Unemployment inaccurate?

Look at all the 66's between your circles, which is what I was saying.

Bullshit.

From BLS:



It's impossible to reason with people who have no grasp of reality (as I apparently need to learn here over and over again).

Of course this begs the questions "What percent of the labor force dropout rate is due to discouragement vs other reasons?" and "Has that percentage changed?".

If the labor force participation is low and a high percentage of that is due to discouraged workers it's a much different scenario than a low labor participation due to early retirement or life priorities.

You would be at full employment from an Unemployment Labor Statistic standpoint, when no one is employed because everyone was too discouraged to look for work....and that would be as bad as it could get. % Unemployed is not a good statistic to look at in a vacuum. You could have the rate go up when more people are employed but more formerly discouraged decide to try to rejoin the workforce. That would be a good thing, but the Unemployment % would look like it was moving in the wrong direction.

There are also other measurements to consider that provide different insights on the economy. Percent Living in Poverty, Average Standard of Living, Homelessness, Debt Levels (Personal, Corporate & Government), and Economic Growth (Which Chilcoot has been so kind to keep updating in another thread). I don't think any of them are purposely skewed one way or another...but in all cases, you have to understand what the measurement actually measures and what the underlying factors are that are responsible for changes.

Complete bullshit.

Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Workforce Partiicipation is, indeed, calculated on those aged "16 years and older."
And there are "underlying factors are that are responsible for changes", . . . changes which one may judge are beneficial, or less so., or even injurious to the population.

F'rinstance, . . . the civilian labor force participation rates data can be broken down by age-groups which the BLs has done here .
Unfortunately for the younger set, it appears those workers 55 and older are participating in the workforce longer and those workers 16-to-54 are participating less.
__Poor old DonDiego judges this condition especially unfortunate for those 16-to-24 whose participation rate has fallen the most.
[DonDiego retired at the age of 50 years and 1-month, so he is not a contributor to this phenomenon.]

And then there's the issue of "workers" receiving disability insurance, which has demonstrated significant growth in the last few years. And the BLS designates almost half of the increase as "UNEXPLAINED".


Perhaps the more recent increase co-incident with expiration of uninsurance benefits explains some of it.


__DonDiego cain't 'splain it all from up heh' in the mountains, He's just a shown' interested folks some data from on the internets.

The 8 year average for president Bush was 66.1% The 6+ year average for obama is 64% For the last 3+ years it is 63.3% For the last 2+ years it is 63.0%. Notice the trend. The U6 rate remains at over 10%, well above it's historical average. There are 6.6m people working part time who want full time work.

The number of hours in a week as well as hourly wages are essentially flat

Give Hoops credit - he's graduated from complaining about Food Stamps to now complaining that people like DonDIego aren't looking for a job. I'm not sure thats progress but at least its not the same, tired argument he normally makes.

Apparently pj didn't see DD's post that for those under 55 their participation is going down, while the participation rate for those 55+ is going up. How do you explain that? Since you bring it up, food stamp growth is another example of the weak economy we are in

"F'rinstance, . . . the civilian labor force participation rates data can be broken down by age-groups which the BLs has done here .
Unfortunately for the younger set, it appears those workers 55 and older are participating in the workforce longer and those workers 16-to-54 are participating less."

uh PJ, you are aware that people are living longer hence the growing number of older folks?