What's the betting on the election - can Bush win?

Great Debates
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RTFirefly: My recollection is that ‘full employment’ used to be defined at about 5%, but the excess optimism of the 90’s, when unemployment dropped below that level without inflation, caused economists to lower the ‘full employment’ line to more like 4.5%. See Pantom’s message above for decent numbers showing the average employment rate in the post-war era - right now, the number is only .3% above the mode, and even removing the Bush/Reagan years only pushes the average down to about .7% below what it is now. As I said, if unemployment drops to 5.5%, it will be below the historical average for the post-war period.

As for consumer confidence, my understanding is that it is a normalized value with the 1985 level set == 100, and subsequent years measured against that benchmark. Things that move consumer confidence are fears of job losses, inflation, and other losses of earning power. Terrorist attacks would also factor in.

In September, consumer confidence was down at about 77. It was recently as high as 91.7, and in late December it slipped to 91.3.

jshore: The fact that unemployment only rose to 6.4% indicates that this was an especially short and mild recession. Which it was. The ‘official’ recession only lasted for two or three quarters, and ended shortly after Bush took office. The period since then has basically been a low-growth environment in which job creation barely kept up with increases in the labor force from population increases.

elucidator: So you’re going to stick to your position that economics is voodoo science, and that that same data can be used to justify completely opposite conclusions? I mean, other than by people like Paul Krugman? I dearly hope, then, that if the economic numbers turn downwards you don’t use that to ‘prove’ that Bush’s policies are failing. If you’re going to bow out of the debate, you don’t get to just do it when the numbers aren’t going in the direction that helps your cause. 'Cause that would be, like, dishonest.

So I expect to never hear anything about Krugman from you again. Because after all, it’s just a game, right? You can prove anything with the numbers, right?

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Some new economic data I just read:

New Jobless Claims Lowest of Bush Tenure

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Yeah…I will agree with you that his implication in that regard is incorrect. What he ought to be making is a more complicated argument…which is that, while it is true that the actual cost of the tax cuts this year is $125 billion or whatever, in the name of stimulating the economy the tax cuts passed will produce a couple trillion dollars of debt over the next 10 years…and even more if they are extended beyond that.

These tax cuts will continue to be in force long after any classical Keynesian stimulus would do any good. At that point, we are in the realm of supply-side belief, at best unproven, that the tax cuts are really doing any good in expanding the economy (let alone expanding it enough to significantly offset their costs).

So, while it is incorrect to claim that the tax cuts are contributing $350 billion to the deficit this year, it is also incorrect to imply that the “price” we have paid for the stimulus is only $125 billion…That’s just the price tag this year. But, we’ll continue paying the bill far into the future.

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Heavens, Sam, I have enough trouble defending my own opinions, without having to defend the ones you make up for me. I clearly stated that I have no particular expertise in economics, and further stated my reservations regarding economics as a “science”. That is not to say that I regard any economic conjecture as “voodoo”, only that such are not as readily falsifiable as conjectures in the “hard” sciences.

Perhaps I was dazzled by his c.v., clearly, Princeton regards him as qualified to teach economics, much as they regarded Einstien as qualified to teach physics. I am content to accept thier judgement, at least until you demonstrate the utter ignorance of that position.

When I brought up the Krugman cite, you jumped on him with both feet with an entirely ad hominem assault. No reference to the cite was given, no refutation of the point of view, merely your strident and vitriolic assertions that he was No Damn Good. Forgive what may seem a lack of due respect for your august and all-encompassing wisdom, but that isn’t quite enough.

Further, I also stated, quite clearly, that I doubt any President has the ability to “tweak” and fine tune the economy, it is a large and unruly creature. You can certainly screw up the economy. I believe, given my limited understanding, that the concensus is the best way to totally screw the pooch is to arbitrarily limit you income with tax cuts while spending money like a drunken tailor. (Of course, I could be wrong. I was wrong once in '68, when I thought I had made a mistake…)

That is about all I am willing to say as to the economic science as regards GeeDubya’s “policies”. The morality of a policy that rewards the rich and comfortable and offers empty homilies to the poor and fearful is another matter altogether. In that regard, the Tighty Righty policies splash sanctimonious cologne to cover the putrid stench of greed and callousness.

Commendable. You have moved from making blatant ad hominem remarks as to my character and honesty, and now content yourself with mere insinuation. Definitely a step in the right direction, Mr. Krugman can take care of himself.

