The recovery has been very slow and drawn out under Obama.
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He's a dim jerk, and a personal friend of James Arthur. He doesn't get what 's going on - there certainly weren't any insults in what you'd posted, and he's too intellectually lazy to realise that there was a real debate going on (not that James Arthur's evasive responses helped).
ntless, though your contributions did evade the points being made with rema rkable enthusiasm.
on the original Fed2 graph
ke it clear that it's running from 298M to 321M, which would also have made it obvious that the number potential candidates for jobs increases only ha lf as fast as the population as a whole. If everybody lived to 80, only 49% of the population is in the 16-65 age group who can be expected to be look ing for work.
t perfectly obvious that Rickman's other contention was correct.
exaggerated the base employment by the extent of the sub-prime mortgage ge nerated building bubble, which seems to have generated a couple of million extra jobs.
ing the number of potential employees by claiming that all the natural incr ease in the population has to find a new job, when - in fact - only half th e population is ever of an age to work - and the other in cherry picking th e starting point of the comparison at close to the top of a boom.
any kind of honest response to either.
You really are being a dolt, Sloman.
Not a conspiracy, it simply didn't occur to me that grown-ups would find a basic graph confusing, baffling, or an elaborate conspiracy.
Here's the employment graph with a long-term trendline--you're just 100% ever-lovin' wrong.
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By this measure we're 10 million jobs below trend, and that's with me tilting the trend line way in your favor, ignoring the higher slopes of yesteryear's recoveries and toward the latest slopes (where the burden of government has weighed heavily on job creation).
The trend-line is linear, but population is exponential, so the trend line underestimates the trend. That is, you're even 'wronger' than this trend line suggests.
ointless, though your contributions did evade the points being made with re markable enthusiasm.
ne on the original Fed2 graph
make it clear that it's running from 298M to 321M, which would also have ma de it obvious that the number potential candidates for jobs increases only half as fast as the population as a whole. If everybody lived to 80, only 4
9% of the population is in the 16-65 age group who can be expected to be lo oking for work.
it perfectly obvious that Rickman's other contention was correct.
ph exaggerated the base employment by the extent of the sub-prime mortgage generated building bubble, which seems to have generated a couple of millio n extra jobs.
bling the number of potential employees by claiming that all the natural in crease in the population has to find a new job, when - in fact - only half the population is ever of an age to work - and the other in cherry picking the starting point of the comparison at close to the top of a boom.
th
Sadly, there's one dolt here, and it's you.
The basic graph is simple, obvious and misleading. You have to look hard to find the vertical axis label " (Thousand of persons) (Thousand of persons
- 150000)" and it isn't immediately obvious that the total population (all ages) isn't directly comparable with the working population (ages roughly 1
6-65).
It was great at giving the visual impression that serves your purpose, but tracking down where it was misleading certainly took me some time.
As usual, you are cherry-picking your data. The GFC was the biggest economi c slump since the crash of 1929, and you want to compare it with recent, sm aller recessions, while neglecting to notice that the 1929 crash ended up p utting 25% of the population out of work.
That would have been 36 million out of the 2006 working population of about 140 million. We didn't do well, but we did a lot better than Hoover.
The linear trend-line is misleading, as you say - they always are.
Your original claim (which the fed2 graph was supposed to support) was
"There's been no employment recovery at all. We lost a bunch of employed in the crash, then only ever got back to a slightly lower-than-usual population-driven employment growth.
Losing jobs, then resuming growth at the population-increase rate, never recovers the lost jobs."
happens to be false. There has been employment recovery, if not to the lev el of the 2006 construction boom - 146M - to the 150M now. A more reasonabl e reference point - in 2004 - puts the non-boom employment level at 140M.
The total US population in was 293M in 2004 and it has gone up to 321M sinc e then, an increase of 18M. Half of the increase is of working age, so that means 9M more workers, and the economy is now employing 10M more people.
A more rational discussion would start worrying about people spending longe r in education before they start working - which is a progressive trend - a nd retiring later (while is an increasingly available option for jobs that don't involve manual labour with a progressively healthier work force, who die later than they used to and get disabled by age later than they did in times past).
An increasing participation of women in the work force also needs to be fig ured in.
There aren't any sound-bites in any of that, so it isn't going to happen.
