10 ms·
This article seems to use the terms "unemployed" and "jobless" interchangeably. People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are
by spir 8y ago
This article seems to use the terms "unemployed" and "jobless" interchangeably.
People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.
On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.
From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/edward_glaeser.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/edward_glaeser.html
- adventured 8y agoArguably most importantly, the labor force participation rate for prime age workers continues to move up. It persistently fell from 83.3% in January 2008, to September 2015, where it bottomed out around 80.6%. It has been climbing since then, and is now up to 81.8%. Getting that back up near 83% would be a big win for the economy. The highest that has ever hit, is 84.5% in 1999/2000. Healthy has historically (in the last 30 years) been anything around or above 83%. I think it's plausible the US can return to that figure in the next year. We've struggled with the prime age unemployment due in part to the big loss in production jobs since ~2000. The continued recent (curved upward again at the end of 2016 [1]) boom in manufacturing jobs (exports are at an all-time high) should pull a lot of blue-collar workers back into the labor market. The manufacturing sector unemployment rate is incredibly low at 3.1% (lowest since June 2000, other than the 2.6% it hit before Christmas 2017). Trump, were he wiser on macro strategy, would resolve NAFTA, close out the trade conflict with Canada & Mexico soon, come to a deal with the EU, and then focus all the trade war on China. US manufacturing will continue to boom, cheap energy and improved margins will largely ensure that. The only serious threat is some really bad trade moves with the non-China trading world. [1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001
- luminaobscura 8y agoi think this needs to be analyzed per gender. Because 2 curves are very different. Female participation rates have been rising historically and it's completely recovered to pre-2008 levels https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25FEUSM156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25FEUSM156N Whereas, male participation rates are declining and did not recovered completely yet. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSM156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSM156N
- tmpz22 8y agoI can't help but feel the unemployment rate is so politicized that its facts and statistics will continue to be cherrypicked outside of reality.
- asah 8y agosigh, and yet it's a key statistic needed to make decisions... improvements welcome!
- tim333 8y agoYou can get a lot of detail and try to correct things, for instance see this graph from the wikipedia article https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/US_Unemployment_measures.svg/720px-US_Unemployment_measures.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/US...
- johannes1234321 8y agoit's extremely political. By the way you define it you can explain the need for some reforms or display how good you were.
- refoundglory 8y agoNonsense. It’s a complicated set of information that people try and reduce to a single number. If you want to actually discuss it you need to start by learning that there are multiple official unemployment rates.
- dev_dull 8y agoIs it called the Wells Fargo effect now? When you optimize for a number, you'll get that number -- and it will deceive you.
- kornish 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- 8y ago
- brlewis 8y agoThe first sentence in the article implies the second sentence in your comment. This morning, the Labor Department announced that the national unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent in June for good reasons, as hundreds of thousands more Americans sought work.
- mc32 8y agoIf they this is true, this will be amazing. For too long we have sold out the American worker to unfair trade and offshoring. It’s great to see our workers in neglected sectors of the economy have a chance to get back in.
- jeromegv 8y agoEconomy has been on the same direction for many many many years, that was before the trade wars started. If anything, the trade wars might stop this whole movement. Sure some workers of neglected sectors got a boost (coal), but at what cost? Funny how there is little talk of the solar workers that got laid off following those change in policies.. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/us-solar-industry-lost-nearly-10000-jobs-in-2017.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/us-solar-industry-lost-nearl...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- badbug 8y agoI'm seeing lots of "help wanted" signs. In fast food places. This isn't progress.
- bobthepanda 8y agoDoes that take into account the incarcerated? From Wikipedia: > In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population. It's very difficult to find work with a criminal record in the US.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoAnd yet, without enough legitimate work opportunities, those with criminal records are strongly incentivized to resort to grey and black markets (or theft) to make a living. A vicious cycle. We've got to get rid of the mindset that we need to "protect ourselves", both corporately and individually, from "dangerous people" (i.e. former criminals) by excluding them from our lives and our companies. "Love your neighbor as yourself" applies to them also. Love always involves risk. A noble society values redemption more than safety. Work itself is ennobling, especially when trust and responsibility can be earned. That's not to say we should ignore background check results. But a crime (or crimes) in the past shouldn't mean they're automatically excluded.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoArguably a low enough unemployment rate can combat this: People may not be automatically excluded for a criminal record, but a company may have "better" candidates without a record. But when unemployment is low and they're desperate for employees, they can't necessarily afford to exclude those on the reform path.
- RIMR 8y agoTo be fair, "You got caught smoking pot a decade ago, and therefore we cannot trust you to write Python code" isn't the kind of judgment a successful company would pass. That's the kind of thing a doomed company would do. However, if you got caught stealing a bunch of electronics from a past employer, you'll have a seriously hard time find a job anywhere where they have to trust you with money or property. Honestly, people who commit crimes against their employers do this to themselves. How could you ever be trusted again when your strategy at the beginning was to shit where you sleep?
