For nearly two years, the job market Americans were told about has been significantly stronger than the one that actually existed, and the Federal Reserve made a major policy decision based on numbers that have since been quietly rewritten.
That’s something people do consider, have common metrics like consumer price index and real wage growth. Unemployment is certainly not as important, though without basic income, it matters-- unfortunately it’s often misleading.
I’ll admit it mattered when I graduated into almost 10% unemployment under Bush’s recession and couldn’t get a job… just, I feel like that only went down because of underemployment. Taking worse jobs, higher hours, etc, made that number look better without actually improving lives.
If we get things back on track, maybe we can have a better metric. But it’ll take a really big progressive swap; corporate liberals prefer this metric still because they don’t have to do anything significant to make the numbers look better.
That’s something people do consider, have common metrics like consumer price index and real wage growth. Unemployment is certainly not as important, though without basic income, it matters-- unfortunately it’s often misleading.
I’ll admit it mattered when I graduated into almost 10% unemployment under Bush’s recession and couldn’t get a job… just, I feel like that only went down because of underemployment. Taking worse jobs, higher hours, etc, made that number look better without actually improving lives.
If we get things back on track, maybe we can have a better metric. But it’ll take a really big progressive swap; corporate liberals prefer this metric still because they don’t have to do anything significant to make the numbers look better.