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Unemployment in the UK is Now So Low It's in Danger of Exposing the Lie Used To Create the Numbers (businessinsider.com)
Unemployment in Britain is now just 4.5 percent. There are only 1.49 million unemployed people in the UK, versus 32 million people with jobs. This is almost unheard of. Unemployment was most recently this low in December 1973, when the UK set an unrepeated record of just 3.4 percent. From a report: The problem with this record is that the statistical definition of "unemployment" relies on a fiction that economists tell themselves about the nature of work. As the rate gets lower and lower, it tests that lie. Because -- as anyone who has studied basic economics knows -- the official definition of unemployment disguises the true rate. In reality, about 21.5 percent of all working-age people (defined as ages 16 to 64) are without jobs, or 8.83 million people, according to the Office for National Statistics. That's more than four times the official number. For decades, economists have agreed on an artificial definition of what unemployment means. Their argument is that people who are taking time off, or have given up looking for work, or work at home to look after their family, don't count as part of the workforce.
Before Brexit the UK never had these problems at all.
They need the EU to take over so that unemployment numbers are never in danger of getting anywhere close to zero.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
"... don't count as part of the workforce" what is the lie? at worst it might be a case of badly defined? what is the lie?
people not looking for work... are not part of workforce. it would be a "lie" to include those that don't want/cant work as well!!
Didn't a chorus of screams arise from leftist journalists, editors, economists, statisticians and politicians worldwide --
-- howling that it was entirely completely wrong and grossly misleading to describe "those not employed" as unemployed,
-- to give some kind of "real" or "true" rate of unemployment, as Trump did?
Stay at home parents are employed. Why would you count then as unemployed?
If they were called "nanny" and received an official salary, you would call them employed. But because they are called "mom" or "dad" and simply have access to all the resources (money, food, shelter, etc) of the working spouse you don't want to count them?
I would have said the lie is that many of the jobs are shit. In fact the big lie is that we need most of those people working to create wealth - most people create no value in their shitty jobs.
Maybe they need to switch to a new reporting metric: how many people are unemployed, or working part time/multiple part time jobs when they would rather work full time? Personally, up until about 2-3 years ago, I was making $13 an hour with a graduate degree. I wasn't unemployed, but I also certainly wasn't making the economic impact I could have. With enough people working minimum wage jobs, part time, or stuck in the gig economy, you are still going to have negative impact on the economy, social unrest, and reliance on government support programs just as if you had unemployment.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
but of course this cannot happen!
I'm still breathing a little after having had someone's shocked ignorance over a commonly known and accepted fact shoved down my throat.
What? Your 16 your old kid in school isn't considered unemployed? What? My Father who took early retirement at 60 wasn't considered unemployed? What?
The house wife who's taking care of her three year old son isn't considered unemployed? Shocking!
This is stupid. Anyone who's read anything about the unemployment knows that the unemployment rate has never been a perfect measure of true unemployment. It's not a "lie", it's an imperfect model. That's well known by economists, and they actively try to correct for it and take it into account. Has the author seriously not read a newspaper article over the last 10 years where they discuss the unemployment rate going down possibly being a bad thing, because it might mean people have given up looking for work?
It isn't. This time is someone broadcasting their ignorance of the difference between unemployment (an economic term) and not working (someone's employment condition).
The correct response is to point and laugh.
It was always a lie, one that was convenient to those in power.
In unrelated news, this month's chocolate ration has increased from fifteen to twelve grams.
Just because accepted definitions are widely used, doesn't mean that they're particularly useful. Personally, I'd love to either see employment redefined or a new term coined that includes people who "work at home to look after their family", but that would be a step towards exposing the huge gaping marriage loophole in tax law, and I think everyone is either terrified of that, or has never really considered it.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
There's a clear word; "unemployment"; which means "people who want work but don't have work". That's not easy to measure, but it's not so difficult. However, the measure, w has been gradually changed so that the number published as the "unemployment rate" no longer tells you how much "unemployment" there is. At least some of the changes were done deliberately in order to mislead. This is called "lying".
An example of this is that long term unemployed people are forced to take training. These people used to be included in the "unemployed" because they were really people that wanted jobs but couldn't get them. Then they were removed without providing both figures for a long time so that we could compare the before and after rate. This is called lying.
>Why is it a lie this time?
because it's probably being used by politicians to be able to boast ? In fact it's probably twisted throughout the years to do this.
Right, the real lie about unemployment figures is that they don't account for underemployment.
Sure, lots of people have jobs, but how many have an 8 hour contract, and are begging the company to let them come in and work minimum wage?
It doesn't matter how you measure unemployment. The data is only going to be used to compare to historical values. If the definition of unemployed were to be changed, the historical data would be useless.
This is the whole accurate versus precise argument. The author argues the number isn't accurate. However, the purpose of this data doesn't require accuracy. It requires precision, a repeatable outcome.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
Because the poster has some weird ideology they're trying to push on us.
Any abstraction is going to hide information, does it really make sense to count someone who took early retirement, or is doing full time childcare as unemployed?
I stole this Sig
Use the "labor force participation rate" metric, not "unemployment". Unemployment is subject to "definitions", which are political by definition.
UK looks to be at 79%. It still doesn't account for people who have been bumped down from full-time to part-time to decrease regulatory costs, but it's the best number you'll get from people whose job it is to lie about how great the numbers are.
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The Labor Participation Rate gives a more realistic picture of how many people are and are not working. This is because it counts those who have not been employed in a long time. You are not counted as "unemployed" anymore in the Unemloyment Rate if you haven't been able to find a job in a long time or you've given up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio
And of course the media, in its infinite wisdom, decides when to question the validity of the employment numbers.
As in most cases you need more than one set of numbers. I think reporting U3 and U6 should be done as a matter of course.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
or even that the politicians don't actively try to help people get a job.
The moment a machine replaced a labor worker on the production line the value of human labor was in decline. Ever since then it's been a political game to make it appear that it's not happening...
Also, with more people trying to participate in the workforce than in the past, TFAs definition probably is quite historically low.
Additionally, everyone knows the definition of unemployment, and laborforce participation (at least if they've retained highschool economics knowledge to any vague amount).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Of course "people who are taking time off" aren't part of the workforce. That's what "taking time off" means.
Absolutely. In the US, there are many metrics that are reported and that help understanding the state of the labor force. Called U-1, U-2, ... U-6 which represent different aspect of the questions.
Saying that the unemployment should be the fraction of the 16-64 year old that do not work is ridiculous.
I did not start working until I was 25. I was a student before. Counting me as unemployed at that time would have been ridiculous.
If I chose to stop working at 60 because I have enough money to retire, why should I count as unemployed?
There are different category of people that do not work which surely needs to be reported. The definition of unemployement used in the US (U-3) is the one quoted, because it is the one that matches better the definition that other country used.
But you need to account differently people not working because they are studying, people that are working but would like a different job, people that are working but not full time, people that stopped looking because they do not believe they can find a job.
There are all important numbers that should all be reported. But in a short piece, you can not give that much context, so you quote a single number "unemployment" which will always be kind of misleading. But calling it a lie is ridiculous.
Life is complicated, a single number can not summarize everything accurately.
If you can't force legally press someone into labor, then there's no point reporting on anyone that is unwilling to or incapable of working.
If you know that 4.5% of Britons want work, but can't find it, then you can act on that information: find them, find open jobs within their skill-sets, and make connections.
If you know that 21.5% of working-age Britons aren't working, you have to do a LOT MORE work to filter out who can/can't work and who won't work.
Retired---that's me.
The point of it is to hide how hard it is for folks to find work and keep any discussion about helping them (which would be expensive) under wraps. It's part of a larger pattern of class warfare against the working class. After all, the best kind of wars are the ones where the other side doesn't know they're fighting.
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Not possible. Everyone in the UK is unemployed because they voted for Brekexit. Liberals told me it would happen. This must be fake news.
lols
It's not a science
Do not forget the infamous “zero-hour conracts”, where the person has, technically, a job, but not actually an income. It looks like there are almost a million of these in Maggie's country.
The bias is that (fake) low unemployment is favorable to the prevailing economic doctrine that is supported by mainstream politics.
Then perhaps you could explain the benefits of including people who have no intention of working in the unemployment rate?
