A timely piece from Adam Davidson on the misuse and
distortion of unemployment data by politicians:
“The results of the
Current Population Survey are held in a secured office in the Bureau of Labor
Statistics... Typically, the numbers are released to
the public at precisely 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of the month. They are
then pounced on by news outlets, banks, hedge funds, advocacy groups, industry
lobbyists, and countless academics and economic forecasters. Many of these
people don’t just look at the headline number. They dig into the thousands of
detailed data points that underpin that much-reported statistic.
It’s in those deeper stats that we learn about discouraged workers, those who want work but are so despairing of finding it that they no longer search for a job. Sometimes, when Trump claims to have discovered a previously secret unemployment rate, he seems to be referring to this result, one that is publicly released by the government every month and widely discussed. There are six different official unemployment rates in the public release, allowing us to see, with precision, various trends in how people are finding and not finding work. The highest number, known as U6, includes not only the officially unemployed and the discouraged but people who have part-time jobs but wish they were working full time. This number, currently, is 9.7 per cent, which is high, but nowhere near as high as Trump’s “close to twenty per cent” or even the “eighteen to twenty per cent” he cited in his Presidential-campaign announcement speech, last year.”
It’s in those deeper stats that we learn about discouraged workers, those who want work but are so despairing of finding it that they no longer search for a job. Sometimes, when Trump claims to have discovered a previously secret unemployment rate, he seems to be referring to this result, one that is publicly released by the government every month and widely discussed. There are six different official unemployment rates in the public release, allowing us to see, with precision, various trends in how people are finding and not finding work. The highest number, known as U6, includes not only the officially unemployed and the discouraged but people who have part-time jobs but wish they were working full time. This number, currently, is 9.7 per cent, which is high, but nowhere near as high as Trump’s “close to twenty per cent” or even the “eighteen to twenty per cent” he cited in his Presidential-campaign announcement speech, last year.”
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Education is supposed to lead to an informed citizenry that is able to weigh the claims of competing candidates and to distinguish truth from friction. But the steady dumbing down of society may lead to an electorate that is far more gullible.
Related:
Modern Politics – The Post-Truth Era
Also, worth reading:
The Dumbed Down Democracy by Timothy Egan
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/opinion/the-dumbed-down-democracy.html
“The dumbing down of this democracy has been gradual, and then — this year — all at once. The Princeton Review found that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were engaged at roughly a high school senior level. A century later, the presidential debate of 1960 was a notch below, at a 10th grade level. By the year 2000, the two contenders were speaking like sixth graders. And in the upcoming debates — “Crooked Hillary” against “Don the Con” — we’ll be lucky to get beyond preschool potty talk.”
“The dumbing down of this democracy has been gradual, and then — this year — all at once. The Princeton Review found that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were engaged at roughly a high school senior level. A century later, the presidential debate of 1960 was a notch below, at a 10th grade level. By the year 2000, the two contenders were speaking like sixth graders. And in the upcoming debates — “Crooked Hillary” against “Don the Con” — we’ll be lucky to get beyond preschool potty talk.”