Recent comments

  • U.S. population, data here, is not the same as noninstitutional civilian population, which is the universe from where all labor statistics are derived.

    Think about it. A 6 month old baby is not going to haul up some 2x4's on a construction site anytime soon. Last check child labor is illegal, although some Republicans wish it were not so.

    In other words, children are not part of the population from which the labor force comes from. Either are the infirm, hospitalized, in nursing homes, those in Prison (officially), and the entire military armed forces. All of these segments of the population cannot be potentially part of the labor force, hence one must start with the noninstitutional civilian population, data here.

    Then, there is always a percentage of that group which are not part of the labor force. Retirees, students, stay at home parent, the idle rich, the homeless not in any category, etc.

    That is where one gets the labor participate rate from.

    In the links I explain many of these labor concepts but the BLS also describes them in their handbook of methods, Chapter 5 here.

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • Our graphs are loaded on this site you can easily write up another post around it.

    Trying to extrapolate any detail from the CES is such a labor. Glad someone appreciates it. I hate how they categorize payrolls, for I want to know more granularity and more importantly, the percentages and wage scales, hours, within those categories.

    To even dig out those statistics often is a data specific request, it's very tough to dig out the granularity to really comment on the types of jobs.

    That said, even at this large "lump sum" level, reviewing the details is labor intensive!

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • You're right, it is 90% confidence level of +-300,000 but the statistically significant change margin is 400,000.

    LOL, I think the Fed is not just basing buying up MBSes on the official unemployment rate, but also the labor participation rate and a few other figures from the employment statistics.

    Notice people thinking the "housing boom" will crash when the Fed stops buying up mortgage backed securities?

    Reply to: CPS Employment Statistics Static for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • if i had seen your pie chart before i wrote on this, i would have stolen it for my coverage; as it is, i'll be using this FRED graph..

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • the household survey is extrapolated from a survey of just 60,000 households & has a large margin of error; the 90% confidence interval for the monthly change in unemployment is roughly +/- 300,000, and for the change in the unemployment rate it's +/- 0.2 percentage points...this means that when BLS reports that the unemployment rate for June was 7.6%, it means that there's a one in ten chance that it's either less than 7.4% or greater than 7.8%; obviously, that's not something you want to base your monetary policy on...

    Reply to: CPS Employment Statistics Static for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • yes $73,000/yr pre-taxes and you can barely get by in CT. The only way i will own a home in Fairfield county CT on my income is if my parents leave me or let me buy for less than market value the home i grew up in.

    And they built that home new in 1977, my mother, now 70 just a high school graduate and payroll clerk and my father had a 2 year technical degree after high school as a graphic artist.

    Reply to: Change in May New Housing Starts cannot be determined from Census Report   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • Population does not mean labor force and in this link, I explain some labor concepts.

    You're missing the background of labor economics, BLS concepts. If you think about it, it makes sense. Population doesn't mean working population. People are in prison, in the military, hospitalized and then many people do not work due to retirement, traditional marriage, in school and so on.

    These days I forget the numbers going to college but it's high, like 65% of high school graduates, and after a Bachelors many go on to a Masters degree.

    The non institutional civilian population to employment ratio is different values for age groups, sex, demographics as well.

    All of this said, there are not enough jobs to employ the 18-24 million unemployed and guess what will happen if they pass immigration reform, something like 30 million new legal workers for Americans to compete with for a weak demand economy and thus labor market.

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • I asked Mike Thorton about job growth keeping up with population growth, and he agrees with you, that job growth is keeping up. I just question how that can be, considering what the government reports:

    The population grew by 7.5 million over the past three years and 3 months:

    316,198,616 - July 3013
    308,745,538 - April 2010

    Acting Secretary of Labor Seth D. Harris reports 6.8 million net new jobs were created over the previous 3 years 4 months. This alone says job growth isn't keeping up with population growth. But then take it one step further...

    With the current population, job growth isn't keeping up with high school graduates either. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that high school graduates in 2011/2012 was 3.2 million when according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics' JOLT report, all the hiring done between April 2012 and April 2013 only yielded a net employment gain of 1.8 million new jobs. (This year for 2012/2013 there was a record amount of high school graduates - 3.4 million)

    It wouldn't matter how many people were retiring, going on disability, being incarcerated or dying. It would only mean that even more jobs would have needed to be created in order to maintain the same level of employment. It doesn't seem to need any specialized macro- or micro-economic data analysis for what appears to be a simple arithmetic problem. 

    I understand you crunch numbers and know how to find data (that's your area of expertise), but I'm just looking at the government numbers that I found and I can't wrap my head around it and wonder why anyone would think differently. Where in the links (that I provide here) am I misinterpreting the numbers?

    Thanks

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • You're not logged in when commenting, thus your comments are anonymous.

    This is the wrong post, you should be commenting on the CPS, located here. This is the payroll report and gives jobs reported by employers, where as those in part-time is part of the CPS and those figures are reported from people.

    In table A of the report, (link at the top of the CPS article), shows those who reported they worked part time hours. There are two categories, those who work part-time because they want to and those who work part-time because they cannot get full-time work as well as those who had their hours cut.

    Take those two figures and you get 27,270,000.

    Part-time for economic reasons is: 8,226,000
    Part-time for non-economic reasons is: 19,044,000

    Add those two numbers together and you get 27,270,000

    I only report the increase in those forced into part-time work (part-time for economic reasons) because that's bad news, it means those people need full-time money.

    Those who want to only work part-time, don't need the money for the most part. Those increased 110,000 for the month.

