it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured [to] speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
> I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured from speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
Basically the finance industry is pivoting away from actually investing in real businesses to more and more elaborate paper pushing schemes (that make them money, but actually weaken the economy):
> Unlike Dawes’s Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, a modern investment bank mostly earns its money in a way that not even the bravest lyricist would set to music: providing advisory services, executing complex financial engineering schemes, trading stocks and bonds, managing other people’s money, issuing credit cards and so on. Assets get bought and sold, divided and packaged, and the bank collects fees at each step.
> David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could not sing to young Michael about the many productive uses to which he might put the tuppence because Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point.
> Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.
> These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.
Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
> If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
You're missing the point. Read the article.
And no one is saying "don't refinance debt." The passage you're reacting to was making the point "less than a tenth of [the capital banks raise] goes toward building anything new."
> Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
The article is talking about banks and the finance industry, not non-financial companies.
Also, if you think they were restructuring debt to invest in productive areas of their businesses, don't you think more than 10% of the capital banks raise would be going to building something new? If you read the article, it spends a lot of time talking about how much money goes into "mergers and acquisitions" and how it's a waste.
Sorry, what is the argument that when a company refinances debt—replacing current cash obligations with larger future cash obligations—they’re not going to use that current cash flow to build something new, or at least hire more people than they would have otherwise?
AFAIK, manufacturers refinance debt to build more/better factories all the time, for example.
Yup, it's the tragedy of the system we have set up.
There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing?
Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
Consider LLMs as the recent iteration to monetize free content, like ads do too, and you are not far from seeing the approaching AI-first enshittoscene. No matter the smart engineers altruistic goals, ROI has to be met.
Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same.
I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
Money follows ROI. Making those speculative or detrimental industries less profitable is the answer.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
If you're asking me? Workers revolution and a complete systems change, towards something that aligns incentives with the good of humanity, not of a money-grubbing few.
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
Those are two sides of the same coin. The "sky is falling" narratives and invasive advertising are both employed by the same elite to control your behavior through fear and suggestion.
Noam Chomsky is one of the loudest doomsayers and "critics" of the system (war, climate, politics) and yet simultaneously was good buddies with post-conviction Epstein. That ought to stimulate a reassessment of what you've believed about how (American) politics and society works.
That's not surprising. Post 2000 Chomsky is worthless, he couldn't defend his original thesis without ad hominems and used his fame to put pressure on universities (it didn't work every time, but enough), he pushed a decade backward part of the linguistics field (after pushing it up maybe two decade forward, but that's not an excuse).
Especially in humanities where you don't have hard data, contradiction is the only way to advance, and he forgot that. He became too full of himself and too confident.
But are you actually against inequality because not every industry is getting its fair share (whatever that might mean), or simply that you don't like the winners under the current system? In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power, would you be like "darn, the inequality under the capitalist system is luring talent from enterprise SaaS (or whatever) and that makes me sad"?
"In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power"
For that to be true, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of money at a massive scale for those, which would imply that consumers are being gouged for it. That's really true of almost any bubble. This is still a negative situation.
That's more of a moral question. The best and brightest are the ones running the casino. Why would someone spend 8 years in expensive schools becoming a doctor when they can work as a developer or marketer for an online sports book? Morals on the consumer supply curb demand. Morals on the provider side can help curb innovation and expanse.
Because the former is meaningful and the latter depresses you if you think too much about it, so you found strategies of not thinking about it that ultimately eat away at your soul and anything that makes a life worth living?
Yes, but the realization of this comes from experience or age. There are always new hires to fill the positions when the pay is high enough compared to the alternatives.
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
> I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out".
However bad their odds are gambling it's often the case that it's still the best chance they'll ever have to meaningfully improve their standard of living.
A lot of it is simply the rising price of housing and stagnating wages meaning that for a lot of people, the "chipping away" path their parents took toward home ownership is never going to bear fruit. Gambling and grifts of one kind or another are seen as the only alternative.
GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
Not every gas station, convenience store and pharmacy is stocked with aisle after aisle of cocaine. I don't know I would call it 'evil' but I agree it is a system most people are forced to exist in.
