[sobellian]

AFAICT the article was written by the guy that germinated the concept in the first place. You can see the paper at https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63ba0d84fe573c7513595d6e/...

tl;dr It is very highly correlated to U-3. The paper doesn't include 2024 in the data series but the figure the article cites, 23.7%, is very near all-time best. That's pretty deceptive framing IMO.

[lapcat]

I feel like you both may be missing the point. The article isn't just about the present. It takes a very long view:

> The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks

> The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.

In other words, the official statistics have been misleading for a very long time, misleading in the sense of not showing the true hardships of the economy on the voters.

"Year X is better/worse than Year Y" is not really the point.

[sobellian]

The proposed measure is highly correlated with U-3, so as time-series they should basically tell the same story. If the assertion is "U-3 doesn't predict this phenomenon but this other measure does" it's likely to be wrong since the signals are roughly equal to a constant factor. For the entire data range depicted in the paper this property holds. Is it possible that back in $GOOD_OLD_DAYS this isn't true? Well I'd like to see the data but I don't have time to chase it down and none has been offered to support that claim.

[bryanlarsen]

> It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks

Then they should have made up a new number that proves that point rather than making up a new number that seems to imply the opposite.

> In other words, the official statistics have been misleading for a very long time, misleading in the sense of not showing the true hardships of the economy on the voters.

There is a relevant official statistic: the poverty statistic.