Things to Blog About/No time!

Don’t get the impression that I’m complaining. But I have a thousand things to blog about, but no time! As Dave Weinberger hints, people have time to blog only when they don’t have a full-time job! Therefore, if a lot of people are blogging, then…

Speaking of unemployment, Paul Solman did an amazing segment on unemployment numbers for PBS newshour. Quote:

2.2 million more Americans are getting disability than in 1982. Like discouraged workers, they’re also out of the workforce. If they weren’t, David Autor thinks disability alone would add considerably to today’s unemployment rate. And then there’s prison. In 1982, about ? million Americans were behind bars. Today, the number is above 2 million… So not only do the incarcerated make today’s unemployment rate for men seem lower than it should be because so many more of them are behind bars, they may suppress the rate for years to come by becoming disproportionately discouraged workers once they re-enter society. That then ends the list of adjustments. Add them all up, and today’s 6.4 percent official unemployment rate approaches 1982’s 10.8 percent record, at least for men. There’s one last way to confirm this. Back in 1982, the percent of total working age men not employed for whatever reason– discouraged, disabled, jailed, retired early, or officially out of work– was 17.3 percent. But as of last month, that total was even higher: 17.8 percent not employed, which make the current job bust, at least for men, look far deeper than the official unemployment rate suggests.