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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Actually, I thought his point was that the 9.7% number in your cite was the same 9.7% number incorrectly described by Krugman as showing the worst job market in 20 years (other than during the prior administration), and there was some discussion of how that 9.7% number was actually generated (which discussion was completely inadequate in both of your quotes). Though the "compare apples and apples" comment should apply, strictly on the basis of the quotes provided, to the Krugman statement only (your article's comparison to the 1990s sounds possibly/probably correct).

I quoted the LA Times for its assessment of the 9.7% figure, not because I have some independent sense that that figure is high or low. Bilmore had quoted Luskin, who says that the number of "discouraged" workers is quite small, and I think the LA Times paragraph suggests that -- no matter how the federal government uses the term in a narrow sense -- the overall concern is valid. Bilmore chose not to respond to that point, but instead refuted a claim made by Krugman -- made elsewhere, and not repeated here by anyone but him. So, to mix metaphors egregiously, he has his own little kabuki performance going, and is playing all the roles since no one is holding up the Krugman straw man for him. The main point: Markets are recovering nicely, the employment situation less so.

Suffice it to say: I hate economic journalism, they think they can get away with these vague, sloppy descriptions of what they are calculating because they think, sadly often rightly, that most americans can't do math and have no concept of statistically valid sampling or calculation methods. Statistics can only "lie" if you conceal the math and/or play fast-ones with your sampling data - case in point: why, exactly, should anyone be alarmed that the "looking for work 15 wks +" number is higher at the end of a recession than at the end of a huge job boom, and why wasn't THAT number compared to the early 1990s (end of recession) data, too? 95% of this stuff is mushy bullshit, and trying to engage it at all is like discussing Proust with a toddler.

The problem also is that the reporters do not bother to understand what they are writing about, since that takes effort and will not be appreciated by most of their audience. Brad DeLong is fond of complaining about this.

DeLong defends Krugman today from an attack very similar to the one by Luskin. It's a long post, but I'm going to copy it here because so much of it is relevant to the conversation we've been having.

• The Slime Machine at Work Again
  
  Daniel Drezner screams and leaps, fangs bared, for Paul Krugman's jugular. However, he trips over a tree root and falls off a cliff:
  
  Daniel Drezner: CORRECTING KRUGMAN.... Krugman's assertion here is that the number of discouraged workers ("those who have given up looking for work") plus the number of part-time workers who wish they were full-time ("only marginally employed") are unusually high by historical standards.... [But] the percentage of discouraged workers... was much higher a decade ago.... [T]he percentage of Americans who are part-time workers but would prefer full-time... was higher a decade ago.... Krugman is either wrong or has a different definition of "unusual" than the rest of the English-speaking world. Distortions like this one...
  
  There are, of course, two big problems with Drezner's "argument." When Krugman writes "an unusually large number of people have given up looking for work" he is tracking the flow of people who used to be employed into out-of-the-labor force status, and is referring to a much larger category of people who have dropped out of the labor force over the past three years than just the Bureau of Labor Statistics's "Discouraged Workers" category. When Krugman writes "many of those who say they have jobs seem to be only marginally employed" he is referring to a large group that has nothing at all to do with those who are working part-time for economic reasons. He is referring to those who tell the BLS household survey interviewers that they are working but for whom there is no corresponding employer telling the BLS payroll survey that they have somebody working for them
  
  Does Krugman say that those who have "given up looking for work" are in the BLS "discouraged worker" category? No. Does Krugman say the words "discouraged workers" at all? No. Does Krugman say that those "marginally attached" are in the BLS "part-time for economic reasons" category? No. Does Krugman say the words "part-time for economic reasons" at all? No.
  
  It is true that anybody who has been watching the labor market over the past three years--and seen the remarkably large fall in employment coupled with the remarkably small rise in the unemployment rate--will know that what Paul Krugman wrote was completely correct: this recession looks small as measured by the rise in unemployment, but it looks large as measured by the fall in employment as a share of the population or the duration of unemployment. Anybody who has been watching will know that Daniel Drezner's fangs-bared attack is fake and loony.
  
  But the numbers of those who watch the flow of data out of the BLS are small. And the numbers of those who will read Drezner, and conclude that Krugman has written something wrong or questionable, are large.
  
  Misrepresent somebody as saying something they did not say. Attack them for it. And then accuse them of "distortions." Way to go, Dan: you're now at the loony hack level. You ought to at least try to be better than that.
  
  
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  What Krugman did write:
  
  Paul Krugman: An aside: how weak is the labor market? The measured unemployment rate of 5.9 percent isn't that high by historical standards, but there's something funny about that number. An unusually large number of people have given up looking for work, so they are no longer counted as unemployed, and many of those who say they have jobs seem to be only marginally employed. Such measures as the length of time it takes laid-off workers to get new jobs continue to indicate the worst job market in 20 years...
  
  
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  Me, from last December:
  
  Look at what has happened to the U.S. employment-to-population ratio--estimated from the BLS household survey--over the past half century:
  
  [The graph here is omitted because it would fuck up the margins, but it's the one that I've linked to twice already and that bilmore has been resolutely ignoring]
  
  The employment-to-population ratio falls in each recessionary period.* Back in the old days, the rule of thumb was that the rise in the unemployment rate (in percentage points) was about five-thirds as large as the fall in the employment-to-population ratio (in percentage points). Thus the 1973-1945 recession saw the unemployment rate rise by 4.4% while the employment-to-population ratio fell by 2.4%. The 1979-1983 recessionary period saw the unemployment rate rise by 5.2% while the employment-to-population ratio fell by 3.1%.
  
  But in the most recent 2000-2003 recessionary period, the employment-to-population ratio has fallen by 2.7% while the unemployment rate has only risen by 2.1%. The old pattern would have led us to expect such a fall in the employment-to-population ratio to have been accompanied by a rise in the unemployment rate of not 2.1% but 4.5%. More than half of the additional people who would have reported themselves as unemployed in a previous big recessionary period... aren't. They're reporting themselves as out of the labor force instead.
  
  Why? What's happened to change the relationship between changes in employment and changes in the labor force? And what does it mean? (It's not the self-employed: this is from the household survey.)
  
  It might be the sheer length of the downturn: a longer downturn may induce more people to give up looking, and produce more discouraged workers out of the labor force. But the 1979-1983 period was also prolonged, and although I remember Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard worrying about how prolonged employment declines might discourage workers and produce a version of the European structural employment disease, it didn't.
  
  It is a mystery to me.
  
  
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  *The employment-to-population ratio also rises over time as discrimination against women is severely reduced, and women find jobs outside the home in amazing numbers in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.

It is a little bit pathetic the way conservatives swarm to attack Krugman. It suggests he's scoring points. He will win a Nobel Prize one of these days, which is not something you hear about, e.g., Luskin.