I've never seen unemployment drop .3 percent on only 114K net jobs

[pinqy]

Well look....were the numbers intentionally cooked by the Obama administration? No. Let's not get crazy here. However, are they accurate? Oh hell no. What we are seeing in this report is a statistical anomaly. It's the result of more people leaving the workforce, inaccurate projections of what would happen by the BLS when they applied their seasonal adjustments, and possibly an outlier in their polling (yes, these statistics are done in large part by simple polling which is subject to an outlier effect just like any other poll).

All true.

The problem is that there is a misunderstanding of what the U3 unemployment rate actually is and that misunderstanding is perpetrated by the media according to their biases. What this report actually says is that fewer people met the definition of U3 unemployed...that does not mean that more people found jobs as a percentage of the workforce.

Actually, in this case it does. Employment from the Household survey went up by 873,000 and Unemployment went down 456,000

The workforce participation rate remained the same

No, the Labor Force Participation rate increased from 63.5% to 63.6%

and the U6 unemployment rate was unchanged.

Because of part time for economic reasons going up a lot.
The U6 is (Unemployed + Marginally Attached + Part time for Economic reasons)/(Labor Force + Marginally Attached). Unemployment and Marginally Attached went down, (U5 and U6 also went down) but Part time for economic reasons went up enough to compensate for the increase of Labor Force.

That would make a lot of sense because the payroll reporting indicated 114,000 new jobs and 120,000 are required to keep up with population growth. In other words we actually went backwards by 6,000 which is not enough to raise the U6 by a tenth of a percent.

The Establishment survey (payroll numbers) aren't used to calculate any of the Labor Force stats.

The reason why it appears that there is a drop in the U3 is because the BLS fucked up their seasonal adjustment projections and more people dropped out of the workforce.

Except the Labor Force went up. And the seasonal adjustment calculations are projections, it's a statistical adjustment calculated from past variance.

 

[pinqy]

[quIs it "cooking the books"? Well in a way sure because it's not providing a true representation of "people out of work".

It's not supposed to. It's supposed to measure Unemployment. People not working and not trying to work are classified as Not in the Labor Force.

But see....that's the critical issue isn't it? The U6 measures people who are "out of work". The U3 measures people who are "unemployed according to the U3 definition of unemployed". There's a huge difference. The U3 is a lot like "well that depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is". So the U3 is "the truth", but it's a very selective truth that is dependent upon very specific conditions that define truth for its own purposes....the U6 is "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".

Well, let's look: Unemployed is defined as

All persons who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed.

Pretty objective, straightforward, yes or no, no grey areas. Margin of error is about +/- 3.1%

U6 adds "Marginally Attached" who are those who have not looked for work in the last 4 weeks but

peop... want a job, are available for work, and have looked for work within the
past year.

This is more subjective as it involves stated desire rather than concrete actions. Margin of error is about +/- 6.8%

U6 also adds "Part Time for Economic reasons" which is people who are Employed and who want to and are available to work 35+ hours/week but worked less than 35 hours in the reference week due to slow business or because they couldn't find a full time job.

So, no it's not the "whole truth." It adds people who have jobs and adds a pretty subjective measure. It's useful, but not as accurate and since it includes people who are working, distorts the picture of those trying to work.

Essentially what happened is that roughly 100,000 people found a new job, 200,000 people quit looking for work completely and were removed from the "labor pool" for calculating the U3 (they are still in the U6 and actually that figure is not exactly correct because it will be removed from the denominator instead of the numerator so it's actually a bit higher once you express it as a percentage), and 500,000 people that the BLS expected to quit their jobs didn't...that's 800,000 people that make up that 0.3% drop.

You made up those numbers. They bear no resemblence to reality. Not seasonally adjuste Employment went up 775,000, seasonally adjusted to +873,000. Not seasonally adjusted unemployment went down 954,000, seasonally adjusted to -456,000
The Unadjusted UE rate went from 8.2% to 7.6% and the Adjusted rate went from 8.1% to 7.8%.
So since the Unadjusted rate went down way more than the adjusted rate, it seems odd you're claiming seaosonal adjustment made the rate go down.

But in reality only 114,000 people found work....well below the 120,000 - 140,000 needed to keep pace. So what happens? The U3 drops artificially and the U6 stays the same which is exactly what this report says.

The 114k is from an establishment survey and excludes Agriculture, Self-Employed, unpaid family workers, people working under the table, etc, all of which are captured in the Household survey. You CANNOT compare the Establishment survey numbers with the Household data without major adjustments. The U6 only stayed the same because of Part time for economic reasons, not people not working. The U4 and U5 went down.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Why are the frighty righty extremists so weird?

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

Why are the frighty righty extremists so weird?

STFU already and go to the rubber room and babble about your far right crazies and all your other usual nonsense. Geez, you're as bad as a broken record.

 

[JakeStarkey]

You are the far righty frighty crazees, Gasbag. You guys are just weird.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

You are the far righty frighty crazees, Gasbag. You guys are just weird.

Thanks again for repeating that Mister Broken Record.

 

[JakeStarkey]

You are the broken record, Gasbag.

You don't offer anything constructive.

You are the far righty frighty crazees, Gasbag. You guys are just weird.

Thanks again for repeating that Mister Broken Record.

 

[Rozman]

No one has seen anything similar to this.
True Journalists would dig into this story.
But we all know that Obama has the media in his corner.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Media, liberal and conservative, have dug into it and are being told the BLS are unable to cook the books.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

Media, liberal and conservative, have dug into it and are being told the BLS are unable to cook the books.

They are. And even if it does get investigated, it won't be until after the election. By then, it won't so much matter.