My apologies. I was trying to figure out the areas where we disagree.
That covers the last year and the current recession. But for many years before that, factories have been closing in the US and opening just across the border in Mexico, Central America and South America. Ford’s newest, most advanced plant is in Brazil. It can produce five different types of vehicles on the same assembly line at the same time. Again, this has been great news for those countries. But pretty bad news for the American autoworker.
Cite?
Seriously, what do you count as “full employment”?
Cite?
While Sam Walton was alive, his company was promoting a “Buy American” policy, but that went by the wayside shortly after he died and the company has become China’s retail arm. Again, I don’t know how you define “full” other than that it must mean something other than “100%”.
Every single day I experience situations with fewer employees doing the same amount of work, or accomplish a task without any human interaction.
[ul]
[li]Shopping at Home Depot and using the self-checkout where one person is monitoring four lines. [/li][li]Buying a movie ticket at AMC from their self-service kiosk. [/li][li]Using an ATM rather than visiting a bank teller.[/li][li]Purchasing music via iTunes rather than visiting a record store.[/li][li]Boarding the CTA using a pass purchased from a vending machine.[/li][li]Buying a book from Amazon.[/li][/ul]
I claim nothing of the sort.
I’m pointing out that the trend of the past 200 years will continue. That automation and outsourcing will continue. That any new businesses will employ as little human labor as possible. Do you disagree with those points?
Existing businesses and industries are trying to replace human labor, as competitive pressure requires them to. If Home Depot converts half their checkout lanes to self-service, Lowes will as well. Currently, they are mediocre and based solely on weight and UPC. But milli-penny RFID tags will dramatically increase their utility and reliability and drastically reduce shoplifting. At some point, probably within a decade, they will have completely replaced all their staffed checkout lanes with self-service ones. All those people staffing checkout lanes will be fired.
Again, it’s not a reversal. You can try to paint it as one if it makes you feel better, but it’s been a trend everywhere, in every field - more work, less workers. And if you have to employ people, do it in another country.
Don’t bother. Just try to disprove it. Show me recently invented products produced in the US that employ substantial numbers of people. Show me existing service jobs that have increased, rather than decreased, the total number of employees (discounting jobs like massage therapy that require personal contact).
Oh please, we’re two people discussing a topic on a web discussion forum. Save the dramatics. Neither of us are going to save the economy any time soon.
I’m just trying to get people to think about this. If I’m successful, you’ll look around the world you live in and count just how many fewer people you deal with on a daily basis than you did a decade or two ago. That you’ll look at the products in your home and see where they are made, and think about how they were made. Think about how few man-hours went into each one compared to the products they replaced.
At least I’m in good company (not in the same league by any measure though.)
This seems like a deliberate mischaracterization of my position.
Businesses will continue doing what they have been doing for centuries, which is to sell more products or perform more services at a lower cost than before.
Automation has always become cheaper. People have always become more expensive. I can dig up cites, but there are some things that are so obvious that it would be an insult to your intelligence to point them out.
I’m sorry, but that is the most asinine this said in this thread so far.
Business owners have no reason to create a “robo-commie paradise”, will not create one and will violently resist all efforts to create one. They wish to sell products or perform services at a profit. If it is possible to make their product or perform their service while employing no humans at all, that means they will make a greater profit by eliminating the substantial and constantly growing cost of wages.
In this world, you have money or you starve. There is no business case for enabling you to live the life of Riley.
Again, don’t just claim the trends I see don’t exist, prove it if you can.
We’re not going to solve any major global issues here. We’re just talking. Hopefully I’ve made you think as well. If you care to actually provide any research to try to disprove me, I feel confident that you will find the opposite.
[ul]
[li] automation, mechanization, mechanisation (the act of implementing the control of equipment with advanced technology; usually involving electronic hardware) “automation replaces human workers by machines”[/li][li] automation (the condition of being automatically operated or controlled) “automation increases productivity”[/li][li] automation (equipment used to achieve automatic control or operation) “this factory floor is a showcase for automation and robotic equipment”[/li][/ul]
There’s nothing so clear when searching Google for “definition outsourcing”. The introduction of the Wikipedia entry is a bit limited:
Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company.
For the purposes of this discussion can we agree that we’re specifically talking about third-party companies in a different country?
Personally, I consider “automation” as any action performed by machine, and that a job has been “automated” if it had previously been performed by a human being. For instance, at one point there were no newspaper vending machines. If you wished to purchase a newspaper, you bought one from a newsagent or a paper boy.
