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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Why would we want to adjust for that with ECI?

Because it provides relevant, if less flattering, data that provides a another framework for understanding views besides 'public discontent over the economy is a result of Republican lies.'

Is workers retraining into better roles not part of an improving economy?

Given the failures of 'learn to code' neoliberalism that simultaneously had oversights in critical areas like regional disparate impacts, the emerging implications of AI technologies in many service/digital economic areas which might be more resilient to distance dynamics, American economic categorization that systemically ignores unemployed persons not actively seeking jobs, and the state of the American (re)education system given it's advancing degrees of political capture that have already affected various fields, whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute.

relevant

It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?

whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute

We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages. Which are currently rising.

It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?

Because there are many, many more things that are used to assess how people are doing besides real wages, particularly in the context of not-terribly-distant economic history which considerably disrupted things like savings, regional economic systems, physical and mental health, and that's not even touching ongoing macroeconomic challenges.

We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages.

We could avoid a whole lot of questions if we ignored most things to focus on the favored economic statistics of the people who want to push a particular point.

This is not a particularly compelling reason to avoid questions, even if it would be much simpler to do so.

I was never suggesting that real wages are the only measure of a healthy society and contended citizenry. Only that it's superior than ECI is making the general assessment of whether Americans are doing better or worse than they were X months/years ago.

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