Thursday, July 3, 2008

Employment - June

Update: Ironman is again beating a dead horse (and again does not let readers post on his site!) that I used a percent of a percent in the chart below. While I love shameless, gratuitous gloating as much as the next man, why is he bringing up something so utterly unimportant when the charts I show are so gosh darn pretty and loaded with great information???

What the chart shows (clearly I may add) is that:
  • the number of those unemployed in June increased by 22% over June of 2007
  • the civilian labor force increased by ~1% over that time (22% is greater than 1% -- we have a problem)
  • men are dropping out of the labor force, women are not (green bars)
  • those aged 16-19 didn't have the same relative increase in unemployment as the rest of the population (but in green one can see why - they chose not to work!)

Two requests for Ironman... let me know if you cannot make out that information listed above clearly and OPEN YOUR SITE TO COMMENTS!!!!

For more beautfiul employment related charts for July, click here.








UPDATE:

Planned to post a response on Political Calculations, but no area for that (and no way to respond to him... very secretive that guy named after a superhero is!). For clarification, calculations in the chart are not percents of percents, but in fact the year over year change in the number of ACTUAL people in:

*The labor force
*Employed
*Unemployed
*Not in labor force

Thanks for the link through though!

UPDATE 2:

Ironman posts:
Yeah, the movie. The worst part of being me is having people do the Black Sabbath guitar theme whenever they see me....

Thank you for clarifying how you determined your numbers - there's still a bit of a problem in that the resulting percentages do not share the same base, which makes for an apples-oranges type comparison between the various figures.

I know it's tempting to try to get everything on one chart, but it's just not viable in this case. I picked up on the percentage change of percentages (which should be identical to your results in the case of unemployment), as the resulting scale was so far out of proportion with the rest of the data.

This just doesn't make sense. A simple example shows why:

*A man moves from China to the U.S.
*U.S. population growth > China population decay (the denominator is smaller for the U.S. because the U.S. is ~1/3 the size)

These can still be (and are) analyzed side by side (so are GDP, inflation, etc...) because the importance is the relative size of the YoY change, regardless of whether the denominators are different.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, the movie. The worst part of being me is having people do the Black Sabbath guitar theme whenever they see me....

    Thank you for clarifying how you determined your numbers - there's still a bit of a problem in that the resulting percentages do not share the same base, which makes for an apples-oranges type comparison between the various figures.

    I know it's tempting to try to get everything on one chart, but it's just not viable in this case. I picked up on the percentage change of percentages (which should be identical to your results in the case of unemployment), as the resulting scale was so far out of proportion with the rest of the data.

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  2. Jake - I meant to follow this up sooner, but I've been busy with other things.

    This just doesn't make sense. A simple example shows why: *A man moves from China to the U.S.
    *U.S. population growth > China population decay (the denominator is smaller for the U.S. because the U.S. is ~1/3 the size)These can still be (and are) analyzed side by side (so are GDP, inflation, etc...) because the importance is the relative size of the YoY change, regardless of whether the denominators are different.


    Three points. First, your population exchange example just doesn't work very well at all. Neither it, nor the math behind it, represent a comparable scenario.

    Second, speaking of comparability, that's the main problem with the chart. By lumping together year over year percentage changes with values that have drastically different bases, the chart fails to clearly communicate the underlying information - and would even appear to contradict itself. You would have been more successful if you had four separate charts, one to track each item with a different base instead of trying to capture in all in just one chart.

    Third, you have a rookie blogging mistake - there's no link (at this writing on July 8, 2008), to the source data from which you calculated your figures! Sooner or later, your credibility is going to be effectively challenged if you can't, don't or won't point to your sources!

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