Discussion

US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide

alkyon: Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275035

wood_spirit: Discussion yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275035

WalterGR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275035US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February (bbc.com)524 points | 23 hours ago | 733 comments

chuckadams: "Sheds". Like hair or skin flakes, completely superfluous and unnecessary things. This is how people and their livelihoods figure into The Dismal Science, even though you don't have an economy when people don't have money to spend. But I guess one more billionaire is worth several thousand of us, no?

totetsu: Already told about this already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287309

9dev: In fact, we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we're winning too much. We can't take it anymore. We're not used to winning in our country until you came along, we're just always losing. But now we're winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you're going to win again. You're going to win big. You're going to win bigger than ever.

rayiner: The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413.Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic.

onlyrealcuzzo: As the population continues to age, and more people are 62+, this is expected...

djohnston: I don’t think that’s telling the whole story.Immigration has always been used as leverage against the native workers, and now it’s more efficiently corrupt than ever.

idiotsecant: Look at that trajectory one more time and tell me how 'expected' it is.The first stages of a worldwide recession is what it looks like to me.

rafaelmn: Is this working age population or all ages ?

nobodyandproud: I’m naturalized—very, very long term—but I couldn’t find any stats that track by US citizens.I suppose that makes me a a second-class citizen?

46493168: Under this administration, you are. Be prepared to have your citizenship revoked. I am not trying to scare you, or be flippant or cynical. I truly believe we are witnessing the rise of ultraxenophobic fascism.

bicx: It means that if we cut off or discourage immigration, we can’t count on non-native citizens to continue boosting our numbers. So, we have to look at the native-born stats to get an idea of our future.

dgellow: I understand the US economy is experiencing some… troubled times. However, 4.4% unemployment rate, while that’s an increase, sounds really low compared to other countries. Am I missing something?

mrtksn: US economy is robust, the problem is that people don’t have the same safety nets when out of work.No job means no healthcare or reduced coverage for many people for example so it is a bigger deal to have unemployment.

alephnerd: "The fall was led by a drop in healthcare employment following widespread strikes by medical workers in New York, California and Hawaii"

throwawaysleep: It is a historical range of working age, so it includes people who are 16 and over and everyone until the die of old age.

sbochins: You’re absolutely right. The labor market is still quite strong. All the doom and gloom from places like HN is coming from the many layoff announcements and fear of AI.

Madmallard: Or the reality, which is that the numbers are royally fudged and the statistic is a farce.

alephnerd: It's not that numbers are a farce but different industry segments are doing better or worse than other.HN being a tech forum that now increasingly skews East and Midwest (heck, it's not even 7am yet in the West) means most HNers are impacted by a slowdown in tech hiring, which exacerbates the sense of pessimism.

bojan: You have one right fewer than natively born Americans - you can't become the President. Make of that what you will.

46493168: Used by whom?

kilroy123: A lot of things unraveled around 2012.https://wtfhappened2012.com

hypeatei: > The ungameable statisticHow are the normal unemployment rates (U-3, U-6, etc.) "gamed" exactly? Or, put another way: what would you do differently?

tialaramex: This is another one of the weird American-isms that many Americans don't realise isn't normal everywhere else.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.

wavemode: I wouldn't call it an Americanism, per se. There are plenty of countries where you can't become a citizen at all without having a relative who is one. There are also plenty of countries where, even being born there is not sufficient for citizenship (in fact, only 35 countries in the world grant citizenship unconditionally via being born within the borders).

api: Isn’t that a proxy for aging and lower birth rates?

game_the0ry: The iphone + fb/instagram = kids spending more time on the screen than irlSince, youth suicide, depression, anxiety, etc have hit record levels.

Imustaskforhelp: Doublespeak, am I right? :)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

SkipperCat: I'd call it dummerspeak...

kitten_mittens_: U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like.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).

hypeatei: The graph ("vs. Headline Rate")[0] follows the same trend lines as the BLS numbers just with a higher percentage. I don't see how the "poverty wage" methodology (which is arbitrary) is helpful here, it doesn't take into account caregivers or disabled people who may be keeping their wage low on purpose due to benefits cliffs.Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.0: https://www.lisep.org/tru

nobodyandproud: I don’t mind it. But not stat tracking citizenship employment seems like a blind spot?

margalabargala: The worst case for the US is a USSR style splintering. Many of the individual constituent states may come out the other end fine or better with time, but that doesn't make "the US" fine.

stego-tech: Hot take, but I don’t think it should recover. If anything, I think a combination of low unemployment, higher wages, and a labor force participation rate of ~45-55% would be a sweet spot to aim for:* 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 affordabilityIn 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.

chrisweekly: I love this vision. What do you think might be required to make it real?

