Is there something wrong with getting the accurate picture of unemployment?
There’s nothing wrong per se with the other figure, I just dispute that it’s “more accurate”. The problem I have is the sudden reveal…“You think the unemployment figure is 6.8%…when it’s really 12.5%! Now do you realize that we’re all screwed?”
But the problem is that unemployment didn’t increase from 6.8 to 12.5. That 12.5 figure tells us something, but it doesn’t tell us that unemployment is a much worse problem than we thought. And it certainly doesn’t tell us that we’re much worse off than in the past. If you want to use a more expansive definition of unemployment and include discouraged and underemployed people, then go ahead, but to demonstrate that we’re headed for a crisis you have to demonstrate that we see disturbing trends when we look at the history of the expansive definition.
If you want to show a trend, you have to show a trend using the same definition of unemployment. You can’t just use the regular definition for the data for the past 70 years, and then use the idiosyncratic definition for the data for 2008 and claim that OMG, last year unemployment was 5% and this year it’s 12.5%. I’m not saying it’s unfair to look at trends for oranges, just that you have to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges if you want to show a meaningful trend.
I understand your point. All I want is accuracy in the actual number. I think that is not too much to ask.
WalMart execs have spoken to this issue - they keep their labor costs low - and they kill their competition - so in a small town they become the major employer - everyone shops at WalMart, but because they are all being paid WalMart wages, WalMart’s profitability is down because WalMart can’t sell anything with margin.
They don’t have a solution.
Everyone needs money to move in order for the economy to be robust. That means the rich people are interested in having the poor people spend money - or they don’t make any money themselves. And the rich people recognize that the poor people need jobs to have money to spend.
There are factors right now throwing all this off - globalization being a huge one as companies not only eye cheap labor overseas, but also the rising standard of living and consumerism that goes with that cheap labor having jobs.
There will be - and there has been - equalization going on (not between the poor and rich - in this country that gap is just widening - but between the poor and middle class here and the poor and middle class overseas). That will be painful for a lot of people.
Self-diagnosis btw is not put in to reduce labor costs, but to make diagnosis even possible. In many systems today you can’t figure out what went wrong by looking in at the outside. Diagnostics are designed to go down to a replaceable unit. In inexpensive products, that is the entire thing, so you may just toss and replace the entire product rather than try to repair it.
Actually, the cost of automation is floor space, maintenance, power, and, most importantly, depreciation. In some cases the cost of labor in the Far East to do an assembly job is less than the depreciation for a machine to do the same job. We’d probably have no problem with factory employment in the US if we’d only agree to work for fifty cents an hour.
Wasn’t the issue with the “jobless” recovery not that jobs weren’t being created, but that they were being created at a lower rate than people were being added to the workforce? Population growth naturally causes some level of job growth, to build residences for all the new people, for instance. But if job growth doesn’t keep pace with population growth, net unemployment increases.
I thought that the definition of full employment changed a bit during the bubble, as unemployment went below the existing definition. Isn’t there some assumption about time to find a new job in there? If job searches become more efficient, thanks to the Internet, wouldn’t that reduce the level of unemployment that would correspond to full employment?
One could say “nearly full” or “functionally full” and convey the same information. But saying “full employment” when the amount of unemployment varies seems dishonest.
I went looking for a 3rd party definition of “jobless recovery” and wasn’t able to find a consensus - the wikipedia article was pretty much useless, listing both our definitions. But an AP news report from 2003 seemed to use one a lot closer to mine than yours:
The new study did not shed any light on one of the biggest mysteries currently facing economists — the divergence between the jobs picture being reported by the business payroll data and a separate survey of households.
The monthly payroll data show that since the recession ended in November 2001, the economy has lost another 1.14 million jobs through August of this year. According to the household survey, however, the economy has gained 1.41 million jobs during that same time period.
They are not clear, but I’m pretty sure the “household survey” mentioned is the BLS one.
If the number of new jobs created lags behind the number of old jobs lost, or if the new jobs are not full time jobs, that looks a lot like a net loss to me.
No, I am legitimately curious what you do for a living. Because you seem to have little contact with the real world, or at least the world as it exists for the vast majority of the rest of humanity.
Right now, I’m doing a lot of personal computer support, AV installation, web development, security systems, whatever shows up. Six months ago, I was working on a Homeland Security contract developing systems for monitoring the borders. In the mid-90s I was working for Hallmark Cards, late-90s Forrester Research.
This allows me to work with people at various income levels in a wide range of fields, including a lot of small business owners. But when I was mainly doing 3D animation, I was working for much larger companies, some with sales of more that a billion a year like Helene-Curtiss and Rockwell. So I’ve had wide experience with a pretty decent sampling of US business.
In all that, I have to say, I’ve never encountered anyone with views like yours. So, I’m curious. Not attacking you, just wondering.