If we're appealing to authority, my mother, my father, and my sister are all highly accomplished doctors, and they believe GLP-1s will become part of a standard drug package to older adults like Statins because it's far more achievable than education we don't have and wouldn't work in the food system that exists in the US.
Yes, so let's just solve it. Okay, no more mental problem.
What's that? I didn't actually say a solution? Yeah, that's because I don't have one, and neither do you.
We can't just make people good people. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and it will never work. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. If you still think otherwise, you should think less because obviously it's not doing you any good.
We can sit here alllll day and tell people not to inject heroine or smoke cigarettes. But guess what? So long as the human brain is how it is, and we have those things available, people WILL continue to do them.
So while you have fake solutions you've made up in your head and can't even articulate, we have real solutions. GLP-1s. They work, as in they actually work. They actually help solve the problem.
So on one hand, you have an imaginary solution. On the other hand, you have a real solution. Hmm, which one should we gravitate towards? What a tough call!
> Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland
Ah, that might explain why you'd think that healthy food is easily available and affordable everywhere. I haven't seen what stores are like in Switzerland for myself, but it sure sounds like a massive improvement and may be part of why the obesity rate there is around 10% instead of over 40% like it is here.
The last times so many tech ads made their way to the Superbowl was during the crypto craze and the dot-com bubble. These are symptoms of an overly speculative economy.
Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that...
1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.
2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.
3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
Yeah, tariffs can be one part of it, especially things like anti-dumping. But there is no tariff for outsourcing virtual work. The US outsources something like 300k jobs per year, and tariffs won't fix that.
I don't think the US is lacking labor capacity, I find it far more likely that capitalists are just too greedy to manufacture in the US because it would make their dividends and bonuses and valuations drop a few points. They lose nothing by outsourcing everything, worst case scenario they are handed government money and bailouts, meanwhile their dividends and bonuses still pay out the entire time. If the company fails because of that? Like the last time GM cut pensions using the excuse of bad financials they gave all their managers and c-suite massive bonuses. If their financials are bad enough to cut legally obligated pensions, how can they afford larger bonuses? Didn't they need that money to keep the business running? Anyone in the company with the power to change any of those things is also wealthy and connected enough from all that to jump ship without a problem.
Labor costs are a minority of expenses even in labor-heavy industries and most corporations profit margins far exceed even "ridiculous" raises in wages and pay for their average worker. But there is zero incentive to benefit average employees and customers and every incentive to try and screw as many over as possible.
Why earn 5% margin on a stable growth path that will remain secure 20+ years down the line when they can earn 10% margin through exploitation and outsourcing and then jump ship and reinvest that money in other business later on.
GLP-1s are miracle drugs that (to my mind) seem one of the great accomplishments of medicine along side things like vaccines and antibiotics. They are a cure for all manner of metabolic conditions.
How are they a “gamble?” For patients, their efficacy rates are stunning. If you meant from an investing perspective, Eli Lilly and novo nordisk have very down to earth valuations when compared with AI companies.
I don't know what OP considers to be a gamble, but one thing that comes to mind is that from what I've read most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.
I'm in the US and if my doctor had suggested such drugs before last year I'd have been reluctant because (1) they were expensive even with insurance, (2) just how expensive varied quit a bit from insurance provider to insurance provider and from plan to plan from a given provider, and (3) as I said I'm in the US, and so never knew for sure who my insurance provider would be next year and even if it was going to be the same provider I never knew what their plans would be like next year [1].
Starting a new drug that looked like it would be a "rest of your life" drug where the price could change year to year from reasonably affordable to painfully expensive would definitely feel like taking a gamble.
Now I'm old enough for Medicare, and they are something I would at least consider because Medicare seems to be less volatile. They are still expensive, if my understanding is correct, with the need to meet a deductible and with copays or coinsurance, but all that counts toward the part D annual cap of $2100 so there is at least a cap making it somewhat safer to make long term plans. (But Republicans in Congress want to eliminate or at least significantly raise that cap, so long term planning is still somewhat of a gamble).
