[talloaktrees]

honest question, because it's something I don't understand well. is it possible the quantity of job openings can mask the quality of jobs openings? if job openings at fast food restaurants goes up 1000% maybe this isn't positive

[nemomarx]

You want to look at info broken down by sector and wages yeah. Look into "underemployment" for more

[marcosdumay]

Yes, employment statistics rarely tell you anything about the quality of the jobs. And when they do tell something, it's the simplest information possible.

But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.

1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.

[lotsofpulp]

Cash is king. Look at change in income by quintile (or preferably decile, but I was too lazy to check mark all those and make a graph)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1Q95B&heig...