On Mar 20, 2012, at 11:46 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> But Doug's logic is the stupid logic of someone who is utterly in the dark
> of how public opinion gets formed. If those 9 million (or 3000) have to be
> derived from a number of different sources and are not named in a figure
> _named_ Unemployment, then they are hidden. Not very many people comb the
> official data or would know how to make sense of a number of different
> figures.
You're funny. Sometimes you rebuke me for paying too much attention to public opinion. In fact, a large portion of the pop thinks the unemployment numbers are phony.
As I just said on PEN-L:
The unemployment rate is meant as a measure of labor market slack, not human deprivation. People who are, in the jargon, "marginally attached" to the labor force barely figure in the capital/labor balance of power and the wage-setting mechanism. The BLS has offered alternatives for a very long time, and every month there are 6 flavors of unemployment rate to choose from in the employment situation release. That's exactly where this writer got the data from.
Many analysts, including a lot of Wall Street economists, have been writing about the decline in the employment population ratio and the effect of labor market withdrawal on the unemployment rate. It's really not anything approaching a secret, though I suppose it's fun to dress it up as one.
Doug