Posted by ceejayoz 16 hours ago
Or not providing inflation adjusted values when referring to historical financial reference points.
I have to go find a happy place now
What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the delta from previous years -- which, conditioning on the same collection methodology etc -- is more reliable.
The actionable piece of info is sign(delta)
> the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless
That is often the case, and being truly data based requires acknowledging that. We can then act based on other data, or admit that we're falling back to intuition and abandoning data based decision making for now.
The former is asking "are my weighing scales accurate?" the latter is, "do I look like i'm loosing weight?"
As a data scientist/generic programmer now, I don't really see them anywhere. I remember a colleague during my postdoc saying 'don't worry, no error bars in industry' when I asked about regression with ML lol
Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.
You have to really dig into their website to find their std errors.
The error updates annually. Their handbook has a Reliability section where they detail sampling/nonsampling error.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
That doesn't mean they don't warrant error bars.
Error bars aren't there to show that you didn't do a good job collecting the data, they're there to show your level of uncertainty.
Moot point as the people who actually act on the data understand how to roll their own anyway.
Except that those things are constant from month to month, so deltas largely cancel them out.
The problem isn't in the size of the possible errors, but in understanding what those numbers mean and how they are gathered. That requires far more background reading.
If the error bars are large, that is important information to know.
"What sort of startups should I fund?"
"Should my business aggressively hire this quarter anticipating growth, or hold out for a possible recession?"
As for businesses hiring, they should hire based on their own growth. Using an external signal that itself gets adjusted drastically is similarly problematic; I don’t hire because I think no one else is hiring and the numbers get majorly adjusted up. Similarly I hire a bunch of people and it turns out no one else hired.
No one benefits from faster numbers that are majorly shifted in a few months anyway. You wouldn’t make any different decision if no one had the numbers. The only thing you’re doing differently is when the numbers come out your gambling whether or not you think the true number will be revised in some major way in a few months. That’s not helpful for the economy writ large.
The data is available. If it were important to the causal reader, however, then those casual readers would have already demanded its presence. But they don't care. What difference does it make to Hilary Homemaker? She just wants to get to say "Did you hear about the bad economic news?" when gossiping with her friends.
Those who need to understand the uncertainty will already be looking at more than a news headline anyway.
It is literally calling/writing 60,000 people and asking "are you employed? did you look for a job? Etc."
"How the government calculates unemployment" [0]
| Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm? | Last week, did you do any work for (either) pay (or profit)? | If the answer to question 1 is "yes" and the answer to question 2 is "no," the next question is: | Last week, did you do any unpaid work in the family business or farm? | For those who reply "no" to both questions 2 and 3, the next key questions used to determine employment status are: | Last week, (in addition to the business) did you have a job, either full or part time? Include any job from which you were temporarily absent. | Last week, were you on layoff from a job? | What was the main reason you were absent from work last week? | For those who respond "yes" to question 5 about being on layoff, the following questions are asked:
GDP too. That's how you can get more accurate information, and you have actual numbers on the discrepencies.
They rely on the household data more because it doesn't have as much systemic error, even though it does have more sampling error. Asking businesses gives you a more complete picture, but it has much more bias.
Hell, this is why even in accounting, you have double-entry bookkeeping, and even there, the numbers don't always match up.
Or "my bank account doesn't match up with my cashflow statement".
It's not that one is better and you should use that, calculating multiple ways is central to accounting so you can detect errors.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/05/economy/cpi-data-bls-reductio...
This is not entirely accurate. AFAIK, teachers usually remain on payroll throughout the summer. This stat _might_ be talking about contractual teaching roles, like adjuncts or subs, but it's hard to say from that BLS category.
It's like reporting that Spirit of Halloween employees accounted for the biggest retailer layoffs in November. It's a totally useless statistic that tells you nothing about what might really be going on that month that's abnormal compared to baseline.
That is not exactly accurate. When I was teaching, my salary was for 9 months only. I was paid in 12 monthly installments to smooth out my income, but technically I was not on the University's payroll during the summer months. That allowed me to seek full-time employment elsewhere (e.g. consulting) during the summer which was not allowed during the other 9 months.
Especially if its not in a well funded area.
I haven't heard it phrased like that before hah. The truth is when a school district is bad enough the state comes in and takes it over to try and get things back on their feet. Fort Worth is just embarrassed because FWISD is so bad the state had to take it over.
My wife is a HS teacher in Richardson and one of her friends was hired as a new principal at one of the FWISD schools. She said the situation is pretty bleak and most teachers should be fired but they likely won't be able to get rid of all the bad ones. That's pretty typical unfortunately in public education.
https://www.fwisd.org/about/tea
/the same thing happened to a school district in Houston
https://fortworthreport.org/2026/08/06/record-teacher-turnov...
