I'm not an economist, but this seems like a strange index. Is job quality really binary? Are pay and hours sufficient to make a binary determination?
Without analyzing the data, it seems like a proxy for income inequality. If salaries go up for top earners, but stay stagnant for everyone else, then more people have a "below average" income, even if their hours and pay are unchanged.
> To grasp the JQI’s significance, it’s worth understanding how it’s made. The researchers take private-sector non-manager jobs—which make up 82% of all private-sector jobs—and divvy them into two groups: the “high quality” jobs that pay more than the average weekly wage and tend to have more hours per week, and the “low quality” ones that pay less and offer fewer hours.
A “high quality job” is any job that pays more than average. So does every person making average or below-average hate their jobs? And everyone above-average love their jobs? I’m not sure this is a logical way to categorize jobs.
Any idea why they exclude government non-managerial jobs?