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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Don't ask a grad student. You'll stop believing in the economy. It's the news doing stupid shit. Just a few days ago CNBC brazenly printed a headline proclaiming the end of the cost of living crisis and that wages beat the inflation from the pandemic.
Turns out they meant the actual pandemic, as in the less than 1 percent inflation in 2020. 2021-2023 is still fucked at record levels though. And the actual data they did manage to print was backwards to the headline.
Then there's the actual data we can easily access. Like the unemployment number. If you don't get a job in the next 6 months it just stops counting you. Most measures of wealth distribution available stop at 100,000. Effectively grouping the middle class with billionaires. (Even researchers at Rand have complained about that one) The further you look, the more shenanigans you find. For example go pull the median household income for the last 30 years from BLS. (The agency cited all over the Internet for those numbers in articles.) I can tell you exactly how many teenagers died by slipping in the bath tub with like ten clicks. But finding the most basic economic data from the government is like pulling teeth.
Yes, free online news that relies on clicks isn't the most reliable. That's why you don't see that nonsense in most respectable journalism.
As for the 6months not counted, you're misunderstanding. Typically, folks have to have looked for a job in the last 6 months. (Once they pass that, they are considered a discouraged worker.) Which seems a pretty fair measure, you don't want tp include people not looking for work, what you want out of the unemployment numbers is "of those working or looking for work, how many are currently unemployed."
Here it is by worker, broken down however you'd like. It took a minute and a half of googling and meandering through the website:
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?le
While household income is less of a good measure (do you only count married folks as people, how about households where one partner doesn't have to work as the house is already owned etc) you can similarly find that with a quick google.
Here's where your link leads. Now go look at CDC Wisqars and tell me with a straight face BLS is good. And while general median household income is a very broad measure, it's the most accurate because it accounts for single people, couples with a single income, and multiple income households. Also individual median income is reliably about half of the household median.
Edit- I forgot to add, the six month limit is an arbitrary number. Just because they don't get a job, does not mean they aren't looking. We have effective surveying tools, we can absolutely ask people what they're trying to do instead of relying on arbitrary time lengths and records.
What do you dislike about that link? Are you literally complaining because the labour statistics aren't in pretty infographics? The BLS is designed for those who most commonly use it and we need access to data sliced well, which it is.
And for the six month, I recommend you look at the actual definition, which can be found here:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#unemployed
It seems like you're angry about your own misunderstanding of the definitions being used.
No I'm angry they've put arbitrary limits on how they collect and give data. And over specifying is a form of obfuscation. You say you like tiny little slices pre made but any competent database query system will create any slice you want in seconds. Instead you're reduced to searching for the basic information among thousands of these slices. Or trying to put each slice together to stitch the data together.
This is not neglect, that would look like an abandoned data set or a data set with nothing but a 90's query. This is not benevolence, that would look like the CDCs query system. This is by design. Someone made the system shitty for anyone who wants to work outside their pre-made crumbs of data. What you're seeing isn't someone who wants pretty little graphs. It's someone who wants a million lines of data in a hundred tables with a query system that's worth a damn.
I've never had cause to play with the cdc data but from what I'm looking st in wisqars, it seems lile you're limited to a si goes query at a time and to .csv output, so are you manually putting those hundred tables together or is there another site or...?
For the bls, as with most organizations that do this sort of thing, there's a handy API so you** can easily** pull all the data and tables you'd like. Also, of course, they have most of their data available in large, admittedly flat, data files for the odd cross section of people who want to get down and dirty with the data but don't have the skills to pull JSON requests. Simply follow the original link I gave you, select all the groups/data of interest and to format options.
It really seems like you're just searching for a reason to be angry. At first you were railing because as far as I can tell, you blamed the BLS for free news sites being clickbaity. Then were raging about the unemployment number because you didn't understand how people were counted. Then got angry about having trouble finding the most basic info and when it was shown, are now angry it doesn't come in database format???
You don't need to put one together, they let you query theirs. That's the point. And "program a front end for our API" isn't an answer either. That's literally the opposite of making data easily available.
And then you suggest clicking hundreds of slices, requiring me to effectively create my own database. So now we're at create the back end and front end. You're getting less accessible, not more.