You can expect whatever you bloody well please. I am very open minded in that regard. You may expect J. Lo to come slithering under your covers in the dark of night, cooing with craven lust for your Canadian beaver-trap. Your chances are roughly equivalent, as compared to limiting my argument to what meets with your approval.

If you can refute, do so. If you are reduced to casting aspersions as to my character and honesty, that will also do nicely, in terms of revealing the clarity of your argument. I have my faults, god knows, but “dishonest” ain’t on the list, and neither is “delicate”.

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Hey, Sam, you do realize there’s a difference between “people applying for unemployment insurance” and “people who don’t have jobs,” don’cha? Because IIRC, you are no longer eligible to apply for unemployment if you’ve been out of work for over one year – which means you’d still be unemployed, but conservative dittoheads get to toot your situation as if it were a good thing…

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Look, I wasn’t attacking you personally. For all I know you are kind to puppies and old people. I was attacking the intellectual honesty of your position, which as near as I can tell is this:

  1. opine that Paul Krugman has data to show that the economy is bad.

  2. When presented with multitudes of evidence to the contrary, throw up your hands and say that economics is a fools game, and the data can be spun to show anything you want, because it’s not a science.

That is an intellectually dishonest position to take. It is not fair debate. You can either take the position that the economic data is amenable to analysis and prediction, in which case you need to formulate an argument against my numerous cites, or you can claim that economics is a fake ‘science’ and meaningless, in which case you forfeit the right to bring up such numbers in the future if they happen to justify whatever political conclusion you wish to make.

Fair?

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rjung: No, I don’t realize that, because you’re wrong. The unemployment data is NOT collected from ‘people applying from unemploymentinsurance’. The federal government recognizes the limitation you’re talking about, so it collects unemployment data by surveying the population, much like polling firms do, and it has been using this method since 1954. The same method is used in almost all industrialized countries.

In the sample survey, people are counted as ‘unemployed’ if they do not have a job, and have expressed a desire to have a job by having looked for one within the last four weeks. It doesn’t matter if they have run out of UI benefits, been unemployed for a decade, or never held a job before and now want one. ‘Looking for a job’ is a straightforward question as well. They don’t have to have been interviewed, or gone to an employment office, or anything else. They just have to answer ‘yes’ to the question, “Have you looked for a job in the past four weeks?”

Thanks for trying, though. I knew that argument was going to rear its head somewhere along the way. Don’t worry though - you still have one ace-in-the-hole: you can claim that the jobs being created are worthless “McJobs” that no one really wants. That has the poltical advantage of being unfalsifiable, and it’s a time-honored way of slamming Republican presidents in good job markets. I’m surprised that one hasn’t been trotted out yet.

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…or, one of these days I’m going to learn to check before I post.
On the subway on the way home, I realized I took the wrong statistical thingamabob. To define terms (from Statistics 101):

Mean: What people normally mean by the average. Take your column of numbers, add and divide by the number of rows in the column.
So, what I posted before for averages is correct: 5.64% total from 1948, 5.23% ex Reagan/Bush.

Mode: take your column of numbers and find THE MOST FREQUENT number.
Also, what I posted before was correct: the most frequent number in either case is 5.6%. Which is kind of interesting all by itself, but not what I said above.

Median: take your column of numbers, sort and find the midpoint. Half are above, half below. Frequently a better average than the mean, this is how the government reports house prices, for instance.
This differs, unfortunately, from what I reported. Total is 5.6%, ex Reagan/Bush is 5.3%, which is somewhat of a significant difference, when you’re looking at 6% unemployment and trying to decide if that falls within some “normal” range or not.

Interestingly, if you take all the figures together, you get what a normal bell curve distribution should give you: the mean, median and mode are all pretty much the same: 5.64, 5.6 and 5.6 respectively. Ex Reagan/Bush, you get 5.23, 5.3 and 5.6, so the mode is somewhat above either the mean or the median, indicating a skew in the curve. But I’ll leave that for the real statisticians to figure out.

Sorry for the confusion, but I was posting in a hurry from work when I did that. Now that I have a couple of wines in me, I’m able to hit the blind side of a barn from time to time.

