Posted by
Katy Grimes on Saturday, December 03, 2011 3:38:05 PM
Katy Grimes: Anyone who has taken a high school statistics class knows that it’s often just a bag of tricks. As one high school teacher told me many years ago, “Numbers are made to be manipulated.”
With the current election season ramping up, it appears that political consultants and politicians have brushed up on high school statistics, and are using the tactics to make lemonade out of a sour economy.
“Jobless rate drops sharply to 8.6 percent” read headlines all across the country. Only 140,000 jobs were gained in November. Here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
But left out of most of the stories is that the rate dropped because the federal government doesn’t count the 487,000 additional people who stopped looking for work in November – 347,000 more people gave up looking for work, than actually got a job.
The real unemployment rate should be upwards of 11 percent, if only the federal government actually counted people who stopped looking for work, as unemployed, and didn’t count them as “out of the labor force.”
Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times had a different spin: ”But the numbers also touched off the kind of partisan reactions that are likely to shape the debate over the 11 months remaining before the presidential election.”
Partisan reaction? The numbers don’t lie. It takes people to lie about statistics.
Here is great overview of November Jobs Report, from Mike Shedlock at Townhall.com.
- US Payrolls +120,000
- US Unemployment Rate Declined .4 to 8.6 percent
- Civilian labor force fell by 315,000
- Those Not in Labor Force rose by 487,000
- Participation Rate fell .2 percentage points to 64.0%, nearly matching a low last seen in 1984
- Actual number of Employed (by Household Survey) rose by 278,000
- Unemployment fell by 594,000
- Civilian population rose by 172,000
- Average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.3 hours for the second consecutive month.
- The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged down 0.1 hour to 33.6 hours in November.
- Average hourly earnings for all employees in the private sector fell by 2 cents to $23.18
- Government employment decreased by 20,000
- The private sector has only recovered 33 percent of jobs lost in the peak-to-trough period of January 2008 to February 2010.
Shedlock added a couple more statistics:
- In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,726,000. Yet the labor force fell by 67,000.
- In November, those “Not in Labor Force” rose by a whopping 487,000. If you are not in the labor force, you are not counted as unemployed.
“Digging under the surface, the drop in the unemployment rate is nothing but a statistical mirage,” Shedlock wrote. “The official unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is.”
1,793,000 people have stopped looking for work in the U.S. How do you put a spin on that number?
DEC. 3, 2011