How the economy health score works

How Plain Vitals turns more than a hundred official statistics into twelve pillars and one plain-language reading, and how the recession watch is built.

Plain Vitals sums up the US economy in one reading, such as "the economy is cooling", backed by twelve pillars and more than a hundred official indicators. This page explains how that reading is built, so you can judge how much weight to put on it.

Step 1: compare each indicator with its own history

Raw numbers are hard to compare: payrolls are counted in millions of jobs, inflation in percent, oil in dollars. So each indicator is first measured against its own last ten years. The result is a z-score: zero means a typical reading for that indicator, plus or minus one is an ordinary swing, and beyond two is unusual. At least five years of history are needed before a score is given.

There is also a "median" yardstick, available on the trends page, which uses the median and a robust measure of spread. It is less distorted by one-off spikes such as the 2020 pandemic.

Step 2: group indicators into twelve pillars

Indicators are grouped into twelve pillars: growth, jobs, prices, interest rates, households, housing, business, financial conditions, government finances, trade, energy and leading indicators. Each pillar combines its members' recent movements over about three months into a state such as "stronger", "stable" or "weaker".

For some pillars a rise is good news (more jobs, more output); for others a rise is bad news for the economy (faster inflation, higher interest rates, tighter financial conditions, more expensive energy). Each indicator and pillar carries that direction, which is how the site colours readings green or red.

Step 3: one health reading

The health score, from 0 to 100, averages the pillars, counting each in the direction that is good for the economy. Government finances are left neutral. The score is then capped if recession risk is raised: no higher than 55 when the risk is elevated and no higher than 30 when it is high. The labels are:

It is meant to be indicative, not precise: a quick summary of where the evidence points.

The recession watch

Separately, six well-tested warning rules are checked every day: the Sahm rule on unemployment, an inverted yield curve, a jump in jobless claims, stress in credit markets, a weak Chicago Fed National Activity Index, and a contraction in regional factory surveys. Each rule switches on and off with a buffer so that one noisy reading does not flip it. The watch reports how many rules are firing, not a probability.

Written notes and checked numbers

The daily briefings are drafted by an AI model from a summary of the latest data. Before a note is published, every number in it is matched against that data; a note that fails the check is replaced by a plain template. All the underlying figures come from official publishers, and every chart links to its source.

What it cannot do

The score describes the economy as the data show it now; it is not a forecast, and official statistics are often revised. Treat it as a starting point and look at the pillars and indicators behind it.