Laurent GUERBY wrote: > According to the BLS as of 2008 about 10% of USA men aged 25 to 54 years > just don't "want a job", so they're not covered by Obama promises. This was > 2008. Increase this number of don't "want a job" to say 20% and "mission > accomplished": unemployment will just be 0% at last! <
In the US, the number of discouraged workers that Laurent refers to typically decreases (relative to the "official" labor force) when the "official" unemployment rate goes down, since their discouragement is based on a real-world lack of jobs. The various alternative measures of unemployment that the BLS calculates typically move together during a business cycle. (The exception is the U1 measure.) BTW, it's interesting that Obama has said stuff that indicates that he knows of the limitations of the official unemployment rate. What used to be a staple of radical political economists (in contrast to the orthodox) has become mainstream. That, of course, why the BLS started calculating alternative unemployment rates (under Clinton). Who says there's no progress? > And even better: no need to create any job or spend any money! Just ask the > BLS to be more efficient at counting those who "want a job". Meaning "really > really really want a job".< Maybe this happens in France, but so far the US BLS has not given in to this kind of political pressure. Reagan proposed modifying the official unemployment rate a little -- by counting domestically-employed military workers as part of the official labor force -- that lowered it a bit, but that change didn't last. (Thatcher was much, much more successful than Reagan at de-defining the unemployment rate.) Frankly, it's quite unlikely that unemployment -- however measured -- will ever equal zero in the US, a capitalist country. As Kalecki pointed out (applying Marx's concept of the reserve army of the unemployed), the existence of unemployment gives employers power over workers, allowing profits to be produced. If unemployment goes down "too far" (by capitalist standards), it squeezes profits, so they punish us with inflation and more inflation. The exception, Kalecki noted, was the fascism: police coercion can replace the reserve army of the unemployed to motivate work. We can imagine that true social democracy might also be an exception, as when Swedish wage decisions used to be centralized in order to avoid inflation. -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
