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On the Rocks: U.S. Unemployment Rate Now at 18%

Take out Humboldt's good fortune in being in the Emerald Triangle and multiply by every plumbing store in America. Throw in the idled lumber yards, construction stores, paint suppliers, and building crews. Count in the car lots that are going out of business because the banks won't finance car loans. Go to the lost auto assembly jobs. It tots up to a job loss across America just in December and January of 1,175,000. And that's an underestimate. Every president since Reagan, particularly Clinton, has jimmied the unemployment criteria to produce an undercount. The actual number for the two months is nearer one and three quarter million. The actual total unemployment rate, according to statistician John Williams, according to pre-Reagan criteria, rose to 18 per cent in January, from 17.5 per cent in December.

How accurate is that number likely to be? Here in SA there's a huge divide between the "formal" and "informal economies", with statistics often rigging the employment figures to include people who are working 6 hours a week at a convenience store or people selling crafts at street corners. Does the same thing happen in the US?

Mina.

Quote from: mina.m->-bleeped-<-ie link=topic=55569.msg346979#msg346979 date=1234617970
How accurate is that number likely to be? Here in SA there's a huge divide between the "formal" and "informal economies", with statistics often rigging the employment figures to include people who are working 6 hours a week at a convenience store or people selling crafts at street corners. Does the same thing happen in the US?

Mina.

You have the same line between the counted economy & the uncounted economy here as well. Although I think that our statisticians have maybe gone to a more efficient way of counting than yours have.

We don't count anyone who's run out of unemployment compensation, but for the most part I think the major method is just deciding what number sounds good and it wins the number-lottery and gets to serve as the figure for a month.

WE could have 50 mil unemployed and I doubt most of us would have a clue if the govt claimed there were only 8 million.

Of course I am rather more cynical than many as well. Maybe tekla or Sandy can show us some figures from a more accepting side of the statistical spectrum than I.

N~

Then there are the underemployed.

It does not count the underemployed, as mentioned above, or the discouraged workers (people who have quit looking for jobs). I think its interesting that if you quit looking for a job you are all of a sudden no longer unemployed. This is how we get unreal unemployment counts.

Nobody can lie about numbers like the Government can, something Lisa, Nichole and I all know only too well.  And the above mentioned standard ways of achieving an 'undercount' are all true, there are a lot of people 'exempt' from being counted.  On the other hand, using the example of Humbolt County is sort of a rip too, the numbers have been high there for decades because of the decline (to put it mildly) of the lumber and fishing industries, which were the two major industries up there.

Quote from: Nichole on February 14, 2009, 08:14:41 AMOf course I am rather more cynical than many as well. Maybe tekla or Sandy can show us some figures from a more accepting side of the statistical spectrum than I.

Haha! Cynicism rules sweetie.

Mina.

Humboldt is definitely declining even more, kind of sad. I lived there for over 35 years. I just went and Arcata is starting to go to pot (yes a pun). One county that could really be helped by the legalization of the "drug". They would be able to collect taxes and so forth. Anyway I just went up a few weeks ago as most of my family is still there and it seems to be getting worse, as pointed out above though it has always been really bad when timber and fishing went it just went down hill and has been going that way ever since. I closed my business there and all of my ex employees have found jobs but not at the rate I paid or with the benefits I offered. Sister in law had her company go to 4 days a week most pople there doing that or boarding up.
Humboldt Homegrown
Myles

You might like to read, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed  by Diamond, Jared

It starts out with the plight of Montana

Right -- I'm guessing that the 18% figure for Humboldt coincides pretty exactly with the number of <ahem> "undocumented agricultural workers."

On the "discouraged workers" thing, the problem is that there's no number that is relevant. If you quit working for a job, you're either homeless and eating at soup kitchens or dead; or (more likely in the U.S.) you've found a different set of accommodations -- your spouse still works, and you stay at home with the kids; you retire early; you move in with your sister and help around the house; you're just out of college and you do the "boomerang" twenty-something bum living with the 'rents with no rent thing. I know people, more or less, in all those categories, and I wouldn't really call them "unemployed" per se.

Like so many things, the term "unemployed" does not describe a binary categorization (damn, that old trope rears its head again), so the raw number isn't very meaningful in and of itself. The month-to-month changes matter, however, once you impose some artificial criteria to make the categories binary.

I don't trust the news or the government, but I trust their economic news and figures more than any other areas. If the Wall Street Journal starts giving bad economic and business news, investors will get very angry. You or I might not know, but somebody will, somebody that has a lot more money than you or I and somebody who cares more.

Here is a goverment job I had for a summer when I was a kid, and I am not joking. I had to review peoples benefits from the state and determine if I thought they were reporting the correct amount of "horticultural" income. In Humboldt of course.
Myles

Right -- I'm guessing that the 18% figure for Humboldt coincides pretty exactly with the number of <ahem> "undocumented agricultural workers."


Nah, those people are off the radar and not counted.  Its the timber and fishing industries that are hard hit.

Yeah the people in the gulch do not apply for unemployment when the season is over so they are not counted in any number, and they don't file taxes.  If they did count the unemployment rate would be higner. You can't collect unemployment if you don't pay in and you don't want the goverment looking for you for any reason. Thats why I knew anyone filing for goverment benefits was definitely not very good at thier job or not very smart. (one may becausing the other) As my friends are getting older they are actually moving into a different industry in order to start paying into things (not that it will be there when they need it). Nursing seems to be a big one.
It's great when the season is over they come into town and buy everything with cash, helps the economy.
The timber is far reaching I have a friend whos husband is a truck driver and as less is getting cut he has less to haul so they are constantly being laid off or having hours reduced. Has been going south for years and continues to do so. My SO worked at the second largest employer there and they moved about 4 years ago becuase the cost of shipping stuff in and out of humboldt was just too high and as the town started to go down hill it was hard to get people to move there. It's one of those towns you have to be into. That took a lot of jobs out and not all could be taken up by the small businesses left.