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Unemployment stats Out of Work? Maybe You Can Play with NumbersBy Rick Horowitz
"Lemme see if I've got this right," Paulie says. Me and Paulie, we like to be sure of stuff, so Paulie, he's always saying, "Lemme see if I've got this right" before he tells you what he thinks about it, whatever it is. Me, I'm pretty much the same -- most of the time it's "You with me on this?" Sometimes it's "Here's the way it looks from here." Paulie, every time I say "Here's the way it looks from here," he says I sound like Walter Cronkite. We're just trying to keep things straight. Like the other day, me and Paulie, we're sitting over something cold at our regular place and we're talking jobs. Not our jobs in particular -- there isn't that much to say about our jobs in particular, except we're better off having them than not having them, even though some days we're not so sure, if you know what I mean. Jobs in general. We're trying to figure out if things are getting better or they're not. "Lemme see if I've got this right," Paulie says. "You're saying things must be getting better because the unemployment rate went down." "Two tenths," I tell him. I've got the newspaper with me, and I show him where it says it dropped two tenths -- 5.9 down to 5.7. "Unemployment going down, that's good news. The president even said so." And then I show him where the president called it "a positive sign that the economy is getting better." That last part's a bad move, I know it the minute I do it. With Paulie and the president, it's personal -- I don't have the faintest idea why. (Some things, I don't ask.) "You really believe that guy?" he says. "It's not a question of believing him or not believing him," I say right back. "It's what the numbers are. Numbers don't lie." Paulie, he gets up for a fresh one, he comes back, he sits down, he says, "They don't?" "But they're right here in the paper!" "Gimme that," he says, but he's already grabbed it. He starts skimming through the story, and he isn't halfway through the thing when all of a sudden you see his eyebrows kind of twitch, and then he reads the same part again and they kind of twitch again, and he slides the paper back to me and crosses his arms and waits. "What?" "Some other numbers in this story, too," he says. "Like new jobs. You know how many new jobs they were expecting in December? A hundred-and-fifty thousand. You know how many they actually got?" I take a shot. "Two hundred thousand?" "One thousand." "You're kidding!" I say, even though I know Paulie doesn't kid about this kind of stuff. "But if there were hardly any new jobs, then how did -- " " -- the unemployment rate go down? Simple." And then he reminds me that the unemployment rate doesn't keep track of everybody who doesn't have a job, but just the ones without a job who are looking for a job. If you're not looking, you don't count as unemployed. "So," I say, "the more people who stop looking..." "The lower the unemployment rate goes." "So if -- just for argument's sake -- if everyone who's out of work got so discouraged about their chances that they all stopped looking..." "The unemployment rate would be zero." Me and Paulie, now we're trying to decide if anybody's told the president. Posted 1/13/04. For
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Rick Horowitz
