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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Is unemployment actually down, or is this just like number fudging from folks who work 3 part time jobs?
There's a LOT more homeless people than I remember ever seeing before.
Unemployment is measured as people who are eligible and looking for work but not employed. People who have left the workforce for reasons other than getting laid off/fired (like quitting to take care of a sick family member) or people who have given up looking for work are not counted, even if they want a job. It's measured by a CPS survey of 60,000 households, and I doubt it includes homeless people (or anyone without a permanent address).
I've heard the opposition party claim the unemployment is under-counted during the Obama, Trump, and Biden years by excluding job seekers who have given up on finding employment. That's probably true, but if it is it has probably been pretty consistently under-counted for decades by both parties.
People that give up are no longer "unemployed", which is why they aren't counted. They wouldn't even count in the labor force either, which is the sum of unemployed and employed people.
Right, and the argument that many Republicans made during the Obama years and many Democrats made during the Trump years is that they should count in the labor force, because they want to be in the labor force but have been disenfranchised. Then there's also the people who are no longer counted because their state has pushed them off Welfare and moved them onto Disability, which has no pathway back to the workforce. It's a very long story involving Welfare reform and a lack of job opportunities, but low unemployment and Welfare rates are greatly impacted by people who want to work but are forced into going on disability.
Yeah I didn't mean to shit on Biden or anything; just seems like we're not quantifying this in a very meaningful way.
It'd be like celebrating that food insecurity is at an all time low! woohoo!! ......because access to affordable food is now so bad that 75% of the people dealing with food insecurity have starved to death since it was last measured.
(numbers pulled from ass for demonstration sake)
Yeah, for sure. My point is just that any under-count has probably been relatively consistent for at least 20 years, so the number is most likely reliably wrong if it's wrong. If the numbers say unemployment is down under Biden, it probably is down under Biden, even if it's not as low as the report says.
Unemployment is a meaningless statistic due to the weird definition. The more useful statistic is #of jobs divided by total population, which peaked in 1970 and has been declining fairly consistently ever since
That's like claiming you have more bread by cutting the slices thinner.
Unemployment stats are typically useless for other reasons. For example, this is the definition of unemployed.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
In the Current Population Survey, people are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria:
Done an hour of DoorDash or whatever? Homeless? Not unemployed. It's very much a meaningless stat and governments around the world game it all the time.
Not that I disagree with you, but if you counted all people who didn't have a job then you'd skew the statistic even more by counting voluntary stay at home parents and other people who don't work because they don't need to.
Can you come up with a criteria that accounts for those who don't have a job because the system prevents their access to the market without counting voluntary unemployment?
Why is this important? Number of people with jobs / number of people is a statistic that obviously shouldn't be 100%, but if it goes up or down that's something we should pay attention to. If we suddenly have a large spike in people who stay at home and don't work, we should at least understand why
Not one that would be completely accurate.
The best I've seen was a measure of underemployment, in which somebody wants more money/better work, is actively looking, but can't get it. It would have to be through random surveys and extrapolate up, rather than something they can get from the benefits office.
Except this doesn't capture it really, either, since the number of people with multiple jobs has been increasing steadily
Oh yeah maybe the statistic I was thinking of was percent of population that has a job
Homeless doesn't equal unemployed. There are a lot of people who have a job but can't afford housing
BINGO. Yes, 2-3 job having people are counted 3x :).
Otherwise, how else would the numbers be so abysmally out of touch ;)?
Does the 1% already know that? Yes.
No, they are literally not counted 3x. You can easily look up the formula. Is it a perfect metric? Of course not, but no need to bring in disinformation.
I don't know the stats being referred to, but if there is a number stated like 'x number of jobs added', where is it said that it doesn't include people with multiple jobs? I've seen reports a few times about 'jobs added', and it seems to be referring to positions being filled, couldn't it be one person in multiple positions?
That is not what this statistic is about though.
I'm not sure what's the case now, but I keenly remember how Obama "decreased" unemployment by having lots of people being counted as "out of the job market" instead, hence they were not counted for the official unemployment figure.
You can actually see the growth in the latter number correlated with the fall in the former if you look at the graphs with the data from back then.
You're not wrong, and they don't usually qualify for unemployment. Also "border secured" is a joke, the reason they're catching more is because the traffic level is unprecedented. The number I keep hearing is 15 million during his presidency.
Lots of homeless people work. I thought this was just like common knowledge but I guess not
Some yes, some no. I know a lot of homeless people.
There was no guarantee that the American economy fully recovered after Covid. It seems to be assumed by a lot of people, but it is certainly not true.