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
Because those assumptions aren't often included when the stats are released to the public. For instance IIRC, our unemployment stats for the U.S. don't include people who are still out of work but have used up all of their unemployment eligibility. So if you have a few million people who are out of work but don't receive unemployment benefits anymore, they aren't reflected in the reports. That certainly presents a rosier picture than reality, especially for those few million people. Politicians can then claim that unemployment has "fallen" when the reality is something very different.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The cake is a lie. This is merely massaging statistics to get useful information. It's not just economists that do this. Everyone does this. Corporate Execs, Advertisers, Publishers. The entire business world is based on numbers that attempt to predict patterns and show what needs more focus and what doesn't. It doesn't constitute a lie.
Sent from my TARDIS
I remember a radio debate back in the 1990's. The lowest you could ever get unemployment was 2.5% of the population, because that was the number of people genuinely in ill health or out of work.
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There are other, perhaps honestly, deceiving nuances to unemployment statistics that people (myself included) don't like. I think the terminology should be changed To something a bit different.
Most people have a solid definition of what "employed" means. When the term "unemployeed" is used, it's thought by many to be the entire of people who do not fit the definition of "employed"--which they already understand.
Reality is, "employed" + "unemployed" != "total population." I'm not saying it should for analysis purposes. There are plenty of cases that shouldn't be considered in either statistic (e.g., children under 16) but there are other cases where the statistic may hide a lot of useful real world information (e.g., those who stopped looking for employment).
At least in the US, the BLS separates full-time employed with benefits compared to part time or contracting work.
They also recently had a massive influx of immigrants over the past few years. How many of them are not working, and just collecting welfare benefits from the people that ARE working?
Just because 20% of people don't work doesn't mean they are unemployed. Lots of old people in the US who have paid off homes and money coming in and don't have to work. My mom hasn't worked since her mid-50's. My mother in law retired and FIL can retire if he wants to and have lots of income coming in.
With the younger crowd there are lots of people now who are 3rd or 4th generation Americans and they have trust funds and other money passed on from the older generations they can live on.
I'm 43 and I can semi-retire if I wanted to, but need to get my kids learned first.
Easy to retire early. You have to live on the coasts or some high price area. Buy property early in life and don't move around for jobs renting everywhere. The high cost areas will generally see higher RE value growth so once your kids graduate you sell and move to a low cost and low tax area and buy a house with cash you have from selling your previous house in a high cost area. It's kind of like arbitrage.
Where my mom lives they get lots of California refugees who make bank on their homes in California and buy for less money when they move. In NJ there is a town called Demarest where property taxes can run you $25,000 a year but the schools are some of the best in the USA and the home values go up. Lots of people list their homes for sale right before HS graduation and move to the Carolinas or anywhere else with a huge bag of money they earned for living in Demarest and similar parts of the NYC burbs.
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
It's a lie because the original definition communicated to voters an indication of how the economy was doing, while the current definition leans on that previous definition to give the appearance of a healthy economy when in fact it's terrible.
It's a lie because there has been enormous political pressure to skew the definition towards "statistical assumptions" in a way that suppresses voter outrage and dissent.
It's a lie because the value has morphed from a valid "quick snapshot" of the health of the economy, to a propaganda tool of the government for partisan purposes.
A much better indicator is had by random sampling, such as the Gallup poll, which tracks both employment and "underemployment". Here, underemployment is "people employed under 30 hours a week, but want to work more"(*).
(Also: Gallup good jobs index, which indirectly tells how satisfied workers are with their jobs.)
The Gallup poll notes that the results(*) can't be directly compared because federal statistics are "seasonally" adjusted. Seasonally adjusted? Why should unemployment numbers be adjusted *at all*?
(*) The article is about the UK, not US, but the principles are the same.
It really is a misconception rather than a lie. It's not really possible to have a formula to calculate unemployment without some faults. Still, a low unemployment rate implies the economy is probably doing pretty well.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
It's a lie now because the other guys are in office.
It's not a lie. The government measures unemployment in many different ways, and economists are all familiar with the disadvantages of each method. Anyone who has taken a basic economics course knows the different methods. Anyone who has read the Wikipedia page knows the different methods (note to ignoramuses: please be familiar with the information on that page before commenting).
(Personally though, I have trouble feeling sorry for people who can't even bother to look for a job once a month.)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the USA it's done all the time. We have different reports on unemployment. One of these reports generally given out the mass media includes rosier numbers. The US Census has a methodology for counting homeless, but the reports we see talked about do not including the following as unemployed:
1. Homeless 2. Those who have given up looking (often out of frustration) 3. Underemployed. So numbers can be misleading depending on whose you read. I'm seeing as I type this a post spelling out the U1-6 metris which give a clearer picture. We all have to be careful and question what we read. Often key information is omitted so you don't know what you are in fact reading. As my old math teacher used to tell his statistics class: "Statistics can lie".
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
We hear about "the Dow" as being some majestic heartbeat of the health of the stock market. It's not really that accurate and/or useful, and better metrics exist. It has history, so people latch on to it as some sort of magic number or indicator. In reality, not that great. But still reported on because it's easy and familiar. Unemployment is actually a complex and multivariate metric, too. It can be sliced and diced by region, ethnicity, age, martial status, gender, job seeking status (as well as combinations of such metrics). This is the kind of thing economists and data nerds get into but when people are listening to the news about all the news will report is the top line number, since reporting the complexity will make for a long report most people don't care about. But the metric has been gathered the same way for years, so it's not a "lie" per se -- it's just people don't generally care about the minutae of the underlying data. It would be worse if the metric were redefined on the whims of politics or popular opinion, then it would really be a lie, or just useless. Including retirees or people who aren't actively looking for a job -- students, children, stay at home parents and retirees -- can be very reasonable assumptions since all those people are doing something else that prevents them from entering the workforce, or they have left the workforce entirely with no plans to return.
Governments should be caring a lot about the minutae of these metric, though, for many reasons. Having high unemployment for young people (especially young men) can have severe consequences for tax revenues, security/unrest/happiness, ability to pay for entitlement programs. Also, young people may leave if they can find work elsewhere, and not come back to help your economy. As retirees live longer they take more financial resources for longer than previous statistical models used for long term budgeting allowed, leading to funding issues for healthcare and drugs.
Of course, you also have politicians who take good numbers as a sign of their brilliance, and bemoan bad numbers as "a result of the poor statistical design of metrics" or "not representing reality", etc. Success has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.
Unemployment as measured today seems like it goes back to a simpler time for the labor force. I know we have U1 through U6, but I think in previous times U1 and U2 modeled the real world better than the higher numbers. Back around the 60s and 70s, the US (and the UK) had a lot more traditional labor cycle. Many more people were employed in the trades or in factories, and the business cycle determined when people were laid off because factories were producing fewer goods, running fewer shifts, etc. If you had a job on an assembly line building a certain component, and the company killed the product line or needed fewer, you were laid off. However, back then you could go down to your local unemployment office and have a much easier time finding a job at a plant across town. Or, you could actually wait until the company called you back once production picked back up.
Today, layoffs are permanent for white collar workers and there are fewer cyclical factory jobs. It represents a permanent shift in the labor force -- you just need fewer humans to do every job these days. Way back in the day I worked an IT helpdesk job for a large life insurer -- they had a 25-floor office that spanned two Manhattan city blocks, plus a 40-story tower that took up 1/4 of a block, plus large offices all over the country. According to the old timers, there were thousands and thousands of file clerks, accountants and clerical staff working in that building as late as 1985 or so, before the first wave of big-company downsizing happened...so many that logistics of getting everyone in and out of the building were more difficult than normal.
Maybe we should redefine what full employment is -- I'm a big proponent of making sure everyone has a way to earn a living, but I think the reality is that the unemployment numbers are going to have to get a lot worse before anybody is going to do anything about it. Maybe publishing some of the scarier numbers is the way to do it, while explaining that this is what's modeling reality these days. I'd prefer finding work for everyone to having more older workers have to fake their way into getting Social Security disability payments because no one is hiring them.
Why is it a lie this time?
Because if your country has a high percentage of the populace who "have given up looking for work", it doesn't really matter what the official unemployment statistic says. The only number that really matters is the number of people who would work if they could find a job. And the official unemployment stat has fuck-all to do with that number.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Because the poster has some weird ideology they're trying to push on us.
This has something to do with Bitcoin, doesn't it?
#DeleteChrome
You may recall correctly, but you never bothered to verify if this politically biased item was true: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.faq.htm See #6
"6. Is the count of unemployed persons limited to just those people receiving unemployment
insurance benefits?
No; the estimate of unemployment is based on a monthly sample survey of households.
All persons who are without jobs and are actively seeking and available to work are
included among the unemployed. (People on temporary layoff are included even if
they do not actively seek work.) There is no requirement or question relating to
unemployment insurance benefits in the monthly survey."