Gaffa, when did this disturbing “automation” that you are so worried about begin? Just a few years ago? Or longer than that?
What’s different about NOW compared to before?
Fact is, people have worried about losing their jobs to automation since the days of Ned Ludd. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Player Piano in 1952. You know this. Yet since the end of the great depression, we’ve been at somewhere between 5-10% unemployment for the last 70 years or so. Yet automation has increased steadily since that time. Global trade has increased steadily since that time. Why is 2008 different from 1998 or 1988 or 1978 or 1968 or 1958, that suddenly NOW automation is going to destroy society? Why wasn’t society destroyed in 1958? Why is there such a big difference between automation now and automation then?
And like others have said, if we truly ever do reach a state where automation really does increase unemployment into the 50%+ range I suppose we can look into confiscatory taxation of the robber barons who own the means of production, or nationalization of the robo-factories. The reason we don’t see anyone with any sense advocating any such thing today is that unemployment isn’t in the 50% range but in the 6% range. Somehow there are still lots of jobs that the fat cats still need to pay humans to do.
This is often called offshoring to distinguish it from outsourcing internally. Outsourcing locally improves efficiency without a cost to US jobs. There is no reason for managers of a small high tech company to keep janitors on roll, especially when a lot of the work can be done in half a day. It makes a lot more sense to outsource that to a janitorial company.
As for Reynolds, let me look for a good introduction to his world. Most but not all his books take place in his future vaguely socialistic earth.
I’ve come to realize that this is not a recent trend. It started a while ago. Pretty much at the birth of the human race.
As I said in the original post, all of human history has been about accomplishing more production with less labor. In the past few decades, as the quality and flexibility of automation has increased as more and more jobs are being automated that could not be automated before. The technology of the Net and cheap shipping has also enabled jobs to be outsourced that could not be outsourced before.
Not just worried. People don’t riot because they’re “worried”. People don’t clash with the British Army because they’re “worried”. People don’t risk the death penalty because they’re “worried”. Nope, they do those things because they have actually lost their jobs.
You know, you’d have a lot more credibility if you actually had a cite once in a while. The official unemployment number has been fudged. For instance, it excludes so-called “discouraged workers” who haven’t looked for full-time employment in four weeks. When you figure those folks in, the percentage of people who can work who can’t find full-time work is 12.5%, actually higher than the 10.8% of 1982.
Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers…
November 2008 12.5%
Would it kill you to debate honestly?
As has the population.
First off, please don’t put words in my mouth. Quote where I said “destroy society” or take it back.
But, again as mentioned in the OP, jobs are being automated far more widely than they have even been before, and this breadth of automation will continue. Previous to this, we’ve been able to grow past it.
Amusing clip of a robotic camera going nuts. Pretty much all TV news programs, national and local, have switched to robotic cameras - one person in the control room controls all the cameras, that move to different locations and change zoom and focus to different presets. This is what happens when the system gets stuck.
Relevance to the thread is that this represents several thousand skilled jobs. Not a huge number, but representative of trends.
Alright, so a machine malfunctioned on one occasion, in a way which viewers might have found humorous or just puzzling. So what?
John Henry’s romantic, but the railways would suck if we were still forced to lay track manually. Better to have all that labor spent doing something more useful, something not more efficiently accomplished by other means. You argue that, in the modern analogue, there will be nothing else people can do, but history disagrees, and you lack the evidence to push it aside.
Worst comes to worst, the fat cat robber barons will sit around smirking as their robo-drones make everything easily for them, allowing them to live lives of luxurious pleasure, with no need to hire anyone else. Well, in that case, fine, let them frolic; the rest of humanity will go on doing its own thing, laboring for each other and so on in its separate economy. It’s not like the robot-owners will be able to prevent other people from getting the essential resources to keep going on their own, is it? At least, that would be rather a different problem from the one of automation, per se. The worst the robot-owners could do would be to offer goods and services to the non-robot-owning classes at extremely low prices… but that’s hardly a bad thing at all; it’s actually rather beneficial.
“Full employment” is not the most intuitive term in existence. But your unawareness of is still a perfect summary of your contributions to this thread. It’s a basic concept, a part of the foundation that people need to speak intelligently about labor issues.
