On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 14:54 -0800, Jim Devine wrote: > Below, David Leonhardt prevents a more complete unemployment rate for > the present which is "above 13 percent" and contrasts it to a > similarly-calculated number for 1982 of 16.3 percent. [...]
For male 25-54 in 1982 employed/civilian...population was 86.5% and "unemployment" was 7.5% In 2008 those numbers are 86.0% and 4.5%. It speaks a lot about the meaningless "unemployment" number. Back to real numbers: employed/population was above 89% from 1948 to 1981 peaking at 95.3% in 1953. Then it was under 89% reaching three time a low in 1982, 2003 (85.9%) and 2008. If we factor in the carceral population trend we're probably below 1982. If you graph 1948-2008, unemployment is very noisy around a long term average of about 4%, while employment/population displays a clear trend downwards starting at 94% with a floor at around 86% we've tested three times in the past decades. For those interested in raw monthly data: http://guerby.org/ftp/bls-men-25-54.xls I used the "annual" columns for the numbers above. Data comes from http://www.bls.gov/data/#employment click on "Labor Force Statistics" ONE-SCREEN DATA SEARCH. Laurent _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
