The Money GPS puts out daily videos with a whole bunch of firsthand chart, stats, and articles, about the economy and current trends. These can be depressing, but it's a lot of solid economic data from firsthand sources, and he includes the links so you can dig deeper into any issue, if you like. For these reasons, I watch his videos every day.
This Money GPS video from August 16th, 2020, shows a Shadow Stats chart about the different unemployment rates available today. He shows the chart at 8:08, and talks about it. Here's the chart from shadowstats.com.
The red and gray lines are official statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The red line is the U3 unemployment rate, which primarily counts people who have recently applied for unemployment. This is the unemployment rate you'll hear in the mainstream and business media, because they want things to look as positive as possible. But it does not count everyone in the U.S. who's out of work, not even close.
The gray line is the BLS U6 unemployment number, down to about 16% to 17% right now. This is also an official U.S. government stat, and includes people who may have been forced to work part time, but would prefer to work full time.
The blue line is the shadow stats number, which adds in the people could work, but are discouraged, or have given up looking for a traditional job, for whatever reason. Before the year 1970 or so, there were very few people in this category, but the number has grown dramatically since, and no one knows exactly why.
Think tank brainiac, and author, Nicolas Eberstadt, wrote a book on this group of people in 2016, called Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis (not a paid link). Here's Eberstadt speaking on this topic, in 2017. The number of these men was about 7 million then, and has grown since, by all accounts. This number of long term unemployed people, not even looking for work, will most likely grow dramatically in the next couple of years.
Ebertadt says there is a growing number of women in this category, as well. These are able bodied people, of working age, who are not even looking for work anymore. Some of these people have felony records, and could not find good work after release from prison. Many seem to be former low skilled factory workers who couldn't find decent employment after their local factories shut down, 10-20-30 years ago. Many now get government checks, largely Social Security Disability. I met dozens of these people when I was living in North Carolina, in the low income areas there. All in all, very little is know about this huge group, and no one is really researching this issue in a serious way. In addition, the nation's opiate addiction epidemic, is very highly tied to this group of people.
Whatever the cause, they are part of the "working age American" group, and they are unemployed over the long term. So when you count the unemployed, if you want to be accurate, they should be counted. Hell, I'm officially in this group, though I do freelance artwork, and and I'm working on building a viable business out of that.
But the shadow stats number, now around 30% of the U.S. workforce, shows the most accurate total number of working age people who are not working, for whatever reasons. And that puts our current situation right up there with the numbers unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Long term solution ideas should take this large group of people into account.
No comments:
Post a Comment