> Superintendent Peter Licata acknowledged that the takeover and instructional changes played a role in some educators’ decisions to leave the district.
> ...But he said he believes employees watched the transformation of Houston ISD under state control and grew wary as Fort Worth introduced standardized lessons and reorganized schools and departments.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/non-farm-payrolls
Neither of these things are evidence of “ghost jobs”.
When I was doing a lot of hiring it would often take months to find qualified candidates for basic roles. I would get 100s of applicants per month but only about 20% of the resumes I received were even close to qualified. I’d try to schedule intro and screening calls with the qualified ones who would actually respond, but you wouldn’t believe how many applicants would have unreliable communication skills. Some times I wouldn’t get a response from someone for weeks or more, but many just don’t respond to contact after applying to your company. If we’re using the lingo I think a lot are “ghost candidates”.
There’s further fallout through the interview pipelines as you discover how many people have lied on their resume or otherwise aren’t qualified. That self-styled C++ expert who can’t give an example of RAII or the self-proclaimed TypeScript expert who doesn’t know anything outside of vanilla JavaScript. It’s weird.
Then there are negotiations. Some candidates want to collect offers from multiple companies and will ask for delays in hiring so they can continue interviewing and getting other offers. It can take weeks for some candidates to accept or decline your offer. If they decline you have to go to the next candidate, which can take more weeks, and then on to the next. If there’s relocation involved it takes longer to decide and get it done.
Then some times we’re hiring multiple people for a row, so we leave the listing up and open to continue hiring. This really angers the “ghost jobs” people because they assume 1 listing == 1 hire, as if the company needs to close the listing and then copy/paste to a new URL for the next hire.
So job openings that exist for “MONTHS” are not evidence of ghost jobs.
The people going 12 months without an interview are almost always doing something wrong. You wouldn’t believe how inexcusably bad many of the resumes out there can be. Some people are hung up on applying only to jobs they aren’t qualified for and then wonder why they’re not getting interviews.
they're not all ghost jobs, and there is probably a base level of noise there you can ignore, but the variability doesn't mean the data is great and perfect
I have to assume they aren't the only employer to do this, so I think job openings are meaningless here.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
But yes, I agree that the US should let in more migrant workers. Good for the workers and good for the target country: cheap infrastructure is great!
How so? What's hard to replicate here? Many rich places could let in more migrant workers. It's good for the workers, and good for the receiving country.
Malaysia and Singapore are two different countries. Despite being right next to each other they have vastly different GDPs, standards of living, government benefits, etc.
New Jersey and Manhattan are in different states. But in any case, why so xenophobic? Borders are an administrative hassle, but they have no moral weight.
Borders are a lot more than just a bit of paperwork or "administrative hassle". Central America is a very different place from US & Canada in many ways. Malaysia is quite a bit different from Singapore in a lot of ways despite such intertwined history.
I'm not passing any moral judgement here, I'm just acknowledging current reality. Singapore and Malaysia are different countries. NY and NJ are two states in the same country. The relationship is very different. Even with "Imperium in imperio" in the US.
To have a similar kind of comparison one would look at the cyclical migrant labor between the Southwestern US and Mexico.
Another benefit: they tell you pretty quickly whether your application is approved or not.
If you have any resources you can recommend on immigrating to Singapore that would be helpful and relevant for folks considering it as an option (whether on an employment, student, or pension/non lucrative visa), I welcome them to add to my resources for distribution to those seeking an exit strategy. Thank you in advance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161587 (resources)
I love it in Singapore, but if you don't want to live in a steam sauna, there are better countries for you. And if you are an American, I guess you don't even benefit from our more enlightened tax system anyway.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation. In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.
So there are mechanisms by which to avoid paying income tax to the US as as someone with a potential US tax liability living and working abroad, although it can be a facts intensive situation. Think like a Hacker, this is just another system and set of rules to hack ("How can I live outside the US, maximize my quality of life, pay the taxes due to my residency jurisdiction, while avoiding paying as much US federal income tax as possible?").
(For the 2026 tax year, the maximum Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) is $132,900 per qualifying person, an increase from $130,000 for 2025. Married couples where both spouses work abroad and qualify can exclude up to a combined $265,800; the contents of this comment are for educational purposes only, and are not financial or tax advice, speak with a professional)
healthcare is not for health. Its for sickness. Going to hospital doesnt make you "healthy" . We dont have any medicines to restore health to ppl suffering for diseases majority of healthcare spend goes to.
Maybe those countries dont have sickly population in the first palce like usa where a majority have metabolic diseases.
If rich people had so much influence, Romney and Bloomberg would have been presidents.
People run to dismiss this with "well we need a different system then", but the problem is a fundamental one on par with "eating your cake and having it too".
The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket.
This isn't possible. Healthcare is a finite resource and having universal, government care not only puts your life into the hands of the government (see the UK for an example where parents are not allowed to take their children out of the hospital) but offers worse outcomes.