I finally found a good link for the different measures of unemployment. The submitted story is about the UK, the link below is American, but the principles are the same:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers
That's how it is in whole EU, basically the fake economic recovery from the debt crisis is in part based on this scheme.
Sure, but the U-3 still gets reported instead of the U-6. Of course the UK has finer data too, but that isn't the point.
There's bias here and it's coming from the poster of this hatchet piece. The lie is that unemployment is rampant and the world is going to hell.
It's the line far-right and far-left populists want to push because it's what validates their facist or socialist agendas (respectively)
They want the same thing. Closed borders. The end to free trade. The end to freedom. Institutional racism under the guise of national security and job protection. (Oh you think socialists aren't racist? Look at every actual socialist country ever and you'll social and governmental institutional racism in spades.)
In what way is this propaganda pieces "news"?
In what way does it matter to a tech geek?
Why is there so little reporting on the progress of the X5000/40?
At least some of the changes were done deliberately in order to mislead
Citation needed. Thx.
As long as the definition does not change that often, or when it changes we know what the effect on the number are, the number in itself is in absolute value useless. What is important is for the same stable definition, whether that numbers rise or drop indicating a fuller or less employment. Frankly 4.6 or 4.5 or 4.7 is about as useless in absolute number than 79, 79.1 or 78.9 to take your measure. BUT knowing that under one political team goal it went from 4 to 8 (or 79 to 75) or the other way around, is a good proxy. Frankly all of you telling it is a lie, misses the point of that proxy measurement, it is a proxy on how the workforce is doing related to the economy. It has never been about the absolute numbers. Otherwise we would still be talking in million of people instead of percent of workforce.
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Because the author disagrees with this particular assumption, and "lie" sounds so much sexier than "assumption I don't agree with".
Any abstraction is going to hide information, does it really make sense to count someone who took early retirement, or is doing full time childcare as unemployed?
Yes, because they are unemployed. The common definition of "unemployed" is "not employed". The first online dictionary entry that google returned says "person without a paid job but available to work." Neither one includes any mention of "retired" or "wants to work".
The "weird ideology" here is called "the English language".
Now, the politicians in power want to make the unemployment numbers look lower than "unemployed" would, so they include "seeking work" as part of the measurement. Every administration in the US that has wanted to make themselves look proactive towards job creation has relied on the modified definition.
However, the answer to "does it make sense" when applied to a number that is being used to measure the employment economy is actually "no", because it is silly to count housespouses, retired, or those who are no longer seeking employment as "unemployed" for the sake of how much money to invest in creating new jobs.
It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly. There is a better word: "underemployed". People who are employed less than they want to be. That would naturally include part time workers who want to work full time, and any government action to try to increase the number of jobs should include consideration of those folks, too.
Given the way the term "unemployed" is deliberately misused, it is not a "ideology" to point that fact out occasionally. It is a valid reminder of what the government is actually telling us, and not telling us.
IIRC, our unemployment stats for the U.S. don't include people who are still out of work but have used up all of their unemployment eligibility.
No. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
U-3 is what is most widely reported. It's "people.. without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks".
You may be thinking of U-4 or U-4; these numbers are available, but they are not as widely reported usually as U-3, which everyone understands (or should, if they care at all) to be what you mean when you just say "unemployment". It helps by allowing you to compare apples to apples rather than allowing people to pick what numbers best suits them.
So, if you measure U-3 at one point in time, and then again a year later, you can accurately say that unemployment has risen or fallen based on that. If you were hoping that that would capture all the nuances of the labor market, however, you were perhaps hoping for too much.
Which measure counts people who don't want to work, but do have jobs?
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
How would you know ?
That's how in the us our unemployment number is so low but you walk around some public subsidies areas and all you see is working age men hanging on corners .
In the US, there are many metrics that are reported and that help understanding the state of the labor force. Called U-1, U-2, ... U-6 which represent different aspect of the questions.
To pad this out - from Wikipedia:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also calculates six alternate measures of unemployment, U1 through U6, that measure different aspects of unemployment:
U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
U3: Official unemployment rate per the ILO definition occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.
U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
U6: U5 + Part-time workers who want to work full-time, but cannot due to economic reasons (underemployment).
#DeleteChrome
If I chose to stop working at 60 because I have enough money to retire, why should I count as unemployed?
Because you aren't employed.
But you need to account differently people not working because they are studying, people that are working but would like a different job, people that are working but not full time, people that stopped looking because they do not believe they can find a job.
Why? If you need something finer grained, you could say 80% employed, 12% unemployed but in education or financially-self sufficient, 5% unemployed but looking for work, 3% unemployed and not looking. No need to call people employed when they aren't. That just confuses the issue of the amount of useful work being produced.
The rest of his post makes perfect sense without the personal example.
There is a reason you do not have the +1 karma modifier. You dismissed his post without addressing any substantive issues, including his thesis: "But calling it a lie is ridiculous. Life is complicated, a single number can not summarize everything accurately."
That US unemployment numbers are any more accurate?
But why should someone who is taking a sabbatical or has quit the workforce to care for their familybe considered unemployed then? They are clearly not looking for work.
The figures also don't include all the people on Zero hour contracts and those scrambling for work with agencies, or on ridiculously low hour contracts.
There are many people who technically employed but are still heavily reliant on the benefits system to survive.
He won't give you one, because that never happened. It's a common line given when an administration someone disagrees with puts forth policies that cause unemployment to plummet.
In the end, unemployment metrics have been the same metric. To change them would render all comparative analysis worthless, and destroy the entire point of them.
It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly.
It's even more absurd to call someone retired or taking a sabbatcal as unemployed. Many 16 year olds are also not employed but no one rational would they should be part of unemployment figures.
The government does not create jobs. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself.
not only is it a widely known standard for measuring unemployment, it would be every bit (and probably a more problematic lie) the other way. The number of working age people that actively remove them self from the economist-defined definition of the labor force far exceeds the problematic group of 'discouraged workers' Early retirees, students, stay at home parents and the disabled would all count as "unemployed" when they are clearly not seeking employment (at that moment, students tend to eventually join the work force), and make the number all together meaningless.
Beyond all that though, BOTH numbers are published - it's not like we only have the one stat to go off. In the US, the BLS publishes a huge amount of data, including basically every facet of unemployment (unemployed, labor force size, % of the population of of the labor force, etc); we just generally have agreed that the unemployment rate (as calculated) is a convenient proxy for measuring the overall health of employment numbers. It is slightly under-representative of the true number, but anyone that uses it explicitly knows that - that's like the first thing taught about unemployment numbers.
42
Why do they have no intention of working?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And those are not the people that are being discussed. Neither are schoolchildren, college students, retirees, and those crippled beyond any chance of employment.
No one is saying to count those groups in the unemployment numbers.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
It is a lie because these numbers are used to support a false narrative that the economy is getting better under current management. This is the same statistical trick used in the U.S. over the preceding years in order to convince the public that we have recovered from the recession of the housing bubble.
It is also a lie because the UK has been using similar tricks to pad their crime figures, for instance, in order to support the idea that increasing surveillance and complete emasculation of the population lead to less crime.
It is a lie because these figures are published in the media, and used by the government to create a false impression for the population. It's the intent TO LIE that makes it A LIE.
Because they can live comfortably on the dole, so why should they be bothered to go earn a living -- especially since they're too useless to earn much more than the dole would pay them anyway.
From that list, I would say the U4 is the most correct number if you want to actually enumerate "the unemployed".
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
It's even more absurd to call someone retired or taking a sabbatcal as unemployed.
Someone who is retired does not have a paying job and is available to work. That meets the definition of unemployed, and it is not absurd to call him that.
Someone on a sabbatical is currently employed, so I agree that counting him as unemployed is absurd.
Many 16 year olds are also not employed but no one rational would they should be part of unemployment figures.
Yes, many 16 year-olds are unemployed, as you say -- "not employed" -- but many of them are also not available for employment. That leaves them out of the second, book definition of unemployed. Whether they should be counted in the government employment numbers depends on whether they are available to be employed, but they should be counted if they are available to work.
Retirement, maternity, great American novel, lotto winner, plain old wealthy.
No, his argument is spot on. Other people in this thread are saying things like, "The common definition of 'unemployed' is 'not employed'.... The 'weird ideology' here is called "the English language'." That pretty closely matches the spirit of the original article [summary], which said that unemployment statistics should include everyone who is not currently in a job, including "people who are taking time off ... or work at home to look after their family."
