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Also illustrates the near-childlike belief some people have in numbers. Give them a chart of some fancy metric and tell them that when the line goes up it means things are good, and they will just take it for granted that it’s correct and reflects some real-world phenomenon that’s relevant to them.
So when an economic metric that doesn’t really tell you how us plebs are doing says that things should be fine, that’s obviously how things are and anybody who doesn’t believe it is stupid. Data can’t be wrong because data is objective, right?
Unemployment numbers are a perfect encapsulation of this. It only measures a fraction of people who are actually out of work.
It doesn’t measure:
- People who are underemployed (e.g. working 20 hours because you can’t get a 40 hour job)
- People who left a job of their own will
- Gig work
- Contract work
- People who were on unemployment, but at 6 months where kicked off even though they still don’t have a job
So months into an employment crisis (like we saw in 2020-2021 and are still seeing), when loads of people who had unemployment who still don’t have jobs, but fall off because they timed out, the numbers suddenly look great! “Unemployment numbers are improving” no the fuck they’re not. The numbers just don’t measure what’s actually happening on the ground.
The problem is: all of this is a feature, not a bug. Capitalism isn’t supposed to benefit us. We’re the fodder. We’re meant to be kept in desperate situations because it keeps us compliant. If you’re constantly at risk of homelessness and starvation, then you’ll take whatever shit job you can and take whatever abuse you have to just to keep a paycheck coming in. That’s not a distortion of the system. It’s not a failure of our economic system. That’s the system working as intended.
For the stock market line go up is good for me because it means the corporate overlords are less likely to hurt me than if line go down.