When you are young and healthy, it's great. As you age, life-or-death surgeries have long wait times. This can be seen in any country with universal care. My aging relatives in Canada are going through this right now and have been forced to come to the US to get surgery in months rather than waiting years.
MAID has been great for healthcare costs in Canada. Many people that would otherwise have been costing the system money, are now a benefit. The sad realization is that government-run programs need MAID to cut down on costs.
I know lots of expats living in Asia that are now getting older. They have to go elsewhere to get any surgeries done, because of this exact reason.
To make it better, we should only have insurance for surgeries that can't benefit from the free market and are relatively rare. Common surgeries and procedures should have no insurance. The prices would eventually fall to levels that were affordable.
The masses don't want plans like this. They like easy solutions that sound good when you say them and don't take a whole lot of thought besides an elementary school level of thinking.
You see this to an even more extreme degree amongst the ultra rich and powerful, who are often using cutting edge, experimental treatments, and often reaping the downsides of being on that edge (though of course also the upsides).
Edit: Seems the lead author is also a vocal supporter of universal healthcare, being a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. So yeah, probably why it's such a strange setup, and what compelled me to check since this kind of thing is super common for "activist research".
I guess the takeaway is to always take a study for what it is, rather than what it paints itself to be.
- infant mortality
- maternal mortality
- colon and breast cancer survival
- heart attack mortality
- childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (most common childhood cancer)
Those are one of the most common health issues.
Also, here is another recent paper showing how it’s better (health care wise) to be average in EU than wealthy in US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
There are also other oddities like using median county wealth rather than household wealth. In many wealthy counties there are still poor areas, I know more than a few. In fact if you look at the appendix, most of the households in the study are, well, average or poor. They also don't include absolute numbers or definitions for the illnesses.
All in all, it's a bad study, and clearly made to color in an agenda.
The second study looks more grounded, thanks.
Or if that random doctor who just walked in is out of network and going to charge $30,000 for my stitches when $3,000 was already egregious.
i softly agree but also think that a body does not need to generate value to pay for the costs in order for the whole process to sustain itself. Monitoring the stars for asteroids heading towards earth provides no market value, for example, but we can still afford to do it. so it's a matter of cost and available expenditure. the market is not net 0, so its possible to generate enough value to have enough to afford healthcare as an expense as a society
what are the costs of fixing a body? The residency pipeline is a bottleneck on labor, but assuming that gets sorted out and AI is capable of guiding any reasonable person through the process, why cant the cost of labor for a doctor drop dramatically?
i would guess limited resources are the biggest blockage, but i dont know how to break down a $20k hospital bill for giving birth into its actual costs. its hard to believe that really needs to be $20k.
I actually think its the opposite. there is so much friction with healthcare and the process of healing is slow enough that costs are inflated because the overall operating cost for the entire facility including rent, ER, having people on standby, who knows what else, all need to be recovered through whatever volume they process and they arent processing as quickly as the resources are able.
healthcare needs do not subscribe to a neat work schedule, and so we have to pay a lot of market prices to have the right availability at all times. but thats not a true cost, it is a result of accounting and underutilization
Now, almost every woman I'm related to is in health care.
I've been joking for years that eventually everyone will either be in the hospital, or working there.
Any sector that's resistant to productivity growth is liable to become bigger and bigger part of the economy.
in fairness also regulation makes it hard when it specificies the solutions not the parameters (just to illustrate the idea not an actual rule: you must have X thickness of PVC versus your pipe must withstand X pressure)
All of these have led to conditions where it is expected for an entire house to go from start to finish in 100 days. A house with very high standards of plumbing, electrical, hvac, insulation, and other essentials compared to previous generations.
And I agree that the standards have been rising such as better R-values, car charging, AC, cat5 etc.
U.S. healthcare is a giant predatory clusterfuck and seems impossible to meaningfully reform.
Americans of all ages are spending more on healthcare, and seeking more healthcare interventions than in previous decades.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
In 1860 someone who went to a doctor would have worse outcomes than someone who stayed home. As medicine gets better over time there is more and more value in seeing a doctor. In turn more an more people are talking to their doctor about things that they would have just ignored a few generations ago. Sometimes this results in unnecessary treatment, but it also results in catching and fixing a lot of real problems that would have made life worse before we could treat it.
Americans are spending a lot more on quality-of-life medical interventions, many of which are outside the normal standard of care that would be covered by healthcare systems. It is a booming business in the US and many people seem to have no trouble paying for it.
My main caveat / counter point is that preventative care may actually increase as more and more people jump on the live for ever, dont die, longevity hacking trend.
All basketball players are tall, but that doesn't mean that all tall people are basketball players.
(Unemployment also generally causes lower inflation in general, at least according to the prevailing macroeconomic school of thought.)
