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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
by 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 agoWhy 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 agoI 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).