The December Jobs report is out and, as is becoming all too typical, it doesn't make a lot of sense. On the one hand, the "official" unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 to 9.4%. That looks like we're making some good progress on the jobs front, doesn't it? Yet, only 103,000 jobs were created, not enough by far to keep up with population growth. So, what gives?
In this era of governmental new math, numbers don't seem to mean as much as they used to. Many economists have pointed out that the ONLY reason the unemployment rate has gone down is that more and more people have given up trying to find jobs that don't exist and, in their great wisdom, the US government DOES NOT COUNT people who are not actively looking for work.
Now, if we look at a standard dictionary, we find that unemployed means "Out of work, especially involuntarily; jobless" (adjective) or "People who are involuntarily out of work considered as a group. Used with the" (noun). Nowhere in this standard definition does it state that the definition is dependent on whether or not a person sends out 100 resumes per week or attends countless job fairs that never seem to lead to gainful employment!!
No, it's far more straightforward than this. An unemployed person is a person who is involuntarily without a job.
The reason that most governments like to employ new math is that it tends to inflate or deflate real figures, depending on the desired effect. In the present case, the US government wants us to think the job picture is getting better when, in fact, it isn't. It's just about as bad now as it was the month before and, by all indications, it's going to remain bleak into the near future.
In this era of governmental new math, numbers don't seem to mean as much as they used to. Many economists have pointed out that the ONLY reason the unemployment rate has gone down is that more and more people have given up trying to find jobs that don't exist and, in their great wisdom, the US government DOES NOT COUNT people who are not actively looking for work.
Now, if we look at a standard dictionary, we find that unemployed means "Out of work, especially involuntarily; jobless" (adjective) or "People who are involuntarily out of work considered as a group. Used with the" (noun). Nowhere in this standard definition does it state that the definition is dependent on whether or not a person sends out 100 resumes per week or attends countless job fairs that never seem to lead to gainful employment!!
No, it's far more straightforward than this. An unemployed person is a person who is involuntarily without a job.
The reason that most governments like to employ new math is that it tends to inflate or deflate real figures, depending on the desired effect. In the present case, the US government wants us to think the job picture is getting better when, in fact, it isn't. It's just about as bad now as it was the month before and, by all indications, it's going to remain bleak into the near future.
(A lip-synced version of the Tom Lehrer song.)
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