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...
Folks keep predicting it. Maybe it's starting?
I'm not actually suggesting there's a good reason for market swings, just that bad news shouldn't necessarily cause the market to go down.
It's usually people who don't understand the context or assign appropriate weights to events and allow randomness that complain about not understanding markets.
That comment should be illegal
Send it back across the Diarrhio Grande
But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-jobs-july-2026-9.729...
Sadly, the people responsible for this in the US have no clue it's happening, no clue of the negative consequences they will face because of it, and show a general disregard for understanding things or relationships in general. The information environment in the US has been rewarding ignorant selfishness for too long, shifting the entire nature of about 30%-50% of the population in negative way.
https://thehub.ca/2026/04/03/can-anyone-solve-canadas-brain-...
general employment? youth employment? labor participation? happiness index? gdp per capita? patents per capita? skilled migration? housing affordability? general inflation? stock market performance? real wages? housing burden? life satisfaction? growth of small business? startup echo system?
The magnificent 7 formed a large portion of the US growth numbers, but many have legally hidden >$1.6Tn in "AI" debt deep in the pages of their reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY
The Shrek movie is due out in July 2027, and strangely these often correlated with market corrections in the past. =3
In particular, the Americans have been throwing endless tantrums Canada's way. This week we're "nasty people" because we refuse to become an ecnomimc vassal state. I'm sure we'll hear more tariff sabre rattling from the Americans soon.
I haven’t even met a conservative who has ever had any sort of problem with Canada
Supposed values of conservatives don't matter at all when value #1 is to be obedient to the one person they want to put in charge of all branches of the US government.
The US has emptied its warehouses of precision munitions to fight a war/non-war that nobody inside the US understands, wants, or could even explain in a half rational way. Yet it still happened! So the US is not behaving like a democracy in any functional sense any more. It's an autocracy, where the autocrat does what he wants, no matter what the rest of the nation wants.
So if you think looking at monthly numbers is "stupid", the only thing more stupid would be to take past good monthly numbers at face value, but then disregard the corrections that come later.
Bless
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2025007/artic...
it's all about optics for mid term.
This is chickens coming home to roost from US actions in Iran, with tariffs, and other things introducing economic uncertainty.
As you alluded to; this is terrible for Republicans in power. And quite useful for Democrats.
As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.
And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.
There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.
So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.
—
The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.
You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.
Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.
Are most teachers considered and counted as unemployed during summner break? All the teachers I know are paid 12 months a year. 10-month appointments are seen in colleges and universities but even there professors often have grants that pay for their research in the summer and even if not I don't think I'd consider them "unemployed" in the summer.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.
They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.
> ...
>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...
>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
Sorry, is OP the POTUS, speaking with Presidential authority and threatening federal employees with termination of employment for their political beliefs? The fact you think they're wrong is not a reason to equate their comment to Trump's actions.
This is the most obvious point in favor of this perspective, especially as it being an escalation by the current president and his administration. It hardly even seems to be a cynical take. At least, the cynicism is being used appropriately, as a tool to guide one's thoughts rather than being the entire argument.
One can look at the DOGE cuts, tally up the numbers, and see for themself that the stated reason (desired reduction of spending that is orders of magnitude higher than what they've actually cut) can't be the actual reason for these cuts. Coupled with the... less than candid statements from this administration about anything and everything the past 17 months (hey, has anyone heard about these "Epstein files"?), the most logical conclusion is that they are deceptive whenever it suits them. And yes, even the nominally-objective numbers need to come attached with a reason to be trusted; we already know a litany of ways they can be manipulated (meaning they are indeed "nominally" objective, and have been for a long time); they can't be reasonably taken at face value.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
And I suspect, sometime in the future, we're going to discover that the numbers were even worse than we thought they were—were covered up.
And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).
And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.
> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).
I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.
But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.
They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.
The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO
I guess also, what's the goal of economic policy? Does your economy matter much if you can't defend it, for example? If you have no industrial base does that matter?
Under sequential administrations all the way up and until at least the end of Mr. Obama's second term we had, broadly speaking, the same economic policy and we lost a lot of jobs under that regime, lost manufacturing capabilities, and more. People were really unhappy with that scheme which was supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe we should examine our policies even if there are temporary changes that are unfavorable. Should we be long-term oriented or short-term oriented?
It's a very complicated topic of course, but I think just "grr mad at Trump" is not only immature but just wrong and leads to no meaningful analysis of what our economic policies have been, the results, and what changes may produce.
The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
Sure but it's not strictly an economic policy. If you want to just talk about the economics of immigration I'd be happy to discuss that. I think there are pros and cons to many different approaches.
> The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.
Similarly Europe and the United States could have been economically smart and unsanctioned Russian gas and let them take over Ukraine. Sometimes economic policy is trumped by other considerations.