Editorial
More Phony Employment Numbers
Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government's latest jobs and unemployment reports "nonsense numbers."
There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month's jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month's jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November "was after a significant downside revision to October's reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November's seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000."
Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9% to 7.7%. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted.
The 7.7% rate is known as the "headline rate." It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6.
The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4%, about double the headline rate.
The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9%.
In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.
The drop in the November headline rate of unemployment from 7.9 to 7.7 is due to a 20.4% increase in the number of short-term discouraged workers in November. In other words, unemployed people rolled out of the U.3 measure into the U.6 measure.
Similarly, a number of short-term discouraged workers roll out of the U.6 measure into John Williams's measure that includes all of the unemployed. Williams reports that "with the continual rollover, the flow of headline workers continues into the short-term discouraged workers (U.6), and from U.6 into long term discouraged worker status (a ShadowStats.com measure), at what has been an accelerating pace. The aggregate November data show an increasing rate of individuals dropping out of the headline (U.3) labor force." In other words, the headline rate of unemployment can drop even though the unemployed are having a harder time finding jobs.
The U.S. government simply lowers the unemployment rate by not counting all of the unemployed. We owe this innovation to the Clinton administration. In 1994 the Clinton administration redefined "discouraged workers" and limited this group to those who are discouraged for less than one year. Those discouraged for more than one year are no longer considered to be in the labor force and ceased to be counted as unemployed.
If the U.S. government will mislead the public about unemployment, it will also mislead about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, China and 9/11. The government fits its story to its agenda.
A government that wants to cut the social safety net doesn't want you to know that the unemployment rate is 22.9%. A government that wants to cut the social safety net when between one-fifth and one-fourth of the work force is out of work looks hard-hearted, mean-spirited, and foolish. But if the government reports only one-third of the unemployed and presents that rate as falling, then the government can present its cuts as prudent to avoid falling over a "fiscal cliff."
If the "free and democratic" Americans cannot even find out what the unemployment rate is, how do they expect to find out about anything?
This column was originally published at paulcraigroberts.org and is reprinted here with the author's permission. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate and has had many university appointments.
l 
|
You must be a site member to submit suggested edits or post feedback. In addition to submitting edit suggestions and posting feedback, your Free Membership to The Daily Bell gives you access to our Member Zone where you will discover a plethora of other member benefits. Want to learn more? click here |
|||||
|
|
||||
 |
Posted by Agent Pete 8 on 12/13/12 06:41 AM
The irony and fractality of "Needing guidance to show the way" is not lost on the one in the over-drafty shed cunning to/too long lingering linguismic lays.
Interestingly similar gordian knotation noted between the molecule 'one's enterprise', and an AllENP as forecast here and there.
As found elsewhere in the U, rotunda conundra loop processes... Infinitely Entangleable.
 |
Posted by amanfromMars on 12/12/12 08:02 PM
More proof positive below, Agent Pete 8, that intelligence is seriously deficient in current power elite systems of conflict command and politically inept control? [and a hat tip to Abu Aardvark who posted the hyperlink to the information in "Spooks, Incorporated" on 12/12/12 12:51 PM ] ... ... "Two years ago, before the Arab Spring erupted, a Stanford colleague of mine met with Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian strongman said, presciently, that he was not worried about a U.S. invasion. He was worried about Facebook. He should have worried more: in the internet age, small local movements often don't stay small and local for long. In business as well as politics, power has gone asymmetric.
Understanding the changing nature of political risk and how to mitigate it is a growing industry. In large part, this is because the U.S. government has left an intelligence gap. In many countries, intelligence services regularly share information with businesses to give them a competitive advantage in the global arena. But U.S. intelligence agencies do not. Since 9/11, the private sector has been filling the gap. In-house intelligence units are the most pioneering examples, but they have plenty of company. There are now scores of open-source intelligence services, analysis shops, and consulting firms led by former high-level officials with names like Chertoff, Albright, Rice, Hadley, and Gates.
So when you think "convergence," don't just think about drones and spooks. There is a burgeoning convergence of intelligence and business. The CIA may not be getting into corporate espionage, but American companies are getting into intelligence. They're just not talking about it much."
And who believes the CIA may not be getting into corporate espionage whenever global activities are created and run by corporations ... . and non-state actors sharing metadata base intelligence for such much smarter intelligently designed entities?
Step into that field of irregular and unconventional work, Agent Pete 8, not knowing how everything works, and one's enterprise will fail catastrophically, very quickly, as one encounters beings and virtual machinery au fait with the overwhelming power and absolute control afforded to Omniscience. And Omniscience Shared is an Operating System of Unbelievable Stealth and Invisible Strength.
|
Posted by Agent Pete 8 on 12/11/12 08:08 AM
Agreed aMfM, a supervacuuminous presence of leadership and sustainably sycophantable subsequentiae.
Stats Lady declined recently here by my stated unwillingness to sleepwalk into accessorising mass-fraud, manufactured hysteria and misrepresentation of facts to the innocent.
If the inedible pretender government(s) and their seldom nutritious saprophitic corporata are measured, monitored and mood-managed according to a wider dream-pool's view sustained via text-tonic featherweight macro-pressure, there is some safety and much opportunity. When Sapes pull back the drapes they will have a lot to say!
In pre-seeing all the chaos and din, have you yet, have you ever, can you see the clearest path, with the least discord? Have a you seen the chord accord that must be strummed, a new hymn rhythm to humanely hum?
IT shines like a light on a dark dark night, that feeling experienced when 'We Agree', like a new breed of hedonism, to head-on 'ism'.
In a heart or mind, an economy or an ecology divided and conquered, in compartmentalised and coveted corners unlit, the medutainment method to peddle/pan-interact with is both diametrically antithetical to domini's diminutions.
Anno a way.
I know a weigh.
Are some folks here needing IT all pre-packaged and readied for no-brainer adoption as a turnkey solution before they 'invest'?
Or are they measuring unknown risk against the known risks brow-beaten and flaunted daily(bell) here? Perhaps they are afraid to speak up, or be seen angelically 'venturing' forth into green fields of iAgreementation?
|
Posted by amanfromMars on 12/11/12 02:03 AM
Further to the statements posted earlier [Posted by amanfromMars on 12/10/12 11:30 PM]
And that is an intelligence failing in those and/or that [for it can be machines and faulty algorithms which are making decisions for dodgy humans] which can be easily exploited by smarter entities sharing system vulnerabilities and novel opportunities and alternative solutions.
Or would any Daily Bell ringers imagine it to be any else and not a lack of greater and more advanced intelligence in current leading voices/programming?
Please share your views here for consideration. Thanks.
|
Posted by amanfromMars on 12/10/12 11:30 PM
"Government Spending Doesn't Create Jobs" …. Posted by 1776 on 12/10/12 01:04 PM
Of course it does, 1776, whenever it is spent wisely and monies [fiat currencies] are given to competent job creators and new orderly world programmers.
It is the poor choices which governments make in supporting incompetent entities unable to provide what is needed that create all of the world's and capitalism's problems.
