pinqy
Gold Member
Correct. And that has not changed.As time goes by some statistics lose their relevance. Historically, the "Unemployment Rate" was a pretty good indication of how many people who wanted to work and were actually working. They took the total population that was employed, added the number of people who were actively looking for work, then created a fraction with the work-lookers over the total of working and looking. The result was theoretically the percentage of people who wanted to work but had not found employment. "Full employment" was considered to be an Unemployment Rate in the neighborhood of 4%, on the theory that 1/25 of the working population would be, from time to time, between jobs.
Generally correct in the demographic changes you're talking about, but the economic causes you're blaming is speculation. And none of it changes the usefullness of the UE rate.But since the Great Recession the whole employment landscape has changed. "Good jobs" were lost by the millions and people were forced to confront new realities. Families that had previously lived on, and depended upon, two full-time incomes were forced to scale back and either live on one income, or a combination of part-time jobs. People in their 50's and older who had planned to work to full retirement age or beyond, found that they could not find anything, and decided to bite the bullet and retire early. Young adults who lost their jobs moved back in with their parents and basically gave up on the idea of full-time employment.
Part-time jobs became, rather than something to make "extra" money in your spare time, a way of supporting yourself. Barely.
Now we also have the un-mentioned phenomenon of hordes of High School grads pursuing college for no other reason than THERE ARE NO JOBS FOR THEM IN THE ECONOMY. Middle class kids who, in previous generations would have gone to work in a gas station or at the mill, or in construction, now are confronted with either going to college or staying home and being harassed by the parents continually because they don't "do" anything.
There have always been such. And they are tracked, and the number has been going down.The fact that these Yoots are not counted in unemployment statistics is a significant driver in Democrats' current obsession for "free college" for everyone. And of course this ignores the destructive effects on the colleges of having students who are not, by any sane definition, "college material." What do they study, and for how long, and how much debt will they accumulate? The mind reels.
So the Unemployment Rate became less relevant because it failed to take any notice of the large number of people who wanted to work but for one reason or another stopped looking (or never started looking) actively. They basically gave up.
Too subjective, and completely arbitrary. And the income data from the Current Population Survey are notoriously unreliable. ..The CPS allows secondary reporting (one respondent answers for the entire household) and people tend to guess their income. Add on that that's the main subject people don't want to answer and it's difficult to get anything useful out them.BLS ought to take some of their mountain of data and develop a new statistical standard that counts the number of Full-Time Equivalent Jobs earning a minimum of $40k (adjusted for inflation) (hereinafter referred to as "Good Jobs") versus the total population, and track that number over time, as compared with the adult population.
It has. Job openings have gone up. The number of discouraged is almost one third of what it was during the Recession. Not all aspects of the Labor Market have improved, but most have.To wit, what percentage of the adult population held Good Jobs in 2008 versus 2015?
This statistic, if published, would paint a much more realistic - and much gloomier - picture of the trend in the American employment picture over time than the Unemployment Rate, which is below 5% now, but near meaningless. Does anybody seriously believe that the employment picture in the U.S. has been improving as that Unemployment Rate has gone down over the past 6 years?