November Jobs Report

[Jacob]

Most of the unemployment numbers are seasonally adjusted, and I guess that means they are somehow smoothing the glut of unemployed graduates each may/june so the number doesn't spike, but I don't know the details.

The smoothing also covers seasonal employment I believe - retail workers at Christmas for example.

[DGuller]

I'm not sure the BLS answers it.  The number of new graduates is easy to get ahold of*, but it would be incorrect to say that all graduates (at every level) are part of the labor force, as many of them enroll in further education immediately.  So what, if any, number do they use to add to the labor force every spring?  Hopefully not only employed graduates, considering unemployed graduates who have not been in the labor force while students to remain unattached to it after completing their program.

They do have a "new entrants" listing, but do not further define it or describe how they arrived at about an average of 1,200,000 for each month of 2011.  I'd suspect 2011's total number of graduates not seeking higher education must dwarf that number (hell, I can account for about 4% of that number just with 2011's J.D.s); perhaps that's accounted for when they stop being "new," but I don't know when that is.

*Actually, I couldn't find it.  Granted, I did not try extra-hard, but it should have been very easy to find.

Most of it is done through sampling.  The government doesn't look at the rolls of people graduating college, and make some assumptions about that.

[Zanza]

So if 120,000 found a new job and 315,000 quit and that's a 0.4 percentage point drop it would suggest that just 108 million Americans are employed. That seems very low. If the participation rate is 64% and even if you exclude those below 16 and above 65, the figure of employed Americans should be higher. Am I missing something here?

[Sheilbh]

Mim says 315,000 dropped out.
And in the UK I know it is people on the dole and not on training which they release figures for.

Doesn't necessarily mean dropped out.  I don't know if that's the American equivalent of NEET, it could be people going to education or training or something like that.

[Admiral Yi]

Raz, don't let yourself get pulled in to an argument with Yi and Neil.  Yi's an unrepentant fuck-the-unemployed-they're-all-lazy-black-single-moms-anyway Reaganaut and Neil's Canadian, where the government pays off his mortgage or some shit if he's unemployed.

You have a soul, and they don't.

The only thing that saves this from being just another tired CDM punch line is that this one shows you don't even understand what the argument is about.  Usually you manage to figure at least that part out.

[CountDeMoney]

What, they don't pay off your mortgage in Canada when you lose your job?

[Admiral Yi]

What, they don't pay off your mortgage in Canada when you lose your job?

No, the what is you're trying to fit the round peg of your Jon Stewart punchline into the square hole of a discussion of whether people who are not seeking work should be included in the unemployment statistic.  It's not as bad as responding that Bush looks like a monkey to any argument about Gulf War II, but it's still not in the same time zone.

[CountDeMoney]

I'm going to continue lashing out with sweeping generalizations and wildly inaccurate ad hominems, as that's the only weapon I have for the 30 seconds or so I can only be bothered to spend typing.

[Admiral Yi]

Kay.

[Ed Anger]

I'm going to continue lashing out with sweeping generalizations and wildly inaccurate ad hominems, as that's the only weapon I have for the 30 seconds or so I can only be bothered to spend typing.

[dps]

Fuck the U-3 numbers.

Next turn, you'll go to U-4 and have to roll for elimination if isolated. 

[dps]

So if 120,000 found a new job and 315,000 quit and that's a 0.4 percentage point drop it would suggest that just 108 million Americans are employed. That seems very low. If the participation rate is 64% and even if you exclude those below 16 and above 65, the figure of employed Americans should be higher. Am I missing something here?

The participation rate doesn't exclude those over 65 if I'm reading the data correctly, just those under 16.  And I think you and I must both be missing something, unless there are approximately 80 million Americans under 16--and according to the Census Bureau, there are only about 74 million of us under 18.  Seems like there should be something on the order of 150 million Ameicans employed, so a change of 435,000 should be a 0.29% change, not a 0.4% change.  Maybe there's some rounding errors in our math (by "our math", I mean yours and mine, not the BLS's)--it is "only" a bit more than 1/10 of 1% difference, which doesn't seem like much, but it translates to something on the order of 6 million people.

[DontSayBanana]

It doesn't really matter though, since the jobs being created are minimum-wage service jobs.

Actually, the current measure is always called "unemployment," but it's been "unemployed and underemployed" lately.  People like myself who are stuck with a crappy min-wage service job usually still count toward the percentage.

[dps]

It doesn't really matter though, since the jobs being created are minimum-wage service jobs.

Actually, the current measure is always called "unemployment," but it's been "unemployed and underemployed" lately.  People like myself who are stuck with a crappy min-wage service job usually still count toward the percentage.

Interesting in light of this quote from the FAQs:

Because of the difficulty of developing an objective set of criteria which could be readily used in a monthly household survey, no official government statistics are available on the total number of persons who might be viewed as underemployed. Even if many or most could be identified, it would still be difficult to quantify the loss to the economy of such underemployment.

I have to agree that it would be hard to come up with a good objective definition of "underemployed".  You seem to equate it to having a minimum wage job.  I would tend to equate it more with having a part-time job but wanting a full-time job.  My definition would almost certainly count more people as underemployed than yours, but how you'd determine how many part-time workers actually want full-time might be tricky.  My definition would also not count part-time workers who want more hours but not full-time (for example, a college student who is working for extra spending money but only getting 5-10 hours a week might want to get something more on the lines of 20 hours, but wouldn't want 40 hours).

And of course, there are other possible definitions of underemployed--people working low-pay/low

[DontSayBanana]

I have to agree that it would be hard to come up with a good objective definition of "underemployed".  You seem to equate it to having a minimum wage job.  I would tend to equate it more with having a part-time job but wanting a full-time job.  My definition would almost certainly count more people as underemployed than yours, but how you'd determine how many part-time workers actually want full-time might be tricky.  My definition would also not count part-time workers who want more hours but not full-time (for example, a college student who is working for extra spending money but only getting 5-10 hours a week might want to get something more on the lines of 20 hours, but wouldn't want 40 hours).

And of course, there are other possible definitions of underemployed--people working low-pay/low

Actually, I consider "underemployed" to mean "employed with a combination of hours and pay that nevertheless is inadequate to independently pay for housing, food, clothing, minimal transportation, and health insurance."  So, to my mind, it's more of a Venn diagram, with some overlap in retail from, say, middle management and above.