Sure. I simplified because the floor space, power air-conditioning, etc. is will be the same or less than a space with humans doing the same job. And those humans have a lot of additional expenses.
Of course doing the assembly job in the Far East in a highly automated factory is the cheapest of all.
Given that it’s near impossible for a human being to support himself or herself in any large US city on minimum wage, I don’t think we’re going to see that anytime soon.
Hooray for you.
My current customer list includes 129 businesses, each of whom I visit at least once per year. Most are small to medium-sized businesses, a few large. The vast majority are manufacturing. That’s just my active list; up until last year I worked with Research In Motion, who hire about 150 people a month or so and currently have 680 job openings at their main campus in Waterloo.
Most of them are doing just dandy, and a lot are desperate for workers. Welders are in terribly short supply; machinists are also in short supply. What’s iknteresting is that even with robotic welders and computerized CNC machines, they just seem to need more welders and machinists. Some places actually have signs on their lawns begging for applicants.
Do I get a prize for my anecdotal evidence?
That’s the point - it sometimes isn’t. Say a person can assemble something in five minutes, while an expensive machine takes five seconds. If the wages are less than 1/60th of the ongoing cost of the machine, people are cheaper and it makes no sense to buy the robot at all. You can hire 60 low cost people. Which is exactly what happens.
That could easily be a factor, and maybe it did characterize the last recession, but it’s not technically necessary. If you want an excellent look at what people are talking about with “jobless recovery”, here’s a fantastic graph that shows unemployment lagging behind the official recession indicators. It’s from Krugman, who is totally worth citing repeatedly because he keeps attention focused on these problems. Yet again, we can see that the economy eventually got around to creating jobs. The problem here is that the recession lasted longer for a lot of people than we might otherwise believe by looking at just GDP stats. Of course, we can’t see wage information here, but that’s just an important reminder that we need to look at many indicators to get a feel for the overall health of the economy.
Notice, too, Krugman complaining about the current “unrecession”, and this back in September. The NBER then proceeded to justify his complaints completely by stating that the recession started one year ago, in December 2007. Which, not coincidentally, fits up pretty much perfectly with the new surge in unemployment. The unrecession was officially dubbed a recession. We can only hope that the next recovery has GDP growth and unemployment improving at the same time, instead of having to wait for benefits of higher GDP to spread to everyone.
Another coincidental point related to this thread: yet another topic covered in that link is different measures of unemployment. Responsible economists don’t just look at the official unemployment rate. They’re happy to discuss other rates, but when they do so, they’re also careful to be consistent. It’s not helpful at all to compare 5% unemployment from the official rate with 10% unemployment from a rate that’s more broadly defined.
There’s definitely talk of lowering the commonly accepted benchmark of full employment. It wouldn’t surprise me if that becomes the consensus in coming years, but right now 5% is still the number that’s tossed around in most discussions that I’ve come across.
So, how you doing on that finding new industries thing? The challenge to identify businesses created within the last five years that employ a significant numbers of new workers?
You still don’t get it, do you? Either that, or you are deliberately avoiding admitting it. There are plenty of robotic welders, but, at this point, they are fixed in place and have a limited range of motion. But when you have a humaniform robot, like an industrial strength ASIMO, that has the range of motion of a human being (or greater) that can get into spaces that a human can fit (or smaller) can costs less than twice or three times the annual wages of a welder, those signs are going to start disappearing.
I doubt there are any welders left at any of the automobile companies welding the cars on the line - they are doing maintenance work or welding prototypes, doing the few jobs that can’t be automated - yet.
Ask any car company executive if they want to rip those robotic welders off the line and replace them with human beings, even if they could get skilled welders to work at minimum wage. Not going to happen, if only because of the massively improved quality of the robotic welds.
Sure. But if the country gets busy enough wages rise. The US corporations are moving from country to country on a constant quest for lower wages. It’s a race to the bottom, and I know there are some countries so destitute that they can compete like that…just not the US.
Knock yourself out - http://www.bls.gov/emp/empfastestind.htm
See above. I was reminding RickJay of the challenge I issued a page or two back, to which he has yet to respond:
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.
Your link has nothing to do with that.
The jobless recovery was definitely in a period of recovery, not recession. (And I got the point from Krugman, who was pushing it all through the time.) The Administration trumpeted job growth figures that sounded good until compared to workforce growth figures. So we need not just some job growth, but job growth at least equal to this.
Completely correct.
And you know, I think I had a brain fart when I said it wasn’t “technically necessary”. If there weren’t at least a little job growth, then GDP wouldn’t start creeping back up. The way to have GDP and unemployment percentage going up at the same time is exactly as you stated. My bad on that one.
This . . . this is beautiful. Permission to use as sig, sire?
I don’t understand. What’s so beautiful about it? No use automating the jobs that have already been automated…
People are dying that had never died before. The end must be near.