Unemployment falls below 9%

Bri said:
I'd like to see your graph with ages 16-18 (who should be in high school) and 19-24 (many of whom are in college) removed. As it is, the graph might simply mean that more people are staying in high school and going to college.
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I already gave the link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, feel free to look up whatever age bracket you want.

Also, the unemployment rate is probably more meaningful than the labor participation rate because it doesn't include people who aren't seeking employment, such as those in school, those caring for children full-time, those who are disabled, etc.
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Except for possibly the first category (and I doubt even that), that won't change quickly because of the economy. The downturn didn't suddenly cripple lots of people, or make the birth rate skyrocket. And you left out a group that's excluded from the unemployment statistic: people who want a job, but can't find a job for long enough that they give up trying. It's precisely because of this group you didn't mention that I think the unemployment rate is less meaningful in this context.
 
Ziggurat said:
I already gave the link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, feel free to look up whatever age bracket you want.
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It appears that the labor participation rate for ages 25-54 from 1990 to 2010 went from 83.5 to 82.2 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

-Bri
 
Bri said:
It appears that the labor participation rate for ages 25-54 from 1990 to 2010 went from 83.5 to 82.2 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

-Bri
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Are you using monthly data? Or quarterly data? And since the recovery is supposed to have kicked in during 2011, why stop at 2010? Why start at 1990?

Jan. 2000 the rate was 84.4. January 2012 it's 81.6. It's down more than 1.3 percent, and it's not coming back up yet. It didn't take as big a hit as, say, 20-24 year olds, but then, that's part of my point: young workers are getting hit harder than older workers.
 
KwamiFabu said:
What's remarkable about the BLS data is the dramatic increase in employment (relatively) from early '02 to late '08 ( almost http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet ).
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Unfortunately that link won't work, it depends on cookies you've set in order to display properly. Find the Series ID number, and people can plot it themselves by editing this link:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300036
The last part is the data series number, just substitute your one.
 
Ziggurat said:
I do.



Don't be so sure of that. The labor participation rate remains in the toilet. People know that it's hard to get a job if you're unemployed. And you know who has been, and still is, hurting the most? Younger workers:
.
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Well, let's look at what Ziggurat's chart shows. As far as to the arbitrarily selected 16-54 labor participation rate. From 2000-2004 it looks like it went from ~80% to ~78%, then it remained fairly stable for the next 2-3 years, then in the fall out of the great Bush recession, it began to fall, tailing off in 2011 where Ziggurat's chart ends, so shedding little light on the recent employment data.

Now for the arbitrarily selected 55 and older group. It looks like their participation rate increased from a little over 32% to about 40% between 2000 and 2008, where they also began to suffer from the great Bush recession, but we can't tell what the current situation since the chart ends at 2011.

So, what have we learned here is:
1. The arbitrarily selected "groups" both saw a change in labor participation rates (in the case of the older group it was a change in the change of the labor participation rate) at the beginning of the great Bush recession.

2. Really nothing about the current drop in the unemployment rate,. since the data ends in 2011 (what month in 2011).

What we could learn if we mined posting history:
1. Whether or not the Bush apologists that post here ever gave a flying F about labor participation rates prior to the 2008 election. My hypothesis is the they did not.

Daredelvis
 
daredelvis said:
2. Really nothing about the current drop in the unemployment rate,. since the data ends in 2011 (what month in 2011).
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If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics links I gave, you can find data through January 2012. And it doesn't show an increase. In fact, between Dec. 2011 and Jan 2012, there's an 0.3% drop in the total labor participation rate. In other words, the decrease in the unemployment doesn't reflect an improvement in the employment picture, it represents an increase in the number of discouraged workers. Why were you not able to figure this out?

What we could learn if we mined posting history:
1. Whether or not the Bush apologists that post here ever gave a flying F about labor participation rates prior to the 2008 election. My hypothesis is the they did not.
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Then go do your homework. Your speculative ad hominems are worthless.
 
Ziggurat said:
Are you using monthly data? Or quarterly data? And since the recovery is supposed to have kicked in during 2011, why stop at 2010? Why start at 1990?

Jan. 2000 the rate was 84.4 ...
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One could ask you much the same question. Why do you start with the year 2000? If one is interested in seeing the effect of the recession, then the time frame presented should be 2007-2012.
 
Ziggurat said:
Are you using monthly data? Or quarterly data? And since the recovery is supposed to have kicked in during 2011, why stop at 2010? Why start at 1990?
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It was from here (it was the first page with data I got to when I searched for "labor participation by age").

