It is true the employment on USA has risen under The Emprah Tupee or it's just politician bulshit and number manipulation?
Like Folly said, it's technically true, but it's been almost continuously rising since early in the Obama administration.
Here's a graph of the US unemployment rate I googled.
More than that, the unemployment rate itself is generally pretty flawed. Most of measures of it don't, for example, measure the people that have just flat fucking gave up trying, nor does it measure underemployment rates (Like when you have someone with a master's degree flipping burgers) or a bunch of other stuff.
From what I understand the unemployment rate with junk along those lines factored in is something around double or worse what the official number is. US economy for the little guy is pretty shit in a lot of places.
But the problem with that perspective is that it's
always double. If the official rate was 10% in 2010, then it was actually probably more like 20% then, and if the official rate is 4% now, it's actually probably 8%. So you can still use the figures going up or down to say "things seem to be getting a little better" or "things seem to be getting a little worse".
Say I've got 8 oranges, and I say the amount of food i have is "8", and I say this is double the amount of food I had when I only had 4 oranges, but then you point out I'm wrong, because I can't eat the rind of the oranges, so you say it's only 7.5 oranges, and thus not double what I had at 4 oranges. Clearly, that would be erroneous, since the rind was there even when I had 4 oranges, so it's
still double the amount of food I had before, even taking into account the part I can't eat.
Similarly, if the official unemployment rate drops from 8% to 4% we can meaningfully say that
many less people are unemployed now. Just because you can include some other people in the metric and come up with some larger number doesn't tell us anything about whether things are getting better or worse. What matters the most is that you use
consistent metrics, rather than changing the metric and then comparing the original metric to the altered one. If the "unofficial unemployment rate" is 8% while the "official unemployment rate" is only 4%, that doesn't actually mean "things are twice as bad as they are saying". It means things are exactly the same as they are saying. These are made-up metrics, but they are indicators of the current situation. An official unemployment rate of 4% is the exact same situation as an unofficial rate of 8%, neither better nor worse.
Which particular metric you use is kind of pointless: you could come up with pretty much any number you want by jigging the formula. For example, literally everyone could work at least 1 extra hour per week so you could put together a metric that says 100% of people are under-employed. Or, you could consider 1 hour of work a week as being "employed" and come to the conclusion that very few people "aren't employed". Or anything in between by using an arbitrary yardstick. The proper use is to pick a yardstick, stick to it, then compare that at different places and different times. The raw numbers themselves are meaningless, it's the relative values that matter.
Also, not everyone needs or should be a wage-slave so to point at the number of people "not involved" in the labor sector as the true "wasted people" is a problematic metric, because it adheres to an extremely narrow set of value judgements, that puts no value on people not being employed in the formal economy.
Like when you have someone with a master's degree flipping burgers
The solution here is that people shouldn't study shit that nobody needs then expect to get paid a lot of money for it. Basically, to put that "masters degree nobody wants" guy in a cushy well-paying job we'd have to relegate 10 other people to burger-flipping in his stead. Saying it's a "waste" that we're not putting this guy's masters degree to use is actually the sunk-cost fallacy. Saying that since we invested money and time in that guy's education, the only sensible thing to do is waste more money coming up with things for him to do. The real problem here is the student loan system. Student loans give out erroneous economic signals about what skills are actually in demand, so you get very high wages in some disciplines where they can't get enough graduates and you get other disciplines with high levels of unemployment/under-employment and low wages, poor conditions, because the student loans / university system doesn't allow for actual economic feedback from industry. They only care about filling up their allotted class sizes every year.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4210692 times)