Unemployment getting close to Depression figures when comparing apples to apples

Williams is simply wrong, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost is that the composition of the labor market has changed.

This data only goes back to WWII, but as you can see, the percentage of the employable population that is employed is far higher now than it was in the 1940s

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If you were to extend this data back to the 1930s, the ratio would have been either the same or lower than it was in the 1940s.

The reason why the percentage has risen so much is because women entered the workforce. When comparing unemployment during the Depression, women would not have been included in the workforce data when calculating unemployment because they weren't in the workforce.

Thus, Williams is correct in that we are comparing apples to oranges, but not in the manner he suggests. If you adjusted for all the women who were not working during the Depression, the unemployment would have been far higher than 25%. Thus, making the comparison of today to the 1930s is a specious comparison.

BTW, I've seen two signs at fast food places looking to hire people over the past few weeks. You can get jobs if you are not picky, at least where I live. That wasn't the case in the Depression.
Toro, you seem to have a minor flaw in your reasoning. I like your posts because they are fairly well presented, and you appear to want to share information. I came here to gain knowledge and I have not failed in that regard.

Now, as to looking at the Thirties, the numbers of families that were employed in farming was far higher than it is today with all of the large factory farms. Those farmwives way back then were putting in 19 hour days. (They aged quickly and were less fat than middle aged women today. I travel the country a lot. There are millions of fat cow human females in states like Iowa. They probably do not work like their grandmothers did.)

I am quite convinced that the farm women in 30's were gainfully employed. When all those farms were foreclosed on (Damn the banks!), those women were put out of work along with their husbands and children over the age of 10 who were regular workers on the farm. I doubt that their numbers were counted in the statistics of the era.

Many of those people went west to California (Thanks Steinbeck for telling some of their stories.) and the men were probably counted in the labor pool out there, but their womenfolk were most likely not. The children probably were not counted until they were 16 or older. So, I expect that the data from that era were probably flawed, just like the politically altered data of the current era. Not reliable data in either case.

We have welfare now and social security and these two sources of money may have cut down on the apple sellers and the destitute who were called Hobo's and Bums back then.

Even in the Great Depression, there were jobs that went wanting if the pay was not enough to get a man through the day. Now a days, I expect that a few fast food jobs might fall into that category. You have got to have a clean appearance to work around food. People working for $8 an hour probably can not afford housing if they are buying food, so they probably look dishelved and can not find work. The teenagers today are for the most part too lazy to work a job as long as they have a comfortable home to come home to. I insisted that all of my kids get jobs when they were 15. All of them are hard workers to this day. I had a daughter who bought a brand new car from her wages when she was a month short of 17. She paid cash.

Final analysis, the comparisons are flawed and as such do not give us a reliable picture. Cultures change and definition of labor pool eligible have also changed. We only consider 155,000,000 to be in the labor pool out of our population of 310,000,000. That is fifty percent. I am willing to bet that the actual number of people who were working or looking for work were more than fifty percent of the population in the Thirties.

Actual uneployment is well over 20% for people who would like to have full time jobs. I am quite certain that THAT is an accurate assessment even if we can not actually count them.
 
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