This is huge, law school is guaranteed 6 figure debt, plus even upon graduation that doesn't mean you're a lawyer, you then have to pass the bar exam, which a large percentage never do.
There is a glut of law school graduates and no jobs.
Could be other universities are doing this in other areas, could be because the semester usually starts around September. Lawyers are a very small percentage, you need to dig out 368,000 phony hires to boost occupational employment statistics, in a month, nationwide.
368,000 and these figures are seasonally adjusted and those adjustments take into account "school's in". If you look at unseasonally adjusted employment figures they vary wildly and that's because we have things like "schools out" for summer, Christmas hiring, seasonal construction (summer) and so on.
That's a lot of bogus hires to boost employment statistics. Look at the two months of August and September it really looks like the survey reference week caught something funky, such as people quitting their summer jobs and taking a couple of weeks before starting their fall part-time job.
I suspect 20-24 year olds went into part-time work here but the seasonally adjusted series isn't available, so cannot say for sure.
The main point of the post is we see wild swings per age bracket pretty much every month with the CPS and those over the age of 55 wild swings I don't think can be explained by college.
So, cherry picking the 20-24 year old employed wild swing this month doesn't fully explain the jump and why this post went into a host of data points to show that. It's part of it, true and if there is something wrong with the survey timing and new college start dates, that could even screw up the seasonal adjustment algorithm, that's true too.
Not true it's all "20-24 yr. olds" that caused the unemployment rate to drop 0.3 percentage points in a month when payrolls added crapola.
There is a category called "unpaid family workers" which is any person who worked without pay for 15 hours or more per week in a family-owned enterprise operated by someone in their household.
The survey requires someone to have worked during the reference week for "pay or profit".
Unpaid interns are not counted as employed (reference here (pdf). The reference link goes to a 2010 study showing the disturbing trend in teenagers and those under the age of 24 not working.
Now here's one issue they never raise up, how has illegal workers, illegal immigrants impacted stereotypical "youth" jobs? Of course they won't even ask the question of how many illegals are working at those jobs now.
But the trend of "work for free" at professional unpaid internships is a crime! I've seen work descriptions which are really advanced, where someone is supposed to "work for free" as an unpaid intern and that's just exploitation, shouldn't be allowed.
Last I heard there was something called minimum wage in this country, so how these corporations and businesses are getting away with this should be stopped.
You'll have to link up references with the claim colleges are spinning their college students and grad jobs numbers.
There is the reference week which is on the 12th, so if schools pushed up their start dates for classes or something like that, I could see easily that throwing off August and September statistics if there isn't a seasonal adjustment for it, but I haven't dig that deep personally.
That said, why I wrote this in the first place is to show the wide variance in all age brackets which comparing the CPS month to month. Why all of the graphs, every month we see wide swings on many of the CPS components and I'm personally convinced we need to see at least a quarter trend in the CPS to get any sort of real meaning out of some of these figures.
Honestly I full expect the unemployment rate to return to 8.0% in the October figures, we'll see but it wouldn't surprise me.
I know STEM prospects are hyped up because they ignore the foreign guest workers that are counted in the employment stats. Only 8 million jobs total with ~185k in H-1Bs each year alone, each H-1B is good for 6 years, has to be biasing the employment stats to give an illusion there is opportunity for U.S. citizens. The USCIS does not track on how many guest workers are in the country, where they are, where they are working and publish even the top level figures, so we don't know for sure.
I'll check this out, I can certainly run the equations and what a great idea to do!
If you know of someone who has run an AI/analysis algo on U.S. government statistics for manipulation data patterns, (Oh so cool!) can you either write a comment or email us? If the methods are valid, be an awesome cross post or to amplify further.
Neat o, didn't even think about something like this.