To make it short: there are different kinds of unemployment, and not all of them are bad things. 0% unemployment would mean that there’s something seriously wrong, that people were stuck in jobs where they weren’t productive. It’s completely normal and expected for even the healthiest of economies to have an employment rate of up to about 5%, and so that’s the most commonly accepted cutoff for “full employment”. Any more than that, and it’s clear that the economy is not utilizing the work force available to it.
Unemployment heads up during recessions, and then drifts back down after the recession as the economy fixes itself and starts creating new jobs to replace the ones that were previously lost. As anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking at historical unemployment rates already knows, this trend toward full employment after every recession is a constant part of the economy. And we’ve attained full employment despite having more and more people working. The number of people available for labor has consistently gone up thanks to increases in population, immigration, and a consistently higher percentage of women leaving the home.
In other words, there have been more and more people wanting work in our country for the whole of its existence, and in good times, they have always been able to find jobs. If you look at the data, you’ll notice that the same was true even during the late Clinton years, and even the Bush years after we recovered from the dot-com bubble’s bursting. We were either approaching full employment, or we’d already attained it.
I was under the impression that the shift had started before he died. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, at least with respect to Wal-Mart, but I’m perfectly happy to look at the data after Sam’s death. The nineties and the naughties remain perfect counter-examples to what you’ve been claiming. We still achieved full employment, quite clearly after Wal-Mart induced the new wave of offshoring. Jobs were destroyed, yes. But it’s simply undeniable that new jobs were also created. Both of those spurts of job creation existed in tandem and harmony with automation and offshoring. They are not mutually exclusive, and they never have been.
Alright. You are claiming that offshoring and automation will create unemployment, so you’re claiming that one significant and important trend that has existed for our entire history will not continue into the future. The history is clear: healthy economies create jobs, no matter how many new gadgets are used for industrial production, and no matter how many factories are shut down and shipped abroad. You are explicitly claiming a sudden and dramatic reversal of that well established historical trend.
I disagree with some of them, because some of them happen to be factually incorrect.
Automation will continue. That’s very true. But we’ve been dealing with improvements in automation for centuries, literally for hundreds of years, and it’s never before caused unemployment. Instead, it has made us rich beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, and practically everyone has been able to find a job in that time (that is, when the bankers aren’t bending us over).
Offshoring, however, will not continue in the way that you think.
With respect to goods, things are much more complicated than you make out: the dollar had managed to weaken quite a bit earlier this year, and that actually brought some major (though temporary) relief to domestic industrial production. It was a fantastic thing, until the world finally realized what filthy liars our financiers are and sought to buy up the safety of government debt, which bumped the dollar up again. When the current T-bill bubble bursts, the dollar will dip once more, and we’ll again have new factories opening within our borders. Heavily automated factories, yes, but until we have robots that can make and repair robots, we’ll always need some human workers to make sure the system is working, even though we won’t need as many as we did previously.
With respect to services: offshoring goes both ways. Computers do allow international consulting in heretofore unimaginable ways, so that people in India can help with problems in the US. But the reverse is also true. Other countries offshore a lot of services to us. My undergraduate schooling in economics was filled with Americans, but the graduate program at my old university had an absolute majority of foreign students.* I am not exaggerating when I say that over 60% of the other students were from China. This is a specific example, but it can provide a decent general insight into how economies normally function. We trade back and forth with those skills that we do best. Education is one area where America excels, and so other countries offshore their children’s acquisition of knowledge to us.
It’s not necessarily true that companies employ the least number of workers possible. Companies resort to a combination of equipment and labor, and they use the cheapest combination of those two inputs to get their desired output. So sometimes they employ more workers and rely on less equipment.
It is true, though, that American firms have a general tendency to substitute away from labor and toward equipment. So, yes, individual firms will decrease their number of workers if they can make more money that way. But the point that you’re aggressively failing to comprehend is that the behavior of individual firms is not necessarily indicative of the economy as a whole. New firms are born. Industries expand. And so, despite the continual improvement in technology that has characterized the entire industrial era, the overall trend has always been toward more and more jobs.
*I don’t mean to apply that I have a graduate econ degree. I took a few advanced classes, but my grad work was actually in language.
(Mostly) from Merriam-Webster:
Data 1 : factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation 2 : information output by a sensing device or organ that includes both useful and irrelevant or redundant information and must be processed to be meaningful 3 : information in numerical form that can be digitally transmitted or processed 4 : the only antidote to bullshit
Manufacturing took a hit, as you can see. I didn’t see agriculture on that particular data set, but it also would’ve taken a small hit.
