Don’t Let Trump – Or Any President – Take Credit for Strong Jobs Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Let Trump – Or Any President – Take Credit for Strong Jobs Numbers

fivethirtyeight.com

31 pointselberto3412 comments

Where was this article the previous 8 years?

In my view, the extent to which the President can be credited or blamed for job numbers is a topic that is discussed periodically in the press.

For fun, I just googled "don't blame president ford for unemployment" and there were several hits.

It's been around for a long time. Freakonomics did a podcast on it in 2010 (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-how-much-...).

> 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.

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.

What is stopping you from making that calculation yourself if you feel its an important indicator? The data is freely available.

The BLS indicator is what it is, not what others think it should be. The methodology is public. If you find other data more valuable, use it.

And, yes,they don't believe retired people or people not looking for work should be included. I tend to agree.

> 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 raw US pop is a wild guess that's probably within 100 million or so

> 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.

The closest thing to what you're talking about is the Labor Force Participation Rate (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000).

The misleading employment number is actually an attempt to be more useful than the measurement you propose.

Do you regularly do things that depend on changes in the employment rate? Why does it matter if it is complicated to understand?

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.

Or oil prices. Or economy.

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