Serious issue here, we all know about the complete explosion of internships that often pay nothing in the last few years, especially in the college-age to a few years out of college/grad school. Many other sites deal solely with this issue. Colleges, grad schools do it to boost their employment stats for grads that couldn't get jobs in this economy. Some grad schools and sectors actually keep their grads employed in jobs only for certain periods shortly after graduation so they show up as "employed" during magazine and other surveys to boost their dismal employment numbers and entice more potential students to spend massive amounts of cash on tuition with dismal job prospects. Private businesses and govt. at all levels also do it. So are these "interns" counted as employed? Because psychologically, self-reporting, of course someone putting in 10-50 hours for anyone is going to feel that of course they are employed and will answer as such during a survey, it's going on their resume, they are putting in the hours and work but just aren't getting paid. So are their bosses, even though they pay no salary. Thus, does this explosion of internships in recent years also cover up a massive loss of paying jobs while showing up as "jobs" that don't pay anything and actually cause the govt. and other businesses and citizens to cover the loss in taxes through free labor? This would again argue strongly for only counting payrolls, salaries, and not relying on self-reporting.
Intern: Of course I'm employed, I'm doing the same work someone else is doing, although I'm not paid for it.
Boss: Sure, he's an intern, does work, but I don't pay him, is he an employee? No. Can I give him orders that he has to follow? Yes.
BLS conclusion: Part-time or full-time "employment" for massive numbers of 20-24 year olds even though not paid.
Again, this site is all economics and I'm not protecting anyone, just analyzing the monthly BLS report as I do every month, point out the problems with the employment report and overview, analyze the results. If one notices, we are a huge provider of economic eye candy. (Thanks FRED!)
Being accurate and objective precludes spinning numbers for a political agenda. Our number one rule around here is no economic fiction.
This ain't a butter churn for any politician or party, we're all about the numbers although we write about policy, legislation and Congressional hearings related to the economy often.
We do believe in Populist rants, emotion and outrage, also sarcasm and gallows humor, but the facts, statistics must be accurate and cited.
One of our jobs, which I hope we succeed at, is to bridge from advanced statistical methods, data, concepts to what they mean, are those numbers to be trusted, and what are the implications. Our job is to translate numbers into meaning.
But there seems to be a pattern where when people either don't have the background or simply go "brain dead" when they see a number, to instead throw out wild hairs. We're doing our best to get that part of the brain which digests numbers to wake up out of it's coma and see what we see.
So, in other words, when one has a wild ride statistical report, it's better to figure out why, from the numbers, than run around accusing people of being in violation of scientific methods and objectivity.
There are (sometimes) ways of telling if the numbers are manipulated. Here is a good example of a country doing that (on "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre):
I never supported Dean. I'm not a Deaniac, or a Kossack and never was a Dean supporter. I never was on the "Edwards site" in 2004.
Additionally, offshore outsourcing is one of the first topics I started writing about, along with STEM labor issues. My motivation to start piping up was the outrageous spin and repression of statistics, facts on what was going on with the U.S. labor force, in particular STEM but also heavily manufacturing.
On this site, on the left column, you will see a host of others whose issue is manufacturing and I made a point to cover trade, offshore outsourcing, labor arbitrage.
This site is nonpartisan and is "all things economic and labor" only site.
I never would say manufacturing does not count or anything of the sort. We've written many articles on the importance of U.S. manufacturing. Additionally manufacturing spans advanced R&D STEM, not the other way around and if one wants to have an advanced R&D nation, they must have a strong manufacturing sector.
This site is nonpartisan. I've never supported Obama and that is from the primaries and warned his economic advisers were all for more offshore outsourcing, more foreign guest workers and more bad trade deals. I have written many posts showing the latest in lobbyist written and demanded policy as you describe, same as I do with GOP agendas. Both parties enable offshore outsourcing, more bad trade treaties, more foreign guest workers and other policies which are destroying the U.S. labor force, middle class.
You are either mistaken or confusing me with someone else. The golden rule of this site is no economic fiction, fact, statistics must be referenced, and not spun.
Normally we don't allow spam, attack comments and such, but this one has so much specifics and was clearly wrong I thought I would respond.
I think you're a little CT here. Read "under the hood" but there is also a time window on the survey which is only worked "one week out of the month" in so many words. There is a reference week, which always contains the 12th of the month which is counted.
This is just one reason why on a month to month basis, CPS comparisons have a lot of statistical noise in them.
I wrote a little opinion on the survey itself and think the Census should pay people for their responses but "audited" for accuracy. That would give people more incentive to be honest, while the BLS throws out outliers and accounts for this statistical speaking, I think the sample size is also just too damn small.
But in terms of some Dem operative getting to the survey respondents, very CT.
