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Workforce participation, median, minimum, and bottom decile wage are in many ways vastly more informative than unemployment numbers.

Workforce participation, median, minimum, and bottom decile wage are in many ways vastly more informative than unemployment numbers. Yes, even the expanded U6 values BLS provides. Participation tells you how many people are working. Minimum wage tells you how well the worst-paid fare (and as Adam Smith notes in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , "A man must always live by his work" -- which he expands to mean: wages must provide not only for the laborer, but for a spouse, children, and the education of those children to provide for the next generation of workers. Median wage tells you where the typical worker is. It's not skewed upwards by a few highly-compensated individuals as mean would be. If you and I are at a bar and Bill Gates walks in, the mean wealth has just jumped tremendously, the median not so much. Bottom decile tells you how those at the bottom rung of the compensation ladder, though not necessarily at minimum wage, are doing. Smith has a considerable amount to say on this as well. The biggest problem with unemployment (and other economic / econometric metrics) is that once defined they become political, and an change to more meaningful statistics tends to make the administration in power look worse.

Posted by dredmorbius on Feb 4, 2015, 6:30 AM

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Workforce participation, median, minimum, and bottom decile wage are in many ways vastly more informative than unemployment numbers.

dredmorbiusFeb 4, 2015, 6:30 AM

Workforce participation, median, minimum, and bottom decile wage are in many ways vastly more informative than unemployment numbers. Yes, even the expanded U6 values BLS provides. Participation tells you how many people are working. Minimum wage tells you how well the worst-paid fare (and as Adam Smith notes in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , "A man must always live by his work" -- which he expands to mean: wages must provide not only for the laborer, but for a spouse, children, and the education of those children to provide for the next generation of workers. Median wage tells you where the typical worker is. It's not skewed upwards by a few highly-compensated individuals as mean would be. If you and I are at a bar and Bill Gates walks in, the mean wealth has just jumped tremendously, the median not so much. Bottom decile tells you how those at the bottom rung of the compensation ladder, though not necessarily at minimum wage, are doing. Smith has a considerable amount to say on this as well. The biggest problem with unemployment (and other economic / econometric metrics) is that once defined they become political, and an change to more meaningful statistics tends to make the administration in power look worse.

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