What I teach my students @newmarkjschool is that the data should determine the anecdotes, not the other way on. So if the data says older workers are retiring early, we should go find people retiring early and talk to them about why.
Where possible, we should disaggregate the data -- is the increase in early retirements being driven by college-educated workers? By women? By Black people? There are limits to this in practice, but we should aim to have our anecdotes be as representative as possible.
We should also be clear that even representative anecdotes are still anecdotes. "Real people" in stories provide nuance and color, and can help readers understand a trend. But they aren't evidence of a trend or what is causing it.
Of course, it isn't always as simple as evidence ==> anecdote. One reason to talk to real people is that they can lead you to ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. (Ahem, cue link to my thread on source diversity:
Maybe you end up talking to a school bus driver who tells you there's been a wave of retirements because people don't want to be around unvaxxed kids. Great story! But your next step has to be figuring out whether that's a real trend.
To be clear, outliers and exceptions can also make for great stories, but we have to be transparent that that's what they are. And we should provide the context to make clear what a more representative story would look like.
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Want a sign that the economy is edging back toward normal? The share of people working from home because of Covid fell to a pandemic low of 11.6% in October. Resumed its decline after stalling out during the Delta wave.
Notable drop in work-from-home among professional workers. Which is a good place to note that I'm tweeting this from the office.
Income/spending/inflation data for September:
Personal income (nominal): -1%
Consumer spending (nominal): +0.6%
Consumer prices: +0.3% m/m, +4.4% y/y
Core consumer prices: +0.2% m/m, +3.6% y/y bea.gov/news/2021/pers…
September Employment Cost Index, *three month* change:
Total compensation: +1.3% (vs 0.7% in June)
Wages and salaries: +1.5% (0.9% June)
Leisure & hosp. wages/salaries: +2.6% (2.8% June) bls.gov/news.release/e…
The drop in income in September was driven by the end of expanded federal unemployment benefits. Wage and salary income actually rose faster in Sept. than in August.
Economic output grew 0.5% in the third quarter (2% annualized). That's a sharp slowdown from the 1.6% (6.7% annualized) in Q2, as supply chain woes and the rise of the Delta variant constrained growth. nytimes.com/live/2021/10/2…
U.S. GDP surpassed its prepandemic level in the second quarter, but it's still well below the prepandemic trend.
But inflation is a big part of the story here. Nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) GDP is back on its prepandemic trend. But real (inflation-adjusted) GDP is below. Fits with the story of demand outstripping supply, so some of it ends up as higher prices, not more production.
I'm busy with other stories today, so won't be delving into the numbers in depth, at least right away. But a few charts to update my earlier reporting on the impact of cutting off UI benefits. nytimes.com/2021/08/20/bus…
The short version: Still no evidence that states that cut off benefits early have seen significantly faster job growth than states that kept the benefits. The two groups have seen essentially identical job growth since April.
Couple follow-up charts to this, as I continue to dig through the data. (I'm still working through all this, so no big conclusions/takeaways here -- mostly just datapoints and a few observations.)
First, the surge in job-switching is heavily concentrated among younger workers. Among older workers, switching is still below prepandemic levels. Among prime-age (25-54), it's above, but not by that much. But job-to-job transitions are WAY up for workers under 25.
Before you start complaining about "job-hopping Gen-Zers," though, note that: a) job turnover is *always* highest among younger workers, and b) young workers, prepandemic, were changing jobs *less* often than prior generations.
cc @graykimbrough