In the US Bureau of Labor Statistics current population survey, who counts as being part of the "Institutionalized" population and thus is excluded from the labor force? Are prisoners who are paid to answer phones (etc.) part of the paid labor force and employment?
The US non-institutional population excludes the armed forces, transients, people on ships or difficult-to-measure people etc., and institutionalised people, i.e. prison inmates, nursing home guests, psychiatric patients, hospitalised people etc. The concept of the "paid labor force" suggests that prison labor should be included in surveys, but in practice they do not do it, in virtue of the institutional/non-institutional distinction and possibly also because of measurement problems. In previous posts, I have tried to show the quantitative implication of the derivations of the different populations definitions used. My personal philosophy has always been, that population analysis (demographic analysis) should try to give a picture of the characteristics of the whole population of a country at a point in time, or during an interval of time, and thus, I've previously tried to estimate the composition of the US population as a whole, in terms of real categories describing what they are doing or what their position is, i.e. children, working, unemployed, housewives, idling, retired, sickness beneficiary, criminal, institutionalised, and so on, working up to a more precise analysis of the real position of social classes. But usually American scholars don't seem to do that sort of thing, such empirical research is just "dirty" and they'd rather just work on an econometric model with a formula. I can give a very simple example: do you know the number or proportion of fulltime housewives or househusbands in the United States ? It's very difficult to actually find out reliable info about it, I mean I tried all over the place to get an estimate, but I couldn't find any, and I just had to guess more or less what it could be within the limits I can define. Yet, there are oodles and oodles of lefties, sociologists, therapists and society magazines and they're all talking about "housewives", "the politics of housework" and so on, blah blah, yet, nobody really knows how many fulltime housewives there actually are, what the significance of this is, and I think I would actually have to estimate this, via a procedure from existing Census data to create a benchmark, and then a formula, along the lines that if the number of females is N, the population size is S, the labour force is T and the employment rate is Q, then the total number of housewives will be such-and-such. I personally quite enjoy Erik Olin Wright's stuff because he actually gets empirical. There are some good scholars like that, like Edward Wolff, Bob Pollin, Thomas Weisskopf, Michael Yates, and so on, and plus of course your own good self and various PEN-Lers, who actually try to quantify and illustrate the objective picture of wealth and poverty in America, plus make the economic and social arguments, in a language people can understand. Prof. Perelman doesn't believe much in the quantification side of things, but actually, my own most powerful economic arguments defending Marx's basic idea are very much in terms of quantitative relations (but that's more about the world economy really). What this quantification means, is that we make the arguments more precise, and understand what is really feasible, what we can realise. Anybody can of course say the rich are too rich or the poor are too poor, but what we really want to know is, exactly what difference we could make to that situation, and how we could make it, in a way that advances our vision of a society fit for human beings to live in, and grow up in. If we have that knowledge, we no longer flipflop between saying "we cannot change anything" and "we can change everything" but we can identify a region within which change can occur, and specify what outcomes we seek given the values and aspirations that we have. It gets us out of the waffly middleclass postmodernist discourses, and relativises the arguments made referring to real experience. Personally, I have been criticised for my interest in statistics by socialists and Marxists for two decades now, and many Americans think statistics are nerdy, but I am quite recalcitrant and continue to believe in the value of statistical information. Ultimately I base that on Hegel's logic, because, if you think through Hegel's argument, it's clear that quantity and quality are not things you can disconnect from each other. Regards Jurriaan ------------------------ Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