[1] In the US around 80-85% of people under 65 who have health insurance that is not provided through the government get their health insurance via their employer's benefits package. Most of the rest get it through the ACA marketplace. Employers often renegotiate plans with their provider or switch providers when the old plans/provider prices go up. The ACA market is even more volatile.
> most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.
Anecdata: I've gone from 260lb down to a minimum of 198ish, up to maybe 230, back down to 193, long slow climb up to 270 and now on a GLP-1 I'm under 230 and definitely look fat, but in the right light you can see my quad separation. The only people I know who've lost the kind of weight I've lost and kept it off (like a 5' man going from 250lb down to 145) went from logging every bite in My Fitness Pal (or similar) to keeping the log running in their head of what they're eating all day every day. Diabetics sometimes say they're making their prefrontal cortex do the work of their pancreas. That feels relatable.
So IDK if there's a weight loss solution that works that you don't have to do in perpetuity. "Eat less" yeah sure, but how? Magic Danish Gila monster potion that makes you want to eat less, or recording everything you eat and using that to tell yourself you're more full than you feel?
I managed some fairly significant weight loss and kept it off kind of by accident.
I was 326 lb when I took the physical that my college required incoming first year students to take. It slowly crept up over the years and by my mid 50s was generally in the 420-440 lb range. I had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about 10 years before that but responded spectacularly well to cheap diabetes drugs like metformin and Glucotrol. Same for cholesterol--it has been very high but Lipitor brought it down to normal. If you had showed my blood work to a doctor with no other information than my age and sex they would have not found any sign of anything wrong.
But then A1C started going up again, despite steady weight and no diet changes. I decided to try to lower carbs to see if that would help. Most low carb diets aim for a very low amount of carbs which require a lot of work to achieve (especially if like me at the time you don't mostly cook at home), so I decided to just try lower the percent of calories that came from carbs rather than worry about the absolute amount.
I picked 40% because (1) that is lower that average and definitely lower than what I was consuming, and (2) it is real easy to track (more on that below).
I was just trying to see if this change in balance would affect blood sugar and wasn't actually trying to lower calories. So rather than do things like give up most bread like many of the low carb diets require, I got the carb calorie percent down by adding non-carbs. For example if my normal ham and cheese sandwich with low calorie mayo was 60% calories from carbs, I'd switch that to regular mayo and/or double meat and/or double cheese. That would add a couple hundred or so calories which would lower the percent from carbs. The grams of carbs wouldn't change.
Two things happened then. First, my blood sugar did start going down. Second, and unexpectedly, I started losing weight. I had been keeping a simple food log for years at that point and it revealed that I in fact was consuming less calories.
Apparently what was going on is that things like the double meat double cheese regular mayo sandwich were keeping me satisfied longer, so I naturally snacked less, and naturally started eating smaller portions.
In two years I was down to 280 lb, and completely off diabetes and cholesterol. (I'd always had high blood pressure, and going from 420-440 lb to 280 lb had no effect whatsoever on that).
Over the next maybe 18 months it crept up to 320-325 lb (so basically my high school weight) and it has been steady in that range ever since (6 or 7 years so far).
I said earlier that 40% is easy to track. That's because 1 g of carbs has ~4 calories. That means all you have to do is look at the nutrition label and if numerically calories/10 <= carb grams the thing is not over 40% calories from carbs. (You can subtract grams of fiber from the carb grams).
For a meal with multiple items, say a fast food burger and fast food fries and a diet soda you could total the calories and total the carbs and do the calculation on that, but an easier way is to do the burger and fries separately and add the over/under amounts together.
For example let's say you are contemplating a Burger King Whopper (670 calories, 51 carbs) and large fries (440 calories 59 carbs). For the burger calculate 670/10-51=16, and for the fries 440/10-59=-16. 16 + -16 = 0, and your burger and fries together is 40% calories from carbs.
It is also fairly easy to keep a running net for the day, so just remember that say at breakfast you came out say at -8 because you decided to treat yourself to a donut for desert. Then at lunch you could change that Whopper to a Whopper with Cheese (770 calories 53 carbs) which is +24 instead of +16, nicely cancelling out your breakfast donut as far as carb balance goes.
