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Not to mention the first graph would be far more useful if it displayed relative job losses rather than absolute.

• noahlt 16y ago
  Forgive my ignorance -- what does "relative job losses" mean, and how does it differ from "absolute job losses"?
  • muzz 16y ago
    I think he means as a percentage rather than absolute number. I doubt the state even has 1.2M public sector employees; this CNN article indicates 240,000 so even if every single one was fired it would still make the graph look like the public sector wasn't cut enough: http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/08/news/economy/california_pay_cuts/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/08/news/economy/california_pay_...
  • stanleydrew 16y ago
    Relative meaning take the ratio of jobs lost to total jobs in each sector and compare.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
• muzz 16y ago
  Yes but then it wouldn't make the (largely political) point that he wanted to make. The comparison itself seems odd. If the state's private sector loses 1.2M jobs, should the public sector shed a proportional number of employees i.e. teachers, firemen, policemen, prison guards, etc?
  • noahlt 16y ago
    His point isn't that the public sector should shed a proportional number of employees, but that the collective income of private sector taxpayers has decreased, yet they are forced to sustain public-sector pensions with that decreased income.
    • _delirium 16y ago
      How is that particular graph making that point? I can see for the 2nd pension-cost graph, but the job-losses graph appears to me to be implying "private-sector employment is falling much faster than public-sector employment". But, by using absolute numbers, it implies that the "correct" outcome, where the two curves would roughly track each other, would be for public-sector job losses in raw numbers to be equal to private-sector job losses, which would be absurd given the large difference in total jobs. With those scales, there is almost no economic situation that would result in the public-sector line being anything but flat, because its raw numbers are far too small to register much of a blip in either direction. It's hard for me to come up with a good reason for that particular choice of graph other than "political spin". One of many reasons I've switched to reading The Economist rather than the Wall Street Journal for economics-meets-politics news, since the Economist makes a more conscientious effort imo to avoid slanting their data or infographics in the direction of their editorial line (and they do take roughly the same free-market editorial line).