Jan. 2000 the rate was 84.4. January 2012 it's 81.6. It's down more than 1.3 percent, and it's not coming back up yet. It didn't take as big a hit as, say, 20-24 year olds, but then, that's part of my point: young workers are getting hit harder than older workers.
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The 19-24 year olds went down slightly more, but it was the 16-18 age group that went down a lot, causing the other age groups on your graph to appear to have gone down significantly more than they did. And the high school graduation rate nationwide went up during the same period, which could indicate that more high school kids stayed in school rather than getting jobs.

Your main point seems to have been that the data indicates that a large number of people gave up looking for a job thereby skewing the unemployment data upwards. That might be true in some cases, but the evidence doesn't support the conclusion that the drop in unemployment is only the result of people giving up on searching for jobs.

-Bri
 
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Corsair 115 said:
One could ask you much the same question. Why do you start with the year 2000?
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Because it's closer to the time period covered by my first graph, which people objected to.

If one is interested in seeing the effect of the recession, then the time frame presented should be 2007-2012.
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Sure, and you'll find much the same thing: we've dropped a lot since the recession started, and it hasn't started coming back up. The employment picture hasn't turned around yet.
 
Ziggurat said:
In fact, between Dec. 2011 and Jan 2012, there's an 0.3% drop in the total labor participation rate. In other words, the decrease in the unemployment doesn't reflect an improvement in the employment picture, it represents an increase in the number of discouraged workers. Why were you not able to figure this out?
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If you look at ages 25 - 54 (to exclude high school and college ages), there was an increase of 0.1% during that time.

-Bri
 
Seems to me the options are to either use the same graph/data used to beat Obama over the head when the rates were high or change the rules and dig into the data to try and find something to keep him looking bad.

I find the first option to be the honest approach.
 
BenBurch said:
For those of you unfamiliar with the sort of number manipulation we are discussing here, there is a great book;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
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Statistics you like, such as the OP's stats, are perfectly valid and not to be questioned. Statistics you don't like must be lies. Is that it?

You'll have to do better than that, Ben. You'll need to present an actual argument. Because so far, you don't even have one.
 
DavidJames said:
Seems to me the options are to either use the same graph/data used to beat Obama over the head when the rates were high or change the rules and dig into the data to try and find something to keep him looking bad.

I find the first option to be the honest approach.
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There's nothing honest about ignorance. And that's basically what you're calling for, intentionally or not. You want certain information to be ignored. Not countered, not understood in some context, not interpreted in some other fashion, but simply ignored.
 
Ziggurat said:
Statistics you like, such as the OP's stats, are perfectly valid and not to be questioned. Statistics you don't like must be lies. Is that it?

You'll have to do better than that, Ben. You'll need to present an actual argument. Because so far, you don't even have one.
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There is a chapter in here about having the axes measuring different things at different scales... It's a lie no matter who does it, unless there is expected to be a clear relation respecting that scaling factor, at which time you better also be showing the line predicted by theory.

I don't think that the data represented by CNN Money were manipulated in that way. The only change I would have made to them is to address inflation over the period. The graph shows both ends of the price excursion, and in terms of the index is not at all misleading, but if you applied inflation we still have a bit of growth to go before we have undone the Bush depression. The overall correction to imagine to the chart is a wavy keystone effect, pinching the y axis at slightly different rates through the course of the chart.
 
Ziggurat said:
There's nothing honest about ignorance. And that's basically what you're calling for, intentionally or not. You want certain information to be ignored. Not countered, not understood in some context, not interpreted in some other fashion, but simply ignored.
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I want to compare apples to apples, you want to cherry pick. Kind of embarrassing in a skeptics forum, but to be expected from blind partisans.
 
DavidJames said:
I want to compare apples to apples, you want to cherry pick. Kind of embarrassing in a skeptics forum, but to be expected from blind partisans.
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Cherry pick? No, I don't want to cherry pick. I want to find out the truth. And artificially confining yourself to only one statistic is a piss-poor way of doing that. If you think that the statistics I've presented here are not as useful or important as whatever your preferred statistic is, then go ahead and make the argument for why. If you want to argue for why my interpretation of the statistics I presented isn't correct, then have at it. If you want to introduce some additional statistics of your own, go ahead and do that too. But don't expect me to take you seriously when you're advocating ignorance masquerading as skepticism. You call me a blind partisan, but you're the one trying to close your eyes to more information.
 
Bri said:
If you look at ages 25 - 54 (to exclude high school and college ages), there was an increase of 0.1% during that time.

-Bri
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Why would you ignore workers under 25 - those most likely to be trying to enter the workforce for the first time?
Is it because, like Ziggy said earlier, those workers are having a particularly hard time finding work in Obama's economy?
 
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