Every single other group increased.
No.
I don’t care about newly invented products or shiny infant industries. That’s completely irrelevant. I’ve been attacking specific false claims that you’ve made. You claimed that “in every field - more work, less workers”. You were wrong. The majority of our current industries, the ones that already exist and have existed for a long time, have been expanding their workforces continually even during this horrible age of offshoring and automation. Healthy economies create jobs.
That’s the real trend. Automation and offshoring have never resulted in a net loss of jobs.
This just kills me.
What you’re describing is economics. You’re trying to re-invent a single wheel, and failing spectacularly at it, when there’s an entire established discipline with centuries of history that’s just waiting for you to notice that it’s revved up and ready to drive. You’re right that businesses have never been interested in creating jobs, but that’s an old, old observation. What you haven’t seemed to observe is that they do so anyway, reluctantly but consistently, out of the constant push to other more selfish ends. You don’t even need to listen to professionals about this. Just look at the data: our economy creates more jobs.
You have, in roughly the same way that I’m provoked into thought by a schizophrenic who claims that Napoleon wants to eat his pancreas. “Wow”, I think. “What a nutty belief.”
And I say this sharing at least a little of your frustration about the “usual suspects”. There are posters here who know their econ, some more than others, but there are also plenty who justify their kneejerk ideology with empty maxims about “markets” that they only superficially understand. That can be annoying. But equally problematic are those on the other side of the political spectrum who simply ignore basic facts when reality undermines their arguments.
One man controls all production and it costs him nothing to turn out an item. He pays no workers, has no material costs and his machines never break down. Who will have the means to purchase his goods? If there is no work to be done then there is no value exchanged (time for money/money for product).
Ah, a Bizzaro World, Alice-in-Wonderland “When I use a word, it means precisely what I want it to mean” definition of “full” that is unlike the use of the word “full” in any other context. Probably defined by the same people who say there is 6.8% unemployment when, if you press them, they’ll admit that the rate is actually 12.5% once you count the “discouraged”.
“What we can’t afford is to have a jobless recovery like we had the last two times. My fear is not a depression, my fear is we end up with a weak recovery we really can’t afford.”
The difference is that jobs are being automated that have never been automated before. This is the thing you seem to be deliberately ignoring. Selling real estate required human to human contact, now you can shop for houses on-line. Buying an airline ticket before the web required a call or visit to a travel agent. Voice response systems have replaced huge numbers of telephone operator positions.
You’re getting a little bit closer. Already, many complex electronic systems have self-diagnostic functions. Computing power continues to obey Moore’s Law, doubling in speed every 18 months. It will become economical to add self-diagnostic abilities to even the least expensive systems. The limiting factor in robotic repair has been vision systems that would allow general purpose manipulation of physical objects. Read the links in the OP about the DARPA Grand Challenge to see just how far general purpose, real-world vision has come in a few short years. There are few environments more challenging to a robotic system than a chaotic, crowded highway filled with human drivers. Compared to that, how hard is repairing another robot in a spotlessly clean entirely robotic factory?
Agreed, we have good schools. They have provided a way into the middle and upper class. Except, if the poor and middle class cannot afford to send their children to those schools because they don’t have decent jobs, there is no way up.
But here’s the thing you don’t seem to grasp…people are a constant and usually increasing expense. Automation is a one-time and constantly decreasing expense.
You keep weaseling around offering any examples. What jobs are employing more people when automation is available?
Thank you for admitting that.
Which, of course, is an aggregation of all those individual firms.
Yes, new firms are born. And what you’re aggressively failing to comprehend is that those new firms are going to create as few jobs as possible. It would be a gross violation of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do otherwise.
But just above, you were crediting “new firms” and “industry expansion” as the source of new jobs. A little consistency, please.
The problem with the BLS statistics is that they don’t rank jobs by quality. If they have a statistic that says the number of service sector jobs increased, they are going to report only the raw quantity, not whether or not those are full-time jobs. Their own statistics admit that one worker in five is working less than 40 hours a week. The link I have uses data from their 2001 survey, but I don’t believe it’s gotten better since then.
Could you please stop pulling these sort of things out of your ass? Please?
Show me some data where the definition of “jobs” is filtered to include only 40 hours a week. Because otherwise we’re talking about people who may have to work several jobs to replace the income of a single job.
