As I knew it must, the spread of Mike Gimbel's monthly circular on the US unemployment rate I posted earlier today has brought a galvanic response from Marxist Update reader/contributor, Cleveland's own Товарищ Х, JR
With all due respect to Mike Gimble and his careful analysis of unemployment statistics, he is making this way too hard and still coming up with low numbers that we have been conditioned to accept by BLS statisticians and other Bull Slingers.
- BLS still reports raw data for new unemployment claims weekly, and have been doing so, on the same basis, since long before the current crisis (see "Initial Unemployment Claims").
- Throughout the current crisis job growth in the US has been at best negligible and at worst negative.
- To get what you have termed "The Real Unemployment Rate" you need to know how many people are unemployed.
- This number can be found as the total of weekly new unemployment claims over the 193 weeks from (e.g.) 1 December 2011 thru 6 August 2011 and is 90,458,470
- This number is greater than the base number that Gimble uses in his calculations by at least a factor of 4.
Note that this base figure ignores the 8.5 million underemployed that Gimble correctly argues should be factored into the total-- with this adjustment we have a proper base figure of 92 million unemployed US workers. This figure still ignores what I believe to be, though I have found no way of tracking it, a huge number of workers newly unemployed each week who never file for unemployment compensation (e.g., I would expect that most undocumented immigrants would not apply).
BLS Data
-- Mike Gimble's careful, but still too conservative, interpretation of available date
Comradely,
tovX
PS Happy cipherin'
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