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by randusername 7 days ago
I find it hard to trust economic narratives when so many metrics cited upon further inspection do not really measure what they are implied to measure.

Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.

I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".

2 comments

To your last point, the Minneapolis Fed just put out a call for a new actual-owner backed housing occupancy rate called HPOP which I think is a step in the right direction: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/new-homeownershi...
Are you aware that you are linking to TFA of this exact hackernews post?
> "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there"

It’s even worse than that, it’s not counting people at all. It’s number of houses with at least one owner living there divided by total number of houses.