- mc32 8y agoYep, there are plenty of people who could be sucked up back into employment. I’m excited to see if after decades of atrophy, the blue collar worker of yesteryear can have another go at it. With enough demand, we may begin to see employers willing to retrain these workers and bring them back into the fold.
- CocaKoala 8y agoAre the employees willing to be retrained? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retraining-insight/awaiting-trumps-coal-comeback-miners-reject-retraining-idUSKBN1D14G0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retrain...
- mc32 8y agoThere’s definitely an issue with retraining people who’ve had a job over twenty years and only know one thing and now we’re trying to train them to something diff and doesn’t pay as well... but I think there are folks who are more flexible, people in their prime working years who can be enticed if given the proper incentives.
- themaninthedark 8y agoIf any industry is going to be killed, like coal, I think there should be retraining of course but you also need to create jobs in the area that the other jobs are going away in. When NAFTA was being negotiated, there was similar talk of retraining all the blue collars. There were blue jean factories in Western NC, once they left there were no jobs to move into. Training or not. Now it is easy to say, "Move to where the jobs are" but for someone who owns a house in an area but has little to no other assets, this is not a solution.
- otakucode 8y agoThe alternatives that coal miners have are garbage. They are being asked to leave union jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, protection from unfair treatment, and embrace radically lower pay, radically worse benefits, and active unfair treatment. You can't expect anyone to get excited by those prospects. If computers were outlawed tomorrow, would you sign up to stock shelves at Walmart with a smile on your face and with desire to gather in the mornings and sing the Walmart loyalty chant or whatever it is they sing?
- tylerhou 8y agoIn June: "And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent." - NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/upshot/we-ran-out-of-words-to-describe-how-good-the-jobs-numbers-are.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/upshot/we-ran-out-of-word...
- bilbo0s 8y agoI have no reason to believe either of you are being dishonest. So taking what you've both posted at face value, i have to conclude that nearly every other adult demographic in the US, does much better employment wise than men. Which is odd? I wonder if you actually only counted white and asian men, would the statistics look any better? EDIT: I just realized how terrible that may have sounded. I'm genuinely only curious about what's causing this apparent disparity. (A disparity that must be a bit severe mathematically speaking.) So my "off the cuff" guess would be that large sections of black, hispanic, and native american men are not really able to participate in the employment markets. And that's maybe how the numbers get so high for men in general?
- jessaustin 8y agoThe difference may more likely be due to different ways of classifying a particular person as unemployed? https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-unemployment-rate-u6-vs-u3.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...
- tylerhou 8y agoThe parent poster said "11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months." It's very possible that ~4% of those people don't want to work, or don't work for various reasons (stay-at-home-dad?).
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoIf you look at Glaeser's publication[0] (page 10) he defines the rate that he is citing as "the share of men who are not currently employed, or one minus the employment to population rate for prime men". That is a much broader measure of unemployment than even the already very broad U6 measure that NYT is reporting as this would include every single person without a job regardless of the reason that they don't have a job. This number would include full-time students, stay-at-home parents, disabled people, retirees and so on. For comparison, using that measure the absolute lowest level of unemployment that the US has ever had for the age 16+ population as a whole is about 35%[1] (this source reports employment to population rate, so it will be 100% minus the rate that Glaeser is using) or 18% for all people age 25-54[2]. Men in that age range are actually employed at a higher rate than most other demographics. He is making a point about men in that age range being employed at a relatively low rate compared to historic rates for that same demographic, not their employment rate compared to other demographics now. Men age 25-54 have at times had rates getting close to 5%[3]. However, this can't entirely be blamed on a poor job market because it has become much more acceptable for men to take the role of a stay-at-home parent or caretaker than it would have when their employment rate peaked in the late 1960s. There are almost far more students in that age range than there would have been in the 60s. [0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/jobs_for_the_heartland_nberwp.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/jobs_for_the... [1] http://www.multpl.com/us-employment-population-ratio http://www.multpl.com/us-employment-population-ratio [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=categories https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S?utm_sourc... [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
- cgb223 8y agoIt’s worth noting that the job report from this week has explicit data suggesting that jobless people are now re-entering the workforce in higher numbers
- all_blue_chucks 8y ago> People who stop searching for jobs are excluded from the official unemployment rate The official employment stats cover both. U3 is the unemployment rate, which correctly covers only the labor force, while U6 covers the labor participation rate, which covers the population.
- calimac 8y ago"despondence or poor health". You're making me laugh. Yeah, that's how they re taken out of the labor force for the unemployment rate calculation ...not. here's a good bit of reading to understand the calculation instead of the crap spin of Harvard "cuck" Econ Talk. . https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm