The unemployment figures came out today. The Bad News just keeps compounding. It is said that 11.8% of Americans are un-or-underemployed. Not to worry say the optimistic investment brokers. At some point in the future they might declare that we are, indeed, in a recession. The dreaded "R word". Markets and financial sectors are in turmoil, sales are down everywhere and consumer confidence in this largest of confidence games has fallen right off the chart. The oracles proclaim that our dire straits are definately not comparable to the disaster of 1929. (That would be the unmentionable "D" word)
Largely their reasoning falls back on the employment figures. We are told (and some remember) that our country suffered a 25% unemployment rate for a period of time. Horrible stuff. They tell us we have, at present, a 6-1/2% rate with a "worst case scenario" seeing that figure rise to as high as 8-1/2%. Bad enough, to be sure, but nowhere near our worst in history.
Really?
I have a hard enough time understanding percentages, much less statistics. When the basis for establishing statistics become malleable I am utterly lost. Remember when we had a GNP? It was traded-in for our newer model, the "GDP". This, I suspect, may have been an effort to paint for us a rosier picture. Likewise am I suspicious of reportage of such "indicators" as unemployment. At some point in the not-to-distant past (Reagoncine Epoch?) the ranks of the military were added to the "employed" side of the economic ledger. Things got a little rosier with that move too. On second examination we might say "so what"- after all we're not talking about a whole heck of a lot of heads to be counted anyway. But on a third examination we have to wonder- do we count all of those of us who work for the government as "employed" in the same sense that we tally those who toil in the "private sector"?
Consider- anyone employed by any public agency; be it astronaut to zookeeper, fireman to French teacher, cop, constable or court clerk takes a slice of the commonwealth pie. Not that I would, in a personal sense, ever consider these folks non-productive or a "drag" on economic growth or any derogatory categorization- but in a practical sense (defined in economic parameters like GN/DP or whatever) how can we not? I'm talking strictly figures here, not value to society! For the fact is, the number of us employed by taxpayers has grown exponentially since the Great Depression and they earn their daily banana not by leaping tree-to-tree like the mass of us competing monkeys, but are fed by those we are "forced" to relinquish through varying degrees of "inducement". Not a good analogy I'll readily admit. Far too simplistic...to the point of sounding like the Grinch or Gingrich. (Are they the same? Separated at birth?)
My point, if I have one, is simply that I don't understand economics (or at least certain formulas) worth a darn. And I wonder, as usual, if we are being told the Truth.
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3 comments:
Just the opinion of a public school teacher here -- I think it is ridiculous to consider public servants as "taking a slice out of the commonwealth pie." The pie could pay me twice as much as they do now and I would still be a guaranteed investment for them -- bringing the pie vastly more money than they give to me each year.
If I had been ruminating more about The Big Picture you and I would have the same opinion. And, in effect, we do. Teachers are the pie bakers. I was trying to be illustrative of where "capital" comes from only in terms of very basic formulations which I do not understand, hence did not expand upon. I just knew my "value to society" caveat couldn't get me off the hook!
I contend that our nation's "product" is reflected as a quotient- a remainder that has been arbitrarily arrived at. The mathematics allow for varying sizes of numerators and denominators which must follow not only algebraic laws and theorems too weighty for my left hemisphere, but also mutable in at least one important sense- in any given "era" or "age" the majority of the populace will change it's definition of "essential services".
One might go so far as to say they change the definition qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Politically you could also say. (Bombs and guns=pie protectors in the "red years"; schools and hospitals=pie bakers in the "blue years" might be an example) In any event, my theory goes, any examination of "jobs" in the public sector must needs reflect the assumption of a reduceability to zero- that all "commonized" jobs (as if in some right-wing wet-dream) could be eliminated (or privatised). We are presented with a sliding scale with the "zero" of an anarchistic corporate totalitarianism on one end, and we approach the "infinity" of state control on the other.
The upshot of all this blather is a reflection of self-sufficiency. We could protect our pie ourselves with militias or Blackwater, use nothing but volunteer fire brigades, take our own trash to a dump, yes, even home-school our kids. But society progesses (at least I like to think I'm progressive)and it specialises and the line at the "public trough" grows ever longer. This is where we are at. When "measuring" productivity or employment figures we must factor in this strange scale of perception for it is also the slide-rule for the calculations which define us politically, and does, in point of fact, make it all seem so ridiculous.
Thanks for recognizing the pie bakers!
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