On Sat, 2010-01-30 at 08:35 -0800, Jim Devine wrote: > > I would have expected progressive economists to stop using mindlessly > > the unemployment measure all the time, but this obviously didn't happen: > > my posts here and blog post are still alone in questionning this > > ultimate faith in the sole and exclusive use of "unemployment measure" > > for anything economics, eg: > > I don't know of anyone on this list who "mindlessly" uses the official > unemployment rate -- not to mention putting "ultimate faith" in the > "sole and exclusive" use of this number. This seems like a "straw man" > (i.e., a weak or sham argument set up to be easily refuted). And > serious economists know that the more information, the better, so that > the official U rate must be complemented by the employment/population > ratio, etc., while disaggregating all of these.
I agree it's easily refuted: compare the number of mails, blog post, articles, etc... using or pointing to the growing gap between unemployed and without a job, or at least using both numbers versus the number using only unemployment. To my knowledge on the blog side only Angry Bear did bother to point out this dual data point, and only once. I sent the data points for the first time on this list in september 2007. So I'm eagerly waiting for the refutation you promised :). > >Summers said one in five American men aged 25 to 54 are unemployed. < > > two questions: > > 1) did he really use the word "unemployed" here? (The term has a > generally-accepted meaning of "lacking a job but actively looking for > a new one," which does not mean that those who without jobs are not > "unemployed" in this sense should be ignored.) Looking around it looks like Summers said "not working", and comparing accross time for male 25-54, quoting BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8488927.stm << He suggested there had been a fundamental shift in the US economy. "At the moment just one in five men in the US between 25 and 54 aren't working" he said. Mr Summers warned that assuming there was a reasonable recovery, that number could rise to one in seven. That compares to 95% employment in the 1950s, suggesting a "profound change" in the structure of the US economy. "This is a statistical recovery but still a human recession," he said. >> Note: anyone with the URL of a full transcript or video? Note 2: this confusion (unemployed/not working) in journalist reports says a lot about the amount of use of "not working" by economists: people just never heard about it, see "refutation" above... > 2) what about American women? don't they count? (not to mention those > below 25 and (like myself) above 54.) I did provide the data in my mail about women: more than 30% out of job and more than a decade of women job gains wiped out. But if you do historical based comparison or geographic based comparison only the men rate will be directly comparable, for women you have no way to compare directly. Men aged 25-54 are the group where people have the most social pressure to work. Of course if people started to focus on this group as only measure that would be obviously bad but here I'm using this group only to show the extreme weakness of unemployment measure for time and country based comparisons and studies. This is after all the group where you would expect the "unemployment" measure to be the most stable and meaningful. I can only be worse in other groups. Side note: INSEE (the french BLS) published a study in october 2009 giving statistics for unemployed and "inactive but wanting to work" (you cannot invent that :) on the 2003-2007 period. From one quarter to another 23% of unemployed got a job versus ... 14% for "inactive but wanting to work". Also about 20% of "inactive but wanting to work" are not counted unemployed because they're just waiting for answer to job-seeking requests they sent earlier and so did nothing more in the reference period (and the same number just gave up after getting no answer, what's the point of resending a letter to the same company? but well if you do you're still counted as unemployed instead of inactive...). INSEE paper uses "halo around unemployment" to describe this. All in all this confirms that the unemployment measure is extremely weak. URL (PDF link in the upper right): http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?ref_id=ip1260 Laurent _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
