, even giving public talks and publishing treatises about their strategies.

Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics.

You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor.

Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.

> the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology

And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy.

> Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc.

And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives.

It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.

You claim it's nonsense, I claim it's been the reality in the United States for decades, and only becoming more true every year. You can choose to confront the evidence before you, or continue to live in willful ignorance, but the world you describe simply does not correspond to the one that we inhabit.

> 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 a bold claim, do you have sources to back it up? If true, we’d all (I’d, at least) learn an important lesson.

It's worse - important metrics like inflation are distorted by "hedonic adjustment" - i.e. pretending cars are getting cheaper because, even though they're getting more expensive, you get "more car" (ABS, airbags, remote unlock, heated seats (if you pay the subscription), hidden GPS tracking..):

https://wolfstreet.com/2019/12/05/what-worries-me-about-hedo...

"for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up"

That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.

I think the real issue now is that it's 10x worse. The people controlling things are actively and shamelessly making things worse, for their own purposes (so there is less accountability, IMO). The problem is the new, unintended side effects of what they are doing. Because they aren't really that smart, they don't even understand this.

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"

what. People absolutely have no idea what's going on without large, organized data.

The point is, the argument isn't "this data is right leaning" vs "this data is left leaning" or whatever your skew-scope is.

The argument at present: "We don't need to know to know X" versus "Of course we need to know X".

And ther'es clearly a fascist convincing people it's all useless while they ply their grift of choice.

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.

That’s just not true. Most of the six unemployment numbers capture unemployed graduates but m3 the headline number certainly does.

How is this information collected? When I was looking for work after grad school I didn't report to anyone as such. The school had no idea whether or not I was actively looking. I was denied unemployment. I'm not sure what my info might have looked like on the IRS end if that is what is being abrogated.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.faq.htm

It also specifically says unemployment figures isn't solely from state unemployment insurance figures.

I see, so they don't capture that data well as they admit. household survey has a high margin of error. You have to also consider signal to noise ratio of some of these data and whether the survey even has the power to detect the signal. My grad school cohort for example was 15 people for the entire department. That is about as large as they get for PhD in most STEM fields. What are the odds this sort of employment sector is captured well in the household survey data?

This is perhaps the most well studied and validated data set that any government has ever produced. Their methodology and techniques are documented to the nth degree. "they" will admit whatever you want them to admit because they are stone cold professionals that are scrutinized by every political hack in the country and their datasets are poured over by teams of financial analysts across the globe every time they are released.

You are an internet commenter that couldn't be bothered to read the summary of the article outlining some of the issues with their data collection, where the very first bullet point summary mentions its survey based. Perhaps you shouldn't try to argue from first principles without reading the _extensive_ documentation of methods and reports the BLS puts out. Lots of us have.

So you are appealing to precedence and authority and not really addressing the underlying point being made.

mark_l_watson says"The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' "

(1)This is normal human behavior usually described as "capitalism". It has been well-studied & the literature awaits you, e.g., The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 by Scottish economist Adam Smith. Go ahead: if you read the entire tome you may be the first man to do so. Perhaps you could write a usefully shortened version or versions of it.

mark_l_watson says"Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses."

(2)the behavior isn't immoral, as you will find by merely educating yourself [see (1)].

(3)There was/is no [US]"empire". And certainly none in the sense of the Persian, Mongol, Roman, incan, Spanish, British, French, or even, God forbid, Belgian empire, all of which were true empires.

We’ve never doubted the BLS numbers before until this admin. Think about how that screws things.

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.

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.

One is safe to assume partisan shenanigans with every single government program and number until proven otherwise.

Thats great; that assumption can be used to adjust expectations of results.

But you can't gaze into an abyss of "I told the guys to just not collect the data"

That's beyond partisan, that's anti-social nonsense. All this bothsides stuff is the difference between a black hole and a mobius strip.

Look, it's all a bunch of rectal sunshine:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/01/22/the-truth-behind-oba...

this admin is different

Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden?

Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.

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