g5000
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2011
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The US population is 319 million people.
Everyone who is not in the military, or in prison, or in a nursing home, etc. is counted as the "Civilian noninstitutional population". Looking at the October 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, we find there are 251.541 million such people.
A subcategory of the civilian noninstitutional population is the "civilian labor force". The labor force is anyone willing and able to work. Looking at the same report, we see the number of people in the civilian labor force is 157.028 million. The balance of the civilian noninstitutional population are those people who are retirees, full time students, stay at home parents, and other people who are not seeking employment.
Here is the BLS table for those who are unemployed.
We find several categories:
1) People on temporary layoff from a permanent job
2) People who lost their permanent job (fired, etc.)
3) Persons who completed temporary jobs
4) Job leavers (people who quit their jobs)
5) Reentrants (people who had left the labor force to go to school, raise their children, etc. who have returned)
6) New entrants (people joining the labor force for the first time)
These six categories add up to 7.908 million people. Divide those 7.908 million people by the 157.028 million people in the civilian labor force, and that gives us the headline unemployment figure of 5.0%.
One year ago, there were 8.983 million of these people. Over one million more than today.
If we want to take a closer look at the "not in the labor force" category, we can look at this BLS table. As I said above, these are mostly retirees, stay at home parents, full time students, and so forth. But we also find people who want a job, but have not looked for one in the past four weeks.
These "marginally attached" workers fall into two groups.
There are the "discouraged workers" who stopped looking for work “for reasons such as thinks no work available, could not find work, lacks schooling or training, employer thinks too young or old, and other types of discrimination.”
Then there are the people who stopped looking for work “for such reasons as school or family responsibilities, ill health, and transportation problems, as well as a number for whom reason for nonparticipation was not determined.”
If we added the marginally attached people to the civilian labor force, that figure would go from 157 million to 159.2 million, and the number of unemployed would go from 7.9 million to 10.1 million, and the unemployment figure would be 6.3%.
The number of marginally attached people is 1.9 million. A year ago, there were 2.2 million. If we added the marginally attached to the labor force a year ago, the unemployment figure a year ago would have been 7.1 percent.
In other words, even if someone tries to downplay the headline unemployment figure by bringing up "discouraged workers", they are still knocked out of the park by the fact that even those numbers have been improving.
Finally, a graph which shows the employment situation has been improving for quite some time, no matter how you slice it:
Everyone who is not in the military, or in prison, or in a nursing home, etc. is counted as the "Civilian noninstitutional population". Looking at the October 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, we find there are 251.541 million such people.
A subcategory of the civilian noninstitutional population is the "civilian labor force". The labor force is anyone willing and able to work. Looking at the same report, we see the number of people in the civilian labor force is 157.028 million. The balance of the civilian noninstitutional population are those people who are retirees, full time students, stay at home parents, and other people who are not seeking employment.
Here is the BLS table for those who are unemployed.
We find several categories:
1) People on temporary layoff from a permanent job
2) People who lost their permanent job (fired, etc.)
3) Persons who completed temporary jobs
4) Job leavers (people who quit their jobs)
5) Reentrants (people who had left the labor force to go to school, raise their children, etc. who have returned)
6) New entrants (people joining the labor force for the first time)
These six categories add up to 7.908 million people. Divide those 7.908 million people by the 157.028 million people in the civilian labor force, and that gives us the headline unemployment figure of 5.0%.
One year ago, there were 8.983 million of these people. Over one million more than today.
If we want to take a closer look at the "not in the labor force" category, we can look at this BLS table. As I said above, these are mostly retirees, stay at home parents, full time students, and so forth. But we also find people who want a job, but have not looked for one in the past four weeks.
These "marginally attached" workers fall into two groups.
There are the "discouraged workers" who stopped looking for work “for reasons such as thinks no work available, could not find work, lacks schooling or training, employer thinks too young or old, and other types of discrimination.”
Then there are the people who stopped looking for work “for such reasons as school or family responsibilities, ill health, and transportation problems, as well as a number for whom reason for nonparticipation was not determined.”
If we added the marginally attached people to the civilian labor force, that figure would go from 157 million to 159.2 million, and the number of unemployed would go from 7.9 million to 10.1 million, and the unemployment figure would be 6.3%.
The number of marginally attached people is 1.9 million. A year ago, there were 2.2 million. If we added the marginally attached to the labor force a year ago, the unemployment figure a year ago would have been 7.1 percent.
In other words, even if someone tries to downplay the headline unemployment figure by bringing up "discouraged workers", they are still knocked out of the park by the fact that even those numbers have been improving.
Finally, a graph which shows the employment situation has been improving for quite some time, no matter how you slice it:
![2pypd6s.png](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi64.tinypic.com%2F2pypd6s.png&hash=80e5dcdfb02d166ff891e93091703883)