The grandparent provided an enlightened discussion of why the current approach to unemployment statistics makes more sense than the original article, and pointed out that there are many useful ways to count unemployment. In that context, your response made no sense at all. You seem to be saying, "the current system would count you correctly, so you shouldn't defend the current system."
The reason this is such a sinister lie is because you can call someone "detached" from the workforce all you want, but you still have to keep them alive. That means they still consume resources from the economy while they are not producing anything of value to exchange for it.
At least some of the changes were done deliberately in order to mislead. This is called "lying".
Where is the evidence of that? The article itself lacks any evidence of deliberately misleading information. However, the authoer of the article itself is very misleading when s/he claims that the "true" figure is 21.5% which they apparently obtain using all people of working age. This does not exclude stay-at-home parents, students and those too disabled or sick to work and so is clearly going to be a wild overestimate.
While it might be true that the current statistics are not giving a true picture but if you want to claim that this is due to lying i.e. a deliberate attempt to mislead, you need to explain why. Governments may be untrustworthy but so are the media so I'm certainly not going to take the word of some random website without a solid, evidence-backed argument.
Because the truth is manifestly obvious ... and different ! Thus the faux-pro assumptions are unreasonable.
Because it isn't the truth.
...most people create no value in their shitty jobs.
If that's so, why do you suppose someone is paying them?
I'm not sure what you include in the shitty job category. Cleaning bathrooms, perhaps? Yup, shitty job, literally. But I sure value having clean bathrooms here in my office.
Those certainly are some groups of people who should not be counted in the "unemployment rate". But there are more than those unemployed people who don't want to work.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
For decades, economists have agreed on an artificial definition of what unemployment means.
So you're upset they're using their artificial definition, and have been for decades, instead of using your artificial definition?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The first online dictionary entry that google returned says "person without a paid job but available to work."
Neither one includes any mention of "retired" or "wants to work".
I would count both of those as "not available". Most employers would, too, doubly so.
The only people who wouldn't are probably trying to sell you gold.
Someone had to do it.
If you chose to stop working at 60 because no decent or decently paid work is available, does that count as unemployed? It is not a hard decision, nd that makes it liable to be manipulated.
You are confusing "unemployed" with "non-employed"
It is always hard to admit you have been using a word wrong your entire life, but it is generally more fruitful to do so than to go about trying to change the meaning of that word. It happens to most of us.
Because the "un" in "unemployed" can be connoted by some to imply job loss, the word has often been considered derogatory, and so has not been used to refer to non-employed individuals in general. Especially homemakers, unless you want your toast burned and bits of shell in your eggs.
Someone had to do it.
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
Calling it the "functional unemployment rate" or "unemployment rate for practical purposes" or "your government ministers hard at work for you unemployment rate" would give a hint that it's swizzled. Just "unemployment rate" implies to the casual reader that it's just a case of total population divided by total people who are unemployed.
...most people create no value in their shitty jobs.
If that's so, why do you suppose someone is paying them?
I'm not sure what you include in the shitty job category
Ministry of Shitty Statistics employees?
Didn't read the article I take it? I know, this is slashdot.
If you don't get benefit, you don't count as "unemployed". All you need is more than 16k in savings and you get bugger all and don't count as unemployed. And the dole now get to say whether you're trying to get a job or not. So if you aren't looking each day (why? The job offers last beyond 6pm closing time) or if you haven't found one in three months, they'll try to kick you off or give you a part time "job" that still requires practically the same government handout in working tax credits and other benefits,but gets you off the figures of the unemployed without saving a single frigging penny.
It's not that the EU kept the unemployment high or that Brexit is causing people to get more jobs, but that the job market is so shit and has been for so long that there are millions of people who get as much or more cash from the social security pot working than they would have gotten sitting on the dole. But they don't count.
And as a form of corporate welfare (the company gets a tax break), this is encouraged both for corporate handouts AND as a convenient lie about unemployment.
I have no idea, but I suspect mostly because people are told they are worthless without work. Their companies produce no real value either but they feel they have to do something. A lot of money simply moves around the business community. Lawyers create contracts for web designers who create websites for business consultants who consult for accountants who do the books for business coaches who hire personal trainers who use dog walkers who buy insurance from insurance brokers who hire lawyers....
If all those people and their employees came into wealth and gave up work the world would not collapse.
"People who are taking time off..., or work at home to look after their family"
Is there a reason why those people (and similar situations) should be on the main "unemployment" statistics? Sure there should be a separate estimate for total unemployed somewhere attached to the same study that results in the "commonly accepted unemployment" rate but when most people think of "unemployment" they are concerned with people actually looking for work not anyone who could possibly work. Where possible there should also be a statistic kept for people who are employed in a low end job short term to help make ends meet but are looking for long term employment (called "underemployment" I believe).
Because those positive factors that lead to people not wanting to work are pretty invariable, while the negative ones respond pretty strongly to policy.
In the developed world, many people now have enough to get by without working or with working far less. This is challenging the fundamentals of capitalism.
Because more people are able to drop out, cut back, and "survive", the current means of calculating unemployment is producing a number that no longer reflects all of those who would like to work. It disguises the fact that if higher quality and higher paying jobs were available, more would work.
This is hiding a very real problem. Essentially, the developed world is in the midst of a massive undeclared strike. Many of us in that gap between the 60% employed and 4.5% unemployed would love to work, but the pay being offered for our time has dropped so much that it is simply no longer worth it to justify leaving our family eight hours a day. In going on strike, we've been a huge drag on the GDP, because we've chosen to consume far less than we could in order to make it with little or no job.
Changing the way the number is reported would highlight the missing potential for growth and benefit all. More people working higher paying jobs produce more spending and higher paying jobs. We've been spiraling down invisibly with the current definition. We need to change it and try spiraling up.
The definition should be geared to show the percentage who would choose to provide more value to the economy in different work from what they are currently doing or not doing if that work were available.
This. It only becomes a lie if you change the definition to suit your narrative. If the the definition stays consistent then it isn't a lie.
Plus I have no problem with the economist's definitions given that unemployment is a "bad metric", whereas someone not actively looking for work (rich, stay at home parent, taking time off etc) is not necessarily a "bad thing". The goal of an unemployment figure is to create a metric to drive it down as far as practical. If you include people who have no intention of looking for work, what is the point?
What's a Bitcoin? Is that like a new version of that Ethereum thing I keep hearing about?
The "% of people actively looking for work" definition of employment is entirely valid for it's intended audience.
The people that track unemployment don't give a crap about newspaper articles or politicians.
Instead they are trying to tell people how hard much competition there is to find a job. The employers need to know if they are going to get 1,000 applications, or just 1. So do the job seekers.
Just as Mode and Median are perfectly valid types of "Averages", so is the "% looking" valid for unemployment.
Stop misunderstanding what people are saying and then blaming them for your own stupidity.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I have a job, but I don't want to work. So it all evens out if you accidently count a few unemployed that are happy with their situation.
I've bolded the important part. TFA makes no such claim, and in fact states that the same measure has been used for decades. If you have evidence that the definition of unemployment was changed to make the economy look better than it actually was, please present it. The argument TFA presents is that the economy has changed so that the definition no longer paints as clear a picture of the economy as it did in the past.
From a statistical perspective, as long as the definition and method of measurement remains consistent over time, it is useful data. It is even more useful when paired and analyzed together with slightly different measures like the inactivity rate as TFA does. But it's not a lie. It is data. Not everything in life has a clear-cut and straightforward definition. So you come up with a definition that is clear-cut and straightforward (and usually selected because it's easier to measure), and you use it to collect data. If you don't like the definition, you can come up with a different definition and collect data on it. But calling the data set you dislike a lie is nothing but an ad hominem attack.
I also find the title of TFA (and summary) highly suspect. The title claims the unemployment figures are very close to exposing the purported lie in the definition of "unemployment". But for that to actually happen, the unemployment rate would have to go negative.. That is, everyone who is looking for a job gets one. And a few people who don't want a job have one (how, I dunno - slavery?).
I'm all for educating people that the definition of "unemployment" is not as clear-cut as they might assume at first glance. But calling it an outright lie is nothing but grandstanding.
Exactly this. Due to better economic conditions and certain tax incentives, adults in the US can choose not to work.
The girl that decided she would rather be a hausfrau than a COBOL programmer is not "unemployed".
Some people also luck out and can retire early. You also have people that can't work. It's misleading to lump people on disability with the unemployed.
Dunno how this translates to the UK.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why would anyone consider you unemployed? There are a lot of people not looking for work like: retirees, students, stay at home moms, caretakers.
