Friday, October 5, 2007

The September Employment Report

When Kash was an Angrybear, he would update us as to the latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I would often tag along with something on the household survey with a graph of the employment-population ratio to remind folks that the rightwing spin on the allegedly amazing growth of employment per the household survey had to be put in context of how that compared to the growth in population. I started also adding the labor force participation rate to remind these rightwing idiots that declines in the unemployment rate could comes from a decline in the labor force participation rate. This morning, the tradition continues over at Angrybear with news from September that was a bit better than the news from August. Note, however, an employment-population rate of 62.9 percent is still far below the employment-population rate that we observed in the late 1990’s.

1 comment:

Caveat B said...

Don't you think adjust for aberrations such as the internet bubble or WWII might be advisable here?

And even if you don't decide to adjust, you must hate that inflection point in employment trends after Reagan took the White House. Or perhaps you have a cheesy adjustment reserved exclusively for that?