The innumerate American public can apparently be made to believe
anything by statistical manipulation. Consider this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/04/
AR2011020406845.html
http://tinyurl.com/6blxd3z
"The jobless rate fell to 9 percent in January from 9.4 percent in
December and 9.8 percent in November."
"Employers added only 36,000 jobs last month, a quarter of what
forecasters had expected."
The above numerical inconsistency should be instantly self evident,
an indication of the degree to which labor statistics have been
redefined and manipulated into meaningless.
If adding 36,000 jobs represents 0.4 percent of the labor market,
then the TOTAL labor market consists of (36000 people) / 0.004 = 9
million people. How insane is that?
The government's own statistics:
http://www.bls.gov/fls/flscomparelf/population.htm
http://tinyurl.com/4zg5j55
shows the labor market in 2009 to consist of 235,801,000 people.
That is 235 million vs 9 million, a mere 2600 percent discrepancy.
The market should have added about 9.4 million jobs to get that 0.4
percent decrease in unemployment. That's not counting the young
people and immigrants coming into the market, less retirees. The
discrepancy is largely attributed to people who have given up on
looking for jobs. Have all those 9 million people taken out of the
job market been asked if they really do no longer want jobs?
Makes me wonder just how bad inflation and other statistics really
are. Retirees like me find it increasingly difficult to pay ever
increasing food and energy bills, while interest paid on savings is
almost non-existent. And yet inflation is supposedly held in check,
deflation is the main worry.
It is bad enough the general public swallows numbers like this, but
there is no excuse for the media. It is difficult to imagine why
there is not outrage in the public and congress. Well maybe not. No
outrage from the public or media I assume means status quo in
congress. Status quo in the congress means the lobbyists remain happy.
Perhaps more sensible statistics can be found here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Too bad you have to pay for them, and pay the government for
producing their numbers as well.
This subject might be completely off topic, if the dismal science,
economics, were not a science, and if the government numbers were not
highly anomalous! This also reflects on our educational system,
which is apparently putting out illiterate, innumerate, illogical and
uncritical sheep by the millions, which does not bode well for
American science and engineering curricula, nor for the quality of
future teachers.
Without change, an age of fantasy, superstition, and magic, a new
dark age, approaches.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
