me: >> the population isn't really observable. Nor is employment. Laurent: > Wow. Let me tell you a secret: nothing is observable!
No theoretical concept is observable, but individual items are. (I can't see the set of all PCs in the US but see this PC I'm sitting at.) The trick is to find theoretical concepts that have a strong connection with real-world items. > More seriously, each measure has a quality. Population and > employment can be measured objectively at pretty good > accuracy, something than can't be done with economist unemployment. The BLS household survey gets its "employment" numbers the same way that it gets its "unemployment" numbers: it's exactly the same sample survey. me: >> All we have >> are guesses, though perhaps they are good ones. By the way, your >> "street man" definition of unemployment is nothing but 100% minus the >> employment/population ratio, a number that the US Bureau of Labor >> Statistics regularly reports. Laurent: > Yep. Published doesn't mean it is used, isn't it? It is used by economists; most journalists don't talk about it. They mostly report the official unemployment rate and the establishment survey's payroll employment. That's partly because they're more concerned with the business cycle. >> To my mind, it's a mistake to look at any single number to understand >> what's happening in the labor-power markets. One of the various >> unemployment rates that the BLS reports, along with the E/POP ratio >> and monthly payroll employment numbers seem to be a good combination. > Yet unemployment is about the only measure used when discussing policy. > We are in agreement here that more data is useful, here is what I said It's not the only number. the establishment survey's employment numbers get a lot of press, since it seems to be a better gauge of the employment situation than the official unemployment rate. These days, the number of discouraged workers has also gotten more attention than in the past. This seems partly a result of Greenspan. Laurent had written: >> > The economist definition is, as the data mentionned in the rest of my >> > post implies, a total joke and is not observable. me: >> Why is the official economist's definition a _total_ joke? the >> question of who is without a job but is actively seeking one seems an >> important question, even though it is not enough. (We should look at >> involuntary part-timers, discouraged workers, etc. in addition.) >> >> By the way, the numbers on employment and those on unemployment have >> similar problems and a similar degree of validity. Thus, the numbers >> on the unemployment rate and your E/POP ratio have similar problems >> and similar degrees of validity. Laurent: > That's completely wrong. population is 0/1 directly observable, > employment is 0/1 and directly observable, "seeking a job hard enough to > be counted as active unemployed" has probably more than a dozen possible > values, is based on human psychology and not on facts so cannot be > honnestly compared in accuracy with the two above measures. In the household survey, the employment numbers are based on the answers given by those questioned. So they are just as (un)reliable as those about unemployment (as defined officially). The employment numbers from the establishment survey may be better, but the same worker can be counted twice or more as employed (because he or she moonlights). Population numbers tend to miss the homeless, undocumented workers, and the like. They are estimates. I don't think monthly numbers exist for the population, either. Rather, what we see are interpolations. > Your paragraph is in the category "total joke". Your stooping to insult reflects badly on you, not me. You should sit down and take a stress pill, Dave. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
