The unemployment rate is very low in the US while tightening of money supply is happening, it is a weird thing to witness as a new comer to the US.
But one has to admit Jerome Powell did accomplish something significant given what his detractors like Summers were painting was going to happen given the covid bonus US citizens got.
While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living.
Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded.
Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work.
Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.
> can they be responsible? Or have they bought into the fantasy where they offload responsibility to a “decider” while they play the role exclusively of “doer”?
I do want to care but decisions feel remote even when you ask or provide feedback and it's overlooked only for it to come back later that what you had suggested was plausible and is being done only a few months late when you've already implemented an RMQ integration that was possibly avoidable.
It's demoralizing when your company starts moving in the direction of bug resolution is simple of a legacy system whose original authors are no longer with the company and you need to be pushing out 10 JIRA tickets in two weeks. Clearly trying to turn the engineers into code monkeys how am I supposed to care in this environment?
Quite an easy prediction to make given Ethiopia is already in the middle of a civil war
edit: It's been so long, but we should remember Libya, Mali, northern Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo. Liberia and South Africa are stable though, and most African countries merely languish in peaceful obscurity.
The idea of living together in a society/city is believing that your neighbour does not wish you ill intent. The question your should ask yourself is if you got it, do you trust yourself to self-quarantine.
