Lonestar wrote:Some of us were liberal arts majors.
What the fuck are you talking about? Use very small, Wikipedia style "Simple English" words.
U3 sounds like a radioactive isotope used in nukes *1960s graphs*
I is a liberal arts and I completely understand what he's saying. So here it is in smaller simpler words so those of you who weren't required to take math courses in your Lib Arts programs can follow along.
U3 is the the headline unemployment number, this is the one that's reported on CNN, MSNBC and all the other news outlets during the first week of each month. U1, U2, U4, U5, and U6 are alternate measures of unemployment found on
Table A-15 of the BLS unemployment report, they basically take broader or narrower slices of the unemployment pie as compared to the U3 headline number.
What Surly-pooh has done is run a bunch of math to show that the other numbers move proportionally with U3 and do so with a fairly good fit over short to medium timespans, so if you know U3 you can plug it into the formula and come up with the rest of them. This lets you compare recent recessions to past recessions to see how bad things really were.
Surlethe wrote:Okay, so the moral of the story? We can naively backward-compare previous recessions with this one as long as we don't take the numbers as too precise, to allow for the structural change (which we don't know). For example:
Peak of 1982 recession (Dec 1982):
Naively would be right, because it assumes that the definitions for unemployment and the methodology used to calculate those numbers have remained constant. They have not.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
Excerpts:
The story starts after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when high jobless numbers marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac and the new administration appointed a committee to weigh changes. The result, implemented a few years later, was that out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs—even if this was because none could be found—were labeled “discouraged workers” and excluded from the ranks of the unemployed, where many, if not most, of them had been previously classified.
Also, on the unemployment front, as Austan Goolsbee pointed out in his New York Times op-ed, the Reagan Administration further trimmed the number by reclassifying members of the military as “employed” instead of outside the labor force.
The Clintonites also extended the Pollyanna Creep of the nation’s employment figures. Although expunged from the ranks of the unemployed, discouraged workers had nevertheless been counted in the larger workforce. But in 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the workforce to include only that small percentage of the discouraged who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged—some 4 million U.S. adults—fell out of the main monthly tally. Some now call them the “hidden unemployed.” For its last four years, the Clinton Administration also thinned the monthly household economic sampling by one sixth, from 60,000 to 50,000, and a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities; the reduced sample (and a new adjustment formula) is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.