IgorPartola: So two factors that affected this report: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...

alephnerd: The FT article brings it up as well - most HNers never read the articles.

righthand: Does that matter if the headline is conclusive of the article result? Financial Times is a costly subscription. Furthermore those details, while interesting, do not change the outcome of the article.

influx: The capital class?

gruez: >The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413.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/CIVPARTIf you look at prime age labor force participation rate, it tells a completely different story:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060It'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.

admissionsguy: Didn't stop Barrack Obama..

gruez: >U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like.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?

snypher: The return of the proceeds of labor to the people who performed the labor.Edit: my CEO owns ~125 houses.

HarryHirsch: The U-3 rate does not include those that drove for Uber one hour in the month. The gold standard metric is labor participation rate of white men over 20, and that's not looking good: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300028

gruez: >The gold standard metric is labor participation rate of white men over 20"gold standard"... according to whom? Economists? Internet commentators? White nationalists?

butterbomb: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47277727None of those are tech

HarryHirsch: Economists, of course - the confounder of discrimination is absent here. Recall: if something appears weird in the US, it's usually due to slavery.

gruez: >The return of the proceeds of labor to the people who performed the labor.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.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

nobodyandproud: Every time I wonder why I don’t lean more Republican, gems like this jog me back.There’s a lot of reasons not to like Obama’s 8 years or why he wasn’t the best candidate. But for god’s sakes, this isn’t one of them.

stego-tech: A lot, because no system or crisis has an "easy solution". That said, a few highlights I've chewed on:* 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.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.

manwe150: That is an impressive number of graphs and very cool! I wonder if the author would consider repeating with KDE plots instead of splines, so the pretty shape of the curves has some statistical meaning also

salawat: For one thing, people to divest themselves of the notion "leaving money on the table" is a bad thing. It's part of the affordability crisis and why two income households are the default. It's already priced in as they say. Until that Ethic gets revised, and all the ethical arbitagers are found and eliminated with extreme prejudice, that vision cannot come to fruition. Because the price you pay will be adjusted to reflect your maximum actuarial capacity to earn. Fun bit is, you on the bottom don't get to make the decisions that effect that change. The people at the top/in the .001% do, because if everyone else made the change first without dealing with them, they're sitting on enough assets to buyout everyone else adopting the new paradigm. Then again, there's also the question of "just let em do it, then ignore their claim." Long as everyone else is in alignment, and we just ignore those people, a second system ought to be able to stabilize to which the .001% can either sync to, or remain ostracized. It does require full solidarity from the 99.99% though. That means literally treating the horded wealth and businesses of these people as no good. Destabilizing in the short term; probably gonna hurt like a sumabitch. A theoretical offramp to the vision, however, it is.

bmitch3020: 4.4% is the headline number, but there are other measures of unemployment [1] that show we are closer to 8% when you include people that are discouraged from even looking and those working part-time but would prefer a full time job.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.[1]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

brynnbee: You can also look at the prime-age employment-population numbers, which show ages 25 to 54.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.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

vlod: https://archive.is/RP83s

forgotTheLast: That's skewed by the number of retirees, which naturally increases in an aging population like white US men.

coldtea: >The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rateWhy would it be "ungameable"?

g947o: Most HNers don't have access to the article.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).

IgorPartola: To be fair FT is a fantastic source. That’s why it costs as much as it does. But yeah the paywall sucks if you just want the one article.

cosmicgadget: The concern may be for the direction rather than the position. Obviously nothing is certain at this point.

alkyon: You're recursively funny :]

rayiner: Looking at native born employment doesn’t “imply” anything. It just excludes confounding factors that come into play when looking at trends because immigration changes the composition of the people you’re looking at over time.

donkeybeer: What? How on earth does that make any sense at all? Do jobs record for recently immigrated vs immigrated n years ago? Is the job market or salary offers different for either group? Then how does it make sense to arbitrarily exclude one set of people and falsely claim it makes the stats more "accurate"?

gruez: >Economists, of courseFor 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.

rayiner: It’s not a contrived statistic. It’s a way to look at the fundamentals of the economy in a way that’s not confounded by the distinct effects of immigration, etc.

oa335: But it is confounded by demographic changes… namely the aging population.

gilbetron: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1T9dv&heig...There are way more retired people as a percentage.

idiotsecant: I need you to very carefully consider the x axis of those 2 plots. Think about it real hard.

foxyv: Only thing I can think of is that if you pick a statistic with fewer confounding variables you have less of a chance to cherrypick?

gilbetron: Ok, and?