Every official number is a story someone is paid to tell.
CPI gets reweighted whenever it tells the truth too loudly. GDP counts a bridge built and a bridge bombed as the same thing. Unemployment drops people off the list when they stop looking and calls it recovery. The S&P measures where new money lands, not the health of the country it was printed in.
I stopped trusting any of it a while back. I watch different things now.
The price of a dozen eggs in sats. How many guys at the gym are working a second job. Whether the young couples at church are buying a house or moving back in with parents. Whether the neighbor who used to mow his own lawn still mows his own lawn.
None of that shows up on a Bloomberg terminal. All of it tells you more than the index ever will.
Bitcoin matters here because it is a number nobody can rewrite. Fiat metrics get revised quietly six months later. Ten million sats is ten million sats. The supply schedule does not care about an election year. The hash rate does not flinch when a Fed governor opens his mouth.
Official numbers are downstream of who is in charge. Ground level numbers are downstream of how people are actually living. Bitcoin sits underneath both, measuring the one thing the others were built to obscure. The purchasing power of your time.
So drop yours. What is the one number, official or otherwise, that you actually trust to tell you how the country is doing?
I like this question.
Personally, I don't think looking at grocery store prices is a great indicator of overall well-being, because incomes could also be going up.
I don't have anything official, but some of the things that determine how I feel the vibes are include:
I really like that third one.
I also tend to pay attention to these kinds of markers and put more stock in them than all the official signals.
It's also nice following the different threads that show up here in ~econ. It gives me another window into how people are feeling about the state of the world.
Yeah, fair point on groceries. Though honestly I have not heard of anyone getting paid more lately. Raises seem to have quietly gone out of style. So the price side of it still hits even without the wage side moving.
Your three are good ones. Marriage, kids, a house you actually own. That is the stuff that tells you if a country is alive or just running on momentum. No agency tracks those honestly because the trend lines are ugly and nobody wants to be the one holding the chart.
What are you seeing in your circle?
But also a lot of late twenties guys still renting with roommates and no real path off that track.
Demographics and demographics alone: "Is the population growing or decaying?" Period.
or gas prices
I think that’s everyone default metric
% of income spent on necessities.
good one halal..what’s up buddy
I am well. nice to see you on sn!
lol. I’ve had several accounts over the years and decided to step back into it. I’ve always loved this space
For me, I've noticed that podcasts that take boosts have been getting fewer and smaller boosts, but that's very new. Older, there's the good ole No Agenda hair stylist and hooker metric.