The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up.
Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting.
The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.
> They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
As a statist, I personally always found it as a fascinating way to look at the future. They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.
They're trying to thread the needle of a collapse bad enough that they'll retreat to their bunkers, but not so bad that their bodyguards will turn on them for their gold. Let's see how it works out!
The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.
And the fact that they're different between the US and other countries, and between other countries and other-other countries is well recognized; "International unemployment rates: how comparable are they?":
Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:
Your comment is broadly misleading. In fact, I would say that "shadow stats" guys like you have enabled the destruction of the system by creating the space to cast doubt on the valid methods used by BLS. BLS unemployment metrics have a valid basis and where they differ from Eurostat those differences are minor and with rational basis (such as 16 vs. 15 year old starting age).
It's worse - important metrics like inflation are distorted by "hedonic adjustment" - i.e. pretending cars are getting cheaper because, even though they're getting more expensive, you get "more car" (ABS, airbags, remote unlock, heated seats (if you pay the subscription), hidden GPS tracking..):
I think the real issue now is that it's 10x worse. The people controlling things are actively and shamelessly making things worse, for their own purposes (so there is less accountability, IMO). The problem is the new, unintended side effects of what they are doing. Because they aren't really that smart, they don't even understand this.
Calculating unemployment seems like it is always going to be a challenge no matter how it is done. For example, the current system in the US does not track unemployed graduates, as they have not been laid off and are not filing for unemployment benefits.
mark_l_watson says"The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' "
(1)This is normal human behavior usually described as "capitalism". It has been well-studied & the literature awaits you, e.g., The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 by Scottish economist Adam Smith. Go ahead: if you read the entire tome you may be the first man to do so. Perhaps you could write a usefully shortened version or versions of it.
mark_l_watson says"Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses."
(2)the behavior isn't immoral, as you will find by merely educating yourself [see (1)].
(3)There was/is no [US]"empire". And certainly none in the sense of the Persian, Mongol, Roman, incan, Spanish, British, French, or even, God forbid, Belgian empire, all of which were true empires.
Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading
Excerpts:
“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”
Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.
“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.
The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.
This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.
Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.
It's sad how counter productive the unreliable economic data is. The people buying groceries know that things are more expensive. And the people looking for a job know how hard it is to find work.
But this administration wants to say everything is fine, and fires those that say otherwise. So now unemployment seems under control even though it's not great.
Now the Fed, with their dual mandate to maintain a healthy labor market and control inflation, is considering raising rates. If it turns out the job market was much worse than we realized, raising rates could tank the economy more than it already is tanking. All because they wanted to pretend everything is fine.
The books Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (by two of the winners of past years Nobel Economics award, both books are a simple thesis and lots of historical examples IMHO) will have to be updated to include this and other current events in the USA. This is one of many aspects mentioned in both books.
It seems nobody has posted this, but the only reason why this would ever be an issue is the principal–agent problem. When a representative democracy has a significant divergence between the representatives and the people being represented, we encounter this:
That will lead to serious problems, as in the case of China, underestimating threats lead to losing edge, from EV to robots and other vital tech, and without experts to ground policy in reality, the country risks making erratic market moves and failing to spot risks from adversaries like China or Russia.Add to that inexperienced staff in the administration who makes the U.S. easier to manipulate.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.
But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.
In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.
People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests.
I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.
We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.
A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.
Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.
Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.
One of the things I do like about the US, and that I think is a reason for America's ability to meet the challenges this country faces is that it has good data collection and aggregation mechanisms: from the seemingly-banal surveys and so on to satellite remote-sensing.
There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.
I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.
We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.
"The change may cause policymakers to misjudge the economy’s health, investors to lose confidence in the reliability of the data, and the public to disengage from participating in official measures altogether."
Many neoliberal Western countries with good data have completely fumbled their economies post-GFC and post-Covid, just look at Canada's disastrous GDP per capita growth.
On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.
On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.
It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
Europe won't be able to catch that. They're too busy regulating ahead of the tech. They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either. In a runaway takeoff scenario, they replace all their factory workers with robots and quickly scale and cost optimize. If America is smart, we might be able to do that too.
Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.
America needs to start pumping out new energy projects. It needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
And we do need factories and raw inputs. The robots will take over for humans within a decade. If we stick the landing, we could be the new China right here at home.
Edit: rate limited on replies, so updating my comment instead.
Edit 2: Europe supplies the EUV lithography, but intelligence manifests higher up the stack. If we're talking rate limits, lots of countries supply critical inputs.
I'm saying that Europe hasn't made strides towards developing their own models and infra, and it doesn't look like it's even close to starting to attack this problem. I want it to.
Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.
America needs to double down on investing in energy and factories now. It looks like it will pay off in a big way.
Edit 4:
> You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code
I would be extremely geopolitically anxious to rely on another country's tech in a take off scenario. Those tokens might be diverted to US businesses and factories. Or the US might strong arm concessions out of Europe. Europe needs domestic capability for this now.
