Sunday, February 21, 2010
Unemployment
This is a very interesting article about unemployment and the man who initially created surveying to try to figure out the rate of unemployment. In 1878 Carroll Wright began to try to count the number of unemployment in Massachusetts. Wright wanted to try to show that the number of unemployed in their state was much less than what people thought. One interesting point about how Wright formulated this rate is how he understood that he had to exclude people who weren't looking for jobs. This article talks about how there are more and more people who are falling into the category of being unemployed, but are not actively looking for a job and do not fall into the governments definition of unemployment. This article makes the point that the more people who are unemployed but are not actively looking only adds to the unemployment rate becoming a less powerful indicator of economic wealth.
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Very interesting post. It is very understanding that many people are going into the category of not actively looking for a job because times are so tough and people, who have been searching for a long period of time, stop looking due to so much frustration in this awful economic time.
ReplyDeleteThis does become a less powerful indicator and may soon have to look at those numbers stronger then ever due to the higher population in that area and more people in the near future that will soon be joining it.
I agree, very interesting post, but not completely. As the article suggests that unemployment be a less powerful indicator of economic wealth, would this "indicator" be even stronger or weaker with the potential reduction of unemployment insurance in the United States. If unemployment insurance (UI) is reduced, it increases the urgency of finding work, which may have other people who are excluded in Carroll Wright's method.
ReplyDeleteBut my question is, if people who job hunt for a long time, who end up stopping due to frustration and failure that remain on UI, do they get excluded?