> I had been keeping a simple food log for years at that point
> It is also fairly easy to keep a running net for the day
Right, so there it is: whatever you did to get to a calorie deficit you need to keep doing to be calorie neutral. If it's take a GLP-1 then that works. If it's using pen and paper or an app or even vibes-based reckoning to track everything you eat, then it's that. Regardless it just doesn't seem like a valid criticism of any given weight loss strategy when I have yet to hear of one that doesn't have that feature
I agree that their large scale rollout will be very beneficial on the whole. The US is absurdly overweight and obese.
But these are powerful medications that affect very highly conserved areas of tetrapod biology. We discovered GLPs in the mouths of gila monsters, after all. So you then can infer that that the mechanism is at least 300 million years old (our last common ancestor with lizards).
Actually, I tried looking this up, and glucagon is likely 5-600 million years old, back to all chordates, the Cambrian explosion essentially, though likely even before that. So, incredibly conserved. Like, if you are a multicellular animal, odds are you have some glucagon-like thing for digestion regulation.[0]
We're strongly messing with a system that is just tremendously old. Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
Like, clearly, other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes, they are developing them, I know. But even the US didn't have these issues near as bad just two generations ago, a blink in biological terms. You and I both know that the solution is not a pill, but the root cause of the obesity epidemic itself. These injections and pill are just band-aids for a much deeper and more pernicious problem.
But then again, you and I both know that we're not going to get at the root cause anytime soon either.
[0] This is biology so you'll find exceptions everywhere though
The weight gain in the us compared to the rest of world is undoubtedly related to the callous disregard corporations posess for life in general, let alone the subtle things like microbiomes and fungi that shape our ecosystem
> Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
As long as you have descendants, biology and evolution don't care, once that's done it's game over for them.
> That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
It's been tested for over 20 years, the weight loss bit is the recent one.
> other countries do not have these issues with weight.
It's part of the solution, is how you help existing people with the issue.
Doing a restrictive diet is not easy (I know, I've been dieting since october, lost 15 pounds, but I can go on autopilot for this, which is not the case for others), it requires a lot of discipline that most people don't have, and our bodies are optimized to store calories, as well as being very efficient in consuming them, because for most of history famines were common, last ~100 years being the exception to the rule for most of the world population.
Future generations can be helped by better food culture and education, and that's the other part of the solution, long term.
I would say the consolidation of small banks into the big banks has fostered this more the people want to admit.
Since banks like Wells Fargo bought up local ones, the equality distribution changes dramatically. Wells Fargo wants the big players while that little bank wanted local players. This causes the market to lack marbling in competition while creating a massive group think economic bubble.
I don't gamble to become a winner, I gamble to keep myself break even desperately trying to hold to some asset that isn't inflated into oblivion by misinformed economic and fiscal policy.
How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
>the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
Adam Smith had a bit of a Marxist view (though, he did come up with it first) on the land value of real property, considering deriving rent from it as "unearned" without labor, which looks a little too close to comfort to appealing to what we would call today the "labor theory of value" which we now know is a largely useless device for creating or observing markets intended to provide voluntary ~free exchange of the fruits of capital and labor.
Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.
Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.
Just a weird, completely unscientific personal metric I've used to note that the economy seems like it's shrinking - last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Gaming technology is kind of stagnant, and there aren't the sort of technical leaps between generations anymore. Games today look and feel like games from 2014 with slightly better graphics (and more aggressive monetization).
The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).
Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
> Sales figures collated by The Game Business last month showed that U.S. Switch 2 sales over the holiday period were down around 35% versus the Switch 1's first holiday sales performance back in 2017. In the UK, a similar comparison saw Switch 2 lagging Switch 1 by 16%. Even in Nintendo's homeland of Japan, Switch 2 holiday sales couldn't match Switch 1, and were down by 5.5% over the year's final nine weeks.
> In France, 2025's final tally of Switch 2 sales was down by "over 30%" versus the amount Switch 1 notched up back in 2017
Switch 2 is the fastest selling console of all time right now. [0]
They sold more than 17 million units in less than a year. The Wii U only sold 13 million over its entire lifetime. The Switch 1 took 2 years to reach 20 million, and the Switch 2 will very likely reach that number in less than half the time.
Nintendo may have expected even higher sales numbers but saying that
Nintendo indicated when the Switch 2 was launching that they were going to do their best to ensure a large supply and make sure actual players were prioritized. They did not want resellers to be profitable and did not want to create a situation like the PlayStation.
It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.
I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
>last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer.
Don't you expect demand to taper off as more people get their hands on it? It also doesn't help that the switch 2 is basically "the switch, but better".
This never happened with the switch. I am not kidding. 2023 I was trying to buy one for my sister, and it took me months of waiting for target to open and beating the resellers to it, because I didn't want to overspend online (plus online stock frequently sold out). It was released in 2017!
Nintendo is notorious for under producing their consoles vs demand in recent years - the worst example was the mini NES or whatever they called it, they could not keep it on shelves for that one either.
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
What are you talking about? The WiiU sold like crap! It was a disaster! And a big reason it was a disaster was because the Wii itself was not selling anymore. It was over and out, people were fed up with it. Nintendo is a very very very bad economic indicator, they're on their own planet, and they're far from selling nostalgia. They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Well, I remember the same thing happening with the Wii for a long time, and then eventually it was easily available.
But now I can't find a Wii at a Target anywhere, so the economy must be booming?
> One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists.
But that's 2026 hiring, and the article's about the 2025 revisions. (And the January number, as they all do, may get revised in a few months.)
It would be quite hard in the long run to make faked BLS numbers line up with other independent data points, like ADP's payroll reports and the IRS's revenues.
Historically both directions are common, but in 2025 every month was revised down from the preliminary report except October. (They were revised down a lot in 2023 and 2024 as well fwiw.)
>>> "Still, Wednesday’s report also shows that not nearly as many jobs were added in 2025 as thought and last year will go down as the worst year for hiring since 2020, or since 2003 outside of a recession."
Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
what i find interesting is that unemployment percent still looks low. is it accurate? even if it's wrong, shouldn't it be correct on a relative basis? why isn't this number climbing?
US Unemployment statistics have a number of flaws, including not capturing people who are underemployed (taking any low paying job to try to make ends meet instead of working in a higher paying field they are qualified for) and not capturing those who are no longer searching for a job
I agree that the most-commonly reported 'head-line' numbers can be misleading, but more detailed statistics are available. One of my favorites is the labor participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
The second point is hard to quantify. If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job. But if I am choosing not to look because I won't take a job, I am technically unemployed by the strict definition of the word but I don't count for what most people care about when thinking about the unemployment rate.
Underemployment is already reported and is distinctly different so I don't think it's fair to say that not counting someone at Burger King who has a Master's degree as unemployed is a "flaw."
>If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job.
The current definition makes sense because it's linked to an overt action that can be objectively determined. "Not looking for a job but theoretically would like a job" gets into all sorts of issues like "I want a job as a king if it landed on my lap...".
The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall
labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate.
Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.
But I think in this case an aging population can hold down the official unemployment rate, even when there are no new jobs outside services for the aged.
They separately report people who are on unemployment insurance, but the headline unemployment numbers come from a survey of potential workers, which will capture recent graduates.
Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they surveyed. Every month for a year they called me, once a month, to ask what my employment status last week was, if I was actively looking, etc. (It was all synchronized around one week a month, but I don't remember which one it was they cared about.)
What stops it from being a more useful metric is that it doesn't account for someone who was employed with benefits five or ten years ago, but today has some crappy gig economy job with no health insurance. They show up as employed either way.
Native population is declining (and prime-age workforce is retiring), and the Trump admin has been extensively working to reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.
So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.
> Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
I wonder what those folks in health care are doing, because (once again) after dealing with the US healthcare system, it seems like it's about 1% doctors, 10% other staff and 90% useless billing/scheduling/collections, designed to extract the maximum possible amount of money from a patient and provide the minimum amount of care.
More jobs being added in health care seems to be an indicator for it getting even worse.
I don't think "U.S. Jobs Disappear At Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession"[1] is vibes.
The future picture on inflation also looks bleak[2]:
> Taken individually, lagged tariff pass‑through, tightening labor supply, looser fiscal policy, and accommodative financial conditions would each push inflation modestly higher. Taken together—and interacting with increasingly fragile household inflation expectations—they create a macro environment in which inflation rising above 4 percent by the end of 2026 is not only plausible but arguably the most likely scenario.
It's common knowledge that the spending in the current economy is very K-shaped: the top 10% are the only ones staying above water.
Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
I don't think you can draw any conclusion about the economic health of the entire population from a small number of cherry-picked cases so egregious that a YouTuber deemed entertaining enough to turn them into monetized videos.
I can tell you about the people around me making below median income and still raising families, but it would not be interesting enough for YouTube.
Youtube is entertainment designed to get clicks, and the algorithm enhances biases. Fox news hosts would likely be youtubers if they started their careers today.
A great example of what seems to be the current ethos for the generation (I realize Handey isn't of this generation). Very much "nothing matters as we'll all die anyway, who cares about what comes after". I don't fault the sentiment, to be clear, it's just an indication of the socio-economic situation that fostered it.
Look into Doom spending. Excessive spending is actually a psychological response to hardship for consumers in 1st world countries. It's a documented phenomenon that has happened in the past and is exacerbated by social media, gamification of wealth, and general incompetence (all of which are on the uptrend).
"It is true that some of the fields that have been adopting A.I. fastest - such as information and professional and business services - have been shedding jobs. That is also partly because those fields hired much more quickly during the pandemic years, and have been going through a correction."
IT, finance losing jobs
Non-IT, non-finance, e.g., healthcaare, gaining jobs
I've mentioned this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45987316), but I follow a labor economist on LinkedIn who puts things into a balanced perspective. The thing he reminds us often is you can't take these numbers in isolation.
Job numbers need to be considered in the context of a lot of other numbers, including population growth. As the other top thread yesterday highlighted, the US is experiencing slowing population growth, which may also have been exacerbated by the recent upheavals in immigration.
I may be butchering the theory here, but the point is that the economy is a dynamic, inter-connected system, and a smaller population requires fewer jobs. (As a silly example, you need many more car mechanics for a town with a population of 1000 as opposed to a population of 100.) That actually has implications for GDP growth as well.
That's not to say the overall economy is doing great, just that these job numbers should not be taken as a complete indicator of it.
If most of the capital is in the hands of tech bros who live out their fantasies from 1980s SciFi novels, it is going to be misallocated.
The fake economy is now about AI, gambling and cryptocurrencies. It does not help that the current administration contains several Epstein disciples when Epstein was into these tech fantasies as well.
The misallocation of capital claims to grow the pie, but it dilutes the pie with fake growth so people that own the fake parts have more money to buy up the good parts.
"The strip mining of trust" is a metaphor describing the unsustainable extraction of social capital—honesty, reputation, and goodwill—for short-term, selfish efficiency or profit. Similar to ecological destruction, this process erodes long-term, foundational trust, leaving behind hollowed-out institutions and requiring massive future effort to restore.
Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand. The value in making it easier to make computers do things for you is plainly obvious. People all across the tech literacy spectrum are seeing benefits, from coding projects that took days or weeks taking minutes to hours to finish to soccer moms telling their phones to fix up family photos and find them the email from the doctor's that's buried in their inbox. Competent doctors are getting help catching things from scans/symptoms that would take House MD to connect but are a breeze for an LLM, and there are numerous reports of people figuring out their own longstanding obscure medical issues by asking an LLM to speculate on their symptoms after a hundred doctors failed to diagnose it. Someone who can't afford to get ripped off by a mechanic and doesn't have the spare hours in the day and technical knowledge to Google it the old-fashioned way has a decent chance of solving simple car problems instantly on their own by asking ChatGPT or Gemini. It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from.
"Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand."
I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."
Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.
> Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.
Books and calculators still required knowledge of concepts and application. That's vastly different from students today asking AI to write a book report for them and retaining no knowledge from it.
