On Mar 20, 2012, at 11:10 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > BTW, just because the government "is in effect saying" that we should pay > sole attention to the "headline" unemployment rate (U-3) does not mean that > we have to. Critics of the BLS have been offering alternatives for decades. > In fact, nowadays the BLS itself offers alternatives, such as U-6 or the > employment/population ratio (which has to be subtracted from 100% to be > comparable to the unemployment rate).
It's not saying that. The unemployment rate is meant as a measure of labor market slack, not human deprivation. People who are, in the jargon, "marginally attached" to the labor force barely figure in the capital/labor balance of power and the wage-setting mechanism. The BLS has offered alternatives for a very long time, and every month there are 6 flavors of unemployment rate to choose from in the employment situation release. That's exactly where this writer got the data from. Many analysts, including a lot of Wall Street economists, have been writing about the decline in the employment population ratio and the effect of labor market withdrawal on the unemployment rate. It's really not anything approaching a secret, though I suppose it's fun to dress it up as one. Doug _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