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By either measure, of course, current unemployment is above normal, by the way. It should also be noted that what minty green posted re the comparability of the numbers is true, as the survey is adjusted from time to time to adjust for new figures from the Census Bureau. Somewhere out there there’s an economist who can tell us what they do and why, I’m sure. luc should keep a weather eye out for one, as they may decide to pay him a visit and teach him a little, um, respect. I hear they’re mostly a peacable sort, though.

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What is the reason to consider statistcs “ex-Reagan/Bush”? Yeah, we had a big recession, but that is no less valid a timeframe than any other. Why not exclude the mid/late 90s, which saw an unusual investment bubble? If you’re going to look at historical data, look at all the data.

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No. “Normal” might be defined as as the median +/- some multiple of the std deviation. Or, at the very least, the median +/- the expected error in the measurement.

No statistician would define “normal” as being right at the median point.

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Oh fine. I’ll go back and figure that out too. Sheesh.

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Minty and Pantom:

The last time the method of collecting unemployment data was changed was in 1994, during the Clinton administration. I don’t know the exact details of the change, but I believe it was basically to bring sampling and collection methods into the computer age, and was designed to be as compatible with the old way of doin things as possible so people wouldn’t have to keep correcting data across periods. In other words, it was just a routine procedural change, not a fundamental change in the way the data was collected.

That’s the only change I know of since 1954. So I don’t think you’re going to find any smoking guns in the data to suggest that unemployment was redefined in some nefarious way. And if you did, it would be Clinton who was guilty of it, since the changes happened on his watch. But really, it was just a routine thing. Nothing nefarious here.

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Are you saying that there is no data out there on the parts of the job sector that are expanding and what they are paying? I don’t necessarily see how claims of this type would be “unfalsifiable”. Whether they would be supported by the evidence, I don’t know, but I find it hard to believe no data exists.

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Sorry, that’s not what I meant.:slight_smile:

If the median is around 5.6, and we’re at 5.9, I think we can all agree that that is well within what any reasonable person would call “normal”.

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jshore: Well sure, lots of data exists. But the question of what constitutes a ‘good’ job is subjective, and it’s very hard to seperate the jobs from the people taking them. For example, if a llot of ex-engineers are working at McDonalds, that would be bad. But if a lot of young people who couldn’t find a job now have one at Mickey D’s, that’s okay. In my experience, arguments about job quality are endless, with each side picking and choosing whatever scenario they want to make their case.

So I guess I shouldn’t have said it’s unfalsifiable. It is, however, extremely hard to seperate out the BS on both sides. I much prefer arguing hard numbers like growth percentages and job statistics.

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I have made no such claim. I merely pointed out that the way the statistic is measured has been changed over the years, making direct comparison over many years a dicey proposition.

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Well, John Mace, I went back and did it any old way, just because. Kind of interesting, actually, but it’s a bit hard to figure out how to do it, because if you’re trying to figure standard deviation, you need an “independent” variable, and what do you take? So all I did was put a sequential list of numbers in one column to be the independent variable.
Anyway, there’s a slight upward tilt in the trend line since 1948, so that the “normal” range was 3.33 to 6.26 in Jan 1948, as opposed to 5.02 to 7.95 today, with the midpoint at 6.49.
Also, RTFirefly had a bit of a point in attempting to ex out Reagan/Bush, as the only “outliers”, that is, figures outside of two standard deviations from the normal occurred in 1982 and 1983, and of course they were more than two standard deviations above the long term trend.
And if anyone wants anything else, I’m gonna need to get paid. So there.

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BTW, minty green was indeed right. I look at the stats every month, and it seems like they adjust the base for the household survey almost every year, making year over year comparisons a bit difficult. I believe this is one of the reasons why Wall Street prefers the “establishment” survey, which takes data from employers. Problem with that one is it tends to miss jobs created by new businesses that the Feds haven’t put in the survey yet. Nothing is perfect in this world.

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Ture indeed. I live in Silicon Valley (home of very high unpemployment of late), and I prefer the “traffic index”. Check out what the major freeways look like at about 7:30AM and that gives you a good sense of what’s going on. (I like an AM data pt better than a PM data pt since I think people start work at about the same time, but there’s a bigger spread of when folks knock it off for the day).

As for having to analyze the numbers, you can’t beat the Whitehouse’ budget page-- you get all the data in an Excel spreadsheet.

Happy New Year. Let’s hope all the numbers look better next year!