It's arguable really, IMO.
Personally, I think calling the U3 figure "unemployment" is total bullshit. If someone wants to work, and can't find work, and hasn't been able to for a while, they are still unemployed. You don't need a degree in economics to understand this. So U4-U6 are all much better figures IMO because they include these groups of people.
I'm a little unclear as to the difference between U4 and U5. Maybe it's from 93 Escort Wagon's summarization. Also, what about people who are actively looking, and haven't stopped looking, but it's been more than 4 weeks? Surely those should be included in U4. Again, it could be the summarization.
The main point of argument which is valid IMO is between U4/5 and U6: should we count underemployed people too? Personally, I think the two should be kept separate measures and reported separately (i.e., "unemployed" and "unemployed + underemployed") so that people using these figures can know them both and make proper use of them. I honestly don't see the value in U3 at all, except maybe a way to see if things are getting bad because too many people have moved into U4/5, meaning there's a real lack of available jobs for them, rather than just regular churn that you get in a healthy economy. In that case, maybe it's useful to know U3, but I completely object to calling this the "unemployment rate"; that term should be used for U4 or U5. (Again, I don't understand the difference.)
Is it just that the unemployment rate quoted doesn't match up with the actual number of people that are actually looking for work?
Because I thought that was common knowledge.
Off by about a factor of four... sounds about right to me.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Since there will always be some people between jobs, unemployment has a floor. Some people think it is between 2.5 and 3.5 percent.
Don't be stupid. "Unemployed" is an English word, which means the official definition comes from popular usage, not economists or any other academic authorities. If most people understand it to mean "people who aren't working", that's exactly what it means, and you're an idiot to tell them otherwise.
If you want a language where terms are defined by authorities, use French.
And WTF is with the bit about burned toast? You think you need someone staying at home all day to figure out how to use a toaster properly?
Of course not. But, please, quote the paragraph that says we (or the UK, in this case) should count retirees, students, and housewives in the "official unemployment rate".
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
To me, it looks like the U5 group includes the guys that do handyman type jobs. They aren't officially employed, but they do have money coming in. (And specifically, it isn't illegal revenue such as from drugs or prostitution.) This group could include those that don't need much money per month, and basically work for their daily food, and are happy doing so. Possibly also farm hands, which are usually not included in the regular employment categories for various reasons.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I am retired. I am unavailable for work. You can't even make me go to work.
You probably shouldn't count me. I haven't even put pants on - for two days.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Ok, I just read it. Nowhere does it say to actually count retirees, students, and housewives in the unemployment rate.
It does say this:
Some of those people — parents with newborns, university students — may not want jobs right now, but they will want jobs soon. Even when you take those out of the equation, the true rate of people without jobs who want them looks like this, [chart of unemployment, 1995 - today]
It says students and new parents shouldn't count now, but may want jobs soon. That is when you would count them, when they are in the market for a job.
It doesn't say a thing about counting retirees, permanent house-wives, and the fully disabled as unemployed.
Thanks for helping me prove my earlier point.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I would count both of those as "not available". Most employers would, too, doubly so.
Many retired people take part time, or even full time, jobs, so calling them "not available" is ridiculous. Not wanting to work does not make one "unavailable", only unwilling. The important question is not what employers would call them, however, it is whether their existence should be considered when talking about "doing something" to increase the number of jobs.
The only people who wouldn't are probably trying to sell you gold.
Or who speak English.
I don't think it's a lie at all, but headline unemployment can be misleading, especially in a period of protracted economic weakness (where many people are pushed out of the workforce and no longer counted in unemployment numbers).
The issue is that if you want to understand what's going on with the economy, you can't look at any one single number. The right thing to do is to look at a variety of numbers. With unemployment, for example, if it gets too low then the result should be rising wages, because employers are no longer to find willing workers. So if you see unemployment creeping down, but wages not rising, then that means that the unemployment number is hiding the real weakness in the job numbers.
Actually that is EXACTLY what the article is making the case for. It uses the number of 21.5% which lumps in all groups in the 16-64 age group regardless of the reason they don't have a job. If 4.5% is a lie then so is 21.5%
When it talks about 21.5% it is using ALL people in the age range 16-64. "In reality, about 21.5% of all working-age people (defined as ages 16 to 64) are without jobs". The article is an even bigger lie, it least the official rate tries to exclude people that aren't looking for jobs or are completely unable to work, yes you could argue other groups need to be included but good luck working out how to accurately measure those without creating an even more misleading number.
I am retired. I am unavailable for work. You can't even make me go to work.
You don't want to work. That's not the same as unavailable. A student going to school full time is unavailable to work even if he wanted to. A housespouse is not available to work even if he wants to. Their schedules will not permit it reasonably (even if they could squeeze in a job of some kind.) A retired person is available but unwilling. Or they can be willing and prove that retired people are available by being available and getting part or full time jobs.
You probably shouldn't count me.
You are unemployed, why shouldn't you be counted as "unemployed"? I certainly wouldn't count you in any figure used to make decisions about the employment economy, however. That just proves the original point: the term "unemployed" is dishonest when used for those purposes. We all know it, because the half that supports using the word "unemployed" when it makes the current leadership look good becomes the same half that points out that it is a lie when the other side's leadership is in charge and tries using the numbers to their advantage. Everyone knows, it's just that half ignore the details when it is convenient.
I haven't even put pants on - for two days.
There are jobs that don't require the worker to put on pants, so your unwillingness to put them on does not make you unavailable.
Because the "un" in "unemployed" can be connoted by some to imply job loss,
"Un" as a prefix has no such connotation. "Unbuttered toast" does not mean toast that once had butter on it and now does not. "Unleaded gas" similarly. "Unwed mother" does not mean a woman who has a child and was once married. (In fact, it usually refers specifically to someone who has never been married, where "single mother" is more often used to refer to both.) "Un" means "not" and does not imply "was before". Unless you can explain how "unsweetened tea" is produced by putting sweetener into a glass of tea and then somehow removing it.
You are perhaps thinking of "de", as in "decaffeinated coffee" or "deionized water."
the word has often been considered derogatory,
The word is considered derogatory by some not because of "job loss", but of the assumption of "lazy ass doesn't want to work. Anyone can find a job if they just want one enough." That has nothing to do with losing a job, just not having one now.
Especially homemakers,
Homemakers are unemployed, unless they are paid to do the work. Employment means "paid", so "unemployed" would include unpaid work. If your spouse objects to that term, remind it that it is doing the most important work because its pay is in seeing a job well done.
You are confusing "unemployed" with "non-employed"
No, the OP was exactly correct. If you are not employed then you are unemployed. A minor variant of that includes "and are available to work". A retired person does not have a paying job and is available, therefore a retiree is unemployed.
That pretty closely matches the spirit of the original article [summary], which said that unemployment statistics should include everyone who is not currently in a job, including "people who are taking time off ... or work at home to look after their family."
Since you quoted me I feel compelled to respond. I said no such thing. I said that the word "unemployed" when used in government employment reports is dishonest. I did not say that the government should be counting all unemployed people in their economic statistics for employment. I suggested the world "underemployed" because that most closely matches the purpose for the statistic -- determining if there is a problem that needs to be addressed in the current employment economy.
There are U1-U6 numbers, and they account for all of the types of people that do and do not look for work, respectively.
Newspapers/etc. use U3 IIRC.
Newspapers/etc. COULD use any of the numbers if they wanted to. But they don't.
There is no lie here. The only lie is people telling you these numbers aren't part of the record, because they are, and you just don't look at them in the BLS' data, which is publicly and freely available online.
Someone who is retired does not have a paying job and is available to work. That meets the definition of unemployed, and it is not absurd to call him that.
It absolutely is absurd. There is no point in counting people who are not looking for work, because they're not competing for the jobs that those who _are_ looking for work are after.
You can't use a dictionary to get your definition for a statistic. Dictionaries are contextless. You need to understand the problem domain to understand the definition.
"person without a paid job but available to work."
Someone who is retired, homemaking, disabled, or does not want to work is not "available to work." The statistical definition seems to match quite closely with the first dictionary definition you posted, except perhaps for people who have given up looking for work. It's likely quite difficult to identify people in that last class.
Unemployment Statistics have several Numbers. They mean different things.
You Look at the wrong one and declare it a lie.
There is the Total not employed. Including the Ones that do not want to work.
The Total Looking for Jobs. (the commonly quoted one)
The Total that would look for a Job, But think it is a waste of time. ( the Lie you speak of)
Your Magic number will never happen until the The Total value is pulled down to those that will not work at any price.
