Knowing that credentials earners then become wage earners is important. It is a relatively reliable signal that the credential carries value. It's also a clumsy proxy for answering the far more vital question of whether the credential is a valuable resource for meeting the skills employers seek in order to fill living wage jobs.

On the erosion of middle class America. Poverty line is around 140k if actual costs taken into account. The 1960s benchmark assumed cost of food to be 1/3 of overall costs. Now it's 7% or so, meaning 1/15 of overall costs. This pushes up the poverty line to 5 times the level used, or some 150k USD pa

Example of a proxy being used as 'measurement' and the assumptions in a proxy never re-evaluated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250707093523/https://scientias.nl/wetenschappers-doen-opvallende-ontdekking-cognitieve-achteruitgang-mogelijk-al-vroeg-zichtbaar-op-een-bankafschrift/

Bank statements, by showing shifts in transactions and usage, can point to cognitive decline years before any symptoms.

for - polycrisis - Russia's subversive geopolitics via proxies

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Publication indicators as proxies for quality. Despite the many problems with peer review, publication indicators are used to evaluate Scholars for hiring promotion, finding, and other Rewards. Weather appropriate or not, outputs of the system in the form of data, documents, and Publications are easier to measure than are the inputs such as Scholars time, education, reading of scholarly literature, and research activities in their Laboratories and libraries. More time in the laboratory or in the library does not necessarily translate into more or better research, for example. While it is understandable that the recognition of Scholars should be based heavily on quality assessments of their scholarly contributions to their fields, it is essential to distinguish clearly between quality of scholarship and the use of indicators such as the publication form and citation counts as proxies for quality.