I remember you, Robert Oak, I was an Edwards' supporter & you were part of the deranged elitist Deaniac horde, who showed up at the Edwards site after Dean embarassed himself, and started demanding Edwards kowtow to get your vote. After reading some of your articles back then, I called you on your indifference to the outsourcing of blue collar jobs, and stated that your indifference would lead to rationalizing tech jobs... you then went on to justify how unimportant blue collar, manufacturing jobs and workers were in the grand scheme of things. Just wanted to know how you feel about Obama not only outsourcing, and making us pay for it, massive amounts of jobs and how Obama increased visas from 65K per year, to 160,000 per month. How is your deranged leftist ideology working for you, Robert?
The only way we can find if the Survey was manipulated, is to go through all the survey calls, find out how the "random" people were identified, were the responses recorded correctly.
Looking at the numbers and stats from fake surveys will show the anomalies, which you have correctly identified, but will not prove that we are looking at fake data.
Check out the other post some differences between payrolls and household, if you're a graph-o-rama person such as I. There I charted out the adjusted CPS series and did a couple of minor calculations with it. Beyond the charts the BLS provides, that's unique.
On the civilian to employment population, I might be doing some original charting by age bracket and this is in response to Krugman's fudge, which I don't find valid but I know why he did it, the real series he needs isn't available and it has it's merits, but is bugging me due to his fudge.
So, I'm going to try to get the right ones, to make charts with, we'll see.
For now, in spite of this month, it's not like the job crisis isn't horrific, serially, 7.8% by itself is God awful for America's labor market, characteristics.
Great charting, Robert. I appreciate it. I especially like the forced part timers as % of employed. I'll be watching that closely from now on since it seems to be a recession indicator.
Re: the conspiracy theory. We all know that job data is noisy and that it takes several months to show a trend.
In the meantime, the civilian employment-population ratio has barely budged since the crash. I trust that metric far more than U-3.
the LPR ticked up due to the increase in the size of the labor force w.r.t. population. CLF increased 418 thousand while non-institutional civilian population increased 206 thousand, result an uptick of 0.1 percentage points to 63.6% for a labor participation rate.
Not in the labor force dropped 211 thousand, but I don't find this unusual since last month those not in the labor force grew by over half a million.
I've been ignoring this for now because I need to break it all down by age brackets and I'm pretty convinced this month's statistics went outside the margin of error.
Civilian labor force = employed + unemployed and that mega jump in employed is what is causing the drop in the unemployment rate, i.e. U-3 (it's not U-1, it's U-3 that is the official unemployment rate).
I've already chimed in and why I focused on other statistics this month. I strongly suspect the normal amount of temporary jobs were extended in addition to layoffs and firings returning to pre-recession levels.
For now, I think this is further justified because those unemployed 5 weeks or less declined by 302,000 in a month, which implies we had a sudden job "lengthening" or "extension" of jobs that would be expected.
Hidden, subtle, I know, but that's what the data is leading me to conclude.
U3 is "false" because there is no way in hell we got 873 thousand additional jobs in a month. That's how it's being interpreted anyway. It's actually "additional employed". What I'm pointing to is there were less who lost their job than would be expected and why that is, could be a statistical anomaly, or could be....drum roll, more jobs became permanent, yet also more part-time.
I edited this post to include the unemployed less than 5 weeks to show the implications. Initial unemployment claims was down to 365k levels the last two weeks of September so, this too supports the idea there were less layoffs, firings and loss of temporary jobs.
That's all good if not a statistical monthly outlier.
The labor participation rate climbed a tenth of one percent. If the U1 stats were phony, the Labor Participation rate would be stable or fall. The size of the domestic labor force has increased.
Look, we have said so much against the U1 rate, this administration weakness from a labor/populist/left perspective here. We are no shills for Obama. He has been weak and disappointed us.
After the so-called "Stimulus", Most here have focused economic blogs toward the expansion of the economy by all means. This site is no orthodox left perspective. We need Bob to chime in.
51 of the 100 best Universities in the world are U.S. So what, if the graduates of the world's best schools work in Starbucks. Who cares how much you improve education if education is the dodge of the Corporate elite who need to find an excuse to bring in Visa workers and send jobs to foreign subsidiaries.
