5 ms·
Unemployment numbers are laughably phony That's simply untrue.
by enjo 12y ago
Unemployment numbers are laughably phony
That's simply untrue.
- irishcoffee 12y agoIn the spirit of neither party citing anything, it is true. I don't understand how people think otherwise. If I had to guess, part of it is the majority of readers here live in a bubble and don't see the forest for the trees.
- enjo 12y agoPlease read the rest of the discussion that happened parallel to this.
- irishcoffee 12y agoAt the time I posted, there was no such thing. I'm going to assume you're smart enough to be cognizant of that, and as such, your comment seems at best troll-ish.
- enjo 12y agoNo.. it was meant to call your attention to the other discussion as opposed to rehashing the whole thing here. I know I don't always go back and check these threads if I don't get a reply.
- TTPrograms 12y agoDid you know that if you can't find a job for a year the government can count you as part of the "discouraged" labor force and not count you as unemployed any more? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker#United_Stat...
- 21echoes 12y agoFalse -- the BLS reports 6 different metrics of Unemployment with every jobs report, more than half of which include "discouraged workers" Here's a graph of a few of them over time: http://www.macrotrends.net/chart/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/chart/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
- joe_the_user 12y agoEven your link lists the 6% as "official". 6% against 12% is pretty huge. It's the old "large print for the rubes, small print so we say we're aren't lying" trick.
- 21echoes 12y agoalright, let's look at the U-6 over time then: http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/u3-and-u6-unemployment-during-great-depression http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/u3-and-u6-unemployme... http://www.scribd.com/doc/82908801/Unemployment-and-Underemployment-1970-2012#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/82908801/Unemployment-and-Underemp... http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp?fromYear=1994&toYear=2015 http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp?f... As is now hopefully obvious: 11% is a pretty normal number for U-6 (especially given the current U-3), and the only reason you think that's high is because you're used to hearing U-3. Which, of course, is why economists chose to focus on one number over time in the first place. Keep your conspiracy theories out of this, please.
- tsotha 12y agoHow do you explain the discrepancy between U-6 and the labor force participation rate?
- rayiner 12y agoDiscouraged workers are those not currently looking. Look at the definition of U4 in the "United States" section.
- TTPrograms 12y agoThe fact that the number that are "not looking" perfectly tracks the number that are and can't find jobs suggests that either there are many individuals who have given up after not finding work or the method for measuring "not looking" is flawed. If it were simply people who were not looking by choice you wouldn't expect it to track the official number so closely.