Discussion

What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

echelon: I feel like we're dancing on the razor's edge.On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.

booleandilemma: [delayed]

rf15: You really do not understand how interdependent everyone is. The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.The US kneecapped itself for no reason.

tomrod: Not accuse. Observed.

paulsutter: > The integrity of U.S. statistical data is under threat from shrinking agency budgets, low response rates to government surveys, and political interference.Just as both "sides" are upset about gerrymandering, yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...So too with this debate. Haven't we heard the exact same arguments made, by the other "side"? I thought we weren't supposed to have flaming political bait on HN?The solution to all of these problems is at hand, and we are the ones to build it. Let's just build.

rapind: There is a valid both sides argument to a lot of these issues IMO, but where the discussion ought to be is at how extreme “one” side has taken it.Whether it’s executive orders, corruption, pardons, appointments, obstruction, gerrymandering. lying, etc. I don’t think there’s a valid defence of just how far one particular side has gone (and proactively I might add).

testdelacc1: Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions?FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t.Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.

Papazsazsa: Sorry, did I miss the period when economic data was reliable?

tomrod: 1900 to 2024 for the US.For Iran, China, USSR, for example, you had to back in estimates from observable benchmark information uncontaminated by dictatorships. You didn't have to do that with tbe US.

readthenotes1: The reported economic data has been squirrelly for many years.For instance, the employment report (establishment survey) has an error rate or +/- 122,000 with 90% confidence--completely swamping the actual value.It be like I said I was 2m tall on my dating profile and one date is frightened off by my being -0.2m tall and another by me being 4m tall.https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm#

twoodfin: That’s 122,000 out of a labor force size of 170 million!!Yes, month to month you have large absolute error bars vs. the monthly delta, but being an imperfect monthly barometer of labor force momentum is only the headline use of the establishment report.

10xDev: >Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.https://www.asml.com

amelius: ASML is under US export control though. Probably because there is US tech in there.

ambicapter: > It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.> Europe won't be able to catch that.You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code? If Claude Code is the one reaping the majority of the benefits of "spit[ing] out a week's worth of business automation tasks", then it's not worth much to the business. If Claude Code isn't the one reaping the majority of those benefits, then...Europe can use Claude Code too and reap the benefits for their business as well.

CalRobert: Well, if it becomes strategically advantageous to bar Europeans from doing so, why would we (Europeans) be permitted continued access?

lostlogin: That dating analogy would work better if America wasn’t messing up every relationship with lunatic behaviour.Everyone swiped left long ago.

mark_l_watson: 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.

throwawa1: Its been unreliable my entire life. Every year the economy gets better but life gets worse. You can't even recognize the country any more.

CalRobert: The economy can get better while life gets worse for most people. After all, an economy where 95% of the work was done by enslaved people might produce amazing profits and a very high GDP....

alephnerd: > The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for exampleThe US, not Europe.ASML's EUV and High NA EUV production is all done in California via US DoE joint ventures. Additionally, their metrology IP is Taiwanese as part of ASML's acquisition of HMI back in 2016 with Taiwanese approval.ASML is the capital partner because in the early 2000s, the FTC wanted to prevent a duopoly forming between Nikon and Canon for photolithography.And the next generation of lithography tooling coming into Taiwan is from Japan due to MUFG, Mitsui, and SoftBank becoming the primary capital partners for Taiwan's electronics industry.

A_D_E_P_T: Open models are, at worst, a few months behind SOTA closed models. This has been the case since 2024, and there's no indication that it's going to change.You don't need anybody to permit you access.You can, in all seriousness, thank Meta and the Chinese for this.

gambiting: >>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.My immediate thought is - why is it a race. Like holy shit imagine if we could actually work together instead of having this mentality of "if we work hard the other countries won't catch that". As someone who grew up in the golden age of globalization and rise of the information superhighway, the way countries are just siloing themselves and treating everything as a zero sum game is both sad and scary - that's exactly how you lead the world on a path to another world war - telling yourself that you don't need anyone else and in fact you need to beat them to the punch and everyone else is your opponent. If an alien race was looking at us right now they'd be shaking their heads.

WarmWash: I think when Europe failed to handle Ukraine on their own, the optics started looking pretty bad.

arjie: One of the things I do like about the US, and that I think is a reason for America's ability to meet the challenges this country faces is that it has good data collection and aggregation mechanisms: from the seemingly-banal surveys and so on to satellite remote-sensing.There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.

Hikikomori: The laser source, not the rest of the machine.

alephnerd: The metrology is coming from Taiwan and California (HMI) as well. The Veldhoven campus "only" does final assembly (which should not be underestimated either).But it's the light source and the metrology that is the blocker.

ambicapter: Weird how all the American social media companies continue to try to operate in Europe in spit of the massive fines they keep on racking up in court. They can't help themselves, if there is money to be made they got to get in there.

CalRobert: Social media is a tool to shift public opinion and extract cash from the general populous. Claude, however, is actually useful.

TimorousBestie: > yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...Last week there was mention here of the proposal to fix the apportionment of House seats so that they are not capped at 435.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332108The only politicians I have seen take this up seriously in the real world are all local-level leftists and the occasional libertarian. This proposal would make gerrymandering much harder.

psychoslave: > They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.42 European here.I've heard my whole adult life that Europe is ten years behind USA.That doesn't feel that bad though. Being bleeding edge comes with the thrill of the avant garde prestige. But it does also mean you take the downsides of navigating the unexplored unknown in your face with no one to help with turn key solution when it happens.If it means 10 years buffer on big social seismic troubles, that doesn't sound too bad if there is indeed an efficient shelve. That's not necessarily the case on every matter though, like global climate change is going to impact everyone, no matter the political isolation, and if a direct military aggression happens, it can be hurtful no matter how prepared is the society.

culi: I agree. The super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time nowhttps://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.

__MatrixMan__: > just a matter of switching the admin, which we should be able toI wish I shared your optimism. Being unable to change the admin has been the default state. The recent few centuries have been an exception. It's a big ship that we need to turn here. Might take longer than we think if we can manage it at all.

quacked: 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.

cyanydeez: Sure, but thetes a sizeable diffetence when skewed data becomes no-data.Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.

smitty1e: 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.

ianhorn: Two things come to mind:- Whatever you measure gets optimized.- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.

WarmWash: The US used this agreement to bar ASML from selling the machines to China in 2018.The machine is a clump of metal without the light source.

Negitivefrags: I’m curious how you would respond to the arguments in this video.https://youtu.be/9KJTWmRrneo?si=I9mvSPfDnhkckb9n

xenihn: "A few months" is an incredibly long time when the gap is widening on a daily basis.

looksjjhg: It’s amazing and terrifying watching an empire die

jjtwixman: Well, at least they deserve it.

wlowenfeld: Watching these types of comments begin to pop up here on HN of all places is fascinating.

zzleeper: Please don't "both side" this. As much as there is corruption in any administration, R or D, the levels we are seeing now are completely unprecedent and blunt. EG: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/trump-fundraise-emai... (from earlier this morning on the HN frontpage)

fhdkweig: On that topic, how many presidents in the past have had merch stores after elected? I can understand fundraising during a campaign, but after winning or losing, the fundraising usually stops.

alexfromapex: You can tell just from recent TikToks that the price inflation at the grocery stores is being fudged. Many items have 75-100+% price inflation from just a year ago.

hattmall: The issue is that this isn't really supply constrained inflation. This is price discovery and discrimination by major retailers. The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. I have paid rather intense attention to the price of groceries since 2015 when I started purchasing for my business kitchen as we started providing prepared meals. In general, prices are very close to 2015 levels for the important goods.I have some basic guidelines for an acceptable range that are from when I started in 2015.Milk: $2.50 / g Frozen Fruit $2/ lb Cheese $3 / lb Wheat $3 / 5lb Oats $3 / 40 40 oz Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast $2 / lbThese are all prices that I am still able to routinely meet or exceed in 2026.