So what about the rest who do not go to college? Germany and Switzerland have a 25 percent college grad rate and a workforce participation rate of 78 and 83 percent respectively(U.S 63.7).Yeah, Switzerland is a democracy, not a plutocracy. Germany and Switzerland have job training and placement for high school grads.
So why don't you get out? Trust me, I have applied. We've fought in every war back to Indendcence, but I can't respect a country who has no respect for us.
I learned from experience in the 70's
and that of academic superiors that soft regulation,driven by industry, is regulation controlled by industry. Hard regulation, controlled by an agency with 3 letters works, for a while. That means you do what I had to do in the 80's: work for a prosecutor like Rudy, under a powerful bureau, and an use the rules to bust the worst of the worst. Like Brad Pitt in "Fight Club", you learn you can upset the establishment for a little while, before they regain control.
Try to listen to a guy who was the point of the spear for busting the worst of the worst. Those soldiers are like Patton. They win battles but never rise to the political power. in this system, of an Eisenhower.
The powers shot down Occupy in New York and elsewhere, they behaved just like the 3rd Reich
by destroying books and computers. Local governments are more corrupt than those who existed in the days of Boss Tweed. with greater transfers of wealth from municipalities to MNCs.
The one answer left is the one we must dread the most. The one answer that they cannot co-opt: violent revolutions, worldwide.
That said, we need more people to pipe up, to confront the never ending spin machine.
I'd also say, since we started EP, it does seem numbers are getting their due, but still not enough.
I agree with you and every time I hear "retraining" and "community colleges" when most Americans already have the training and education for jobs and on top of things, the real effective job training is on the job, done by employers, I just want to throw a shoe at whatever screen that insult is originating from.
That bogus crap is actually a lobbyist "talking point" and has been going on since they started labor arbitraging Americans as the "blow off" response so people do not revolt over the fact they are labor arbitraging the U.S. citizen workforce as a whole.
Sure people without a high school diploma and so on need more education and training, but that's only part of the labor force and has nothing to do with PhDs, Masters, Bachelors, 20 years of experience U.S. citizens being thrown under the labor bus.
The thing is there are plenty of people in the population that have excellent educations and read, read, and read some more. So when the media and businesses blame our education system or say Americans are idiots or our public education system everywhere in every state and district is terrible and privatization by Murdoch and charter schools is the answer, we know that's a lie. But we're out here, reading and learning until we die. And not just mainstream news (worthless unless its international sources), but everything under the Sun, blogs, classic literature, foreign affairs, stats, science, history, math, etc. Plenty of understanding of not only their own fields, but a real interest in learning as much as possible about everything else they have an interest in. But looking at who rises to the top in the media and business and politics today, it's damn obvious the people that know what they know and what they don't are purposely shut down and ignored. I don't need to hear Chris Matthews kiss Kennedy ass one more time (Chris, that was the 1960's, move on, find some new ass to kiss) or watch talking points repeated ad nauseum on all the channels and conveniently splitting everything into some arbitrary Democrats vs. Republicans theme on every issue. Out here we know those that ask questions and show an interest are purposely ignored. Your site and other sites have repeatedly shown that people with the skills and education are purposely not hired, purposely blamed for things they have no control over. Quite frankly, they want customers and drones. And if people learn "too much" or show a willingness to ask questions, they aren't drones, so corporate/govt. America doesn't want them. "Overqualified" is the new message to all those that know, learn, or simply want to ask questions. What's the reward for doing what we were told to do or simply being interested citizens? We're screwed over at every turn. Have plenty of knowledge and try to understand things? Great, join the long-term unemployed and sit there with all that knowledge festering as asshats with no morals and less knowledge bring in six-figure or seven-figure salaries. And then be judged by those very same asshats or be derided as "lazy". Sure, we'd like to work in the govt. or fix corporations or work on international issues of concern that affect us all, but we're not allowed past the velvet rope and our voices are drowned out by dolts with golden megaphones.
This is huge, law school is guaranteed 6 figure debt, plus even upon graduation that doesn't mean you're a lawyer, you then have to pass the bar exam, which a large percentage never do.
There is a glut of law school graduates and no jobs.