No, I'm unavailable. You can call and leave a message, if you want. I'm going fishing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I did not say that the government should be counting all unemployed people in their economic statistics for employment. I suggested the world "underemployed" because that most closely matches the purpose for the statistic
Sorry, I should have read more closely beyond the first couple of lines of your comment. I would note that the thread of your argument is a little unclear. You start by saying the dictionary definitions of unemployment don't exclude people who are retired or don't want to work. (I would argue that people are not "available" for unemployment if they don't want/need paid work, but I don't think we'll get anywhere in that discussion.) You then argue that it's not helpful to count people who are no longer seeking work (I would narrow that to people who no longer want work), when deciding how hard to push for job creation. OK, fine so far, and that's the part I should have caught the first time.
But then you say, "It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly." In this sentence, as far as I can tell, "them" must refer to the subject of the post and the previous sentence: "housespouses, retired, or those who are no longer seeking employment". But then you go on to act as if these people are "'underemployed'. People who are employed less than they want to be." I would say that is really a separate issue.
Anyway, I think I'm getting too deep into semantics. I think we would probably agree that everyone who wants work but doesn't have it or doesn't have as much as they want, should be counted in the national statistics. I think we would disagree about whether the people who don't want work should be called "unemployed" (I say no). And I think we would agree that it would be helpful to report and act on the "underemployed" statistic. All of those are included in the U-5 statistic that Godrik mentioned - thus my support for his post.
The girl that decided she would rather be a hausfrau than a COBOL programmer is not "unemployed".
Yes, actually, she is unemployed. She should not be counted as underemployed for purposes of economic planning, however.
Some people also luck out and can retire early.
Also unemployed. Also not counted for economic planning...
You also have people that can't work.
Using the "and are available to work" definition, no, they are not unemployed. Using the shorter definition, yes, they are. And that might be a bit clearer if you use the term "unemployable" for people who cannot be employed. If you are "unemployable", then it is much clearer that you are, indeed, unemployed.
It's misleading to lump people on disability with the unemployed.
Only if you are trying to mislead people by using the term "unemployed" when you mean underemployed.
Dunno how this translates to the UK.
I think they have retirees, house spouses, and disabled people. I think they have people who train to be COBOL programmers, but I don't know. And they do speak an interesting variant of English, so they do have the word "unemployed."
Question: If you're not employed, and not looking for employment, how are you "part of the workforce"?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The big question is what you want to measure. The unemployment rate (as conventionally defined) is trying to measure what fraction of people who want jobs can't find them. The author of the cited article is correct that the official unemployment rate is leaving out some people who probably ought to be counted, like people who have given up looking for work. This can be really important, because bad data may cause economists to recommend bad policy. In the USA during the 1990s, for instance, sustained low official unemployment wound up encouraging "hard core" unemployed people who were left out of the official statistics to start looking for work. That meant low unemployment didn't cause inflation to take off the way economists predicted. A different measure of unemployment that made fewer assumptions about who was employable might have prevented them from making that mistake.
That said, there are problems with the author's proposal of including everyone between 16 and 64 as the pool of potential workers. The economy has changed over time in ways that systematically change who is likely to look for work. Higher education is far more important than it used to be, so that college age people probably shouldn't be looking for full-time work, and 16 to 18 year olds certainly shouldn't be. At the same time, though, there are fewer stay-at-home parents, which increases the expected size of the workforce. That means using the entire 16-64 year old population as the potential workforce will make comparisons to historical data much less useful, which also undermines the value of the data for policy decisions.
Probably the best solution is to give up on the idea of capturing the state of employment in a single number. The US government, for instance, calculates no fewer than 6 versions of the unemployment rate and a "labor participation rate" that is closer to the kind of calculation the original author wants. One of those rates is the official unemployment rate, but it can be compared against other rates to see if they're changing in sync. A common comparison is between U3 (the official rate) and U6 (which counts part time workers who would like to work full time as unemployed and includes people who have given up looking for work as part of the potential workforce). U3 is what has traditionally been used to measure unemployment, but U6 probably gives a better idea of how much real slack there is in the labor force.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, I'm unavailable. You can call and leave a message, if you want. I'm going fishing.
If you have time to go fishing, you have time to work. You don't want to work, which is not the same as "unavailable to work". I don't always want to work, either, even though I have a job, so I understand both how you feel and the difference between what you think your situation is and the truth.
Suppose you get back from fishing tomorrow and find out that someone has stolen every penny you had in the bank and your retirement account. Are you "unavailable to work" to make enough money to live on? Or someone left you a phone message offering you a ridiculous amount of money to come work for them half-time. Are you still "unavailable"? (You can assume for the sake of argument that "ridiculous" is defined as "an amount of money that you would not turn down".)
Saying a student is unavailable or a housespouse is unavailable is no different than saying a retired person is unavailable. Plenty of students and housespouses could work if it was absolutely required of them. Same thing with retired people. We just don't generally expect any of these people to do so and they will put up one hell of a fight (as KGIII shows) to retain their "right to not work".
Quite frankly, I know a number of students and housespouses who SHOULD be working, their families are getting into trouble carrying their lazy butts and there is going to be a huge bill before they officially join the workforce.
From reading the description, the difference between "discouraged" and "marginally attached" workers is pretty thin. "Discouraged" workers are ones who say specifically that they don't think they can find work as a reason for not looking, while "other marginally attacked" workers are other people who would like work but aren't looking for some other reason. I guess that might include seasonal workers during the off-season; they could look for a different job but have decided not to bother. It looks to me as if the difference between U4 and U5 is pretty small in practice, and U5 is not massively higher than U3. The big gap right now is between U5 and U6, and that's a gap that varies a lot over the course of a business cycle.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You start by saying the dictionary definitions of unemployment don't exclude people who are retired or don't want to work. (I would argue that people are not "available" for unemployment if they don't want/need paid work, but I don't think we'll get anywhere in that discussion.)
They are available but unwilling. They can find all sorts of ways to make themselves "unavailable" for specific jobs, but overall they are still marketable and can work. "Available to work" doesn't mean "I rescheduled my tea with the Queen for next week so I can fit you into my calendar today..."
But then you say, "It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly."
It is. That doesn't mean we should change the meaning of "unemployed", it means we should clearly report the numbers we are using.
But then you go on to act as if these people are "'underemployed'.
I do not refer to housespouses that way. I am pretty clear that I feel that housespouses are unavailable for work and should not be counted in any "employment" statistics. They technically are unemployed because they have no paying job, but not underemployed because they choose to seek none for a reason other than "I can't find any".
I think we would disagree about whether the people who don't want work should be called "unemployed" (I say no).
It is simple English. If you do not have a paying job you are unemployed. A more strict definition adds "and are available to work", but that's what appears in the book and not on most people's tongues. The fact that you don't want to work doesn't mean you aren't available, only that you are unwilling. Every husband who trudges off to the salt mines to support his wife and family is unwilling to work but certainly is available.
And I think we would agree that it would be helpful to report and act on the "underemployed" statistic.
And to be completely honest about the numbers, to use a word that does not have a standard English definition that doesn't match the numbers it is being used to label.
But only those looking for work count as unemployed. The rest include students, homemakers, independently wealthy, disabled and others.
What ignorant baboon allowed this piece of drooling bullshit to be published?
That summary is so biased and blatantly ignorant it isnt worthy of being used to wipe ones ass.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Yes they do. That janitor getting minimum wage to clean the toilet? Means your high-priced ass doesn't have to bother. That janitor is indeed creating wealth indirectly by giving you more time to create wealth directly.
Of course the whole concept of creating "wealth" is pretty lame thanks to how we compute it (GDP and corporate profit margins and other mechanics that intentionally group the high-paid outliers in with the general masses in order to make pretty numbers while obscuring any non-numeric factors such as citizen/employee quality of life.)
Take with a grain of salt and dydd, but according to John Williams @shadowstats, "long-term discouraged workers [...] were defined out of official existence in 1994" so the definition of discouraged workers is a shifting target from a historical perspective. Maybe he's a crackpot with an axe to grind, but he substantiates his arguments quite extensively.
Another lever that BLS uses in their statistics is the "seasonal adjustment," a rather squishy concept once you investigate.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alt...
100 REM PISS OFF CODE FASCISTS 200 GOTO 100
You have a strange idea of "available to work". My six-year-old son is quite capable of, e.g., picking up litter or washing dishes - is he "unemployed" too?
