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A reminder to all you far left and far right nutjobs that think Joe Biden has done nothing significant in office (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Unemployment is a meaningless statistic due to the weird definition. The more useful statistic is #of jobs divided by total population, which peaked in 1970 and has been declining fairly consistently ever since

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's like claiming you have more bread by cutting the slices thinner.

Unemployment stats are typically useless for other reasons. For example, this is the definition of unemployed.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed

In the Current Population Survey, people are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria:

They were not employed during the survey reference week.
They were available for work during the survey reference week, except for temporary illness.
They made at least one specific, active effort to find a job during the 4-week period ending with the survey reference week (see active job search methods) OR they were temporarily laid off and expecting to be recalled to their job.

Done an hour of DoorDash or whatever? Homeless? Not unemployed. It's very much a meaningless stat and governments around the world game it all the time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Not that I disagree with you, but if you counted all people who didn't have a job then you'd skew the statistic even more by counting voluntary stay at home parents and other people who don't work because they don't need to.

Can you come up with a criteria that accounts for those who don't have a job because the system prevents their access to the market without counting voluntary unemployment?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

but if you counted all people who didn't have a job then you'd skew the statistic even more by counting voluntary stay at home parents and other people who don't work because they don't need to.

Why is this important? Number of people with jobs / number of people is a statistic that obviously shouldn't be 100%, but if it goes up or down that's something we should pay attention to. If we suddenly have a large spike in people who stay at home and don't work, we should at least understand why

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Not one that would be completely accurate.

The best I've seen was a measure of underemployment, in which somebody wants more money/better work, is actively looking, but can't get it. It would have to be through random surveys and extrapolate up, rather than something they can get from the benefits office.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Except this doesn't capture it really, either, since the number of people with multiple jobs has been increasing steadily

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah maybe the statistic I was thinking of was percent of population that has a job