Both are points that Rickman pointed out, and you evaded.
pointless, though your contributions did evade the points being made with remarkable enthusiasm.
line on the original Fed2 graph
o make it clear that it's running from 298M to 321M, which would also have made it obvious that the number potential candidates for jobs increases onl y half as fast as the population as a whole. If everybody lived to 80, only 49% of the population is in the 16-65 age group who can be expected to be looking for work.
es it perfectly obvious that Rickman's other contention was correct.
raph exaggerated the base employment by the extent of the sub-prime mortgag e generated building bubble, which seems to have generated a couple of mill ion extra jobs.
oubling the number of potential employees by claiming that all the natural increase in the population has to find a new job, when - in fact - only hal f the population is ever of an age to work - and the other in cherry pickin g the starting point of the comparison at close to the top of a boom.
with
to find the vertical axis label " (Thousand of persons) (Thousand of person s - 150000)"
The data series description is repeated in the legend AND on the axis. I didn't anticipate engineers reading & interpreting a graph without first looking to see what was on it.(!)
't directly comparable with the working population (ages roughly 16-65).
No, I insist, you really are being a dolt. I'm not going to waste bandwidth shooting down all your conspiracy theories. Call that 'evading' all you want, I'm just not interested in that, or correcting your arithmetic.
Here's another graph that shows your metric, population * .5, AND civilian employment (the number of people actually employed(*)).
*(in ANY kind of job, part-time or not, which still understates today's employment problem, since it counts an engineer with a part-time paper route the same as one with full-time employment. But we'll ignore that here.)
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You're still wrong on all counts, by all metrics.
For others (not you), if 10 million people lose their jobs in a recession, then we start adding jobs only as quickly as population growth adds new people who need jobs, we never re-employ the original 10 million people who lost their jobs.
Our current status is not quite as bad as that--we *have* added jobs-- but only marginally more rapidly than new people have needed them. It's pretty bad.
There are other, more technical measures and comparisons that make these same points and come to the same basic conclusions, I just thought this was a particularly clear and direct way to visualize the raw data, free of spin, politics, adjustment, etc.
My statement stands. We have NOT had an employment recovery. Eight years hence, we've never recovered the jobs lost in the recession. That's not healthy, and it's not normal.
And before you repeat that thoughtless meme yet again, recovery after a severe recession is normally much FASTER, not slower, for the same reason an R-C slews faster at the beginning of its exponential curve--there's a greater potential across the forcing.
But I'm not going to argue exponentials to someone who's struggling with linear graphs.
There are doubtless millions of off-the-books jobs, in farming and construction and landscaping and roofing and childcare and food prep, businesses where people with no legal status and limited education/language skills can be paid cash and can sneak under the radar. Tens of millions of illegal immigrants are working and surviving and sending money home.
I don't blame any one of them (well, excepting the criminals) for coming here to do better, but the mass of ambitious cheap labor has decimated the low-end, starter-job labor market. Here, the Irish used to do all the painting. Now a painting company is one Irish boss and thirty undocumented Mexican workers. Think about the "income inequality" implications of that!
It happens in electronics, too, but the workers are more likely to be legal and asian. Longterm, the latino and asian folks will raise kids who will be just like prototypical anglo kids, and fit into the general economy, doctors and engineers and such, but mass immigration has transient effects.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
n't pointless, though your contributions did evade the points being made wi th remarkable enthusiasm.
s" line on the original Fed2 graph
s to make it clear that it's running from 298M to 321M, which would also ha ve made it obvious that the number potential candidates for jobs increases only half as fast as the population as a whole. If everybody lived to 80, o nly 49% of the population is in the 16-65 age group who can be expected to be looking for work.
makes it perfectly obvious that Rickman's other contention was correct.
t graph exaggerated the base employment by the extent of the sub-prime mort gage generated building bubble, which seems to have generated a couple of m illion extra jobs.
n doubling the number of potential employees by claiming that all the natur al increase in the population has to find a new job, when - in fact - only half the population is ever of an age to work - and the other in cherry pic king the starting point of the comparison at close to the top of a boom.
up with
rd to find the vertical axis label " (Thousand of persons) (Thousand of per sons - 150000)"
isn't directly comparable with the working population (ages roughly 16-65).
an
n, then we start adding jobs only as quickly as population growth adds new
You make a good point. A year or two back I saw an article to the effect that people in the new underground, under-the-radar economy were saving our collective bacon. Black-market productivity, as it were, boosting GDP higher than the disastrous official employment stats predicted.
Makes sense. When it's no longer legal to earn a living, people earn their livings illegally.
I'm contemplating membership in the 'lunatic-fringe club'--3kW from 11V d.c., SMD!
You continue to ignore the fact that this is what has happened in every downturn on your graph from 1980. Employment goes down and when things pick back up employment never recovers the lost jobs.
I stated this in another post but you seem to be ignoring that.
Lol! You spin the data by misinterpreting it, then say your view is perfectly obvious.
I can't say if it is healthy, but your data seems to show it as perfectly normal.
A completely inappropriate analogy. The economy is not a stable, regulated system. There is nothing to force it back to a state you prefer.
