Posted on 10/02/2009 7:07:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I don’t like the U-6 measure being trumped up as if the traditional measure of unemployment were worthless. Let’s not forget that there is a huge difference between somebody not working at all and somebody working part-time. Also, as the U-6 measure includes people who *voluntarily* withdraw from the labor pool, they must have savings or something keeping them afloat. The different measures of unemployment have their uses, neither one is the whole story.
Figures from the GD are less precise than they are today, as are all econ statistics.
That could well be. The BLS explanation is a bit long and tedious to wade through:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf
bookmark.
I don't like U6 because it seems very squishy to me. How do they measure someone who works part time but wants to work full time? Just gimme a straight up number. Actually, it seems like it'd be easier to measure employment than unemployment.
Something that greatly added to the depression was the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, putting many farmers out of work and forcing them to migrate. This added many unemployed people(and probably had an impact on food supply)to the roles that wouldn’t have been out of work if it wasn’t for the drought. Bozo is trying artificially recreate that by turning off the water in CA.
Well, there’s no perfect measure, each tells us something different and each has its uses. No solutions, only tradeoffs.
As his CFR elite puppeteers told him to do.
You are missing the point. BHO was maneuvered into office by his elitist puppeteers. Same with his predecessors.
No, incite them to revolt.
You are correct that salaried employees don’t punch clocks and are harder to estimate “hours worked.” The BLS has their methods for estimating these issues.
My point is this: the BLS didn’t even count unemployment during the 30’s. The BLS’ mission wasn’t to estimate or report unemployment until after WWII. The “25% unemployment in 1933” was an estimate made by Stanley Liebergott, a BLS statistician, in the 1960’s, and he used state-level employment data and tax information to work backwards into unemployment estimates. The methodology of post-WWII unemployment and establishment reports didn’t exist prior to WWII, and therefore you can’t easily compare the data.
“Hours worked” data does exist, however, and is easier to compare. Relatively speaking, what can be compared is the depth of the decline in hours worked from 1928 until 1935, and then the relative changes now.
Seems like the IRS must have accurate figures on monthly wages or FICA taxes collected. That might be a better guage of unemployment. No matter what they use it's ugly out there. Construction and even renovations are flat where I live. Building permits down 50% from last year and commercial building permits down 25%. Thats a figure I saw in a letter tacked on a boarded up electrical supply house of all places. As another freeper wrote: After this administration gets done, I HOPE I'll have some spare CHANGE left in my pocket.
That’s true about the Dust Bowl adding to the depression, proving that not every aspect of the depression had an economic origin.
The dust bowl occurred mainly in land that had formerly been prairie. Native deep-rooted grasses had been replaced by shallow-rooted grains. When the drought began the shallow rooted grains died and their root systems couldn’t hold the soil in place. Crops are now being developed that have the huge root systems characteristic of prairie grasses and they will be harvested without disturbing the roots.
Yes, the unemployment number from the 30s would have been lower if they used something like our current U-3.
Probably much, much lower since chronic long term unemployment was the problem, and U-3 kicks the long term unemployed off of the roles.
You are correct that salaried employees don’t punch clocks and are harder to estimate “hours worked.” The BLS has their methods for estimating these issuesThey're into pure synthesis then for those numbers; there isn't one job where we've informed 'govt' that engineering personnel were pouring hours above and beyond the standard 8 into a project ...
MAybe ... they count the cars in the parking lot after 6 PM.
Or, observe office-lights being on past 7 ...
“I understand that, but is the measure of 25% similar to the way we measure our current 9.8% unemployment ?”
Since sometime in thr 70 they have counted welfare cases as employed so the current figures don’t relate to anything historical.
Deduct those on welfare and the unemployment rate rises quite a bit.
As a retired engineer, I know exactly what you mean. Their estimates for salaried personnel are SWAG’s. However, for every engineer in the US, there’s at least one banker who left by 3pm to make a tee time somewhere.
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