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USA official unemployment rate: the missing 15.9 million
Source: https://www.marketslant.com/article/next-crisis-not-our-lifetimes-yellen-62717
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
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—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
About 12.1 million Americans who are eligible for employment are not employed. This represent [sic] a percentage of about 8 percent. ( https://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_Americans_are_employable )
That means that the unemployment rate is at least 8% and not the 3.9% that is touted. Lies are everywhere, it seems.
Correct. The 3.9% (U3) is percentage of workforce looking for employment. U6 gives the unemployment and it is currently listed as 7.5% or about 12 million people assuming a 157 million workforce.
I’min a small US town with homeless people suddenly living on the common. A new law was written last night to evict them. Our mayor believes the lower estimate and one city councilor patiently explained statistics lie when I shoed him the graph of wealth concentration from this site. He said the poor in the US have a lot more even though wealth concentration is so high.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Re: shadowstats. Maybe they know what they are talking about with respect to unemployment but I still have a grudge against them for misleading people about inflation. Stuff the poorest in society buy hasn’t gone up at all, but we have had significant inflation because inflation includes rent. Shadowstats likes to compute an inflation number that includes not just the “rent equivalent” price of homes, but the actual price of homes itself.
So, why does this matter? Increase in the price of goods comes from the bottom 90% of society having “too much” money compared with our economic ability to make stuff. House prices go up when the top 1% has “too much” money. Saying that house price increases and milk increases are the same thing is completely ludicrous, which anybody can verify by going to a grocery store and then looking at Zillow. Shadowstats is mad at the official numbers (I kid you not!) because we didn’t continue to use the “Housing price increases are inflation” method of calculating inflation.
The assertion:
“So, why does this matter? Increase in the price of goods comes from the bottom 90% of society having “too much” money compared with our economic ability to make stuff.”
Justify with empirical evidence. This claim is based on false premises as to the origins of inflation.
“Justify with empirical evidence. This claim is based on false premises as to the origins of inflation.”
Which premises are you claiming are false? I am only assuming that the price of goods is determined by supply and demand for the goods. Perhaps you have a theory other than supply and demand that would cause the price of goods to go up?
I have no explanation for prices to rise other than vendors will charge as high a price as they can.
However, their is a reason for prices to fall other than simple supply and demand. Technical progress increases productivity. Goods are produced with less effort. Wages can rise and prices can still be reduced. Higher wages provide the demand by which economies grow.
I will assert that higher wages for the lower paid are beneficial for everyone.
Jeff. Inflation can come from business owners raising the level of profit taking.
The government’s figure for “unemployed” (U3) corresponds more or less to those “between jobs” but fairly sure of finding one.
As for the genuinely unemployed, they are called U6 or ignored completely – the latter category being a very large one. In all, the correct unemployment figure is about 20%.
Of course, it is all too easy for the wealthy and securely employed to claim that anyone unable to finds work is lazy, “workshy”, or whatever. But the fact is that there are fewer and fewer decent jobs that pay enough for someone to live on (even modestly).
Its a serious problem that we cannot trust government statistics. The shadowstats site above I looked at in the past and it provided some great information on the lack of quality especially for the CPI. Even Fed BOG member Laurence Meyer wrote about how he did not trust government statistics. I think the conventional narrative for the participation metric is that baby boomers are taking early retirement or impacting the numbers in strange ways, but I believe that is suspicious given the correlation with the recession and generally weak recovery in concert with globalization.
Oh yes! I believe I am in that category. I’ve been looking for work off and on since my younger daughter was in middle school. She graduated high school in 2015. I’ll be 60 yrs old in September. I’m well educated, a college graduate with a B.A. in English, have a variety of skills I’ve kept up through volunteer work. Out of all the resumes and applications I’ve submitted over the years, I’ve had maybe 3 interviews. None of those positions paid over $13/hour and were not what I’d call “career track.” Never was offered a job. I wonder sometimes if it is age discrimination? And how many others “out there” are like me? I’m willing to be trained!
In the UK these unemployed are referred to as “economically inactive” but numerous studies have shown they have sought work or are seeking work but they are not formally registered as unemployed. In some cases, it is simply that there is no point in registering because they can’t face the process or they are not entitled to receiving benefits (unemployment pay is currently £73.10 a week).
