4 ms·

It's shocking, just plain shocking, how short people's memories are, in regards to their own governmental details. The manipulations to deflate the unemployment

by jack9 10y ago

It's shocking, just plain shocking, how short people's memories are, in regards to their own governmental details. The manipulations to deflate the unemployment numbers, I was cognizant of in high school, have never stopped. New techniques come up every administration (seemingly every year). It's like how "the tech industry innovation value" is now added to the UDP arbitrarily. Smoke and mirrors. Google "US employed population" then click "What percentage of the US population is working?" - What percentage of the US population is working? According to the October jobs report, the seasonally adjusted employment-to-population ratio was 59.2% last month, one percentage point higher than it was a year earlier. Over that same period, the “official” unemployment rate fell from a seasonally adjusted 7.2% to 5.8%.Nov 7, 2014

extra88 10y ago
For that 59.2%, who counts as employed and who counts in the population? To have 40.8% not employed, they must be counting people in school, people who are retired, probably stay-at-home parents, people with serious disabilities, and the people wealthy enough not to work. How is that a useful figure? The official figure doesn't include people who are too young or too old and doesn't include people who are not looking for work. Certainly there are some people who society would say should be looking for work and we'd like to count them amongst the unemployed but there isn't a good way differentiate them from the people who have good reasons for not looking for work. So the official number is based who says they are looking for work.
tomjen3 10y ago
That seems like a low number, but babies tend not to be allowed to work in this country, and more people are going to college, retirees are living longer. A better number might be NEET - self employeed under the retirement age vs entire population. Thats still not entirely fair, since it misses those who have deliberately chosen not to work, but that number is probably pretty small.
nodamage 10y ago
59.2% is quite misleading because it includes students and retirees. The next two paragraphs from your own source[1] say: One reason for the difference is that the share of Americans saying they don’t want a job has trended up since the Great Recession: from 31.9% of the working-age population in October 2008 to 34.6% last month (on a non-seasonally adjusted basis). Some of that increase, though, may be due to Baby Boomers reaching retirement age; as they leave the workforce over the next several years, labor economists expect the employment-to-population ratio to trend lower. Young adults staying in or returning to school also may be a factor. So if we look at just the 25-to-54 age group, which strips out most students and retirees, the employment-to-population ratio has been slowly improving since it bottomed out at 74.6% (not seasonally adjusted) in February 2011. Last month, 77.3% of all 25-to-54-year-olds were employed, which is well below the indicator’s pre-recession high in October 2006, when 80.7% of people in this age group were employed. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/employment-v...
- jack9 10y ago
  > 59.2% is quite misleading because it includes students and retirees. Misleading does imply context, which is used to confuse the issue and has traditionally been used to alter the statistic to meet agendas. People who aren't looking for work, students, retirees, etc is irrelevant. It's a statistic about who is employed versus not employed as a relative portion. While I don't think there is a canonically sound source anymore, we have had a serious system problem for awhile. When even the curated sources by one agency are more pessimistic than the celebrated federal numbers, it's now a question of how wrong they are, not what they say.
- lacker 10y ago
  Why should we exclude students and retirees from our key employment metrics? Society must pay for students and retirees, and the higher the employment-to-population ratio, the easier that is to do.
  - nodamage 10y ago
    I suppose it depends on the purpose of the metric you are evaluating. If your goal is to find the percentage of people currently unemployed because they are looking for a job but unable to get one, then it does not make sense to include students or retirees that are not currently looking for work. Besides, I'm not sure it's accurate to claim "society must pay for students and retirees". Some students can pay for themselves (via loans) and some retirees can pay for themselves (via their own retirement savings).

by jack9 10y ago

extra88 10y ago

For that 59.2%, who counts as employed and who counts in the population? To have 40.8% not employed, they must be counting people in school, people who are retired, probably stay-at-home parents, people with serious disabilities, and the people wealthy enough not to work. How is that a useful figure? The official figure doesn't include people who are too young or too old and doesn't include people who are not looking for work. Certainly there are some people who society would say should be looking for work and we'd like to count them amongst the unemployed but there isn't a good way differentiate them from the people who have good reasons for not looking for work. So the official number is based who says they are looking for work.

tomjen3 10y ago

That seems like a low number, but babies tend not to be allowed to work in this country, and more people are going to college, retirees are living longer. A better number might be NEET - self employeed under the retirement age vs entire population. Thats still not entirely fair, since it misses those who have deliberately chosen not to work, but that number is probably pretty small.

nodamage 10y ago

59.2% is quite misleading because it includes students and retirees. The next two paragraphs from your own source[1] say: One reason for the difference is that the share of Americans saying they don’t want a job has trended up since the Great Recession: from 31.9% of the working-age population in October 2008 to 34.6% last month (on a non-seasonally adjusted basis). Some of that increase, though, may be due to Baby Boomers reaching retirement age; as they leave the workforce over the next several years, labor economists expect the employment-to-population ratio to trend lower. Young adults staying in or returning to school also may be a factor. So if we look at just the 25-to-54 age group, which strips out most students and retirees, the employment-to-population ratio has been slowly improving since it bottomed out at 74.6% (not seasonally adjusted) in February 2011. Last month, 77.3% of all 25-to-54-year-olds were employed, which is well below the indicator’s pre-recession high in October 2006, when 80.7% of people in this age group were employed. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/employment-v...

jack9 10y ago
> 59.2% is quite misleading because it includes students and retirees. Misleading does imply context, which is used to confuse the issue and has traditionally been used to alter the statistic to meet agendas. People who aren't looking for work, students, retirees, etc is irrelevant. It's a statistic about who is employed versus not employed as a relative portion. While I don't think there is a canonically sound source anymore, we have had a serious system problem for awhile. When even the curated sources by one agency are more pessimistic than the celebrated federal numbers, it's now a question of how wrong they are, not what they say.
lacker 10y ago
Why should we exclude students and retirees from our key employment metrics? Society must pay for students and retirees, and the higher the employment-to-population ratio, the easier that is to do.
- nodamage 10y ago
  I suppose it depends on the purpose of the metric you are evaluating. If your goal is to find the percentage of people currently unemployed because they are looking for a job but unable to get one, then it does not make sense to include students or retirees that are not currently looking for work. Besides, I'm not sure it's accurate to claim "society must pay for students and retirees". Some students can pay for themselves (via loans) and some retirees can pay for themselves (via their own retirement savings).