[anoncoward111]

I'll call you inhumane then. Despite record employment levels and rising average net worth in the USA, millions of people are still starving and struggling with drug addictions and so on.

Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".

[drdaeman]

> Despite record employment levels

That's also a single aggregated number. Until the data doesn't cover those millions dire situation, it's a bad data. Emotionless analogy: like a green status page when some percentile of requests is failing.

See, you've mentioned "millions" rather than some "that person.". That's exactly what I mean.

[cyborgx7]

All data is always incomplete. And we can only find this out by looking at the individual case to interrogate the data.

[cyborgx7]

There was a time (or at least so I'm told) when having a job meant you could build a living, own a house, support a family. So we the started looking at employment percentages as a measure for the quality of the economy.

This incentivizes increasing employment percentage. An easy way to do that is by decreasing the value of a job. Suddenly it doesn't ensure you can build a living, own a home, support a family anymore. But it is still used as a primary measure of the wellbeing of the economy.

This is why you need individual stories to interrogate the quality of your data. Afterwards, you obviously need to come up with new measures that more accurately reflect how well the economy is working for the people in it. But the interrogation will have to work on the basis of anecdotes.

[kgwgk]

When was that time when any job meant you could own a house and support a family?

[empath75]

There are not millions of people starving in the us are you mad.

[kaybe]

You'd think so, but a little googling shows me that an optimistic estimate is that 1-2% of US Americans that go hungry once in a while because they cannot afford food. Some sources, such as those cited by wikipedia [0], put the number as high as 5-6%.

(Now we could have a debate on the meaning of 'starving', but let's just say there is a broad area between skipping a few meals and dying from lack of food that is all covered by how people use the word.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States