On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 09:42:48AM -0600, Dan Minette wrote: > This is an interesting question. On the face of it, your arguement is > intuative, but there are other factors involved. People who work in > housing, but are not "on the books" are usually (or at least often) > illegal immigrants. They tend to eschew filling out government forms > and surveys.
I don't follow your point here. Are you saying that we shouldn't count these as jobs because the people doing them are not legally in the country? > Other people who are working "off the books" would also have > incentives to not report those jobs. The people who are in drug sales > comes to mind here. My impression was that most organized crime had a legitimate-looking business as a front, so these guys would still be counted, only they would be on the books as "strip club worker" instead of "drug dealer". > Economic View: Two Tales of American Jobs: ...the Federal Reserve has > just thrown cold water on the household data. It concludes that the > gloomy payroll data is essentially accurate and that the household > survey is probably off base. "I wish I could say the household survey > were the more accurate,'' Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, said in > his testimony at a House hearing on Feb. 11. "Everything we've looked > at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you > have to follow.'' Good find. I hadn't read that before. > I think that the overestimation of the population growth is a good > candidate for a source of overestimation of the employment growth by > the household survey. Makes sense. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