It's not just Europe and sovereign nations. Workers and labor capital will be effectively frozen out of participation if there aren't open source equivalents.
> This is an downright evil take on the current situation.
It's just reality. Multipolarity means we're going to see a lot more of this type of framing, because it's what's happening on the ground.
While we're on the topic, why is it that we love to point the finger at other countries' corruption and we completely ignore the very obvious, rampant corruption in our own government? And I mean on both sides - Democrat and Republican. Insider trading, revolving door policies, etc. That's not even mentioning why we have people like Luigi Mangione. That's a whole separate elephant in the room.
395 comments
Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting.
The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
> They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
>
super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time nowFor every prepper in the $100+ million class, I know a hundred who are not. They’re enjoying their lives or working to make more money.
>
Calculation of unemployment […]Define "unemployment". There are six (U-1 to -6) ways of classification in the US:
* https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unemployment.asp
And the fact that they're different between the US and other countries, and between other countries and other-other countries is well recognized; "International unemployment rates: how comparable are they?":
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/06/art1full.pdf
And this isn't something new; from 1957, "International Comparison of Unemployment Rates":
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/measurement-and-beha...
Just because they're different does not mean that they are "misleading" or 'manipulated'.
> The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.'
How is this new? Is greed something discovered recently and especially in the US?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
>Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries
Source? For unemployment, isn't the U-3 definition used for "headline unemployment" consistent to most other countries?
>
for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things upThis is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.
> Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries.
This is a big claim. What other countries? What are their methods and how do they differ?
> for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up.
That’s a bold claim, do you have sources to back it up? If true, we’d all (I’d, at least) learn an important lesson.
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/12/05/what-worries-me-about-hedo...
That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.
Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.
(1)This is normal human behavior usually described as "capitalism". It has been well-studied & the literature awaits you, e.g., The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 by Scottish economist Adam Smith. Go ahead: if you read the entire tome you may be the first man to do so. Perhaps you could write a usefully shortened version or versions of it.
mark_l_watson says"Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses."
(2)the behavior isn't immoral, as you will find by merely educating yourself [see (1)].
(3)There was/is no [US]"empire". And certainly none in the sense of the Persian, Mongol, Roman, incan, Spanish, British, French, or even, God forbid, Belgian empire, all of which were true empires.
But that's probably just my lying' eyes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/economy/inflatio...
Story title:
Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading
Excerpts:
“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”
Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.
“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.
This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.
Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.
But this administration wants to say everything is fine, and fires those that say otherwise. So now unemployment seems under control even though it's not great.
Now the Fed, with their dual mandate to maintain a healthy labor market and control inflation, is considering raising rates. If it turns out the job market was much worse than we realized, raising rates could tank the economy more than it already is tanking. All because they wanted to pretend everything is fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
- Whatever you measure gets optimized.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.
But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.
In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.
I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.
We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.
A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.
Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.
Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.
There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.
I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.
We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.
Many neoliberal Western countries with good data have completely fumbled their economies post-GFC and post-Covid, just look at Canada's disastrous GDP per capita growth.
On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.
On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.
It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.
Europe won't be able to catch that. They're too busy regulating ahead of the tech. They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.
If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either. In a runaway takeoff scenario, they replace all their factory workers with robots and quickly scale and cost optimize. If America is smart, we might be able to do that too.
Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.
America needs to start pumping out new energy projects. It needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.
And we do need factories and raw inputs. The robots will take over for humans within a decade. If we stick the landing, we could be the new China right here at home.
Edit: rate limited on replies, so updating my comment instead.
Edit 2: Europe supplies the EUV lithography, but intelligence manifests higher up the stack. If we're talking rate limits, lots of countries supply critical inputs. I'm saying that Europe hasn't made strides towards developing their own models and infra, and it doesn't look like it's even close to starting to attack this problem. I want it to.
Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.
America needs to double down on investing in energy and factories now. It looks like it will pay off in a big way.
Edit 4:
> You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code
I would be extremely geopolitically anxious to rely on another country's tech in a take off scenario. Those tokens might be diverted to US businesses and factories. Or the US might strong arm concessions out of Europe. Europe needs domestic capability for this now.
It's not just Europe and sovereign nations. Workers and labor capital will be effectively frozen out of participation if there aren't open source equivalents.
> This is an downright evil take on the current situation.
It's just reality. Multipolarity means we're going to see a lot more of this type of framing, because it's what's happening on the ground.
Edit: noneconomic not none comic.
For instance, the employment report (establishment survey) has an error rate or +/- 122,000 with 90% confidence--completely swamping the actual value.
It be like I said I was 2m tall on my dating profile and one date is frightened off by my being -0.2m tall and another by me being 4m tall.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm#
While we're on the topic, why is it that we love to point the finger at other countries' corruption and we completely ignore the very obvious, rampant corruption in our own government? And I mean on both sides - Democrat and Republican. Insider trading, revolving door policies, etc. That's not even mentioning why we have people like Luigi Mangione. That's a whole separate elephant in the room.