mikeyouse: This ratchet effect of partially righting the ship every four years followed by drunken sailors YOLOing further into a reef because the ‘responsible party’ didn’t fix things fast enough is unsustainable. No clue how it ends but it’s so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage.

david422: > so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantageTangentially related, there was a local property nearby that had these large, aesthetic trees in the yard. The house was sold, a developer cut them all and flipped the house for sale.Probably took 50+ years to grow, gone in an hour.

lokar: The use of GDP, or GDP/Population as the primary metric is a real problem.We need to use a metric that is closer to "total economic benefit for the median person", that would include income, as well as government services.

cess11: The Gini coefficient and sometimes its' velocity would be a better alternative.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

CursedSilicon: They're handling Ukraine better than America is "handling" Iran

varispeed: > our government could do a better jobIt's no longer your government. It's run largely by Russia and Israel, using vast array of kompromats and bribes. Republicans and Democrats would rather burn the country to the ground that admit wrongdoing and do the time for it.

NewJazz: I remember seeing a lot of social media posts during the Biden admin about grocery prices... Turns out a lot of folks were just comparing the same cart, not taking into account discontinued items that were being auto-replaced with more expensive goods, or things like that. It wasn't always an accurate representation.

tehjoker: We are tightly integrated with Israel, joined at the hip, but you realize we are at war with Russia right? If we were controlled by Russia, we would not be at war with them.

whattheheckheck: You would think...

bcrosby95: Merch. NFTs. Playing cards. Crypto coins. A phone. It's like we have Dennis Duffy as POTUS. If it were 40 years ago it would be like Reagan starting his own MLM.

input_sh: 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.

mattmaroon: I honestly think that the idea that this is what’s happening is almost entirely propaganda.I think people have an overly rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery.Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party.Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several

righthand: This is overly optimistic and a "it hasn't happened to me yet so who cares" view. World War 3 has started and DHS is killing Americans and rounding up people in the street because one side was able to convince the country that the only thing to do was destroy and hurt a lot of people including themselves. That's not better than my past and it is significantly worse in a lot of ways. I haven't even received a cost of living increase in my salary in the last 5 years, let alone watch things and places I enjoy in life be dismantled so someone can make money off the attainment of bread.

paulsutter: Great! So please explain what algorithms are used by these "nonpartisan" commissions?

specproc: I spent a fair bit of time in the former Soviet Union, what happened there is instructive for what comes next.I think we will see, across the West broadly, to varying extents:- peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)- widespread looting of public assets, a new oligarchal class minted- total destruction of the middle class, particularly those with ties to government and NGOs (I'm in this camp and miserable for it)- at least one civil war, lots of territorial disputes kicking off, separatism- breakdown of law and order, local gangsters as local authorities- mass ex-migration, ethnic cleansing- weak governments, coups, demagogues, vassalage- hyperinflation and scammy get rich quick scams (watch crypto)

username135: I have been a nay sayer on LLMs/GPTs in general having tried many, but recently Ive been shepherding a fairly complex code build through the latest opus model and its quite impressive.It still gets things wrong occasionally but the time its saved me has been substantial. Im starting to enjoy it.

ssl-3: I recently built a reasonably-complex embedded controls project using codex and an esp32.Starting with systems stuff like "Set up vscode with whatever it needs to work with codex and talk to an esp32," and ending with "Now add a web interface with persistent tunables that always runs in both AP and station modes," my prompt inputs were very terse.And it'd just kind of go forth and just do it. It'd even design and run its own tests.I never once looked at the code. For all I know, the code doesn't even exist.And it works. I'll be using it in the field (in the proverbial middle of nowhere) all next week. I have every expectation that it will behave itself.(I did spend a lot of time defining and refining some ground rules with AGENTS.md, but in theory I get to re-use that effort for the next go.)

anonnon: This chart: https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-vs-inflation/And Case-Shiller is based on price-per-square footage, so the argument that houses are bigger is moot.

fifticon: the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.

estimator7292: No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.

jeffbee: 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).

iugtmkbdfil834: 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?

jeffbee: Do you have a substantive complaint to make about the BLS methodology? So far all I see in your remark is shadowstats vibes.

whateveracct: I regularly buy whole chickens (locally raised free range) for $1/lb. With individual cuts comparably cheap (and often BOGO). I live in an above-average, CoL area too.

pocksuppet: 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.

