[upchuck]

South Carolina Ping
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[Foundahardheadedwoman]

This for the New York Times may signal a revolutionary move, actually reporting the news. I doubt it.

[monkeyshine]

This is from the NYT? Interesting. Seems to me economic news is designed so politicians can spin things any way they want. Green chutes, unemployment, tax revenues, inventory levels, core inflation and on and on.

We have the fewest people employed since I don’t know when, but IRS reporting record breaking receipts and state budgets are expanding.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Someone’s gonna get fired at the Times.

[Iron Munro]

[Army Air Corps]

Bookmark

[NYFriend]

It's true that the unemployment rate is a poor proxy for whether there are enough jobs to go around.

If only there was a government agency working full time to collect statistics on the labor market. One that would track trends in numbers of hires, number employed, number of people on salary vs hourly, and the average wage by industry over time. I bet that would let you paint a picture that people could recognize. If that data was on the Internet, journalists could study it. Build their own basket of middle class jobs, mid-level to skilled jobs, and track the trends in employment and wages for “regular people”, and see if they are doing better than x years ago? Unemployment rate could more accurately (but less precisely) be expressed with a 10 level code, while economists can dig into the BLS tables like they do anyway.

[JoeFromSidney]

This chart is truncated at both the high and low ends, which even further distorts the presentation. The apparent amount of change is greatly magnified.