this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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[–] Sterile_Technique 94 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (10 children)

Is unemployment actually down, or is this just like number fudging from folks who work 3 part time jobs?

There's a LOT more homeless people than I remember ever seeing before.

[–] pjwestin 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Unemployment is measured as people who are eligible and looking for work but not employed. People who have left the workforce for reasons other than getting laid off/fired (like quitting to take care of a sick family member) or people who have given up looking for work are not counted, even if they want a job. It's measured by a CPS survey of 60,000 households, and I doubt it includes homeless people (or anyone without a permanent address).

I've heard the opposition party claim the unemployment is under-counted during the Obama, Trump, and Biden years by excluding job seekers who have given up on finding employment. That's probably true, but if it is it has probably been pretty consistently under-counted for decades by both parties.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

People that give up are no longer "unemployed", which is why they aren't counted. They wouldn't even count in the labor force either, which is the sum of unemployed and employed people.

[–] pjwestin 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Right, and the argument that many Republicans made during the Obama years and many Democrats made during the Trump years is that they should count in the labor force, because they want to be in the labor force but have been disenfranchised. Then there's also the people who are no longer counted because their state has pushed them off Welfare and moved them onto Disability, which has no pathway back to the workforce. It's a very long story involving Welfare reform and a lack of job opportunities, but low unemployment and Welfare rates are greatly impacted by people who want to work but are forced into going on disability.

[–] Sterile_Technique 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I didn't mean to shit on Biden or anything; just seems like we're not quantifying this in a very meaningful way.

It'd be like celebrating that food insecurity is at an all time low! woohoo!! ......because access to affordable food is now so bad that 75% of the people dealing with food insecurity have starved to death since it was last measured.

(numbers pulled from ass for demonstration sake)

[–] pjwestin 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, for sure. My point is just that any under-count has probably been relatively consistent for at least 20 years, so the number is most likely reliably wrong if it's wrong. If the numbers say unemployment is down under Biden, it probably is down under Biden, even if it's not as low as the report says.

[–] [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

[–] Blackmist 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.

[–] HandBreadedTools 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

[–] Blackmist 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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

Homeless doesn't equal unemployed. There are a lot of people who have a job but can't afford housing

[–] chiliedogg 7 points 10 months ago

Housing prices are out of control where I'm at. Prices have tripled in 5 years, and the interest hikes haven't brought them down, so it's gotten even worse.

[–] Aceticon 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm not sure what's the case now, but I keenly remember how Obama "decreased" unemployment by having lots of people being counted as "out of the job market" instead, hence they were not counted for the official unemployment figure.

You can actually see the growth in the latter number correlated with the fall in the former if you look at the graphs with the data from back then.

[–] nbafantest 2 points 10 months ago

There was no guarantee that the American economy fully recovered after Covid. It seems to be assumed by a lot of people, but it is certainly not true.

[–] doingthestuff -5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You're not wrong, and they don't usually qualify for unemployment. Also "border secured" is a joke, the reason they're catching more is because the traffic level is unprecedented. The number I keep hearing is 15 million during his presidency.

[–] Misconduct 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Lots of homeless people work. I thought this was just like common knowledge but I guess not

[–] doingthestuff 2 points 10 months ago

Some yes, some no. I know a lot of homeless people.