Can we necessarily believe Bush's new jobs claim?

Great Debates
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Whoops, thanks for the catch zimaane and jshore! You’re right that I misread the “1 in 37” figure in the article as those
that were currently in prison, rather than those who are
serving or have served time. Sloppy of me.

jshore: So, my guess is that, under reasonable assumptions (say, 25% or so percent unemployment for that group, although we could argue about that), the large number of incarcerated people in the U.S. is having a measurable, but likely fairly small (on the order of a few tenths of a percent) influence on the unemployment rate.

Actually, the estimates I linked to earlier (and I think I read those correctly) suggested that well over half and maybe as many as two-thirds of inmates were not (legally) employed before going to jail. They would therefore make the unemployment rate around 6.5% if they were out, but you’re right that we’re not looking at a change of several percentage points here.

Of course, we wouldn’t be releasing all inmates anyway if we had comparable incarceration policies to Western Europe’s. But I think that, given that the average European incarceration rate* is about one-seventh of ours, and that [nearly two-thirds (PDF)](www.aspanet.org/ethicscommunity/documents/ War%20on%20Drugs%20and%20Economics.pdf ) (1.2 million of the nearly 2 million prisoners in US federal, local, and state jails in 2001) were nonviolent drug offenders,** that still means that the “War on Drugs” is measurably (if not greatly) depressing our unemployment rate by tossing many unemployed people in prison.

jshore: And, of course, one would have to compare the percentage of people in the military in our country compared to the other countries we are comparing to. Is ours unusually high in percentage terms?

Actually, as far as I can make out, in 1994 Western Europe had a slightly higher force ratio than North America: 7.4 soldiers per 1000 population as opposed to 5.2. Can’t find more recent numbers, nor ones that break out the US from the rest of N. America. But if those force ratios are roughly accurate, then throwing the military into the “employed” side of the scale will not end up reducing the US unemployment rate in comparison to Europe’s.

  • Those rates, just to complicate things, are measured in number of inmates per total population rather than per adult population. However, since Europe and the US have roughly similar age demographics, this won’t significantly change the comparison.

** Geez, that sounds like an awfully high proportion. Am I reading numbers wrong again, or do non-violent drug offenders really make up about 2 of every 3 US prisoners?

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This issue is so much more complicated than just adding some percentage of the prisoners back into the unemployment numbers. And given the large number of drug offenders, one certainly wonders how many of these were drug dealers who probably would be considered unemployed even if they pulled in darn good incomes.

I think that lacking a good source study of this issue and how it plays into the unemployment rate, it’s a red herring relative to the main topic.

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JM: And given the large number of drug offenders, one certainly wonders how many of these were drug dealers who probably would be considered unemployed even if they pulled in darn good incomes.

Which reinforces my point: if they’re not legally employed when they’re not incarcerated, then their incarceration (for non-violent offenses for which other industrialized nations wouldn’t jail them) artificially depresses our unemployment rate compared to that of other nations.

I think that lacking a good source study of this issue and how it plays into the unemployment rate, it’s a red herring relative to the main topic.

Well, as I noted a few posts ago, it’s certainly a hijack relative to the OT, whether it’s got good source studies or not. It is, however, quite relevant to the question of how bad or good unemployment really is in the US compared to Europe. If you don’t like the introduction of a topic that doesn’t directly speak to the OP, you’ll have to blame Brutus for introducing this one.

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Never said that. I’m just pointing out that there is a lot of speculation on this particular topic with no real data on the phenomenon and how it affects the employment/unemployment picture.

If you want to start digging up things that would inflate the unemployment figures, I can just as easily dig up things that would deflate it. For example, I’m sure my cleaning lady is not counted as employed. She makes $20/hr strictly cash and her response to any official who asked her would be: “Yo no trabajo”. (trans: “I don’t work”.) And there are many, many like her.

Europeans may have a lower incarceration rate than the US, but I bet they have a smaller illegal alien population as well. If we took all the illegal aliens out of the picture, the unemployment rate would go down, too.

The governmnet figures are what they are. Trying to tweak them is a great way to serve your political ends (curious how no one on the left is offering any tweaks that might result in an lower unemployment rate), but it doesn’t deal with the issue at hand: Is the jobs scenario getting better or worse? The oficial data says it is getting better, but I’d like to see 2 or 3 more months of strong jobs growth before I’d declare a trend.

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But just imagine if drugs were made legal. Then all these people with experience selling drugs could become entrepreneurs. They could hire people, fill a consumer need and pay taxes. They could develop new delivery business methods or new more powerful compounds. They would be INNOVATORS. Maybe drug emporiums are the next “BIG THING” that we are waiting for <lol>?

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And they don’t necessarily give the whole picture, which is why I think it’s legitimate to discuss other factors that affect them. I did my best to flesh out my speculation about one of those other factors with actual data and crunching the numbers (with some timely help from jshore), and if you want to do the same for another factor such as undocumented workers, I’ll be happy to see the results.

I take your point that the issue at hand is about the reliability of the BLS statistics in themselves, but I think that’s been quite ably and thoroughly discussed by others. If you object to my complicating the issue in response to Brutus’s hijack by introducing a discussion of other factors, then by all means feel free not to read my posts about it. If you’re objecting just to moving the discussion off-topic at all, then as I said, your beef in this case is with Brutus.

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But most prisoners probably would not have been counted as unemployed before being incarcerated, even if they did not have jobs. To be counted as unemployed, one must be jobless and actively looking for work. People who make thier living illegally would be counted as out of the labor force, just like students or stay at home parents. So being put in jail would not change anything.

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2098408/

This article documents how both sides have flip-flopped.

Before, the Bushies were attacking the payroll stat as being horribly flawed, and saying we should use the household stat. Now, when it shows a single month of payroll growth, they tout that number without reservations, and don’t mention the previously lauded household stat: which now shows negative news.

And the Dems have done pretty much just the opposite flip-flop on which stat they think is most important.

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Well, sort of…But, this seems to be overstated in the Slate article. If you actually follow the links that they give, none of these Democrats / liberal-leaning think-tanks are really saying, “We shouldn’t believe the payroll numbers; we should believe the household survey numbers.” Rather, they are pointing out ways in which the one number in the payroll survey itself doesn’t tell the whole story and emphasizing ways in which everything is not completely honky-dory. (The links are here, here, and here.

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Yes, they are. The problem is that the major media generally only reports the headline number and both political sides manipulate this figure for their own advantage. What I want to see is a better, more reliable number that would eliminate the many opportunities for that to happen. To accomplish this, we need to know where the weaknesses are and we need to figure out how to fix them.

Meanwhile, it would help if the media would do a detailed analysis of what is being reported before they jump on the headline figure because their are too many people in the world who only focus on the headlines. They really don’t understand what is going on, yet they make important decision based on that little information.

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iamme99: I agree. What you need to do is look in business mags and journals for some non-government figures. I can’t give you specific cites, but I’m sure there are businesses that need better data than the government figures.

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zimaane: But most prisoners probably would not have been counted as unemployed before being incarcerated, even if they did not have jobs. To be counted as unemployed, one must be jobless and actively looking for work.

Good point: if the prisoners would have fallen into the “discouraged workers” rather than “unemployed” category, that changes the comparison (how, we can’t tell for sure unless we know whether the European stats account for “discouraged workers” in the same way ours do). However, I’m not sure how many people do fall into that category; it seems from one of the articles I linked to that a number of the non-violent drug offenders were indeed actively searching for legal employment.