The new U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI) has gotten lots of enthusiastic attention from serious media recently. This new index will be updated monthly on jobs day starting next week. So I took a look and was surprised by what I found. jobqualityindex.com
The index equals the ratio of high-quality to low-quality jobs. That is, the JQI measures the share of jobs in industries where average weekly wages are above the contemporaneous economy-wide average weekly wage. (Plus fixes to avoid heaping issues by big middle-wage industries.) 
To me that sounds like a measure of skewness. A uniform economy-wide doubling of wages would likely leave the index unchanged. Further, a big drop in wages in the lowest-wage industries, all else equal, would likely improve the index by pulling down the economy-wide mean. (Yes?)
The skewness of the employment-weighted distribution of industry average weekly wages may be an interesting measure of the labor market, but it's not an obvious measure of job quality. Job quality should reflect the level of wages and ideally non-wage attributes too.
To be sure, defining job quality -- or good jobs -- is hard. Here are two nice attempts:
cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work…
cew.georgetown.edu/good-jobs-proj…
cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work…
cew.georgetown.edu/good-jobs-proj…
I understand the appeal of an index that complements the jobs report, is frequent, and can be calculated historically -- and provides a different angle from headline employment numbers that tend to move together.
And I'm curious to hear more from the creators at @jobqualityindex, reporters, and other researchers.
