At 3:45 PM 1/1/97, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >The point of all this is that all these statistics describing the working >class in the united states really must be taken with a grain of salt. While >I do think the BLS does an excellent job given their limitations, I think we >should stop short of saying that these statistics accurately describe the >working class. For one thing, the collection of statistics is run by people >who believe that everyone's work is accurately recorded. This is simply not >true. No one claims that. Talk to a BLS economist and you will hear quite a lot about the limitations of their info. The BEA and the Fed have spent quite some time trying to quantify the informal sector. The Census Bureau has spent quite a bit of time trying to study the limits of its own counting. They're not perfect, and they work for a bourgeois goverment, but it's a bit exasperating to hear people rehearse the limitations of the data that are well known to the people who collect and publish it. >I think part of the job of left economists should be to use the BLS not as a >place for answers, but as a beginning point to begin building a picture of >the working class, not as an actual picture. But of course. But almost all attempts to build a broader picture of the working class have to rely on reworking existing official data. You have $40,000 in your pocket to do your own survey work? >I do not think that the importance of anecdotal evidence of contingency >should be underrated. It was inaccurate pictures of welfare mothers which >fed the drive to eradicate welfare as we know it. Don't those two sentences contradict each other? The innacurate pictures of welfare mothers were built on anecdotes. Welfare "reform" was done in blatant disregard of social science - indeed, it was led by people who hate social science and social scientists (neoclassical economists excepted). We've got a fairly good picture of who's poor and why. The sad thing is that those facts hardly matter for policy. >It is the thought of being >made contingent which keeps many workers eating shit to bring home a paycheck >which does not fill the needs of themselves or their families. Exactly. So if contingent work isn't as prevalent as mainstream sources claim it is, then isn't it important to say so? Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