Ah, in that case IMO it seems like U4 is the "real" unemployment number. It's arguable of course, as some of those handyman-type people might want full-time jobs, but others are probably quite happy with that kind of work because they don't have to work regular hours (and might not be capable of it--some people just can't hack that). I'd count them in the underemployed number though.
Which is literally no different than it is for a housespouse or a student. They could, technically, work. But they don't. By choice.
You can try to twist it any way you want, but it's true. As I have repeatedly seen.
Which is literally no different than it is for a housespouse or a student. They could, technically, work. But they don't. By choice.
In theory, a student or a housespouse could hold down a 40 hour per week job in addition to being a student or housespouse, and some do. But they suffer as students, and they aren't really a housespouse anymore if they are working. It's a gray line, but in either case, they are unemployed unless they are working a paid job. They just aren't underemployed and should not be counted in that category for employment metrics.
You can try to twist it any way you want, but it's true.
Yes, it is true that they are unemployed, and that they could make other choices. What's the point?
It's true that when someone says "unemployment is 5,3%" they don't go into the exact details of the number, and how there are other (possibly more valid) numbers that people could use.
It's also true that when someone says "it's hot today" they don't go into the physics behind temperature and kinetic energy in particles, and that "hot" is a completely relative term.
What's not true is that when someone uses the shorthand version (of either unemployment or temperature), it's because they are trying to deceive. Using U-3 unemployment is perfectly valid, especially because it is easily comparable to the U-3 number from last year. If you feel we should be using a different U-number, then you should explain which one is more valid and why. But complaining about "politicians" and "a rosier picture than reality" implies that you don't want a more valid number, you just want to whine.
It actually shouldn't matter much whether you include them or not, for the simple reason that (approximately) the same number of people will be in that category at all times. Yes a mother may want to go back to work in 3 months.. but another woman somewhere is going to be taking maternity leave in 3 months. Unless there's some reason to believe that birth rates are going to change significantly in the short term, the year-over-year difference will be near zero.
Similar for university. Unless you're seeing a significant change in enrollment numbers, the year-over-year change will be negligible.
Now if you include them last year, and don't include them this year (or vice-versa) then anyone comparing the YoY will of course notice a significant difference which they will have to take into account.
Isn't that the fault of the reporters then?
The common definition of "unemployed" is "not employed". The first online dictionary entry that google returned says "person without a paid job but available to work." Neither one includes any mention of "retired" or "wants to work".
The "weird ideology" here is called "the English language".
It's possible for the same word to have a different definition in different fields of study. Jargon overrides layman's English terms all the time. Consider reading a physics paper and just assuming that all the words you see fit the common definitions (quark is a cheese, right?). That would be incorrect.
That would be "% employed" surely...
The only number that really matters is the number of people who would work if they could find a job.
What "matters" is highly subjective.
That definition might sound good to you, but what matters depends on the goal. If the government's goal is to maximize production, then a much broader definition would be desired, so it would include schoolkids and grannies. If the goal is high productivity per worker, then the "discouraged" job seekers are undesirable to add to the unemployment stat.
Kinda like how "sunset" has a handful of different meanings, depending on what you want.
It's a lie, because it is wilfully excluded a group of citizens who by definition, are without employment, when that is the very thing that is being determined.
That seems like a lie to me. Does it not to you?
I don't consider this collusion or disingenuous reporting. They selected that metric reporting methodology for a reason. Probably a reason that suited certain groups or individuals interests more than say, the publics' for instance, but they should know better how to manage the fallout when they get called out for what many consider erroneous reporting.
It not a fake number, it's the International Labour Organisation standard for labour market statistics. If you are in paid work you are employed, if you are not in paid work and are looking for work you are unemployed. You can't get any simpler or more accurate than that.
There are other measures that can tell you other things about the labour market. The participation rate, underemployment, discouraged unemployed who have given up looking for work and left the labour market, dependants who don't work, the number of people on disability or single parent pensions aren't in the labour market.
Just because you and the media are too lazy to bother looking at those figures, doesn't mean that the unemployment number is wrong.
shooting down one ship doesn't mean you stopped the invasion, kiddo
the official definition comes from popular usage, not economists or any other academic authorities.
Most people do not consider all non-employed people to be "unemployed". You are in the minority on this. Face it.
Someone had to do it.
Homemakers are unemployed, unless they are paid to do the work.
Like I said... tell that to a homemaker ad see what happens.
Someone had to do it.
Actually, yes, most people do consider all non-employed able-bodied, adult people to be "unemployed", with a few exceptions (housewives most notably, full-time students, retired people who have no financial need to work). You are in the minority on this. Face it.
Many retired people take part time, or even full time, jobs
...and are then considered employed. They have "re-entered the work force".
Not wanting to work does not make one "unavailable"
Yes it does, unless your society permits slavery.
Someone had to do it.
retired people actively searching for work are actually counted as unemployed and no longer counted as retired as they have re-entered the work force. not willing to work is not and should not be counted as available as they aren't fucking available to work. When you are talking about employment figures with regards to unemployment benefits and helping people looking for a job you don't want unavailable people in the mix confusing the numbers.
There are currently 1.5 million people employed by the NHS.
Right, the real lie about unemployment figures is that they don't account for underemployment.
Yes they do. You are falling for the common mistake that headlines = science. If you want science, read the actual science and not the headlines.
From my reading of the article, the author is simply using that number as an upper bounds. He isn't advocating for that to be the official unemployment number.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
To call it a "lie" implies some sort of bias. Assumptions are often built in to such statistical analysis. Why is it a lie this time?
There's a clear word; "unemployment"; which means "people who want work but don't have work".
Not it doesn't. There are many definitions, full time, part time, under employed, not wanting work etc, all of which are covered in the statistics. Just because you read a headline and believe it on face value doesn't make the original report wrong.
In some cases, because people in management justify their existence (and salaries) by the number of people that report to them. Add more employees, manager's importance goes up. That provides a strong incentive to have employees that don't do anything useful, but do report to you.
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I've bolded the important part. TFA makes no such claim, and in fact states that the same measure has been used for decades. If you have evidence that the definition of unemployment was changed to make the economy look better than it actually was, please present it.
This article, Unemployment: How Official Statistics Distort Analysis and Policy, and Why is a good start. My claim was not based on the original article which I think is wrong in some aspects.
The changes were carried out over a long time with many individual changes taking place all the time from the government of Margret Thatcher, through John major and Tony Blair and now including the May government. Some of these changes are likely done for good motivations such as trying to get long term unemployed back to work, however that still means the effect should be measured and declared. Changes included:
starting counting people taking training for the unemployed as being no longer unemployed
forcing more people into training (which is now counted as not unemployed)
changing the definition of unemployed so that people have to prove that they are searching for work
making it more difficult to count as searching for work (e.g. now you have to provide "proof").
bringing in enforcement officers who attempt to show that the proof was false
redefining the disabled who are searching for work but can't take just any work as "sick" and thus not unemployed
eliminating students who search for summer work from the unemployment figures if they are known to continue studies at the start of the next term
To give the article the benefit of the doubt, it doesn't state that "the measure hasn't been changed", it's just that the "definition" (unemployment does not include people who don't want work or have alternative things to do ) hasn't been used for a long time whilst in fact the implementation of that definition has become more and more careful to exclude people who don't want work without being more and more careful to identify those, such as people with very limited zero hours contracts, who do.
The argument TFA presents is that the economy has changed so that the definition no longer paints as clear a picture of the economy as it did in the past.
This is an argument which is separate from my explanation of how we got to this and why it's a lie (because the method of measurement has been consistently changed to reduce the published rate without allowing comparison with earlier numbers). It is possible for both to be true. The numbers are lies because they have been fixed and the numbers are misleading because they pretend to be something they aren't. I am not certain enough of the motivations of the economists involved to be sure that they are deliberately misleading, however I find the article quite convincing on this.
From a statistical perspective, as long as the definition and method of measurement remains consistent over time, it is useful data. It is even more useful when paired and analyzed together with slightly different measures like the inactivity rate as TFA does. But it's not a lie. It is data. Not everything in life has a clear-cut and straightforward definition. So you come up with a definition that is clear-cut and straightforward (and usually selected because it's easier to measure), and you use it to collect data. If you don't like the definition, you can come up with a different definition and collect data on it. But calling the data set you dislike a lie is nothing but an ad hominem attack.
I have been very specific about how the numbers have been changed in a way which can be called lying. It's very clear that, if you look at my list above there is a huge series of changes that have been made and they have been alm
More than FIVE times. Why did the summary writer write "That's more than four times the official number" ?
5 x 1.5 = 7.5. Not a difficult equation to do in your head.
