Friday, February 3, 2012

How Fraudulent Was the January Unemployment Number? Unemployment Actually Went UP last month, Not Down

I've written about this quite a few times before (most recently here). Essentially, the unemployment number reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is complete fiction as millions of workers have been thrown out of the labor force, artificially lowering the unemployment rate. If you look at the labor force participation rate, it is now at multi-decade lows:


As you can see, the labor force participation rate is now down over 2% since Obama has taken office. Some would argue that this is due to demographics, as baby boomers leave the labor force as they reach retirement. The problem with this argument is that if you look at the participation rate for those 55 and up, it is slightly up since Obama has taken office. All the decline in due to those who would be considered to be in their peak working years. If you keep the rate at 66%, where it was at right before Obama was elected it appears that there are 5 million people missing from the unemployment data, and it seems to be spiking right now:


What does this mean for the unemployment rate itself? By my calculations, if you keep the missing people in, it is 11.4% right now, up 0.1% from last month when it ws 11.3%. The whole thing about it being down to 8.3% is absolute hogwash. Below you can see the striking difference between the real unemployment rate and the official one:


It's really a striking divergence isn't it? While the official rate seems to show a 1.7% improvement in the unemployment rate since the peak, the improvement is really a paltry 0.4%! And if you don't believe me, check out the government's own employment to population ratio which is also at multi-decade lows:

4 comments:

  1. 250,000 new jobs is not an increase in unemployment no matter what metric you try to force upon it.

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    1. Just remember, we are talking about the unemployment RATE, not the number of jobs. So if employment doesn't go up enough to keep pace with the population growth the unemployment rate will be going up. Note that the straight up, no manipulation on my part, official employment to population ratio continues to be at multi-decade lows.

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  2. Unadjusted unemployment rate spiked up from 8.2% to 8.8% in January. 8.3% was the adjusted unemployment rate for January.

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    1. Correct, the unemployment rate always spikes in January because of christmas workers being let go but that the seasonal adjustment is actually pretty good. I looked at it before and it doesnt seem to be manipulated. My point was that the number of people dropping out of the labor force was artificially depressing the official rate and that because so many dropped out last month, if you include those people the rate actually would go up, even on a seasonally adjusted basis.

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