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Re:Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations ... by t_mann on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @02:54PM (#44447453)
I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.

One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.

Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

Re:Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations ... by TheOtherHobbes on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:42PM (#44447969)
I think income is still too crude and misleading. You really need some kind of complex individual economic health measure made of many indicators.

But a more informative proxy would be median net worth - individual, not household, with married couple net worth divided by two for simplicity - as a fairly simple assets vs liabilities calculation.

The net worth distribution would be even more revealing because it would highlight the difference between owners and renters.

This still doesn't reveal net worth stability. In the US you can - and many people do - go from a seven figure net worth to bankruptcy because of a health crisis or (increasingly) a climate disaster.

So you'd want a supplemental distribution showing how variable net worth is, how many people are reduced to bankruptcy at each decile, and how much movement there is in each decile.

Reducing these kinds of complexities to a single number seems misleading at best.

Re:Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations ... by t_mann on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:56PM (#44448113)
As you yourself pointed out, trying to squeeze all aspects of how well people are doing into one metric is tricky - although useful efforts in that direction exist, eg Human Development Index [0]. That's why we're focusing on one specific aspect here, economic activity, for which flow-based metrics like GDP or household income are better suited than stock-based metrics like net worth.

[0] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index