Please see my comment just posted a few minutes ago.
Mathematical and statistical manipulations are not new phenomena. Neither is warmongering, violence and cruelty. What is unprecedented is the extremism with which they are taking place within and without borders. The victims are always the destitute, the homeless, the weak and vulnerable. The hierarchies of extreme polarisation flatten whatever and whomever lies in between. I quoted tonight the Financial Times and the Corporate Watch, but countless other accounts exist that would easily explain the state the world has been forcibly placed in. The only amendment I added to the good FT just for the record is that instead of “Shaming the Regulators” we should shame them all, including economists who deliberately conceal the truth, as they have always done. Very few exceptions exist who did not. These are either dead or silenced by the “negotiators” and “regulators” and “mediators” of the next round of arms sales.
I am very pleased to see the various exposes of the manipulation of unemployment statistics. Some months ago I questioned the American stats claim of five precent and added the observation that here in Australia the politicians had halved the official unemployment stats by eliminating all those on various retraining schemes and those who. only worked one hour per week. The response to that post was a polite explanation of why I was wrong. Surely this shows a need fore some critical realism an the fearless honesty of Helen Sakho above Ted
Thank you for your compliment dear Ted. The last time I was in Australia, I genuinely did not know who to feel sorry for the most. The natives who are a showcase for tourists, my poor old Professor Martin Cave talking about the privatisation of water there. I believe I referred colleagues to this in some earlier comment. But, his lecture in available free of charge on you-tube. Or others…
But, most of all, I feel sorry for the millions of destitute Venezuelan women and their children crossing the boarders to any equally destitute neighbouring country who will save them from an almost certain totally undeserved end. It was always the poorest who had mercy on the poorest. Women have a special role to play to protect their children. They always have had. This does not demean the brave men who, throughout human history, stood by them and supported them and still do. On the US itself, please look up the latest sectors of growth released today. I will post the link if necessary. As we all know, the US economy has been technically speaking bankrupt for a long time. No other State or society would have survived this level of indefinite reliance on debt. It does not take a genius to look up a few facts and figures, nor a Braveheart with whom we are all familiar. A little bit of good conscience will go a long way. I assure you I am not as brave as any of these people, only not quite as destitute or desperate. I think the best way forward for us is to set up a new court for the trial of arrogant and self-righteous economists. We have already tried the discipline and found it failing to explain much at all.
Thank you Helen, enjoy your witty-n-wise comments. A breath of fresh air.
Like all economic numbers, unemployment is an invention. It is not a simple case of counting who has a job and who doesn’t, though even that isn’t quite as simple as it seems. What does it mean to be employed? Full-time work, part-time, temporary, seasonal? Is a farmer employed? How about an actor between jobs or a ranch hand in fallow months? And how do you count? Surveys? Who conducts the surveys? How many surveyors would you need to get an accurate measure of every single employed and unemployed person in a population of millions spread across thousands of miles? You couldn’t possibly pay enough people to count everyone on a regular basis—except at an unfeasible cost. The census was one of the least visible pillars of American democracy, but few questioned the considerable expense. Still, it was an expense borne only once a decade. Not until 1902 was a permanent, continuously funded US Census Bureau set up by the federal government. Counting jobs, however, is more intricate than counting bodies; bodies are there or not, but jobs and employment are amorphous, so much so that until the late nineteenth century, no one even thought to bother counting. The invention of unemployment and the efforts to measure it didn’t begin till the creation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the 1920s. And did not bear fruit until the BLS began to expand and collect data. One of the most difficult aspects of The Great Depression is there was no agreement on what was happening and why, or how to measure these events. Classical economists claim there is no such thing as unemployment. Their view: in any society, there are always jobs that need doing by someone at some price. Therefore, supposedly, there is no unemployment; there is only an individual’s choice to work or not to work. An understandable position in 1900. But not today. Most western nations spend billions of dollars to measure and solve unemployment. Therefore, it must exist. But before it was invented and ways to measure it were invented, it did not exist. American conservatives (libertarians particularly) want to change the societal definitions of job and unemployment to conform to those of classical economists. But in today’s economy BLS’ definitions and data come nearer to events on the ground. Classical economists miss the boat entirely.