Another terrible jobs number

u don't see a change around 2009 in that chart?

 

Somebody alert Mitt Romney of tallanchor's EXCELLENT NEWS

They may want to do a quick ad and push it out to the youtubes, as well as have the boys start running this one out on the Sunday morniing shows. Roger will coordinate. Within a few days it should start to show in the Gallup Daily Tracker!

 

Yes, what's your point? There was a recession that caused alot of people to retire earlier than they had anticipated. It also shot up again around 2009/2010, are you going to give Obama credit for that too?

 

Yes - again, what's the proper amount it should be at and what does this indicate? The unemployment rate that accounts for people that gave up looking also declined again this month.

 

The GOP's 2012 theme... In Search of Relevance.

 

People helped point you in the right direction but you need to look deeper yourself. Look at baby boomers, retirement age, labor force statistics.

You don't have to know everything but if you are going to pass judgement, at least have a half way decent understanding of the numbers.

 

Of course my advice to tallanvor doesn't apply to you. You are beyond help.

 

For tallanvor---

The short story is that you should be looking for employment-population ratio, not the LFPR. The LFPR has all sorts of craziness going on.

 

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000

 

delete

 

How are people under 16 and over 65 relevant to employment?

 

Employment-population gets rid of all the noise of who is a labour force participant or not and allows for easier direct comparisons across time series so you can actually see what is going on in terms of employment (at least on a historical comparison-based method) in different years without conjecturing about idle job seekers and etc. It's imperfect, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better than the LFPR in terms of assessing where the country is in terms of employment just based on getting rid of that arbitrary variable of who is in or out of the labour force.

That's why it's a favorite of guys like Mankiw trying to run the Obama recovery into the ground.

With that said, as someone has pulled it up, you'll note the pronounced drop from 2008-2009, something not so easily observed in the LFPR. You have your answer there. The largest private sector failure in history caused this crisis, and we are all left to pick up the pieces. The "new normal" might just be several shades paler than the old, thanks to our friends at Lehman.

 

There's a reason you have to pay an extra $5 for Fox News on Shaw Cable in Canada - its an entertainment channel.

 

Don't you think 14 year olds and infants and the already retired will skew the data? I think a better population sample would be the working age population, or to use labor force plus all those not in a labor force who want a job now. Your numbers would have us believe that the unemployment rate is 25%.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/NILFWJN

 

The reason why the unemployment rate is so cited and why it is probably the best short snapshot of the labour situation is that indeed, it disqualifies people from the labour force that don't belong there.

I'm not arguing for or against the unemployment rate here. That has its' uses. I'm arguing that in comparison to the LFPR, employment-population is a much better metric to compare broad employment situations and variations across time series because it gets rid of that additional complication of who is in the labour force, and because it adjusts less to exogenous shocks to the LFPR such as the baby boomers retiring, women taking jobs etc. You'll see less noise in that from employment-population than LFPR just based on the virtue of larger sample sizes.

 

Another month of job growth and a drop in unemployment to 7.6%.

Sounds like we're going in the right direction to me.

 

Guess you must be a glass half full type of guy.

From CNN: Jobs report: Hiring slows severely in March