Luddism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Aug 2 06:59:51 PDT 2001


Kelley Walker wrote:


>At 08:17 PM 7/17/01 -0700, Michael Perelman wrote:
>>Kelley, these are the same authors that Doug has previously torn to shreds.
>>Look at hours on the job. Yes, it fell from 1870 till 1973. What about the
>>1990 data? Well, more and more jobs are part-time. Is that
>>progress? So, if
>>you have 2 part time jobs both jobs will contribute toward a lowered average
>>time on the job.
>
>
>Yeah, but this was on the bootstrap study where they argue that
>people move up the ladder, yes? I was wondering if anyone had looked
>at the way they decided to count these hours. I find it suspicious,
>for example, that they count household labor form a century ago and
>don't seem to think it necessary to count "going to school" as a
>form of labor!

Just catching up.... These guys are totally unprincipled in their use of data. Nothing they say should be believed without thorough factchecking. I'll bet they're not defining workers very well - e.g., all full-time workers, instead they're probably mixing in part-timers.

Doug



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