Why don't you take another look at the graph and tell me how the economy responded to the recessions of 1990 and 2001? Your fictitious trend line was specifically constructed to show those recessions as random perturbations rather than the recessions they were.
I am ignoring the "employment going down" part because it's obvious, not worth addressing; implicit.
It is not true that the jobs aren't recovered. If true, we'd be cumulatively adding more and more unemployed over time. We're not, we haven't been, so it's simply not so.
It's harder to understand all this numerically from a visual graph because of everything being superimposed on an exponential population curve.
Cutting the time interval, as in my first post, is a first-order compensation. That removes much of the exponential effect. It also makes neophytes squeal 'cherry-picking' when you aren't, and then they're befuddled by exponential-related effects when you cite their expanded interval. You can't win.
Overall, employment rises and falls with the business cycle, oscillating above and below the long-term population-driven exponential trend. A deviation from the population-driven trend signifies a structural change in society, causing a larger or smaller portion of society to seek work.
All things being equal, employment increases organically at the rate of population growth.
All things being equal, people lose their jobs in a recession, usually quickly.
People need to eat. Therefore, all things being equal, they typically scramble, start finding new jobs, and employment recovers fairly quickly after a down turn. Usually.
If you pull out the population exponential, time-constants for recoveries--the phase delay reflecting society re-organizing and reallocating jobs and people--appear.
At that point you've lost everyone, and ankle-biters will heckle you mercilessly about trivia. You're probably better off citing our awful GDP growth, which is a single figure and easier to grok, but then you've lost the human impact of all these people who cannot find work.
Because the topic is this recession?
I agree GWB's Big Government, big-spending recovery was not as robust as normal. But we're discussing the current, bigger-spending shovel-ready "stimulus" recovery. That's *legions* worse.
You keep assuming other people are morons. I looked at those from the start.
Here's the employment graph, log-scaled to make the population effects linear for easy eye-ball comparison:
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You're just mistaken. This recovery simply is NOT normal, not business as usual. We have not recovered to trend and are still not recovering like we should. Something is physically, structurally, semi-permanently depressing employment. Something is WRONG.
(Government.)
You check other analyses and reach the same results. There's a nice graph from one of the Federal Reserve Banks that compares this 'recovery' against the many before it, and this one is awful on GDP / employment, the worst, etc.
But that's complicated graph, and it might confuse people. :-)
You refuse to consider anything I provide. You over analyze the ideas behind the data while not actually looking at the data at all. You talk about exponential growth while drawing an arbitrary linear trend line.
The bottom line is the data *you* provided clearly shows that in 1990 and 2001 jobs were lost which were never recovered. The job growth resumed at its normal rate after the downturn ended, but never rising to catch up with where it would have been if the downturn had not happened. The recession of 2008 was exactly like the others (except much larger), no matter how you try to twist the data to show differently.
Here is one last attempt to show you how to look at the data you are presenting. Your new log graph, extended to start in 1983 and the proper trend lines added for each recession. Now it is clear that none of these recessions even reached the same level of growth as prior to each recession much less the same level of employment. But that's actually an artifact of the log scale since population is not growing perfectly exponentially these days.
Rant and rave all you want. YOUR data does not show what you claim it does and in fact shows the exact opposite.
You're part right and mostly wrong--while jobs did recover to trend after almost all prior recessions, they dropped in the last two. I get it.
But I'm pointing at the elephant, while you're screaming at the mouse. I'm not interested in the mouse.
Here:
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The labor force participation rate dropped 1 percent after the 2000 recession, then 3 percent in the present one. Three percent of 320 million is 9 million fewer employed, the same thing I've already showed six ways from Sunday.
Don't keep telling me that's normal. It's not.
Both drops reflect the same phenomenon: higher parasitic load on the economy, drains the economy.
Yes, this was a very large recession. You could say it was abnormal. So far that is the *ONLY* thing you have shown to be abnormal.
I think we must be doing a great job as a country if we can continue to grow the GDP as well as we are doing while the Labor Force Participation Rate shrinks.
BTW, did you notice that the shrinking Labor Force Participation Rate started about 2000, with a noticeable drop following the .com bubble, then a bit of a resurgence (but not much) around the peak of the housing market and then back to decline. Further, the sharp run up came to an end in the 1990 recession. So this is not at all driven by either the
2006 housing bust or the recovery from it. This clearly shows long term effects. BTW, I had to edit your chart to be able to see this. I gave the GDP a separate axis on the right hand side. Works great, you should try it!
I see I forgot to post a link to the graph I mention in my previous post. Here it is. Care to discuss this?
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You seem to want to tie every negative economic indicator to the last 8 years as the cause. Clearly this is not the case. I don't know how anyone can look at this data and think otherwise... unless they had already made up their mind and were only looking for a way to justify it.