Thanks.
When you don’t have a solid argument, go for the ad homin.
From my point of view, you’re the person ignoring reality when it contradicts what you’ve learned in school. I have to wonder what field you work in where you have so little contact with the real world, if you know anybody who works more than one part-time job, if you know anyone who sleeps on a relative’s couch, or anyone who has ever been evicted.
By the way, are you connected in any way to Kendell-Jackson wines?
We’re talking about capitalism, right? This is the system that was perfectly ok with kidnapping human beings from one country and forcing them to work for free until death in another country, right?
Unlike some of the posters in this thread, I don’t expect rational or ethical behavior from business owners or the market as a whole. Most business owners are perfectly happy to let that be someone else’s problem. For instance, most of them want an educated workforce. Rationally, they would make sure they paid their workers enough so they could send their children to college. How many do?
There is nothing intrinsic to capitalism in the endorsement of kidnapping and slavery. It’s not an issue that’s on a capitalism/non-capitalism axis. It’s entirely orthogonal… Even the most ardent free market libertarians are against violent coercion. This is a ridiculous attack.
Because, prior to robotic camera systems there would have been three human camera operators in that studio. Less jobs in every TV studio, every station and network in every city in the world. The systems aren’t cheap, but they are less than one camera operator’s salary and benefits for a year or two.
You’re invited to play. Same challenge as RickJay:
Name some new product categories invented in the last five years that are not created with with automation or outsourcing. Name some that are employing significant amounts of labor. Not prognostication, just find some new, sizable industry that is currently employing large numbers of employees.
This is the Great Debates. You can’t just say “you’re wrong”, you have to prove it. (Well, you can, but you’ll look like a dick)
Slavery was, from the point of view of the slave-owner, a perfect capitalist system. Buy a person once, then as long as you feed them and keep them healthy and from escaping, and you have their labor for free, for life.
I’m not saying you can’t make money through kidnapping and slavery… for that matter, you can make money through robbery and murder. Every crime is something which gets someone something they want. What I’m saying is that it’s not intrinsic to capitalism that these particular methods of making money, or otherwise getting things one wants, be condoned. It’s simply not. Capitalism isn’t the same thing as anarchy. Capitalism is compatible with the existence of prohibitions on violence. Every capitalist society that has ever existed has supported prohibitions on violence, if not always the same ones…
Should I be feeling silly having to make this defense?
Sure, but for hundreds of years in the US, slavery was legal and was the foundation of the principal business where it was legal to do so:
According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal.
I’m not denying what you say, or that capitalism is incompatible with the existence of prohibitions on violence. Just that capitalism was equally happy with slavery. It was equally comfortable with other “lite” forms of slavery like indentured servitude, sharecropping, the “company store”, etc.
We can’t count a 0% unemployment rate as “full” because it doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing, even in the very best of times, so full employment is defined in a different way. This might be a bit hard for lay readers to understand, but it’s easier to write “full employment” than “an unemployment rate that’s not quite full in the literal sense but is still as full as we can reasonably hope for, as it’s pretty much limited only to frictional unemployment, which isn’t such a bad thing to have”. Professional jargon in any given field is often confusing because it needs to denote a lot of information in a relatively short amount of space.
You’re right, though, that there are several potential measures of “unemployment”, and responsible economists do make a note of it when alternate measures are creeping up. But in that case, you should be consistent in the same use of the unemployment rate. You can’t change measures of unemployment arbitrarily, or you’ll overstate the loss of jobs.
But beyond the unconscionable slipperiness of comparing two different measures, there’s still good reason most times to stick with the standard figures. There’s no justification to include people in the labor force who aren’t interested in working. And if you’re not looking for a job, your actions would seem to belie your claim that you want a job. People who want jobs tend to look for them, and in good times, there are jobs available (even if they aren’t all good jobs). Still, those discouraged workers did technically claim they wanted a job, even if they’re not doing anything about it, and this is why the discouraged worker stats exist. It’s why you know about them. The BLS keeps track of these numbers, and when they start creeping up, it’s definitely worth acknowledging that.
This is another piece of economic jargon that you don’t understand. You’re simply accepting it blindly because you think it’s saying something it isn’t.
