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Posted on 11/16/2014 5:32:16 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The latest jobs report showed the unemployment rate was at its lowest level in six years, 5.8 percent.
But Americans aren't convinced that things are nearly that good. In a recent Ipsos-MORI poll, 1,001 Americans were asked, "Out of every 100 people of working age, how many do you think are unemployed and looking for work?" Their average response was 32. That's almost 26 percentage points higher than the 6.1-percent jobless rate in August, when the poll was conducted.
Americans are way, way off here. But they aren't alone. Here's how other countries' average estimated unemployment rates stack up to their actual unemployment rates:
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To be fair, it's possible that question wording matters here...though "out of work and looking for work" is the most broadly used definition of unemployment, people may be also considering their discouraged-worker friends who have given up the search. Still, even when you include discouraged and other marginally attached workers, even the broadest definition of unemployment in August was only 12 percent.
But moreover, unemployment is still a big problem, and those high guesses may reflect that. The job market is simply painful for many Americans right now, so to many people, it really might feel like the jobless rate is much higher.
This all doesn't just matter because people are off. It matters because the degree to which people perceive problems guides how they make political decisions. (Not that Congress has been doing much about boosting jobs, as Ezra Klein wrote earlier this year.)
Update: This post was updated to provide more context and analysis about the jobless rate.
All I see at the super markets are EBT, Social Security recipients, and unemployment checks. Someone tell me I am wrong.
When every family has someone who is unemployed, they don’t believe the lying government.
The public is smarter than the obomites admit.
Where’s Øbongo to tell us that we’re not the unemployed that we thought we were?
/johnny
You see...here’s the problem, those number crunchers have cooked the books so often for their masters and overlords no one believes anything they say.
There’s a massive credibility issue in studies like this.
America is waking up.
One look at the labor force participation rate (not the artificially lowered unemployment rate) ... or a look at the record numbers on welfare ... and well, I can’t say you’re wrong.
Because the Unemployment Rate is pure BS and always has been.
I would say here it is around 25%.
What is the “Underemployment” rate?
They say 12%, but I doubt if that is even near the truth.
Yes it does. Makes me wonder what the numbers would be if the feds did not cook the books.
Where you is at?
Unemployment rates are more than twice the number put out by the feds. Same for inflation.
The books are being cooked in Washington.
Here’s a term that the media has never used since Obama has been in the White House, “McJobs.”
When jobs are scarce, salaries rise. How much has your salary been rising?
We are in a depression. The reason why the government started adding “transfer payments” (welfare and other gov’t giveaways) and other “newly conceived” items into the GDP calculations was to prevent the GDP from going negative. If you adjusted their figures to back out the newly created items the GDP would be negative for the last year and reflect the Depression.
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