me: >> 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. >> ...<<
Doug: > 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. < Right.[*] It's like the distinction between the GDP and such alternatives as the Genuine Progress Indicator. In essence, GDP tells us the amount of activity in markets for goods and services, i.e., commodity production. It's a measure of exchange-value. On the other hand, the GPI is an effort to measure what's good for humanity (in the US) in the long run (given the effects of economic activity on the natural environment). It's an attempt to measure total use-values produced by the economy (though, strictly speaking, those can't be aggregated). A capitalist economy's "health" (from its own perspective) is measured much more by the GDP than by the GPI. It's (real) GDP that is associated with job creation (in Okun's "law"), which allows most people to survive in a commodity-producing society. On the other hand, humanity's health (in the US) is measured by the GPI or similar indices. There can easily be a contradiction between what's good for capitalism and what's good for humanity, or between exchange-value and use-value. So when folks refer to alternative measures of unemployment or of the economy's production, they are engaged in a critique of capitalism, whether they know it or not. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac [*] Actually, those who are "marginally attached" to the labor force _might_ "figure in the capital/labor balance of power and the wage-setting mechanism." It's possible, for example, that U6 could do better in Phillips Curve estimates than U3 does. I don't know that literature. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
