Re: Playing with unemployment numbers

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (midtowng) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> From: Ernst Blofeld ([EMAIL PROTECTED])

> >Reader Marten Barck writes 

That would be Glenn Reynolds, not me.

> >Longterm notification of illnesses have tripled since 1997. One in
>  six
> >of Swedes of working age are listed longterm sick or prepensioned.
> >That's about 800 000 yearjobs in a population of 9 million. The cost
> >is 10 billion dollars per year. The
> >wellfare state has turned into an illfare state.
> 
> November 30, 2003
> The Unemployment Myth
> By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
> NY Times
> 
> The government reported that annual unemployment during this recession
> peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in
> 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment rate has
> been low only because government programs, especially Social Security
> disability, have effectively been buying people off the unemployment
> rolls and reclassifying them as "not in the labor force."
>     In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a
> more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan
> administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified
> from "not in the labor force" to "employed" in order to reduce the
> unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.

I've never understood why someone in the armed forces shouldn't be
counted as employed. Apparently the economists who compiled the
stats thought the same as me.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils51.pdf

For a view of the situation with less heavy breathing.


====
In summary, during the most recent economic
downturn, the labor force participation
rate among younger workers fell quite a
bit more than it did during the recessionary
period of the early 1990s; workers in that age
group were more likely to have reported "going
to school" as a reason for nonparticipation
in 2001 than their counterparts had been a
decade earlier. The labor force participation
rate among males aged 25 to 54 fell slightly
more than it had before, and there was a slight
decline rather than a slight increase in labor
force participation among women in the central
age range. In contrast, workers 55 and
older increased their participation in the labor
force significantly during the most recent

====

Looks like the "hide out in grad school until this
whole thing blows over" strategy is still quite popular.

The increase in disability among women 25 to 54
seems to have been matched by a decrease in
those who declined to look for work due to
"home responsiblities" compared to 1991, and
the increase in the number of men 25 to 54 who 
claimed disablity was matched by those who said
they were retired. 

It doesn't follow that the increase in disablity
comes straight from the unemployment category. It
looks as if the reasons people are out of the
labor force is shifting around, and some that
are claiming disablity now would have been out
of the labor force then, too. Say, someone who
in 1988 would have said they were staying home due
to home responsiblities now claims disability.