Saturday, October 6, 2012

Jobs report mystery solved

In the household survey (which indicated +873k people found work) 582k of the +873 (exactly 66.6666%) people said they found part time work.  Even if this data is clean, what the survey questions don't screen for is...if you lost a full time job and subsequently "found" a part time job  (aka...you were reduced from full-time to part-time)....that counts as a job created (+1)..but in my mind, that should = 1/2 of a job lost (-0.5)...or at the best (0).  So, if there was a sizable move of employees from full-time to part-time....that move will be counted statistically as a gain in employment (yup...thats crazy talk).  That seems to be what we saw from today's survey.  So, even if you believe that the data was clean...it still was a bad number.

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