In case you've forgotten, we are not alone

I have a really good memory.

And dools, I never said everything was peachy. Just saying that the comparisons to the Depression are irrational hysterical premature.

Also, spnited..."King Ronnie?" Seriously? I have something for you...I think you dropped it a couple posts up:

 

An interesting "piece," but I've got to quibble with Phillips' mention of employment. Not counting "discouraged" workers in unemployment rates isn't some sneaky Washington accounting trick; it's the way every country in the industrialized world counts unemployment. People who aren't making any attempt to stay in the workforce are, by definition, not in the workforce. As for "the 'marginally attached,' a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one," well...they're not exactly the most sympathetic case, are they?

If we're going to count "discouraged" and "marginally attached" workers as unemployed, then why not count homemakers, retirees and schoolchildren?

 

MW -

Not sure whether your quibble with Phillips on the unemployment metrics is correct or incorrect. There seems to be a range of measurement possible - U1, U2, U3, etc. - that includes different criteria. Also not sure that it matters.

What matters here, and what prompted me to post this, is that the most ballyhooed measure of unemployment, the one we use for all our headlines, has been amended over the years to the point of uselessness. It obscures the public perception of the problem. So too with "inflation" and "GDP."

It is a given that people on the left and on the right will look back across the years to compare our current rate of unemployment with that of earlier periods. The most common citation on the right, for example, being the misery of the Carter administration.

Thing is, if we keep changing the yardstick, we have no real idea how this economy looks compared to any other. I'm not arguing for one measurement over another, but rather that we pick one and stick with it.

If we'd been using the same measures all along, how much sooner would we have been able to detect - and deal with - the rottenness at the core of our current economy?

 

ZV,

I agree that the refinement of the statistics increases the difficulty of comparing eras, and I think the argument is a valid one, though I can't follow you all the way to "uselessness."

The statistical refinement seems to me to be a net positive; it enables us more accurately to measure unemployment, by removing from the picture people who don't fit the most accurate measure of the unemployed: Workers who are actively seeking a job but unable to find one. Just because our statistics haven't always been so refined isn't, for me, a compelling argument to keep using less accurate numbers.

It boils down to this: Counting "marginally attached" and "discouraged" workers in the unemployment figures may make it easier to compare this era to previous decades. But it does so only by inflating -- and misrepresenting -- the actual level of unemployment.

That's not, of course, to say that everything's peachy with the economy. I'm not enough of a math guy to make much sense of the CPI or the other bellwethers that Phillips uses, and the tinkering he describes does feel dishonest. But the overall argument -- that the statistics make it harder for us to figure out how bad the economy is -- seems irrelevant.

The economy IS bad (I read my 401k statements like everybody else), but the idea that we're a few ticks in the unemployment rate away from The Grapes of Wrath is alarmist, at best.

 

When I was growing up Western Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember unemployment reaching over 10%.

That was bad, but like another poster said, not everyone was so strung out on credit cards and bad car loans back then.

 

I think we're a lot closer to 1932 than 1982 right now.

 

Honest questions:

How does counting people without jobs still willing to work but who've given up looking - "the discouraged" - and gone on public assistance "inflate" unemployment figures?

I grant that the "underemployed" or "marginally attached" should be cataloged separately.

As to "uselessness," this: how differently would voters and politicians have responded over the last 28 years if we had used the same metrics that gave Carter double-digit unemployment and inflation above 15%?

 

Good Christ, comparing our current economic situation to the Bush1 recession we had in the early 90s is decidedly lame. This isn't some typical cyclical "dip" that happens every few year, and fundamental underlying economic conditions are radically different now than what existed in this country in the 40s through 90s--we've never had a debt situation that even remotely compares to what we have now, we've never had a trade deficit that compares to what we have now, we've never had a population so leveridged in personal debt, and the manufacturing base that brought us back to life after prior recessions largely does not exist anymore. This may not be 1930s serious, but it's immeasurably more dire than dips like 82 and 92.

 

Holy crap, you've got to be kidding. That is so bizarrely far from the truth it's staggering. News flash: we had balanced budgets and, lo and behold, even surpluses in the late 90s. But we've been running the largest annual deficits in history during the last eight years. Bush might not be responsible for our entire debt crisis, but he's more responsible than any other president in history, and that ain't even close.

 

So a President shouldn't be held accountable for what happens on his or her watch?

 

Umm, show me where I ever said Bush gets all the blame? You can't because I never said anything like that. All I did was correct an exceedingly wrong statement that you made.

Nice strawman, though.

 

And presidents can choose to solve problems within that outline or ignore them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/politics/28obama.html?_r=2

But officials from both sides said it was the beginning of a dialogue between Congressional Republicans and the White House that did not exist even when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office.