Aurornis: > 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?

anonnon: > The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.Yeah, the EUV photolithography machine, but not much else. American companies like Lam Research and Applied Materials are the leaders in thin film deposition and etch, KLA Tencor is the leader in metrology, and Synopsys and Cadance are the leaders in EDA (though there's also Germany's Mentor Graphics).

kittikitti: People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests.I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.

throwawaypath: >They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about CoronavirusThat was fake news:In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated.In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_Jones

iugtmkbdfil834: 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?

patmorgan23: What are the alternatives, and do other countries labor statistics agencies use them?

PaulDavisThe1st: There will be no "peripheral states flipping" in the USA. Secession is not an option here.

hackyhacky: > It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign landsIt 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 discontinuedI'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.

SoftTalker: Beef is an outlier though. $20-$30/lb for supermarket quality is quite a lot.

PaulDavisThe1st: Many parents that nominally "control" their children might take issue with this claim.I don't have a particular position on the actual "controlled by Russia" claim.

michaelchisari: The collapse of the Soviet Union was ahistorical in many ways. It's rare that collapse of an empire can be pinpointed to a single day. And what you saw was a result of shock therapy imposed from the outside. I doubt that would happen to the US.It's unlikely collapse will be felt as a singular, apocalyptic event. More like a slow, steady loss of influence and excess wealth. Countries on the periphery stop considering the empire's perspectives before making their own decisions. Other trading partners emerge. Bridges stop getting maintained until they're no longer usable.And soft power declines. Imagine a day when the biggest pop star in the US, someone on the scale of Michael Jackson or Madonna nationally, is virtually unknown outside of its borders.There are reasons to believe the American empire is in decline, but I maintain this will look more like Britain. It could take 50 years before American fully realize it.Thankfully, that means there's plenty of time to reverse or mitigate the trends, or to make a decision to strengthen the Republic over the Empire.

fhdkweig: And the worst part is, I don't think we will ever close this door. Even if the Democrats are in charge of the next presidency, the temptation of easy money will be too strong to resist. It wasn't done in the past, because it was assumed that the people would push back severely, but now that it is clear that they won't, it is full speed ahead.

kenferry: Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden?Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.

PaulDavisThe1st: Actual evidence of kompromats?Israel? Bribes? We pay them ...If one was to really think about national level bribes then presumably Saudi Arabia would be worthy of mention, given their involvement with the Trump (extended) family.

wood_spirit: You pay Israel because AIPAC paid your politicians?

doctaj: Wouldn't it be funny if they "fixed" spam calling in order to make it so that the government could call people again?

logicallee: the answer is reliable money. how much money would you pick up a verified 1 minute survey from the real u.s. government for? I'd do it for $5. (=$300 per hour) and hope for as many calls as possible.For comparison purposes the U.S. budget is about $20,000 per person ($7t budget, a bit under 350m people), so the government could definitely pay you to answer their "spam" calls. (While mandating that first parties show that it is the real U.S. government and not a spammer.)So it would be your actual first party telephone showing "Answer this real call from the U.S. government for $5 instantly, 1 minute average call time."I think that would be a good way to get good data fast. What do you think? (At the same time, impersonating the U.S. government would remain illegal, and the first party would ensure the payment is real.)

davidw: This is going to take a generation or two to fix. If we're lucky and work hard at it.

overfeed: ...and don't vote in more wreckers the whole time

salawat: 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.

silvestrov: This is only true as long as there is money for the military.When money is gone, the military is gone.Money goes easily when a country has a large debt and need other countries to continue to buy into that debt.

