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Originally Posted by smooth
The employment rate only counts the "civilian workforce." So no government workers or military are in that count. Marginally attached workers (people who want to work full-time, but can't because their company won't let them), seasonal workers, and people below the poverty line also don't show up in the unemployment count.
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Ah, I understand now!
I thought you meant workers below the poverty line "are not counted as employed or unemployed", when you where really just saying the working poor/underemployed where counted as employed.
And civilian government employees count towards 'employment', while people in the military (and intelligence) are considered 'out of the workforce'. That makes sense!
My apologies, I misunderstood.
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Originally Posted by smooth
Your analysis of how relative poverty is figured is flawed. Relative poverty is determined by taking half of the median income. Median measures are resistant to outliers. The median income does not fluctuate because one person at the top suddenly makes a billion extra dollars. If anything, relative poverty underestimates poverty (for much of the same reasons I outlined earlier in our estimation of the unemployed) and that's one of the reasons we use it here, versus absolute poverty as reported in the rest of the Western nations.
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The number of people below the poverty line is a crude measure of the income disparity of the nation, at best. While income disparity is important, it isn't real poverty, it's relative poverty.
I am not aware of a Western nation that uses absolute poverty as a measure. There are very few absolutely poor people in Western nations, it would be pretty much useless. I do know that Canada uses a slightly different low-income line. Quite possibly I'm wrong about other Western nations.
The international measure for absolute poverty is 1$/day. Now, practically, you should bias this at purchasing power parity, but even beggers on the street in the West are not-poor by world standards.
Relative poverty is a problem (and a pretty big one! Many crimes and many measures of happiness corelate in not-good ways with wealth inequity), but the measures nations use tends to be crude and often misused, at least in my opinion.
I was doubting that U.S. economists would use the poverty line as a requirement for 'employment', because I misunderstood your first post. You where saying that they did not use poverty as a requirement, which I do believe. Sorry about that misunderstanding on my part.
One person getting richer can make 2 people poor under the described poverty line, with no change in the newly poor people's standard of living. I would not claim it would be common, but it is possible. It requires someone to move from below the median to move above it.
1$,1$,5$,5$,8$,12$,30$,30$,30$
median income is 8$. 1/2 median income is 4$. 2 people are under the poverty line.
Someone earning 1$ starts earning 30$
1$,5$,5$,8$,12$,30$,30$,30$,30$
median income 12$. 1/2 median income is 6$. 3 people are under the poverty line.
The only change is someone got richer.
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Originally Posted by smooth
Like I said, however, I was just trying to be helpful to you. Please do your research instead of bickering with me. I don't come into these forums very often usually as a consequence of what I perceive to be one-up-manship mentality. What I saw was someone from another country making an attempt to understand a complicated issue in how my country calculates unemployment and poverty levels, initially stating that the basis of his points were shaky. Then respond to my clarification with, I doubt this to be so and I doubt that, too. So doubt all you want, I suppose, but such responses obviously don't compel me to lend you some clarification in the future.
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Thank you -- I didn't know that US military where outside of the US employment/unemployment statistics.
I tried to express how I understood your statement, and it lead to things that didn't make sense. A good chunk of that was because I misunderstood you. My apologies if my doubts where offensive -- it turns out most of them where myself doubting a false model of what you said. *sigh*