The "economy"

Portfolios, not bank balances, but otherwise that’s what economy means to capitalists. The economic hardship index is what we all actually care about, but that’s never on the news.
- Economist here. There’s obviously no single measure of the state of the economy, and if there were, jobs and wages would clearly be a key component. It’s mostly those “left-wing” journalist that will have you believe that one number, GDP growth, represents the state of the economy.
  
  What "left wing journalists?" I want names. There aren't any left wing journalists in MSM.
  
  Please provide an example.

Hilarious! This is definitely the right place to post this

Reminder that GDP is a bullshit number and so are nearly all made up numbers economists use to justify capitalist wage theft

This article made a prediction that turned out to be wrong.
In the time since the headline in July 2020, the number of jobs in the U.S. rose back from 139 million to 159 million. (In January 2020, before COVID hit, there were 152 million jobs).
Average weekly earnings went up from $1016 to $1236, a 21.6% increase. That's come up short on the 23.4% inflation in that time period. But also, this number didn't drop for COVID, so these wages are higher than in 2019.
People can complain about how the economy isn't working for regular people, but the last 5 years were actually a pretty good run for wage earners.
- These sentences:
  Average weekly earnings went up from $1016 to $1236, a 21.6% increase. That's come up short on the 23.4% inflation in that time period.
  answer the implicit question in this sentence:
  People can complain about how the economy isn't working for regular people, but the last 5 years were actually a pretty good run for wage earners.
  It wasn't really a good run. Wages didn't keep up with inflation. Even though wages are higher, the buying power with those wages is less.
  
  Think it might be grading on a curve. Wages have long lagged inflation. Lagging less than 2 percent over 5 years is bad, but less bad than most 5 year periods in recent history.
  
  Decreasing the rate of loss is good. Not great. Just good. It's certainly better than average, since average was a much bigger loss.
  But it's semantics. We need to do better regardless.
  
  Wages didn't keep up with inflation
  Counting back from July 2020, the average weekly earnings per worker came up just short. But the huge addition of workers during the economic recovery would have been expected to dent that further.
  Compare the exact same comparison from July 2019 versus April 2025, we have weekly earnings going up from $964 to $1236 (28.2%), while the inflation over that time period was 24.6%. So workers gained across even that metric over this time.
  But we'd never say that the economic conditions for regular people improved between July 2019 and July 2020. Those huge job losses during the first few months of the COVID recession were devastating for regular people, even if the average earnings among people who kept their jobs shot upward. It wasn't because their wages went up, it was that the people who were the lowest earners lost their jobs. As they reentered the workforce, they were taking higher paying jobs than the ones they were previously laid off from, so that overall average stayed stable with the artificially elevated July 2020 number, through improved bargaining power during the great resignation and some recovery of union power, especially in the summer of 2023.
  That's why economic conditions for regular people can't be measured by a single metric, and all the different stats need to be read together.
- That doesn't sound like a good run at all, that sounds like a less terrible run than other terrible runs. Literally wages did not keep up with inflation. The net economic power of workers went down. That's not a good run.
  
  The net economic power of workers went down.
  The aggregate economic power of workers went up, because the actual number of workers went up by 20 million, or 14% of the workforce as of July 2020, and the number of unemployed or involuntarily part time went down over that period of time. There were a lot more wages being distributed per unit population, even if the real wages slightly decreased per worker.
- The problem with looking at "average wages" is that you've got outliers like "Spiders" Elon over there fucking up the numbers.
- t wasn’t really a good run. Wages didn’t keep up with inflation. Even though wages are higher, the buying power with those wages is less.
  Generally averages, in my opinion, are not a good measure.
  Here is the median:
  Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
  Edit: Maybe this is even better:
  Real Median Personal Income in the United States (MEPAINUSA672N) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
  
  All of these stats matter, because it shows multiple facets of a complex economic system.
  Bottom quartile earnings are here.
  Real Median Personal Income
  I don't like using personal income as a metric that represents what's happening to regular people because it's noisy data that incorporates retirement income and investment income in the numerator, and includes in the denominator non-earners (including the idle rich, retired people, full time students).
  But as part of a broader look at multiple metrics, it should be considered.
  Others include the different categories of unemployment (including the underemployed, the weekly hours worked, marginally detached), read with other employment indicators like layoffs and volunary quits, job openings posted, people making unemployment claims for the first time, etc.