Thursday, September 18, 2008

How many people have lost their jobs?

According to Barack Obama, 600 thousand Americans have lost their jobs since January. Actually, he's wrong: something like 20 million Americans have lost their jobs since January. It's just that most of them found new jobs. Probably the new jobs generally weren't as good as the ones they lost. And almost certainly, more than 600 thousand of them were unable to find new jobs, because many of the new jobs created were filled by new entrants to the labor force or by people who were already unemployed when the year began.

Like almost everyone else I've ever heard, Senator Obama is making the mistake of using a net job loss figure with language that, if taken in its plain sense, clearly implies he is talking about gross job loss. And it seems to me that gross job loss is the appropriate concept: losing your job is a pretty serious bummer, even if you are able to find a new one after a few months.

There has been a lot of talk about Senator McCain and how he has been saying things that aren't true in order benefit himself politically. It turns out that Senator Obama is also (obviously unintentionally) saying things that aren't true, but in this case they benefit his opponent.

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36 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Economic Snapshots
Snapshot for September 17, 2008.

Got work?
by Heidi Shierholz

In July, there were 8.8 million unemployed workers actively seeking jobs in the United States, but only 3.4 million job openings, according to data released last week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, there were an average of 2.6 job seekers for every available job—an increase of over 60% from the low point in the 2000s expansion a year and a half ago, when there were just 1.6 job seekers for every job opening (see chart).1 There are now 5.4 million more job seekers than job openings in this country, meaning that millions of dedicated, productive American workers are experiencing the hardship and insecurity of unemployment with little hope of finding a job. The job openings data represent one more strong indicator of the need for a second stimulus package that is targeted directly at job creation.

Got work?

Thu Sep 18, 05:28:00 AM EDT  
Blogger stellios said...

Has anyone ever looked at what the definition of "employment" is? I didn't know how grim it was until an economist told me.

Most people think employment is someone who has a full time job and works at least 40 hours a week... way off!

In the US the unemployment statistic is someone who has actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks:

How Govt measures Unemployment

In Australia, you're classified as employed if you've worked at an hour in the previous week.

Unemployment in Australia

Thu Sep 18, 08:06:00 AM EDT  
Blogger Stephen Gordon said...

Are those 20m job separations or layoffs? Presumably at least some people who quit their old jobs are happier in their new ones.

Thu Sep 18, 08:47:00 AM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

20 million is my "ball park figure" for layoffs based on extrapolating the "gross job losses" figure from the Business Employment Dynamics data. None of the data for 2008 have been released yet, but gross job losses in 2007 were running at about 7400 per quarter. On the premise that the rate in 2008 was higher, I used 8000 as a round figure and multiplied by 3 (although the 3rd quarter isn't quite over). That gives 24,000. Then I rounded down to 20,000, figuring that maybe 4,000 of the job losses weren't actually layoffs. (A job loss could be someone quitting without being replaced.) Now that I'm looking at the definitions from CES, it's also possible my figure is too low, because if someone is laid off from one position while someone else is hired for a different position in the same establishment, it looks like that would not count as a job loss.

Thu Sep 18, 09:19:00 AM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"20 million is my "ball park figure" for layoffs"

You are failing to net out baseline turnover - which would exist even in a "good" employment year.

Using your metric, even the best year of the 90's would likely show gross job losses in the high millions.

That is because you are measuring *separations* - which occur in the millions even in the best of times.

I think the underlying point about underemployment is very valid but the 20 million figure is extremely inaccurate/deceptive.

Thu Sep 18, 09:43:00 AM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

I'm not measuring "separations"; I'm measuring "gross job losses" (extrapolating the figure of that name from the BED data). As best I can determine, they take the change in employment at each establishment and add them up. The only issue is what proportion of quitters are replaced within the quarter. I'm assuming that most of them are. But I rounded down as a rough guess to account for those that aren't replaced.

Thu Sep 18, 10:20:00 AM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'll repeat my main point:

You are failing to net out baseline turnover - which would exist even in a "good" employment year.

Using your metric, even the best year of the 90's would likely show gross job losses in the high millions.

Thu Sep 18, 11:08:00 AM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

I'm not sure what you mean by
"baseline turnover." If you're talking about people who quit one job and go to another one, then you're criticism is only valid to the extent that replacing quitters takes longer than to the end of the quarter (or that quitters are not replaced at all). If someone quits and then is replaced within the quarter, the statistic will show no job loss, because the head count for that establishment at the end of the quarter will be the same as the head count at the beginning of the quarter. Your criticism would clearly apply if I were measuring "separations," but I'm not.

If by "baseline turnover" you mean people who are laid off from one job and then find another one, then of course I don't take that into account: that's my whole point. These people have "lost their jobs," most of them have experienced at least a short spell of unemployment, and they should be counted in the number of people who have lost their jobs.

It's true that my figure would show a lot of job losses during the 90s, because there were in fact a lot of job losses during the 90s. I imagine that, in certain industries and occupations, and in certain parts of the country, jobs loss was a serious problem even then. The major difference is that the job market as a whole was strong, so it was easier for most people to find a new job (and a reasonably good one) than it is today. (I think the extent of the contrast has been exaggerated, though. Even in the 90s, losing your job was bad news.)

So in the 1990s, although job loss was high, it usually wasn't such a big deal. Maybe say 15 million people lost their jobs in 9 months, but it wasn't painful enough to be an issue. Today, losing your job is very bad news, because finding a new one is a major struggle, and because the likelihood of finding a new one as good as the old one is low in most cases.

I stand behind my point that around 20 million people have lost their jobs. We don't really know how painful the job losses were. We know that most of them found new jobs, but we don't know how difficult it was or how good the new jobs were compared to the old ones. We do know that average unemployment duration has been longer than usual, so that's one indicator that a large fraction of these job losses were difficult for the people who experienced them.

I'll grant you that gross job losses by itself may not be the best statistic to describe the state of the job market, but neither is net job losses. I would want to know both numbers, among numerous others.

Thu Sep 18, 01:29:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

knzn,

Your estimate of 20 million for gross job losses is too low, by at least a factor of 2. Using the CPS, I calculate that 46.9 million workers left employment in 2008.

A detailed analysis is here:

http://chrisnekarda.com/2008/09/gross-flows-on-the-campaign-trail/

Fri Sep 19, 09:25:00 PM EDT  
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