Could be other universities are doing this in other areas, could be because the semester usually starts around September. Lawyers are a very small percentage, you need to dig out 368,000 phony hires to boost occupational employment statistics, in a month, nationwide.
368,000 and these figures are seasonally adjusted and those adjustments take into account "school's in". If you look at unseasonally adjusted employment figures they vary wildly and that's because we have things like "schools out" for summer, Christmas hiring, seasonal construction (summer) and so on.
That's a lot of bogus hires to boost employment statistics. Look at the two months of August and September it really looks like the survey reference week caught something funky, such as people quitting their summer jobs and taking a couple of weeks before starting their fall part-time job.
I suspect 20-24 year olds went into part-time work here but the seasonally adjusted series isn't available, so cannot say for sure.
The main point of the post is we see wild swings per age bracket pretty much every month with the CPS and those over the age of 55 wild swings I don't think can be explained by college.
So, cherry picking the 20-24 year old employed wild swing this month doesn't fully explain the jump and why this post went into a host of data points to show that. It's part of it, true and if there is something wrong with the survey timing and new college start dates, that could even screw up the seasonal adjustment algorithm, that's true too.
Not true it's all "20-24 yr. olds" that caused the unemployment rate to drop 0.3 percentage points in a month when payrolls added crapola.
Just one quick link, plenty more in different areas, different schools, different geographic areas. This one covers law schools.
http://blogs.findlaw.com/greedy_associates/2012/04/top-10-law-schools-th...
There is a category called "unpaid family workers" which is any person who worked without pay for 15 hours or more per week in a family-owned enterprise operated by someone in their household.
The survey requires someone to have worked during the reference week for "pay or profit".
Unpaid interns are not counted as employed (reference here (pdf). The reference link goes to a 2010 study showing the disturbing trend in teenagers and those under the age of 24 not working.
Now here's one issue they never raise up, how has illegal workers, illegal immigrants impacted stereotypical "youth" jobs? Of course they won't even ask the question of how many illegals are working at those jobs now.
But the trend of "work for free" at professional unpaid internships is a crime! I've seen work descriptions which are really advanced, where someone is supposed to "work for free" as an unpaid intern and that's just exploitation, shouldn't be allowed.
Last I heard there was something called minimum wage in this country, so how these corporations and businesses are getting away with this should be stopped.
You'll have to link up references with the claim colleges are spinning their college students and grad jobs numbers.
There is the reference week which is on the 12th, so if schools pushed up their start dates for classes or something like that, I could see easily that throwing off August and September statistics if there isn't a seasonal adjustment for it, but I haven't dig that deep personally.
That said, why I wrote this in the first place is to show the wide variance in all age brackets which comparing the CPS month to month. Why all of the graphs, every month we see wide swings on many of the CPS components and I'm personally convinced we need to see at least a quarter trend in the CPS to get any sort of real meaning out of some of these figures.
Honestly I full expect the unemployment rate to return to 8.0% in the October figures, we'll see but it wouldn't surprise me.
I know STEM prospects are hyped up because they ignore the foreign guest workers that are counted in the employment stats. Only 8 million jobs total with ~185k in H-1Bs each year alone, each H-1B is good for 6 years, has to be biasing the employment stats to give an illusion there is opportunity for U.S. citizens. The USCIS does not track on how many guest workers are in the country, where they are, where they are working and publish even the top level figures, so we don't know for sure.
I'll check this out, I can certainly run the equations and what a great idea to do!
If you know of someone who has run an AI/analysis algo on U.S. government statistics for manipulation data patterns, (Oh so cool!) can you either write a comment or email us? If the methods are valid, be an awesome cross post or to amplify further.
Neat o, didn't even think about something like this.
Serious issue here, we all know about the complete explosion of internships that often pay nothing in the last few years, especially in the college-age to a few years out of college/grad school. Many other sites deal solely with this issue. Colleges, grad schools do it to boost their employment stats for grads that couldn't get jobs in this economy. Some grad schools and sectors actually keep their grads employed in jobs only for certain periods shortly after graduation so they show up as "employed" during magazine and other surveys to boost their dismal employment numbers and entice more potential students to spend massive amounts of cash on tuition with dismal job prospects. Private businesses and govt. at all levels also do it. So are these "interns" counted as employed? Because psychologically, self-reporting, of course someone putting in 10-50 hours for anyone is going to feel that of course they are employed and will answer as such during a survey, it's going on their resume, they are putting in the hours and work but just aren't getting paid. So are their bosses, even though they pay no salary. Thus, does this explosion of internships in recent years also cover up a massive loss of paying jobs while showing up as "jobs" that don't pay anything and actually cause the govt. and other businesses and citizens to cover the loss in taxes through free labor? This would again argue strongly for only counting payrolls, salaries, and not relying on self-reporting.
