To do what? To produce a self-swallowing concept of unemployment that disguises the nature of work in the US?
>You can
>criticize, rightly, the definition of >unemployment in the U.S. as too
>strict, producing too low an estimate,
Thanks for your intellectual generosity Doug! I feel so less hemmed in now.
but >it's a reasonably accurate
>picture by its own definition.
That is quite literally begging the question.
>But remember that the jobless stats
>are not intended as a measure of human >deprivation, but of labor
>market slack.
I think you can use them to understand both and don't see the dichotomy. We gather and analyze economic statistics to understand a society. You might argue that it's wrong to make a basic social indicator one that serves market economics.
In fact, in any political economy, deprivation is far easier to understand than 'labor market slack'. Even as wages went up during the 'tight' labor market of the 90s in the US, how many more people found themselves without adequate health insurance?
>On that conception, it's appropriate to >exclude people who aren't looking
for >work, since they've been demobilized from >the reserve army of labor.
As if people who are underemployed working part-time jobs and jobs under the table have the time even to go in and waste their time at a state employment security office. My point was and still is that anyone who relies on federal statistics gets a skewed picture about the US. Again, more on this later.
>The BLS also produces wider measures of >unemployment, which includes
>discouraged workers and unwilling part->timers. These tend to be about
>1.5 times the official number.
And how did they arrive at this figure of 1.5? My basic rule of the thumb is if a federal or national government reports unemployment for international purposes, multiply it by at least 2 and you are getting closer to the depotemkinized truth (unless they need to report that to get subsidy from the EU).
When I was a full-time administrator at a rural national guard unit I noticed the difference between that unit and a poor unit in Philadelphia in the same squadron (armored cavalry for battalion). Over 10% of the guys in the rural unit lived in housing like trailers or mountain shacks, received no federal housing, no welfare and no foodstamps. None of the poor had ever collected unemployment. Many worked full-time temporary or worked more hours than many full-timers by working several part-time jobs (many jobs under the table since neither the employee or employer would then have to contribute to social security). Many worked for private contractors who assigned them work in the booming DC area. Yes, rural white labor could 'compete' with immigrant labor because So. Central PA has always been a 'right to work' non-union area.
Compare that to the Philadelphia unit. These guys lived in federal housing, received welfare and foodstamps, and complained when the government tried to count their national guard checks (for working 2-3 days a month) as part of their income in order to formulate what benefits they received.
>What's "way too low," anyway? The U.S. >has one of the world's highest
>shares of the adult population working. >We've got some of the longest
>workweeks in the world. You could say >that overwork is at least a
>serious problem here as underwork.
So you have much higher unemployment than official statistics and concepts allow for and those who do have work work too much. I don't even see a counterpoint here.
Charles Jannuzi