I never blamed BLS for CNBC's shittiness. Those were two separate things. And yes the arbitrary cut offs in data collection is a giant fucking problem. Not counting the bad thing so you can ignore it is one of the oldest ways governments use to ignore things. Such as the way we count unemployment, the 100,000 cap in income baskets, "core" inflation instead of real inflation, household median instead of individual median, etc, etc.
We're not going to have a clear picture of the real economy until we get rid of these diet statistics that serve to paint a false picture.
No one suggested anything of the sort. I have no idea how "Simply follow the original link I gave you, select all the groups/data of interest and to format options." translates to hundreds of clicks. Make a click per group of interest (Black women, Hispanic men etc) and export.
Should you need to dig deeper, the BLS makes almost everything available at a high level of detail, e.g., you could drill down to Women in Seafood processing over time. I get that it can be daunting, but that's kind of the tradeoff; they give you access to way more info than you could need but it is up to you to comb through it.
It's not as pretty as Wisqars because this is for people who know what they are doing and looking for. If you are in school, you could ask a librarian to help you and they may be of assistance.
Again, read the definition and tell me specifically what you dislike.
It really just seems like you're insistent on being angry at the BLS because you didn't know how to find the data. Now that you've been shown the data, you don't have the maturity to admit "oh, cool, I didn't know you could grab it that easily."
Lmao. Wisqars isn't for grown ups. Oh dude. Hold on lemme go tell a bunch of bio phds that. It'll be good for laughs.
Having a more fucked up system isn't some badge of honor. It's not a mark of being better or smarter. It's just laziness, and that's the best interpretation. It's absolutely a case study for obfuscation by inundation.
You haven't shown any easy way to access the information. It's a fucked up search bar that throws hundreds, if not thousands, of slices of information at you. And God forbid you want historical data.
I was just screwing around with it again, to make sure you're actually gaslighting me and the reports it does give have columns with generic names such as "label" and "value". Where label was a date and value was the total number of non farm workers. This is ridiculous. And go look at the site on mobile, just once. You won't need to do it twice. You cannot easily find critical information; the front end itself is a F grade high school project; and the mobile formatting is actually non-existent.
So again. That's not a badge of honor. That's a failure. I want my tax money back.
Lol, mobile? Really? The BLS should configure their website in case you need to assess the state of the economy on the go?!?
Just... Wow. This is about the silliest possible take. I don't remember the last time I read anything quite so utterly ridiculous.
Thank you, I now have the ultimate reference when talking about the stupidity of internet disagreements.
So you can only access data on desktop computers? That's really the gatekeeping line you're drawing?
In terms of BLS priorities? Yeah, ignoring mobile seems pretty reasonable.
"Quick, I need to see seasonally adjusted farmworkers by gender while I'm in line for groceries! For reasons!!!"
Lol
Sure. That's the exact scenario...
Okay, I'll bite because this is too funny. What is your scenario where you need detailed, tabular American labour and economics primary source data on the go and google won't suffice?
When I'm sitting on the shitter talking to you. Or any time I'm traveling and don't want to bring a whole ass laptop? Formatting for mobile isn't exactly hard. You're not asking for months of work. And data about our economy is exactly the kind of data that needs to be as open as possible.
I think this is what you are fundamentally misunderstanding. BLS data is for doing actual analysis and is designed people like me who actually work with data can easily grab and compare from a couple dozen highly specialized tables at once. They have tens of thousands of tables and datasets as they track literally the entire economy.
Their website does not and should not sacrifice that just so you can hunt down data while you poop. That's why I asked what sort of question requires primary source data rather than google. What question do you imagine answering on your phone that google couldn't handle? (Or, that the BLS' "top data" section couldn't handle?)
Oh only for the blessed? Everyone else doesn't matter? No one else deserves to know what's going on? When you could just hook up a report generator?
How are you okay with being spoon fed information instead of pulling your own reports if you're a researcher? Seriously I've never met a researcher who was happy to let other people slice their data. And all of this of defense of them not doing a bog standard query generator. They could still cut the crust off your bread for you. It's not an either/or situation. And it's certainly not the standard in any other academic field.
What serious researcher is doing said serious research on their phone!?!?! Are you high?