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Originally Posted by dude1394
Okay did some looking around to try and understand the constant statements of anti-bush types everytime the unemployment rate goes down. We get the same story that we are still in depression and the only reason the employment rate is going down is because people are leaving the workforce.
Econopundit addresses this. I do not pretend to understand this all.
Caption: While driving back to the office I heard some NPR expert explaining why the current employment figures only look good because so many job seekers have gotten discouraged and dropped out of the labor market.
Here's BLS series LNS13327707, seasonally adjusted total unemployed plus discouraged workers as a percent of civilian labor force plus discouraged workers. Don't be confused here. This is what the unemployment rate would look like if we included discouraged workers in the calculation:
I guess I could be missing something, but the BLS inclusive-of-discourage-worker-effect seems to be going down, not up. |
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Originally Posted by Mavdog
I'll look at the numbers with that set of assumptions and respond, but off the cuff the graph doesn't appear to match the fact that there are more workers not in the labor pool today than when the peak is shown in this graph (est. 3Q 2003).
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ok, here's the conclusion:
the chart is off due to including discouraged workers twice.
there is good job growth for the last 3 plus quarters. the same timeframe shows the number of unemployed to be down. there is growth. a better first year of the second term than any other year in the first term.
there remains a lower worker participation rate and almost historic numbers of workers discouraged enough to not be looking for jobs.