{"id":8811,"date":"2009-09-28T02:45:19","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T09:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8811"},"modified":"2009-09-28T02:45:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T09:45:19","slug":"52-youth-unemployment-i-call-bullshit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8811","title":{"rendered":"52% Youth Unemployment? I call bullshit."},"content":{"rendered":"

On an email discussion group, a right-wing friend of mine gloated that youth unemployment in the US is currently at 52.2%. Glenn Reynolds reported<\/a> the same statistic, and so have many other right-wing bloggers. They’re all relying on the same source, the New York Post’s<\/em> Richard Wilner<\/a>, who wrote:<\/p>\n

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wilner is wrong. Wilner claimed his statistic was for those aged 16 to 24. According to the Labor Department<\/a>, unemployment for young Americans aged 16 to 24 is 18.5%. (That’s the highest they’ve ever seen “in July”.)<\/p>\n

One of Glenn’s readers wrote to tell him that current youth unemployment is 25%, not 52.2%. (Glenn’s reader was a little off-base. It’s 25% for folks in the 16-19 age group<\/a>; it’s 18.5% for those in the 16-24 age group Wilner was talking about.) Glenn responded by asking “Anybody have an idea what\u2019s going on?”<\/p>\n

I have an idea. From the Labor Department’s press release:<\/p>\n

The employment-population ratio for young men was 52.2 percent in July 2009<\/strong>, down from 57.9 percent in July 2008. The employment-population ratios for women (50.5 percent), whites (55.2 percent), blacks (36.4 percent), Asians (41.3 percent), and Hispanics (46.5 percent) in July 2009 also were lower than a year earlier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I’m pretty sure that what happened is that Wilner is so ignorant that he doesn’t know the difference between the “unemployment rate” — the percent of people who are looking for work without success — and the “employment-population ratio,” which is the percent of people who have a job.<\/p>\n

It’s okay not to know that difference. Lots of smart people don’t. But if you’re going to write a column read by hundreds of thousands of people, it would be helpful to have a clue what you’re talking about.<\/p>\n

(One last point: The economic situation sucks, especially for employment. We shouldn’t lose sight of that reality as the partisan bickering goes on. 18.5% is tragically bad, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.)<\/p>\n

(Edited to reword definition of unemployment.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On an email discussion group, a right-wing friend of mine gloated that youth unemployment in the US is currently at 52.2%. Glenn Reynolds reported the same statistic, and so have many other right-wing bloggers. They’re all relying on the same … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}