gmueckl: This is an downright evil take on the current situation. The supply chains are so complex that no single country is capable of replicating them entirely. It starts with the fact that the required natural resources are distributed around the globe in a way that no country has access to all of them. The production chains from resources to finished machines are downright byzantine. And this becomes recursive with the need for specialized tools and their own production chains along the way. You need trains amd trucks and ships to be able to build semiconductors, for example. Except for maybe China pr India, there is no country that has the manpower to cover all of this domestically. The supply of workers and training falls far too short.Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.The result is either a silent collapse of that country's economy or the start of an ill-conceived war of conquest to gain by force what the country cannot supply itself.

watwut: > Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.The problem is that Europe does not have a choice here. The Greenland steal crisis is on hold, but not fixed. America clearly shown it will abuse any ties there are - it will lock accounts to tech to bully and get what they want. It will use tariffs to bully countries to make laws, release presidents friends criminals from prisons, you name it.Meanwhile, America seems to take Russian side in Russian expansion. Meanwhile, America is just cause major oil issue and potentially triggered next refugees crisis. Meanwhile, America clearly shown it does not even pretend to care bout war crimes and international law at all. It is sponsoring afd and other fascist parties all around the Europe while openly insulting Europe. Maybe it is too late for disconnect, but not trying would basically be a suicide for Europe.It would be great if it was not "us vs them". But it is "us vs them". Trust toward American made Europe super vulnerable.

gmueckl: The US isn't the navel of the world. It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific community.The European Union has many friendly trading partners left in the world and is also receiving an influx of previously US based talent. The trade decisions of the US aren't forcing the EU into isolationism. This is where your argument goes wrong IMO.The US government has announced that it plans to actively support extreme right wing parties in the EU. If this comes to pass, it is a direct attack on political freedom in those countries, separate from any economic policy decisions. I don't know how well EU countries can defend themselves against this in the short amd medium term. Some counties have better defenses than others. But I see virtually all of them struggling.

enraged_camel: 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.

iugtmkbdfil834: 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.

bborud: I recently saw “Mountainhead”. Apropos.

silvestrov: > peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)This is already happening with trade (e.g. soy beans) and with military purchases.Canada is moving quickly with moving trade elsewhere.

JumpCrisscross: > would argue the empire already collapsedThe republic is collapsing. Not the empire. The rich benefit if we transition to an autocratic empire based on American military might.

jmull: "for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up"That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.

xanthor: Can you address any of the points the commenter made instead of retreating into an ideological non sequitur?

tomrod: My comment was made prior to the parent's edit.Further, familiarity with the subject does not make an informed comment a non-sequitur. Happy reading.[0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha...[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293...[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...[3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9...[4] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/350051528721174623-0050...[5] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf[6] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5140733[7] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/22/4620[8] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2022/06/03/mea...[9] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf[10] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23323/w233...[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372649[12] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15199/w151...[13] https://www.economic-policy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/S...[14] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1273505[15] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...[16] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10439...

tootie: The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.

nine_k: 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.

JumpCrisscross: > super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time nowFor every pepper in the $100+ million class I know a hundred are not. They’re enjoying their lives or working to make more money.

tw-20260303-001: “Never trust any data you haven’t manipulated yourself”.

JumpCrisscross: > for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things upThis is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.

unselect5917: They're not.

lateforwork: Speaking of US economic data reliability:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/economy/inflatio...Story title:Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation ReadingExcerpts:“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.

tw-20260303-001: Under the current understanding of “not an option”. Who knows when this changes.

PaulDavisThe1st: It won't change until states nominally considered "red" or "blue" actually lose the vast majority of their nominally opposed population (e.g. Atlanta's current population migrates out of GA). Until then, just about every state is a complex mixture of populations with different political alignments and sufficient sizes to make secession extremely difficult if not impossible.

JumpCrisscross: > It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific communityWhile asserting itself militarily. This is the Roman Republic —> Empire transition.

empath75: It wasn’t an option in the USSR, either.

gwerbin: 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.

suzzer99: * Does not apply to native Americans or slaves.

jfengel: The fundraising never stops, not even for lame ducks, because the money can always be delivered into related war chests.But here it is going directly to the President's pockets. That has never happened before.

actionablefiber: 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.