Personally, I would also characterize the last two recoveries as “jobless”, but that doesn’t mean that no jobs were made. I’ve already demonstrated that jobs were made. Here’s more proof. But let’s remember the timeframe for the last two recessions: in GDP terms, those downturns lasted a very short time, less than a year, and yet it took a relatively long time for the economy to reach full employment again. This means that job creation was slower than we’d like, not nonexistent, which is what you’ve been trying to argue. The recovery was “jobless” in the sense that unemployment lagged behind other macroeconomic indicators, not in the sense that no jobs were created.
If you want to complain about the relative languor with which our economy created jobs after the last two recessions, I will be happy to join you. The noted liberal economist and recent Nobel (Memorial) Prize winner Paul Krugman would do the same. He’s made a point of noting the shortcomings of official recession indicators, because the recession isn’t really over for people until the economy finally gets off its ass and makes jobs again.
Still, this did happen. We again reached full employment despite an ever increasing labor force, just as we’d always done before.
True. This is a very real problem.
I will be happy to join you in trying to figuring out the causes and potential solutions to this very real problem. This issue interests me a great deal, because it actually exists.
Your logical illiteracy is not a sign of inconsistency on my part.
1a) Sometimes firms go bankrupt and are liquidated. This eliminates jobs.
1b) Individual firms will fire workers if that will improve profits. This is entirely true. However:
2a) Individual firms will hire workers if they need a branch in a new city. This is industry expansion.
2b) New firms will hire new workers when they come into being. This is industry expansion. When they expand to new sites (see point 2a) they will continue hiring new workers.
The second set of forces outweighs the first set in almost every industry. It is not a contradiction to note that the net effect is consistently positive despite the fact the firms fire workers when it’s good for the bottom line. In the real world, there is both addition and subtraction. Just because I note that subtraction exists does not mean I’m no longer capable of addition.
The net effect includes both ups and downs. That’s what “net” means. I’m not running around catching butterflies here.
The BLS does rate quality, although the numbers are a touch harder to gather quickly. They measure both real earnings and hours worked, and it can sometimes take some jiggery-pokery to spit out useful information from that. But once that’s done, it’s easy to realize that real wages are stagnant (meaning that people aren’t getting paid more this year than they were last year after adjusting for inflation), and that gives us a very good indicator of job quality. The results aren’t good news. Good jobs pay better, and yet people aren’t receiving better-paying jobs. This is another very real problem.
Not unemployment, mind you. The quality of jobs. The jobs did exist, as I’ve shown. But the people on the bottom didn’t get better jobs. They were stuck in a rut.
I’ve already cited that the net effect was more jobs. Look at the total job numbers. Look at them. They’re listed using Arabic numerals. The numbers go up, up, up. At the same time, it’s true that real wages did not go up, up, up. They averaged out pretty much the same, and even a bit lower for some people. This isn’t some hidden fact. It’s even been reported in major media outlets.
I can explain the terminology from the chart if it’s not clear, but I’m not going to pretend that our economy lost jobs when that’s not true. The data is incontrovertible: automation and offshoring have never resulted in a net loss of jobs. The problem is compensation. The problem is that the types of jobs that are being created are no better than the jobs that were lost.
That wasn’t an ad hominem, at least not in the classical sense. I wasn’t appealing to emotion, and I wasn’t bringing your character into this discussion. I did call your belief nutty, yes, but only because your belief is nutty enough, I could put a shell around it and give it to a squirrel, and he’d be sure to store it for the winter.
This is an ad hominem.
It takes a really special sort of person to complain about something, and then proceed to engage thirty seconds later in the very activity they’d complained about. What a priceless piece of hypocrisy.
Oh, for crying out loud. You keep wanting to compare apples to oranges. If you want to toss the underemployed and discouraged into the unemployment figure, you’d have to do it every time if you want a good comparison of how unemployment has trended over time.
Let’s say we agree that your 12.5% figure is more accurate. Even you must see that you can’t compare that 12.5% figure for comprehensive unemployment to the 10% conventional unemployment of the 80s, you’d have to compare today’s comprehensive unemployment to comprehensive unemployment in the past.
Even if the conventional unemployment rate isn’t a good measure by your lights, at least you can see that it allows us to compare the past to the present. But if we define unemployment differently we have to use that different definition every time if we want a meaningful comparison, right?
And if you do that, what sort of trend would you see? Would we see the conventional unemployment rate remaining steady over the last centruy, yet your comprehensive unemployment rate skyrocketing? Since change in the conventional unemployment rate don’t reveal any shocking trends, why do you think if we tracked the comprehensive rate we’d be frightened?