Actually, closer to half the rate of population growth, because little more than half the population is of working age. The other half is growing up, getting educated or retired.
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But you haven't tried to fit an exponential curve to any part of the data, and the data looks noisy enough that you have very poorly defined exponenti al time constants if you did.
You have ignored the fact that the unsustainable pre-GFC housing constructi on boom pulled a lot of people into jobs that shouldn't have been there, an d persuaded kids who should have known better to train for construction job s when they should have opted for higher-level skills that take longer to e arn.
My guess is that the pre-GFC boom added about 5 million jobs. Your original graph (Fed2) started when that boom was close to its peak, so about 5 mill ion of your 9 million jobs lost were lost because the building bubble burst .
The GFC had lots of other consequences, but ignoring the house building bub ble is pure political propaganda.
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The only obvious difference between the recent recession and those that wen t before was that GFC was bigger - which is generally accepted.
Since your aim seems to be to confuse people, it's more likely that it has features you don't want to expose.
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"Recovering to trend" isn't a meaningful statement. You put in what you thi nk are the trend lines. There's a mathematical procedure - least squares cu rve fitting - which can fit a trend line to raw data, but it isn't all that useful if you haven't got a mathematical model which actually fits the dat a.
A succession of linear trend lines doesn't constitute that kind of model.
The elephant in question being the Republican Party symbol, and your intere st is in proving that the Republican's have done nothing wrong and the Demo crats have screwed up.
Sure. But the GFC was way bigger than the busting of the dot-com bubble. Th e banks had pumped a lot more liquidity into the economy with sub-prime mor tgage loans than was ever invested in the bot.com companies, and the boom i n home-building pushed up employment a lot more than than the dot-com compa ny hires
It's bigger than most of the recessions we've had since 1929, but the shape is the same. Since the Democrat have been running the country since Dubbya let the GFC happen, you want to concentrate attention on the recovery from the GFC, rather than the bank irresponsibility that created the GFC.
The GFC in the US meant that a lot of houses were built that nobody could a fford after the GFC hit. That was a drain on the economy when it happened, and house building is going to be depressed until the population has grown enough to take advantage of all the extra houses.
Most of the extra extra bandwidth laid down at the peak of the dot-com bubb le was exploited shortly thereafter, but technological advance meant that y ou could put a lot more data down the same fibre, so there's not a lot of n ew fibre being laid now.
Wittering on about "parasitic loads" is just trying to import electronic ci rcuit concepts into an are where they aren't remotely relevant.
have to retrain to do something else if you want to work"
Like what, flipping burgers ?
Manufacturing is the backbone of any strong economy. Manufacturing means th ings you do not have to import and have it f*ck up the balance of trade. No w the problem is that other countries are tooled up so well to do what we u sed to do that we are never getting that market back. Hell, we don't even have the employable people anymore.
When one person can do the work of ten, what happens to the other nine ? We already had enough restaurants and bars and car washes etc. So the questio n is, train for what ? Start now and learn C+ ? Write phone apps ? What els e, do tell me what else in THIS country. Investment banking ?
ou have to retrain to do something else if you want to work"
Making made-measure furniture, perhaps with fancy finishes, like French-pol ished.
things you do not have to import and have it f*ck up the balance of trade. Now the problem is that other countries are tooled up so well to do what we used to do that we are never getting that market back. Hell, we don't eve n have the employable people anymore.
Manufacturing implies mass-production of lots of identical items, which you can ship off-shore. When somebody wants a specific individual solution to a specific problem, have the problem-solver close by helps a lot.
For really expensive items, airfares and international freight charges are less of a problem. When I was working at Cambridge Instruments (in Cambridg e, England) we did a number of "specials" for IBM in the US and IBM in Germ any, but these were worth around a million dollars per special.
If you want a French-polished dining room table and matching chairs sized t o fit your dining room, overseas suppliers are less attractive.
We already had enough restaurants and bars and car washes etc. So the quest ion is, train for what?
Look at the jobs ads and see what's in demand?
se in THIS country. Investment banking?
Investment banking is international. One of my nephews (who got his univers ity training Sydney) is now an international currency trader in London.
Gee George, no animus here. Surprised it made you uncomfortable.
This is an OT thread about busts and booms, so it didn't seem out-of- bounds to discuss ... busts and booms.
I think Rickman and I are just each amazed our counterpart doesn't see what what we each see. I think it's better to talk than not.
Communication--it's a tough nut, but bridging that gap is what keeps us from being permanently divided.
2008 was manmade, and the aftermath too. We're not bouncing back like we should, our recoveries from recessions are getting markedly slower and weaker, and I see us rapidly getting to a point where we won't bounce back.
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