Make line look good.
Obviously I get that this is awful. But, I love that you just know that whatever poor statistician got hired to make this is utilising skills that they learned from desperately manipulating the scales on graphs for their coursework/research the night before a deadline to get their data to look like it agrees well with predictions. STEM students don't change (except for the fact that most of us never end up using it for evil).
That's the level these bastards are on: bullshitted last minute first year university papers. That is what's justifying capitalism right now, and somehow it gets a pass.
That’s the level these bastards are on: bullshitted last minute first year university papers. That is what’s justifying capitalism right now, and somehow it gets a pass.
This basically describes every think tank "report" produced since the 90's.
Do people actually believe any of these underlying statistics? 9 million jobs in 3 months would be insane numbers. Obama's best after the 2008 recession was like 600k in a single quarter, I'm very suspicious of any number coming out of the current admin. Neoliberals already manipulate the methodology to make the numbers shine. Conservatives just straight out lie.
I don't think it's impossible. Huge parts of the service industry will have laid off, then taken back on, a bunch of workers.
This to me is magical thinking, most of those companies are small to medium sized businesses, and those jobs aren't coming back. Over 3 million businesses have closed down permanently, and the owners of those have spent their investment capital, they are liquidating and being bought up at firesale prices by wall street.
Yeah, overall there's been a huge loss of jobs (looks like about 20 million net from eyeballing that bottom graph). But there will also be a huge number of companies that fired all their front-of-house staff in March and rehired them in July/August. That's where the 9 million number comes from.
Can I get an ELI5? I've been looking at it for 5 minutes, but I'm still not able to make sense of the graph.
Top graph: how many jobs we lose/gain every day
Bottom graph: how many jobs there are total
When top line is at 0, it means no jobs gained or lost, bottom line holds steady
When top line is negative, we're losing jobs, bottom line go down
When top line is positive, we're gaining jobs, bottom line go up
So if you want to pretend we fixed everything, even though we've only partially recovered the lost jobs, show them top graph, and say "Look, line was down, now line is up!" and hope they don't notice what it's actually measuring.
Time you told me what the fuck the X-axis is on either of these.
