Tag: Bureau of Labor Statistics

As Harry Frankfurt duly noted (pdf), “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”  Obama’s awkward relationship with the truth consists, in part, of bluffing, bullshitting, and lying his way deeper into our economic morass.

Paul Craig Roberts:

If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October?

Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were “phantom jobs” created by “concurrent seasonal factor adjustments.” In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.

As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics re-organized their website, and it took me an extra four minutes to find out what the unemployment rate was for July.

Why would a re-organization slow down finding that info? Because I do not look for the “headline” or U3 measure of unemployment. I look for the “broad” or U6 measure, which takes into account those “marginally attached” to the labor force as well as those working part time who would rather be working full time.

You might not have ever seen these figures, so I’m going to try to copy the whole table, if it works … lessee, View/PageSource … uh … search for <table … copy, paste … come back to Docudharma … OK, here goes nothing …

Series Id:           LNS13327709
Seasonal Adjusted
Series title:        (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total
                     employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor
                     force plus all marginally attached workers
Labor force status:  Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data:        Percent
Age:                 16 years and over
Percent/rates:       Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus
                     marg attached

Yoopie! It Worked!

Now, this is seasonally adjusted … unadjusted given below (the figures are worse in summer and better at Christmas) …

Yup, even though GDP was up by a “healthy 1.9%” last quarter … broad unemployment rose from 9.1% before the start of 08Q2 to 9.9% at the end of 08Q2 … and July is up to 10.3%.

And, no, you won’t read these figures in the newspaper … newspapers go by the press release, they do not go looking for the alternate measures (maybe if they did, the alternate measures would be even harder to find).