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Why on earth would we want to count someone who isn't working or searching for a job as part of the unemployment rate?
To come up with a 'discouragement' rate when compared to past percents of people working. That's probably a good thing to know why they were working in the past and aren't now. Have an economist call up a marketer and ask them why it's done every day across the US when you are talking about products falling out of favor.
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How would you propose we quantify someone is working below their skill level to consider them unemployed?
Have a category for 'underemployed', and then ask them in the existing random surveys if they have had higher paying or more responsibility in the past.
Do you have any more extremely basic questions that you need answered?
I mean jeez. The Moneyball guys can calculate ridiculous stats for a right handed pitcher on BFE crappy baseball team, but our genius collection of government economists have 'are you employed?' 'are you looking for work?' as the sum total of their questions they can even fathom to ask about the American working public.
To come up with a 'discouragement' rate when compared to past percents of people working. That's probably a good thing to know why they were working in the past and aren't now.
And we have one, that is why there are several different measures of labor underutilization. It doesn't make any one of them wrong or misleading. There might be jobs out there that someone who has given up looking doesn't find because they aren't looking, so a certain measure wouldn't include them.
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Originally Posted by TheOverdog
Have a category for 'underemployed', and then ask them in the existing random surveys if they have had higher paying or more responsibility in the past.
Underemployed isn't the same as unemployed, so it doesn't make sense to call them so. What about people who purposely take lower paying jobs for the convenience or pursuit of different goals? What about retirees who work part time. All of them would be considered unemployed this way, which isn't what we're interested in measuring.
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Originally Posted by TheOverdog
Do you have any more extremely basic questions that you need answered?
Yes you have answered with opinions that don't make any sense and would further muddy the data we're interested in. Thanks for the input!
So lets see if I get your crazy hypothesis here.. You take the total population and divide that by those listed as "working" to come up with the TRUE unemployment rate?
Is it 16-65 or total population? What is your definition of "working".
You include students, "housewives", those with a handicap, "Hobos", etc. ?
You guys CAN'T STAND a mixed race child from a broken home is doing pretty good despite an interfering/obstructive GOP congress.
So lets see if I get your crazy hypothesis here.. You take the total population and divide that by those listed as "working" to come up with the TRUE unemployment rate?
Is it 16-65 or total population? What is your definition of "working".
You include students, "housewives", those with a handicap, "Hobos", etc. ?
You guys CAN'T STAND a mixed race child from a broken home is doing pretty good despite an interfering/obstructive GOP congress.
Unemployment statistics (like inflation) have been grossly manipulated for decades for political purposes. Doesn't matter which party is in charge.
PS - And stop trying to make this into R vs D argument. I (unfortunately) voted for the current President the first time; HUGE MISTAKE!
[url=http://danielamerman.com/articles/2012/WorkC.html]Making 9 Million Jobless "Vanish": How The Government Manipulates Unemployment Statistics by Daniel Amerman[/url]
America's Structural Jobs Depression Is Here to Stay
Just because a video is on the internet doesn't necessarily make it true.
First of all he uses the St. Louis Federal Reserve's own numbers and the Government's own population statistics.
Second of all the other people on this thread parroting the lie that the unemployment rate and labor participation rate has gone down because of baby boomers or old people leaving the labor force is an absolute statistical lie as some one else has pointed out and this video shows.
As a matter of fact the 50 to 55 plus age cohort are the only ones whose participation has risen. The people in their prime working ages has fallen. Have a look.
The BLS has a very narrow definition of "unemployed". While that is fine when you compare that rate over time and see it shoot up in a recession, then slowly float down afterwards, I have not seen anyone calculate this simple ratio: number of people employed divided by total population.
I am using the number of employed persons by the BLS and the population age 18-64 by the census bureau as of year-end 2014.
One problem is that people between 55 and 64 can retire and I'm not able to locate that data. It would reduce the 26% figure somewhat. On the other hand, people are counted as "employed" even if they work just 5 hours a week, which is silly. People who work part-time but would like full-time work should be counted as 1/2 employed. So I think the early retirees and involuntary part-timers should cancel each other out. Round this off to 25% if you want. Point is, that is a HUGE number.
I think it is just absolutely terrible that 1 in 4 working age Americans does not have a job. While some are independently wealthy, those are very few in number. Some don't need to work because they live in a household with someone else who earns enough to run the household. That's not a large number of people.
The reason the official unemployment rate is so much lower is because it ignores people who are disabled, in prison, or unemployed but not looking for work. While I agree they are not in the labor force, it is nondebatable that they do exist and require resources.
Thoughts? Is 26% unemployment normal? Acceptable? Or disgusting?
That's wierd. I don't know a single person who can't get a job right now
The thing you fail to understand is that the United States has a labor shortage. The problem is that there is a complete mismatch between the skill set (or lack thereof) of the people not working and what employers want to hire. At this point, the country probably has 20% of the population that cannot be hired for anything but the most trivial minimum wage job and even then, much of that 20% would be fired shortly afterwards.
The U1 headline unemployment rate only counts recently unemployed people. For the most part, those are people who have at least some kind of chance of finding another job. That's about 5% of the labor force. At 5%, we're at full employment and hiring employers start seeing upwards wage pressure. Most of the long-term unemployed and non-working aren't qualified for any of those jobs.
Now this I believe. Sad as it is.
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