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
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.