
Don’t Let Trump – Or Any President – Take Credit for Strong Jobs Numbers - elberto34
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-let-trump-or-any-president-take-credit-for-strong-jobs-numbers/
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altoz
Where was this article the previous 8 years?

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dwaxe
It's been around for a long time. Freakonomics did a podcast on it in 2010
([http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-how-
much-...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-how-much-does-
the-president-really-matter/)).

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emodendroket
> Even if the economy does start to change direction in coming months, it’s
> unlikely Trump or his policies will be the primary cause. Presidents in any
> case have little control over the economy, especially in the short-term. The
> government can (probably) help ease the impact of a recession, and bad
> policies can (definitely) slow down growth. And presidential policies on
> things like education, infrastructure and tax policy can have long-term
> effects, for good or ill. But presidents have little influence over the
> month-to-month ups and downs of hiring or inflation.

Perhaps this is true under prevailing conditions, where politicians are quite
hesitant to take an activist role in reducing unemployment (except massive
handouts to businesses, seemingly). I am less than convinced that there isn't
anything governments could do to promote employment.

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tabeth
I'd love to know the history of the (misleading) unemployment indicator. I
feel that the true indicator of employment should be very simple: the amount
of people who have full time jobs divided by the amount of people, period. The
amount of people who are "not looked" or "dropped out" can be gamed so badly,
not to mention that it's irrelevant.

~~~
wyldfire
> not to mention that it's irrelevant.

For the longest time, married women had extremely low participation in the
labor market. Even still, many women choose to work part-time or not at all.
This represents a very large portion of the adult population.

> the amount of people who have full time jobs divided by the amount of
> people, period.

300 million / 150 million employed = ~50% [1], so that's roughly half the
country not working. The retired, the disabled, the minors, and others all
take away from this number. When it swings by 100,000 either way, then the
resulting percentage is less than one tenth of a percentage point. Sure, this
is okay we just have to get used to dealing with small numbers, right? Well,
lots of people have a lot of trouble comprehending numbers like this IMO.

It's not political for statisticians to want to normalize a raw stat like this
in order to show what seems like the "true" number that matters. How many
constituents out there want a job and can't find one? That's a very different
stat from "how many humans in this geographical region are have jobs?"

[1] Raw stat from BLS
[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000)
raw US pop is a wild guess that's probably within 100 million or so

~~~
tabeth
> It's not political for statisticians to want to normalize a raw stat like
> this in order to show what seems like the "true" number that matters. How
> many constituents out there want a job and can't find one? That's a very
> different stat from "how many humans in this geographical region are have
> jobs?"

I disagree. The definitions themselves are political.

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ThomPete
The job numbers are in some ways inflated as most of the jobs are temp jobs
which in the US is extra problematic, furthermore since Bush the definition of
havving a job have been expanded.

95% of the jobs created under obama was tem jobs, dont think that have
changed.

All in all structural unemployment in the west is growing and we onlyy seen
the surface.

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macspoofing
Or oil prices. Or economy.