I don't consider AI to be outstanding. Maybe that bridge they're talking about was. Seems that this comes down to opinion.
On the other hand, it’s not clear if any of it is sustainably profitable. Zitron has done a lot of reporting in this area, but since he’s “controversial” let’s stick with Forbes and the case of Sora (2025):
As far as I can tell, the math isn’t getting any better. The financial costs of running an AI service are enormous and it’s not clear where sufficient revenue is going to magically come from once the aggressive loss-leading ends.
> America’s economy added 130,000 jobs in January, almost double the number that analysts had been expecting, indicating that the labour market might have picked up after months of apparent stagnation. Unemployment also fell to 4.3%, a slight dip from the previous month. The figures may put off the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates as quickly as Donald Trump would like.
Yeah not sure where the 600k figure is coming from. But that 130k that's being reported is almost certainly not correct, and will be revised down.
The ADP is only reporting 22k for January. Which lines up very closely with the monthly pace of job creation for 2025 (~15k, on average).
The downward revisions on the BLS numbers for 2025 are the largest on record. There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
> There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
Jobs data (which comes from a survey of employers) is always subject to revisions, and the revisions have gotten worse. But it's not necessarily political. Back when Trump unprecedentedly fired Erika McEntarfer (former head of the BLS) I looked into this and tried to understand where the data comes from, how it works.
Basically, the BLS surveys 50k out of the several million companies in the US. But response rates have dropped rather strongly since the Pandemic in particular. If you give them 3 months, it gets up to 90%, but after 1 month it is only 50%. This would be okay, except that the response rates turn out to be skewed: large companies almost always respond quickly, small companies respond more slowly. And small companies tend to be much more responsive to the state of the overall economy than large companies- for good and for bad. And even the response times of the small companies turn out to be sensitive to economic trends, for good and for bad: the companies that respond more slowly to surveys, it turns out, tend to be the most sensitive to the broader economy, the first to fire in a recession, but also the first to hire when the economy is getting better.
The final thing is that these companies can be highly correlated with each other and the broader economy. So there are always corrections, but in placid economic weather the corrections cancel out- some of the extrapolations are high, some are low, it ends up being close to 0. And the financial markets understand how to read these corrections. They understand that when the economy is shifting you will get all of the misses in the same direction- either high or low- and to pay attention these corrections data.
All of these misses low in 2025 are a very bad sign for the economy overall, not necessarily a sign of political pressure. That would probably show up in large, sustained differences to the ADP numbers or other privately reported numbers, rather than revisions announced by the BLS itself.
Both Trump I's appointee to head the BLS, William Beach (who served from 2019-2023) and Biden's appointee Erika McEntarfer (whom Trump fired in 2025) wanted to modernize the survey system, make it easier for companies to respond, and get better and faster data collection. But, because this system is so incredibly important to the markets, they wanted a larger budget to run the new system and the old system together for a significant portion of time (several years) so that everyone would be comfortable understanding the intricacies of the system, what revisions would mean, etc. And since they didn't get that budget (in fact it got cut) they decided to prioritize the old system rather than throw it away and experiment with something different.
Good explanation. I think it's sad that people find it easier to adopt imaginary theory of why labor statistics are flawed than they are to simply go read their methodology. People don't want to believe that there are BLS statisticians working the phones and knocking on doors. They don't want to know that there are hundreds of USDA employees tasked with writing down the retail price of carrots in every major American city every day. They aren't interested in how Census takers judge the population by counting gas and electric meters. They'd rather believe that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent.
I think it's the rise of authoritarianism: we are losing trust in truth, in what is said, the day to day social trust is dissolving. It worries me an awful lot, but it seems like we're (1) destroying the basis for much of our society and prosperity. All of the social technology we've amassed over the past century and a half seems to be in decline.
1: American English language culture I can read as an insider, and I pay some attention to the UK culture as well. I'm sadly monolingual so I have vague understanding of other countries, but they seem on a broadly similar path.
I'm assuming this is talking about the revised numbers for 2025? And if that revised so heavily downward, hard to imagine the latest numbers are somehow more stable?
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
reply