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For me prose is a really hard medium for parsing trends like the ones Will is describing here, so I made a scraper that turns the Bureau of Labor Statistics API
by brchr 10y ago
For me prose is a really hard medium for parsing trends like the ones Will is describing here, so I made a scraper that turns the Bureau of Labor Statistics API into live D3 charts that refresh themselves every day and stay current. I’ve found it really useful.
For instance, here’s manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get excited about.
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-employees-per-capita?from=2009-11-30T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&to=2016-09-26T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&y_scale=from_zero https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-emplo...
Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me) highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse that.
And here’s the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking about in the article:
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-forc...
You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of the millennium -- this is Will’s point at the start of the piece -- but you can also see that we’re still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s.
Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the labor force were, I’d have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses specifically on men. It doesn’t look like the BLS breaks labor participation out by gender, which would be interesting.
If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven’t finished making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I’m more than happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.
- dahdum 10y agoI posted separately, but your graph is for everyone while the article is about idle men, which is on clear downward trend over decades. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 (Men) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 (Women) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025 (Men, 20+) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026 (Women, 20+)
- brchr 10y agoOh I stand corrected that the BLS doesn’t break that out! Here’s a comparison of men (in black) vs. women (in blue). Very interesting. https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-participation-rate-men-20-years-and-over?y_scale=from_zero https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-partici...
- roymurdock 10y agoIs there any special function your website can do that FRED can't? I'm pretty sure all BLS data ends up in FRED.
- brchr 10y agoIf you’re trying to make a point about a change over a specific period, you can select a range and the selection gets appended by JS to the URL, such that if you send someone else the link they’ll see exactly the selection you made. It’s also possible to follow figures and be updated when they change. But also interesting things become possible across datasets. For instance, it becomes possible to mash up absolute job numbers from the BLS with population estimates from the Census and get accurate per-capita figures, that stay current when either the BLS or the Census publish new numbers.
- vmarsy 10y agovery interesting data! It would be even better if we could see the "Active population"(18 to 65) Looking at the 20+ charts: Back in the 50s, only ~30% of women used to work. Since 1950 it now went up by 27 points. (31% -> 58%). In the meantime men employment went down of 17 points (88% -> 71%). So overall for the population, we went to 59.5% ((88+31)/2) of the population working (Assuming as many men as women) to 64.5%((71+58)/2) of the population working. Where is the 'quiet catastrophe'? Compared to 1950, 5% more of the current population is now working. Shouldn't the author feel happy about the gain of "meaning, self-esteem and masculinity" of those 5%?