March 28, 2024

Economix Blog: Getting the Number Wrong

Mitt Romney said on Friday that there were 23 million Americans struggling to find work. It looks as if he got that wrong, by engaging in a little double counting. The real number is around 21 million.

FLOYD NORRIS

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

The just-released Labor Department report for September says there are 12,088,000 people classified as unemployed, meaning they looked for a job during the previous month and did not find one. That is the seasonally adjusted figure. The actual number the department estimated was 11,742,000.

There are no seasonally adjusted numbers for the other groups that could conceivably fit into the category — people not in the labor force who say they would like work if they could find it and people classified as “marginally attached” to the labor force.

There are 6,427,000 people counted as out of the labor force but wanting to work, and 2,517,000 classified as marginally attached.

Add them together, and use the higher (seasonally adjusted) figure for unemployment, and you get 21,032,000. If you were trying to be fair and compare apples to apples, you’d used all numbers before seasonal adjustment, and get 20,686,000.

Either way, that is a long way from 23 million.

So where did the rest come from? My guess is that Mr. Romney’s aides looked at Table A-16 of the release. That shows the 2,517,000 “marginally attached,” and breaks them into two groups. The first is 802,000 discouraged workers, and the rest — 1,715,000 — are classified as people who are deemed to be marginally attached but are not discouraged workers. That includes people who were ill or had school or family responsibilities that kept them from looking for work. If you add those two groups to the whole, then the number gets to be over 23 million. But that would represent a misreading of the figures.

Even if Mr. Romney had done his arithmetic correctly, it would be a stretch to say there were 21 million people “struggling to find work.” Of the 6.4 million who said they were not in the labor force but would work if they could, 3.3 million said they had not actually tried to find a job in the last year.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/getting-the-number-wrong/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix Blog: Back to School, With Fewer Teachers

On Thursday I called attention to the question of how many teachers returned to work this fall. The answer seems to be: Not that many.

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

According to the monthly labor report issued today, the number of education employees in state and local governments rose by 1.12 million in September, compared to 1.16 million last September. That is the smallest increase since 2003. It is 12 percent below the peak gain, registered in 2006. (These figures are, of course, before seasonal adjustment.)

The number may be revised next month, of course, and since the figures are for the week after Labor Day, there are a few schools that were not back in session yet. There are typically small gains in October as well.

But make no mistake: School budgets are hurting. This ought to sound alarm bells in Washington.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9f269ab13a917455d39dc069e32ea4cf

Economix Blog: How Many Teachers Went Back to Work?

One thing that may be worth watching in the jobs report Friday is the numbers on state and local education jobs added during September. In other words, how many teachers came back to work this fall? To get that figure, look at the figures before seasonal adjustment.

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

There has been enough written about cutbacks in local government spending to make me wonder just how bad those figures will be.

In each of the past three Septembers, the number of added public education jobs was below 1.2 million, while it was above that figure in every September from 2004 through 2007.

The number for 2010 was 1.16 million, which was 9 percent below the 2006 figure of 1.27 million. The Census Bureau estimates that the number of school-age children was virtually the same in 2006 as 2010.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f1a54017bd3ae2ba13667eaa92bfb471