Intern: Of course I'm employed, I'm doing the same work someone else is doing, although I'm not paid for it.
Boss: Sure, he's an intern, does work, but I don't pay him, is he an employee? No. Can I give him orders that he has to follow? Yes.
BLS conclusion: Part-time or full-time "employment" for massive numbers of 20-24 year olds even though not paid.
Again, this site is all economics and I'm not protecting anyone, just analyzing the monthly BLS report as I do every month, point out the problems with the employment report and overview, analyze the results. If one notices, we are a huge provider of economic eye candy. (Thanks FRED!)
Being accurate and objective precludes spinning numbers for a political agenda. Our number one rule around here is no economic fiction.
This ain't a butter churn for any politician or party, we're all about the numbers although we write about policy, legislation and Congressional hearings related to the economy often.
We do believe in Populist rants, emotion and outrage, also sarcasm and gallows humor, but the facts, statistics must be accurate and cited.
One of our jobs, which I hope we succeed at, is to bridge from advanced statistical methods, data, concepts to what they mean, are those numbers to be trusted, and what are the implications. Our job is to translate numbers into meaning.
But there seems to be a pattern where when people either don't have the background or simply go "brain dead" when they see a number, to instead throw out wild hairs. We're doing our best to get that part of the brain which digests numbers to wake up out of it's coma and see what we see.
So, in other words, when one has a wild ride statistical report, it's better to figure out why, from the numbers, than run around accusing people of being in violation of scientific methods and objectivity.
There are (sometimes) ways of telling if the numbers are manipulated. Here is a good example of a country doing that (on "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre):
http://www.badscience.net/2011/09/benfords-law-using-stats-to-bust-an-en...
and the Wikipedia link explaining:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
Funny that Greece's statistics should show a marked deviation from the expected distribution. Maybe there are others.
I never supported Dean. I'm not a Deaniac, or a Kossack and never was a Dean supporter. I never was on the "Edwards site" in 2004.
Additionally, offshore outsourcing is one of the first topics I started writing about, along with STEM labor issues. My motivation to start piping up was the outrageous spin and repression of statistics, facts on what was going on with the U.S. labor force, in particular STEM but also heavily manufacturing.
On this site, on the left column, you will see a host of others whose issue is manufacturing and I made a point to cover trade, offshore outsourcing, labor arbitrage.
This site is nonpartisan and is "all things economic and labor" only site.
I never would say manufacturing does not count or anything of the sort. We've written many articles on the importance of U.S. manufacturing. Additionally manufacturing spans advanced R&D STEM, not the other way around and if one wants to have an advanced R&D nation, they must have a strong manufacturing sector.
This site is nonpartisan. I've never supported Obama and that is from the primaries and warned his economic advisers were all for more offshore outsourcing, more foreign guest workers and more bad trade deals. I have written many posts showing the latest in lobbyist written and demanded policy as you describe, same as I do with GOP agendas. Both parties enable offshore outsourcing, more bad trade treaties, more foreign guest workers and other policies which are destroying the U.S. labor force, middle class.
You are either mistaken or confusing me with someone else. The golden rule of this site is no economic fiction, fact, statistics must be referenced, and not spun.
Normally we don't allow spam, attack comments and such, but this one has so much specifics and was clearly wrong I thought I would respond.
I think you're a little CT here. Read "under the hood" but there is also a time window on the survey which is only worked "one week out of the month" in so many words. There is a reference week, which always contains the 12th of the month which is counted.
This is just one reason why on a month to month basis, CPS comparisons have a lot of statistical noise in them.
I wrote a little opinion on the survey itself and think the Census should pay people for their responses but "audited" for accuracy. That would give people more incentive to be honest, while the BLS throws out outliers and accounts for this statistical speaking, I think the sample size is also just too damn small.
