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Except that 4.9% rate is a) an average across the country, and b) not reflective of the true rate of unemployment. ShadowStats suggests the real rate (including

Except that 4.9% rate is a) an average across the country, and b) not reflective of the true rate of unemployment. ShadowStats suggests the real rate (including those who have given up on finding work) is more like 23%. In certain areas of the country (the rust belt, for example), it's higher than that.

bjourne 10y ago
I've only made a cursory glance, but the statistics on that site appears to be the work of an MBA named John Williams. A lot of other sites claims to have debunked ShadowStats.com and that their data is flawed. In addition to that, no other source claims that the US employment rate has stayed constant since 2010. Oh, and to explore the data he is using to draw the graphs you need to be a SGS subscriber which costs $89 for six months. In Pennsylvania (which I think is the center of the Rust belt) unemployment has decreased from a high of 8.7% to 5.3%. It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. Even if the real unemployment rate is double, that just means the decrease is from 17.4% to 10.6% instead.
- aianus 10y ago
  > It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. No, it's certainly possible that more and more people have given up finding work since 2008, widening the spread between real unemployment and reported unemployment.
  - bjourne 10y ago
    But where is the evidence for that? Btw, there are statistics that takes the "giving up rate" into account and they also show that the unemployment rate has decreased!
- monodeldiablo 10y ago
  I don't know anything about that site, but the employment rate has remained roughly constant since 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2013 (when I last looked). The unemployment rate had declined by 3% since 2010, but the employment rate hadn't budged. This was a puzzling stat. NPR(?) did an expose on how states were moving the long-term unemployed into disability programs to get them off the states' budgets and onto the federal government's rolls. Their investigation into the private companies that states outsource this to seemed to show that this practice accounted for much of the decline in the unemployment rate. The rest was people simply giving up the search. So yes, the numbers are fudged more than they were in 2008. By shuffling employable people from one (state) agency to another (federal) agency, the politicians in power can brag that they've lowered unemployment without ever having to show any evidence of increasing employment. And states got to make room in their cramped budgets. It's statistical slight of hand.
  - bjourne 10y ago
    I didn't think of that. But look at the stats here: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R# When employment rate was at its lowest it 2009, it was 67.6% but for the last year they have numbers which is 2015 it was 68.7%. So even by that metric things have gotten better.
    - monodeldiablo 10y ago
      Over that same time period [1], unemployment fell by 4%, which means that we shifted up to 2.9% of the eligible working population onto long-term disability, effectively paying them not to work. And not paying them much, either. Disability benefits are depressingly inadequate to survive on. So, in effect, we've taken a population that was capable of productive labor and banned them from participating in the labor force, locking them in poverty. We've increased taxpayer burden while simultaneously reducing the number of taxpayers. And we've done this in the middle of a massive demographic shift that's already piling citizens on the wrong side of the contributor-recipient equation. So no, I don't see how that's an improvement on anything. It's a net negative in terms of productivity, tax base, and individual quality of life. [1]: The OECD data doesn't seem to correlate precisely with the BLS data, but the trends are the same.

bjourne 10y ago

I've only made a cursory glance, but the statistics on that site appears to be the work of an MBA named John Williams. A lot of other sites claims to have debunked ShadowStats.com and that their data is flawed. In addition to that, no other source claims that the US employment rate has stayed constant since 2010. Oh, and to explore the data he is using to draw the graphs you need to be a SGS subscriber which costs $89 for six months. In Pennsylvania (which I think is the center of the Rust belt) unemployment has decreased from a high of 8.7% to 5.3%. It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. Even if the real unemployment rate is double, that just means the decrease is from 17.4% to 10.6% instead.

aianus 10y ago
> It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. No, it's certainly possible that more and more people have given up finding work since 2008, widening the spread between real unemployment and reported unemployment.
- bjourne 10y ago
  But where is the evidence for that? Btw, there are statistics that takes the "giving up rate" into account and they also show that the unemployment rate has decreased!
monodeldiablo 10y ago
I don't know anything about that site, but the employment rate has remained roughly constant since 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2013 (when I last looked). The unemployment rate had declined by 3% since 2010, but the employment rate hadn't budged. This was a puzzling stat. NPR(?) did an expose on how states were moving the long-term unemployed into disability programs to get them off the states' budgets and onto the federal government's rolls. Their investigation into the private companies that states outsource this to seemed to show that this practice accounted for much of the decline in the unemployment rate. The rest was people simply giving up the search. So yes, the numbers are fudged more than they were in 2008. By shuffling employable people from one (state) agency to another (federal) agency, the politicians in power can brag that they've lowered unemployment without ever having to show any evidence of increasing employment. And states got to make room in their cramped budgets. It's statistical slight of hand.
- bjourne 10y ago
  I didn't think of that. But look at the stats here: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R# When employment rate was at its lowest it 2009, it was 67.6% but for the last year they have numbers which is 2015 it was 68.7%. So even by that metric things have gotten better.
  - monodeldiablo 10y ago
    Over that same time period [1], unemployment fell by 4%, which means that we shifted up to 2.9% of the eligible working population onto long-term disability, effectively paying them not to work. And not paying them much, either. Disability benefits are depressingly inadequate to survive on. So, in effect, we've taken a population that was capable of productive labor and banned them from participating in the labor force, locking them in poverty. We've increased taxpayer burden while simultaneously reducing the number of taxpayers. And we've done this in the middle of a massive demographic shift that's already piling citizens on the wrong side of the contributor-recipient equation. So no, I don't see how that's an improvement on anything. It's a net negative in terms of productivity, tax base, and individual quality of life. [1]: The OECD data doesn't seem to correlate precisely with the BLS data, but the trends are the same.