... people who are taking time off, or have given up looking for work, or work at home to look after their family, don't count as part of the workforce
This is quoted from the article itself, which by the way is full of accusations of lying and senationalism. The way I read it, the statisticians don't include people who, for some reason choose not to pursue employment - how is that supposed to be wrong? Am I excluded from, say, football, because I choose not to watch it? This is just sensationalism.
Crippled beyond any chance of employment is a tricky area. I was doing job X and I have an injury that prevents me from doing job X does not mean you not capable of doing a job.
The easiest way to illustrate the point is to point to Stephen Hawking. It is pretty hard to be more disabled than him, yet has had a full career earning significantly more than the medium income in the UK. Clearly not every disabled person is Stephen Hawking, but writing off even severely disabled people as able to work is incorrect.
Regardless this number is a small fraction of the "unemployed".
Obama profited from this greatly. Unemployment was so bad and went on so long, they were able to push people off the roles due to them 'giving up' on finding work. What a fantastic lie. 'If we fuck up for a long time, the number fixes itself!'
And yes, both side profit from this, Obama was just the most recent to be able to produce a number that was declining when in fact it was going up.
Not to mention that most managers not only do no useful work but actively impede an organisation by spending all day playing power games against other managers.
You make a good point, which is why I did say beyond any chance of employment. Someone who is only trained in a physical job, who then becomes a quadriplegic, won't be doing that job anymore. If they cannot be trained to do something that is voice only, and then become so good at it that accommodating their condition makes hiring them feasible, they are unemployable.
Stephen Hawking was that good before he lost his functions, so was able to continue. But imagine if he had been unable to move and speak when he was 8, back in 1950. He could use a wheelchair, but there would have been no computer assistance for him to talk, and his intelligence may have never been discovered.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
why do you suppose someone is paying them?
Because it's (currently) cheaper than automating the job out of existence.
All that matters is the number of people who relies on help: that include
- healthy young individual who can't find a job ("unemployed")
- Small business domestic slave force who lives on the street and need food stamps to exist (people are attacking Walmart instead of attacking these loveable mom-and-pop sweatshops)
- elders
- children
- sick
We are focusing on the first category only because it's the category that can overthrow the government.
Housewives are employed for all that matters. People who work part time and still can live on what they earn part time are still employed for all that matters.
And finally. Unemployment is just a metric. Only relative changes of that number with time matter.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
businessinsider strikes again.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
They haven't though, the UK has changed the way of measuring unemployment multiple times, that portion of his post is absolutely true.
The reason for doing so we can debate.
A person who is retired has, unless they're looking for another job, by definition made themselves unavailable to work. That's the point of retirement, you're no longer working. They're not employed, they're not unemployed, they're retired.
Indeed. Why on Earth would you count people who do not want a job as unemployed?
All of the above.
One group gets two new hires, manager of other group also wants two new hires and gets them.
No manager ever is going to say he needs less people.
Plus, people with nothing to do create more drama, so need more 'managing'.
Might not a better metric be the average number of hours spent by a member of the population, working. Because everyone has to report their incomes to "the tax man", this would be relatively simple, we could just add another box next to the one that says amount earned called, hours worked? This would also remove illegal working practices from the counted figure, which depending on who you are, might be the right decision anyway.
Try here -
http://www.economicshelp.org/macroeconomics/unemployment/measuring_unemployment/
I think the indicator of government tweaking is the line - "The government has often changed the criteria (30 times since 1979) for those who are eligible for benefits, usually this has been to reduce the claimant count. This makes it difficult to compare over time."
That was the very first link in my search.
Perhaps the person you replied to is not 'grandstanding' after all.
But I thought managers laid people off for bonuses?
So you can manage to get 1 hour per week watching your cousin's kids.
You want to have a real job and work 40 hours per week. You cannot find one.
Under U4 you count as employed.
Senior management does, because their peers judge them on output of their department relative to costs. Middle management does the opposite, because their peers judge them based on number of subordinates.
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It is a lie in the UK for the same reason that it is a lie in the U.S. The number is biased because the bureaucrats, and the politicians who give them orders, have every reason to make the numbers as low as possible so they can claim their policies are good for the populous, whom it is assumed want to be employed.
The unemployed should be anyone who wants a job but can't get one. That includes any adult who doesn't have a job but wants one. It should not include those who have decided to leave the work force for other reasons, such as to raise children or because they have (willfully) retired. In the U.S. the measure of those people is the U6 rate, as opposed to the U3 rate which is the official unemployment rate and is a lie, because is biased to be lower. I don't know if the UK makes equivalent measurements.
While it is accurate to describe some one who is retired as "unemployed" in the literal sense (and in the U.S. a case can be made that Roosevelt created Social Security specifically to lower the unemployment rate by pushing a large number of people who previously would have worked until death into retirement to make the unemployment numbers go down) typically it make no sense to count the retired as unemployed.
The reason people care about the unemployment rate is that it is a reflection of the health of the economy. If unemployment is high general prosperity is low and the economy is not good. If unemployment is low then the economy is healthy, though there might be a danger of inflation, due to the rise in the cost of labor.
We don't care about the unemployment rate because we have a fascination with arbitrary numbers. We care because it tells us something about how we expect the economy, and our own personal prosperity to be going.
And we care about that because it lets us know if we should vote the bastards out or give them a chance to keep ruining our lives.
Absolutely. The government is run by careful people trying to do a good job under trying circumstances. If they have to lie, we should cut them some slack.
Now about that bridge you were interested in ...
When measuring the money supply we use different terms to differentiate between different definitions. Eg M1, M2, M3.
You can look them up your interested, but the point is that we simply need new words for different definitions. So lwts say we have workforce size, unemployed, and job seekers. The unemployed could be people who don't need to work or can't work. Job Seekers are those who want amd need work and can't find it.
There problem solved without invoking some sinister intention to midlead on behalf of economists or politicians.
I know, I wish all those bloody children and retired people would find jobs. I'm fed up with them not being employed and hence being unemployed.
Same too with all those members of the Royal Family who have so much money they don't need a job - I'm fed up with them inflating the unemployment numbers.
Most people are not idiots and do not think that "unemployed" = "everyone who is not employed". Most people can quite happily understand that some people are not part of the labour market.
It is quite reasonable to question the details of how the employment figures are worked out. One particularly questionable issue is the timeout period - a person who has been unemployed for a long period and has stopped looking is by some measures counted as not part of the labour market, and so neither employed nor unemployed. But this person could quite well want to work and would take a job in a second if offered, but is just so disinclined to keep trying - are they part of the labour market or not?
But to claim that all people in a country are either "employed" or "unemployed" is naive - there are plenty of states that are neither of these.
My country (well province) just announced lowest unemployment rate ever!
Why? because many baby-boomer that were on the welfare are 65 now, so they no longer count as "looking for employment".
So only by their metric.
After a large natural disaster, GDP normally goes up, because you're spending more money fixing all the broken buildings.
Yes, actually, she is unemployed
No, actually, she isn't. That we assign no economic value to someone staying at home and looking after the children is just one of the many problems with the way in which we measure 'employment'. Someone saying at home and looking after the house most definitely is working, and for economic purposes might best be considered to be 'employed' the the other person in the house that is going out to work for someone else.
Because they can live comfortably on the dole,
Nobody can live comfortably on the dole. Nobody.
What a terrible inflammatory title for an article. There are many measures of employment/unemployment because each one of the available ones is incomplete. The one cited is useful and historically fairly consistent so it is possible to make some meaningful comparisons from year to year. At least it is more useful than many other cited numbers like the Dow.
As an example, here are 6 measures for the USA: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
In the US?
http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/c...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
And so on, as long as you dig.
The number have been manipulated since Nixon (at least) and maybe as far back as The New Deal. The imaginary numbers are generally misrepresented in language as a "unemployment", when referring to the unemployment rate. This is known by anyone who starts to mentally track them. This unemployment rate is itself, of little use in relation. It is simpler to falsify, serving the political winds without needing to worry about concrete census/CBO data at times. I contend that the unemployment gimmick is as obvious as the ignorance of legislators, in service of their own sponsored bills ("we have to pass the law to know what's in the law"). This is business as usual in the US.
Unemployment levels as a measure of economic health is bullshit.
If somebody loses a well-paying full-time job with benefits, and then picks up
a low-paying part-time job without benefits, UL considers that to be a wash:
one job lost and one job gained. Clearly that is nonsense.
The only meaningful measure of the health of an economy is median annual wage, adjusted for inflation.
A better metric would probably be % of population being net tax payers