But in terms of some Dem operative getting to the survey respondents, very CT.
So, you're concern about unemployment isn't quite what you claim it is, if it comes to protecting the outsourcer in chief, Obama.
I remember you, Robert Oak, I was an Edwards' supporter & you were part of the deranged elitist Deaniac horde, who showed up at the Edwards site after Dean embarassed himself, and started demanding Edwards kowtow to get your vote. After reading some of your articles back then, I called you on your indifference to the outsourcing of blue collar jobs, and stated that your indifference would lead to rationalizing tech jobs... you then went on to justify how unimportant blue collar, manufacturing jobs and workers were in the grand scheme of things. Just wanted to know how you feel about Obama not only outsourcing, and making us pay for it, massive amounts of jobs and how Obama increased visas from 65K per year, to 160,000 per month. How is your deranged leftist ideology working for you, Robert?
The only way we can find if the Survey was manipulated, is to go through all the survey calls, find out how the "random" people were identified, were the responses recorded correctly.
Looking at the numbers and stats from fake surveys will show the anomalies, which you have correctly identified, but will not prove that we are looking at fake data.
Check out the other post some differences between payrolls and household, if you're a graph-o-rama person such as I. There I charted out the adjusted CPS series and did a couple of minor calculations with it. Beyond the charts the BLS provides, that's unique.
On the civilian to employment population, I might be doing some original charting by age bracket and this is in response to Krugman's fudge, which I don't find valid but I know why he did it, the real series he needs isn't available and it has it's merits, but is bugging me due to his fudge.
So, I'm going to try to get the right ones, to make charts with, we'll see.
For now, in spite of this month, it's not like the job crisis isn't horrific, serially, 7.8% by itself is God awful for America's labor market, characteristics.
Great charting, Robert. I appreciate it. I especially like the forced part timers as % of employed. I'll be watching that closely from now on since it seems to be a recession indicator.
Re: the conspiracy theory. We all know that job data is noisy and that it takes several months to show a trend.
In the meantime, the civilian employment-population ratio has barely budged since the crash. I trust that metric far more than U-3.
the LPR ticked up due to the increase in the size of the labor force w.r.t. population. CLF increased 418 thousand while non-institutional civilian population increased 206 thousand, result an uptick of 0.1 percentage points to 63.6% for a labor participation rate.
Not in the labor force dropped 211 thousand, but I don't find this unusual since last month those not in the labor force grew by over half a million.
I've been ignoring this for now because I need to break it all down by age brackets and I'm pretty convinced this month's statistics went outside the margin of error.
Civilian labor force = employed + unemployed and that mega jump in employed is what is causing the drop in the unemployment rate, i.e. U-3 (it's not U-1, it's U-3 that is the official unemployment rate).
I've already chimed in and why I focused on other statistics this month. I strongly suspect the normal amount of temporary jobs were extended in addition to layoffs and firings returning to pre-recession levels.
For now, I think this is further justified because those unemployed 5 weeks or less declined by 302,000 in a month, which implies we had a sudden job "lengthening" or "extension" of jobs that would be expected.
Hidden, subtle, I know, but that's what the data is leading me to conclude.
U3 is "false" because there is no way in hell we got 873 thousand additional jobs in a month. That's how it's being interpreted anyway. It's actually "additional employed". What I'm pointing to is there were less who lost their job than would be expected and why that is, could be a statistical anomaly, or could be....drum roll, more jobs became permanent, yet also more part-time.
I edited this post to include the unemployed less than 5 weeks to show the implications. Initial unemployment claims was down to 365k levels the last two weeks of September so, this too supports the idea there were less layoffs, firings and loss of temporary jobs.
That's all good if not a statistical monthly outlier.
The labor participation rate climbed a tenth of one percent. If the U1 stats were phony, the Labor Participation rate would be stable or fall. The size of the domestic labor force has increased.
Look, we have said so much against the U1 rate, this administration weakness from a labor/populist/left perspective here. We are no shills for Obama. He has been weak and disappointed us.
After the so-called "Stimulus", Most here have focused economic blogs toward the expansion of the economy by all means. This site is no orthodox left perspective. We need Bob to chime in.