DonThomasitos: Impressive thought. It could also be a built-in mechanism by nature to reshuffle the cards.

lpa22: The US is the best 400 mil population country in the world

HarHarVeryFunny: Well, it's certainly not the "best" if you remove that population stipulation.A bit like saying that Walmart is the best 4000 store grocery store in the USA.

suzzer99: A hundred more preppers who aren't $100+ millionaires? Or a hundred more $100+ millionaires who aren't preppers?

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

indymike: > Actual evidence of kompromats?Epstein.

testdelacc1: I’ll reply in good faith even though I detect sarcasm in your comment.Generally nonpartisan commissions prioritise contiguity and compactness. There is an element of “I know it when I see it” because you’re trying to avoid both packing (packing minority voters from disparate areas into one) and cracking (distributing a minority district like Salt Like City into its 4 neighbouring districts, ensuring the city can’t vote for … whoever cities generally vote for).So there is a human element involved, but these commissions generally do a reasonable job. You know how we know? States that move from nonpartisan to partisan commissions cause a dramatic change in the results of the next election. If the nonpartisan was biased like you imply with your air quotes, we wouldn’t observe that effect.Also there are algorithms to draw fair districts without needing human judgement. See this paper[1] that expounds on one such algorithm.1 - Swamy, R., King, D. M., & Jacobson, S. H. (2022). Multiobjective optimization for politically fair districting: A scalable multilevel approach. Operations Research, 71(2), 536–562. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2311

_heimdall: 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

svnt: 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.

jeffbee: 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!

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

Sam6late: That will lead to serious problems, as in the case of China, underestimating threats lead to losing edge, from EV to robots and other vital tech, and without experts to ground policy in reality, the country risks making erratic market moves and failing to spot risks from adversaries like China or Russia.Add to that inexperienced staff in the administration who makes the U.S. easier to manipulate.

jgilias: The situations are not comparable at all. That was the collapse of an authoritarian (wasn’t totalitarian anymore by the time it’d collapse) system running (badly) on command economy. Most of the points you mention are therefore just really off.Say, the Baltics flipping. Where the hell are we supposed to flip to? Russia? Where ethnic minorities are sent to die in expansionist wars in disproportionate numbers?

twodave: I really don’t like people bashing my state, especially when they’re repeating made-up bullshit. Do you just believe anything negative you read as long as it fits your views?

PaulDavisThe1st: I'm not following the file disclosures in particular detail; I haven't yet heard any disclosures from the files that are evidence of kompromat. What are you thinking of?

asdff: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/12/trump-jeffrey-epstein-ghisla...

iugtmkbdfil834: 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 countriesNo, it doesn't mean I am wrong.

jeffbee: "BLS CPS is worse than a hypothetical better thing" is tautological, void, and without meaning.

asdff: 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.

jeffbee: > 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.

tick_tock_tick: If you start all your conversations with a blatant lie that is incredibly easy to prove as such why are you surprised people scoff at you?

mentalgear: 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?

abirch: 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.

giardini: 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&#x2F;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.

svnt: 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.

gcanyon: > 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.

biztos: 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.

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

asdff: 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.

comet_browser: One underappreciated effect is how bad economic data cascades into private sector forecasting. Investors and startups build on top of official numbers — if GDP or employment figures are systematically off, you get valuation models and hiring decisions based on fiction. By the time reality corrects, the damage is already done and everyone acts surprised.The historical record of Gosplan-style distortion in the Soviet Union is instructive here. The data eventually became so gameable that the system lost its ability to coordinate anything.

cyanydeez: 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.

smitty1e: One is safe to assume partisan shenanigans with every single government program and number until proven otherwise.

sroussey: Sounds like Fallout

marcosdumay: > due to lack of magnetosphereWell, it's certainly one of the concerns there. After the lack of an atmosphere, biosphere, usable water...