On Feb 5, 2011, at 12:14 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
I see no compelling
reason to disbelieve the official explanation, nor to conclude that
somebody must be lying, because the statistics are confusing.
Perhaps more sensible statistics can be found here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
"Despite minor changes to the system, government reporting has
deteriorated sharply in the last decade or so."
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
http://www.shadowstats.com/primers-and-reports
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/employment
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/276-employment-2009-benchmark-
revision
"The "surplus" jobs created by start-up firms, which get added on to
the payroll estimates each month as a special add-factor, have been
revised lower. Prior to the benchmark revision, the Birth-Death Model
appears to have been adding an average of about 72,000 extra jobs per
month (roughly 861,000 per year), but that appears to have been
revised now to an average of about 42,000 per month (roughly 509,000
per year). This monthly bias should be negative, on average. Since it
is not, the BLS continues to overestimate monthly growth in payroll
employment."
"During the Clinton Administration, "discouraged workers" — those who
had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had —
were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been
"discouraged" for less than a year. This time qualification defined
away the long-term discouraged workers. The remaining short-term
discouraged workers (less than one year) are included in U.6."
"Adding the excluded long-term discouraged workers back into the
total unemployed, unemployment — more in line with common experience
as estimated by the SGS-Alternate Unemployment Measure — dropped to
about 21.2% in January from 21.9% in December. While there likely
were some seasonal aberrations in the January reporting, the SGS
measure is based on the reported U.6 measure and usually varies with
it. See the Alternate Data tab at www.shadowstats.com for a graph and
more detail."
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
