The Daily Feather — Widening the Mosaic
The word “mosaic” is a whispered echo of the ancient world, its very origin a storied journey from sacred grotto to digital screen. Rather than spring from the ground, it was born in the humid, echoing chambers of the muses – Greek mythology’s goddesses of inspiration. The term traces its lineage to the Greek μovσϵoν (mouseion), meaning a “seat of the Muses,” or shrine dedicated to them. From there, it traveled to Latin as musaicum, eventually morphing into the Italian mosaico before landing in English. The dramatic shift occurred because the early, exquisite wall and floor decorations, often crafted from tiny colored stones or glass pieces called tesserae. They first adorned the walls of grottoes and temples, the very mouseia dedicated to the arts. These intricate works were seemingly too beautiful to be of human design, suggesting the divine inspiration of the Muses themselves. Today, this tradition of fragmented assembly persists: from the colossal Byzantine domes shimmering with gold leaf tesserae to the everyday brilliance of a digital photograph, where each pixel is a tiny, essential tile in modern illuminations held in the palm of our hands.
As of this writing, the U.S. government shutdown has moved into Day 3, postponing Employment Friday. Without government agency economic reports, new tiles in the mosaic come courtesy of the WSL ALTE function on Bloomberg, ‘private and proprietary alternative U.S. economic indicators.’ Props to Bloomberg’s Michael McDonough and team for the compilation. Conveniently, 34 “Jobs” metrics top the list. After nonfarm payrolls (NFP) and ADP’s employment data is a new proxy for NFP called Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS). Revelio Labs built it from a dataset of more than 100 million U.S. public professional profiles and covers approximately two-thirds of all employed individuals. For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Establishment Survey “includes approximately one-third of all nonfarm payroll jobs.”
When considering additions to QI’s data mosaic, the first step is drawing a picture. Since private payrolls are most in focus, the “new kid on the block” can tell us four things: