2,000,000 jobs created in 15 months

Knowing this will turn into a GD anyways, here it is. Obama recently made a claim that he had created 2 million jobs in the last 15 months. How does he arrive at this number? The only things I can think of is:

  1. He just makes shit up.
  2. Based on decrease unemployment. If so, does it account for people losing their benefits and or giving up looking (ref: AP article)
  3. Some sort of complex calculations looking at the national economy numbers.
  4. Counting new jobs without counting new unemployment (e.g. me being laid off last month doesn’t count against the 2,000,000 figure.
  5. Some sort of bizarre record-keeping that give Arizona extra congressional districts (ref: his first jobs created numbers)

How about:
6) It actually happened

It must be pointed out, again, that unemployment is not calculated by how many people are collecting unemployment benefits.

As to your question, you should rightly be skeptical of claims involving

a) Conveniently round numbers, and

b) Things that can be attributed to complex systems and multiple factors.

The statement linked to the last post is substatively not the same as “I have created two million jobs,” though.

But how do they count them to come up with the figure?

“That means over the last 14 months,” Obama said, “we’ve added more than 2 million jobs in the private sector.”

Who is “we”? Who does Obama what you to think he’s referring to when he says “we”?

"even though the economy is growing, even though it has created more than 2 million jobs in the last 15 months,”

Who does Obama constantly tell us is responsible for the recovering economy?

Since he says flat out that the jobs were created “in the private sector”, I don’t know why you think there is a gotcha here.

The country.

Constantly?

It’s sad that the word “we” is apparently no longer a generally accepted catch-all for Americans.

Even if it’s 100% true, it doesn’t mean all that much by itself.

From 1/1/08 to 1/1/09the total U.S. population grew by 2.7 million.

By the end of 2009, the population had grown by an additional 2.6 million.

And by the end of 2010 it had grown by another couple million.

So, to oversimplify, the population is growing faster than the number of jobs. And since the average family size isn’t getting bigger, that means all those new people aren’t babies.

We may be adding jobs, but we’re adding more people.

Politicians of all parties claim credit for creating jobs, but I don’t think either Scott Walker or Barack Obama should get credit for it. NPR’s Planet Money and This American Life cooperated on stories about this issue.

From data collected by the Department of Labor: detailed explanation. Here is the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting “Since a recent employment low in February 2010, the
private sector has added 2.1 million jobs.”

And “we” obviously refers to socialist secret Muslims. Duh.

The “gotcha” in part is explained here, though it’s not just Obama:

The number of jobs that were “really” created won’t be known for several years, if then.

But the number of people really unemployed will be voting before then.

They use complex mathematical models to account for the relationships between all the various sectors of the economy and how resources, profits, commodities (ie. Employees), etc flow and ebb as time goes by. Now, the overwhelming consensus in the scientific, engineering and technological fields is that the universe follows a certain set of mathematical rules, we’re just trying to understand them. Overall though, there is no fraud, only deeply ignorant people with a poor education believe that.

On the other hand though you gotta realize that Obama is the Head of State of our country, and you should know the implications of that position.

A lot of the time, actually, no it doesn’t, insofar as anything can usefully be predicted. Earthquakes are one example: AFAIK the emerging consensus is that tectonic faults, and other systems in a critical state, not only are not known but never can be known by any mathematical model.

May seem tangential to this thread, but not really.

Given enough powerful computers and real world data, mathematicals models do predict reality with a high degree of confidence. You don’t need to predict when an earthquake will occur to the precise minute for your mathematical model to be useful. Mathematical models used in economics, engineering, geophysics, climate, etc all share elements along the deterministic - > nonlinear -> stochastistic -> chaotic spectrum, and all yield a wealth of knowledge, grounded in reality. Again, just because a large segment of the population of our country doesn’t comprehend an iota of mathematical models and are very vocal about calling fraud on them doesn’t validate them in the most minimal sense.

But that’s just the thing, they don’t predict earthquakes with anything approaching even a rough level of useful accuracy; they never have, and they never will:

and in Geller’s own words,

Your faith in a mathmatical predictability of the universe is a quaint, almost nineteenth century attitude. Complexity theory, baby!

This is the correct answer. You seem to be implying that estimating the number of new jobs is an illegitimate manouevre? Are you aware that Republican presidents also did this?

Well, maybe I’m not explaining myself correctly, but geophysicists don’t spend their time trying to predict earthquakes to the very minute they happen, just like economists don’t generate complex mathematical models to predict the time and hour when poor Saint Cad gets called into his boss’ office for “the talk”.

My view of mathematics is not quaint, with all due respect. The fact of the matter is that entire teams of very brilliant mathematicians work on these sort of problems, overall I trust their competence. Some people feel that if the numbers of jobs added/subtracted is a round number such as 2000000, then that’s a figure that’s made up, because it looks suspiciously accurate. Of the other hand probably if a figure like like 1953612 jobs added/subtracted is provided they may be more inclined to accept the figure as more plausible. In reality the opposite is true, as the concept of significant digits escapes their mind (something taught in 6th grade math, no less).

Sure they can. It’s very useful to be able to predict that major earthquakes will happen more often in California than in Florida, and you can make that prediction using a very simple mathematical model indeed.