51 of the 100 best Universities in the world are U.S. So what, if the graduates of the world's best schools work in Starbucks. Who cares how much you improve education if education is the dodge of the Corporate elite who need to find an excuse to bring in Visa workers and send jobs to foreign subsidiaries.
So what about the rest who do not go to college? Germany and Switzerland have a 25 percent college grad rate and a workforce participation rate of 78 and 83 percent respectively(U.S 63.7).Yeah, Switzerland is a democracy, not a plutocracy. Germany and Switzerland have job training and placement for high school grads.
So why don't you get out? Trust me, I have applied. We've fought in every war back to Indendcence, but I can't respect a country who has no respect for us.
I learned from experience in the 70's
and that of academic superiors that soft regulation,driven by industry, is regulation controlled by industry. Hard regulation, controlled by an agency with 3 letters works, for a while. That means you do what I had to do in the 80's: work for a prosecutor like Rudy, under a powerful bureau, and an use the rules to bust the worst of the worst. Like Brad Pitt in "Fight Club", you learn you can upset the establishment for a little while, before they regain control.
Try to listen to a guy who was the point of the spear for busting the worst of the worst. Those soldiers are like Patton. They win battles but never rise to the political power. in this system, of an Eisenhower.
The powers shot down Occupy in New York and elsewhere, they behaved just like the 3rd Reich
by destroying books and computers. Local governments are more corrupt than those who existed in the days of Boss Tweed. with greater transfers of wealth from municipalities to MNCs.
The one answer left is the one we must dread the most. The one answer that they cannot co-opt: violent revolutions, worldwide.
That said, we need more people to pipe up, to confront the never ending spin machine.
I'd also say, since we started EP, it does seem numbers are getting their due, but still not enough.
I agree with you and every time I hear "retraining" and "community colleges" when most Americans already have the training and education for jobs and on top of things, the real effective job training is on the job, done by employers, I just want to throw a shoe at whatever screen that insult is originating from.
That bogus crap is actually a lobbyist "talking point" and has been going on since they started labor arbitraging Americans as the "blow off" response so people do not revolt over the fact they are labor arbitraging the U.S. citizen workforce as a whole.
Sure people without a high school diploma and so on need more education and training, but that's only part of the labor force and has nothing to do with PhDs, Masters, Bachelors, 20 years of experience U.S. citizens being thrown under the labor bus.
I rant your rant and up the ante. ;)
The thing is there are plenty of people in the population that have excellent educations and read, read, and read some more. So when the media and businesses blame our education system or say Americans are idiots or our public education system everywhere in every state and district is terrible and privatization by Murdoch and charter schools is the answer, we know that's a lie. But we're out here, reading and learning until we die. And not just mainstream news (worthless unless its international sources), but everything under the Sun, blogs, classic literature, foreign affairs, stats, science, history, math, etc. Plenty of understanding of not only their own fields, but a real interest in learning as much as possible about everything else they have an interest in. But looking at who rises to the top in the media and business and politics today, it's damn obvious the people that know what they know and what they don't are purposely shut down and ignored. I don't need to hear Chris Matthews kiss Kennedy ass one more time (Chris, that was the 1960's, move on, find some new ass to kiss) or watch talking points repeated ad nauseum on all the channels and conveniently splitting everything into some arbitrary Democrats vs. Republicans theme on every issue. Out here we know those that ask questions and show an interest are purposely ignored. Your site and other sites have repeatedly shown that people with the skills and education are purposely not hired, purposely blamed for things they have no control over. Quite frankly, they want customers and drones. And if people learn "too much" or show a willingness to ask questions, they aren't drones, so corporate/govt. America doesn't want them. "Overqualified" is the new message to all those that know, learn, or simply want to ask questions. What's the reward for doing what we were told to do or simply being interested citizens? We're screwed over at every turn. Have plenty of knowledge and try to understand things? Great, join the long-term unemployed and sit there with all that knowledge festering as asshats with no morals and less knowledge bring in six-figure or seven-figure salaries. And then be judged by those very same asshats or be derided as "lazy". Sure, we'd like to work in the govt. or fix corporations or work on international issues of concern that affect us all, but we're not allowed past the velvet rope and our voices are drowned out by dolts with golden megaphones.
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