We all have our triggers, mine are the people who took economics 101 who say “supply and demand explains everything”.

No, no it doesn’t. Not even close.

And while I’m mostly an autodidact, my academic training such as it was, was in sociology – I am fascinated the boundary conditions of modern economics, and modern economic systems, that many economists don’t seem that concerned with. Free markets are profoundly unnatural and uncommon, and in the long view of human history they are the least common way to allocate scarce resources, not the most common one. The conditions under which they operate; the conditions that distort them; the conditions that destroy them, are as important, and arguably more so, than their internal mechanics.

Maybe I’m just imagining this…

The data on unemployed who are actively seeking jobs come from people who register as such at Labour exchanges – not from surveys but from actual records. If you have not registered as unemployed and seeking employment you will not figure in the data bank.

Resetting data definitions is an old political trick – Maggie Thatcher excelled at it. I believe Bush Jnr’s redfinition included limiting the period during which someone made the attempt to find a job to the immediate past four weeks – this does not take into account many long term unemployed unless they are registered as unenemployed or those who rely on turning up at the gates to scout for casual vacancies but which are uncorroborated by relevant authorities.

The Bush Administration has been very active in changing the way the statistics are compiled.

Please review the changes that the Bushies made in computing the unemployment rate and the GDP rate. I don’t remember how they changed this, but I DO remember that they did change this. I recall that at the time I thought: “Wow! They’re covering up their mess!”

Not only is it worse than they say, they have been active in trying to cover up how much worse it really is.

The issue of immigration has been too politicised lately with irrational ‘appeal to the base’ GOP idiocies. Same goes for education, particularly school education, where we have a policy defunct strategy touted by a President who would not pass the required tests.

Most economists tend to use labour force participation rather than unemployment rate and then even that with caveats that take into account relevant country/region spcific information. Serious economists that is. Politicians like to use the unemployment rate because they can massage the definition of those willing to participate in the work force.

A more useful indicator is to look at the number of people entering the workforce each year, after graduating from full time education in high school, college or university relative to the number of net labour market vacancies in the economy. That measure takes into account the number who retire although their jobs remain in the labour market, jobs which disappear and ‘new’ jobs that weren’t there the previous year. It also accommodates self employed people in registered small businesses but the data still needs to be adjusted for jobs which are contracted out to self employed people rather than being offered in the labour market for a wage/salary. No serious economist looks at unemployment as an issue without looking at the rate of incarceration and age, gender and race/social group composition of those incarcerated. (S)he also remains aware that the crime rate depends on many factors, including labour market opportunities and prospects and silly wars against drugs. Serious economists also look at other issues of relevance in this debate, including rates of growth in GDP, household indebtedness, cost of credit/money (ie interest), labour remuneration, consumer price index, etc. Despite the attempts of John K Galbraith, JM Kynes, Amartya Sen and others, the public perception of economists and economics is driven by politically motivated games of financial players aka Greenspan and Bernanke.

Many in economics get lost in the mathematical intricacies and ignore that it is a social science totally dependent on interpretations of empirical evidence of human interactions concerning the production-distribution-consumption cycle. The late Galbraith railed against university economics courses of over emphasisng the econometric mathematical model analyses at the expense of the socio-cultural dimension in which those models operate. Human beings are capable of reacting in unpredictable ways even as groups that can upset all the niceties set out by those models however stringently they define ceteris paribus caveats.

Serious economists also acknowledge costs of production with no imputed money values, eg environmental degradation and its impact on health. It is entirely a polical gambit to exclude such costs from the corporate balance sheets.

I didn’t want this to be an impassioned defence of economics or economists as such but merely to point out that economists are no more heinous than legal practitioners or scientists or other professional groups. All operate in political environments focused on establishing and entrenching power elites and are subject to misinformation and misconceptions generated to suit political tactics.

It doesn’t take into account people who have simply given up.

That will be most of us soon.

New World Order means you have nothing, coroprations have EVERYTHING

Enjoy slavery.