    From a year ago, those forced to work part-time increased 16,000. I made a typo, it is 16,000, not 17,000. If you're wondering why that figure is so much less than the month, those forced into part-time had been dropping in earlier reports and why this month isn't good news.

    Generally speaking, monthly changes have high error margins, 400,000 on the main CPS numbers so looking at the annual change gives a clearer picture. That said, 322,000 is a huge number and probably indicates the part-time, deny benefits work culture is increasing in America.

    Those are two disjoint figures, either you are forced to work part-time or you want to work part-time.

    Multiple job holders can be people working two part-time jobs, one full-time and one part-time, two full-time jobs, three part-time jobs. All this means is the number of people working more than one job.

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • I'm trying to reconcile two numbers in this one paragraph you wrote.

    "Those forced into part time work is now 8,226,000, an increase of 322,000 from last month. Those stuck in part-time has increased 17,000 from a year ago, not a good sign of the labor market. This is a hell of a lot of people stuck with part-time hours who need full-time work. Of those considered employed, a whopping 27,270,000 of them are in part-time jobs, for whatever reason. That's 18.9% of people employed are in part-time jobs, a very high ratio."

    8,226,000 and 27,270,000

    Thanks

    Reply to: A Detailed Look at the BLS Payrolls Employment Report for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • By limiting the supply, keeping the shadow inventory off the market and institutional investors, they cause prices to soar.

    That said, home ownership is at record lows and rents are soaring for you're right, people cannot afford homes and worse, soaring rents mean people cannot afford a roof over their head.

    If you are an engineer, you're probably aware 6 figures in California means you can barely make rent and are living paycheck to paycheck. Horrific!

    Reply to: Change in May New Housing Starts cannot be determined from Census Report   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • Corporations make it their business to have an unlimited supply of cheap labor. they do this by manipulating immigration, illegal labor and offshore outsourcing.

    Therefore, the employee cannot quit and that is how Walmart gets away with it. There is no other job and that worker will easily be replaced for people need to eat, live and they are forced to take low paying jobs like the kind Walmart offers.

    If there was not a flooding of the U.S. labor market the situation you describe would have some validity, but those are not the labor supply conditions.

    Reply to: New Study: The Wealthy are more Unethical   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • i'm not an economist, an engineer... can someone who knows more than i do please explain the "housing recovery"? How can a nation whose largest employer is Wal-Mart, a nation where wages for the middle class have been stagnant since the 1970's support a housing turn around?

    I just don't get it. Someone please explain.

    Reply to: Change in May New Housing Starts cannot be determined from Census Report   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • We're being asked to believe that if a person makes more than 'a certain amount of money', that there is an obligation for them to pay his employees an amount more than what they are willing to work for. Why? If they don't want to work for that wage, they can quit. If no one wants to work for that wage, the store closes and Christy Walton gets hurt - unless she pays higher wages. But she is under no more obligation to pay her employees more than what they are willing to accept than she is obliged to pay more for her dinner than what the restaurant bill requires. The fact that she CAN is irrelevant.

    Reply to: New Study: The Wealthy are more Unethical   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • Bud, login! You're posting anonymous comments whereas if you are logged in you can track your comments and replies via your account.

    Yes, it's true, there are way more college graduates than jobs. There are almost double the number of STEM graduates than jobs. Basically as it is, they import more H-1B Visa foreign workers than jobs created. This is before the Comprehensive immigration reform disaster.

    Reply to: CPS Employment Statistics Static for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (www.nces.ed.gov) America's schools and colleges have a record number of students attending school as the population has continued to increase and enrollment rates have also continued to exponentially rise --- 3.4 million high school graduates this year alone --- but there weren't 3.4 million net jobs created for them. Job creation has not been keeping up with natural population growth. Then add in the work visas, cut hours, the escalation of TEMP jobs, the continued offshoring and further downsizing...and we have a national unemployment crisis not seen since the Great Depression. But because the DOW JONES is breaking all-time records, everybody thinks the economy is improving.

    Reply to: CPS Employment Statistics Static for June 2013   11 years 4 months ago
  • Great article!

    Darwin was definitely misunderstood and misconstrued by the social Darwinists who followed him. Steven Jay Gould has a great article about this, and Kropotkin:

    http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm

    Reply to: Human Nature Needs to Be Back in Business   11 years 4 months ago
  • In the "News" section are updated headlines from other sites. Eyes on trade, Public Citizen is the best for deep analysis on TPP.

    Think about the billions spent for Presidential elections to end up with the exact same agenda as the Bush administration, which was the same as the Clinton Administration.

    Corporate written bad trade deals is at the top of the list for absolutely no difference no matter who is elected.

    Gotta love the Panama trade deal, creation of beyond the arm of any law tax havens is part of that. It's a joke Congress talks about removing the incentive to offshore outsource when they pass things like the Panama trade deal, pure theater.

    Reply to: TPP: Obama's Free (but not Fair) Secret Trade Agreement   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • i've been involved with a local anti-fracking group, some of whom understand that the TPP will allow multinational corporations to overrule local ordinances...moreover, politicians should understand that they can be sued by these corpoations for foregone profits should a local law impede their attempts to pillage the countryside...

    here's the sierra club statement on Japan's joining the TPP negotiations, which also links to sierra club fact sheets on the TPP:
    http://content.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2013/03/sierra-club-stateme...

    Reply to: TPP: Obama's Free (but not Fair) Secret Trade Agreement   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:
  • Corporateland, nuf said.

    Reply to: Ralph Nader questions Corporate Patriotism   11 years 4 months ago
    EPer:

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