[Lemmy]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

The active and inactive has to do without a telephone survey of 54,000 persons that Statistics Canada does monthly. You are asked if you are looking for a job or not is you are not working. There's a technical definition, '' in the last four weeks" or something. People will drop out after a year or so of looking and they will not show up in the unemployed statistics. They may drop out for years of even permanently in the case of early retired.

Lemmy is a labour economist and informs me I'm a kook but I looked at the labour statistics closely and it's clear almost no one does. It's a social problem.

It's "In the past two weeks". But, sincerely, you are more expert than I in the finer-points of the calculation of the unemployment rate. My research concerns public service unions, labour substitution policies in Singapore, Marginal Revenue Products of Labour and, if I could squeeze the Social Science Research Council a little more, I'd hire a couple of grad students and do a study of municipal corruption and mismanagement (David Miller and Tom Jacobik and that lot would GO DOWN). But I defer to you on most matters regarding unemployment...oh, except for the fact that people who don't look for work aren't unemployed.

[ShepherdsDog]

$1:

This is why I'm known in Parliament.

Still sending nude pictures of yourself to MPs??

[Bruce_the_vii]

Thanks for the responce Lemmy and thanks for being deferential. I believe you mangled the English there in the last sentence. There are stay at home Moms, early retired and students who head back to school that would work if there were jobs. So I call these '' unemployed''. A professioanl economist might argue, be shy of claiming some student were just the unemployed, but the man in the street gets the point. In Canada, the USA and the UK there are cities were there is or was full employment and the employment rate went significantly above what is normally considered full employment. So you can approach the deficit, the deficit in the Western countries, by getting more people working rather than by tax increases. I get rather a lot of attention for this suggestion, but so far not from the top bananas.

[ShepherdsDog]

Stay at home moms have never been part of the unemployment statistics. In fact, if personal tax burdens were a lot lower, you'd find that there would be more people who would want to be stay at home parents.

My wife, with a M.Ed, chose to do this for our kids until they were 3 years old, then she returned to teaching/administration part time for another year. She didn't consider herself unemployed during that time and most other full time parents don't either, nor should they be considered as such. It's a job that unlike most is 24/7. The pay may suck, but the pay off is the best. She was continually asked(begged at times) to return to 'work' during these periods, but she refused to.

4 - 5 % unemployment has traditionally been referred to as full employment because there are always those who are in between jobs, quitting or being fired. There are also those who choose to be unemployed

[Lemmy]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

Thanks for the responce Lemmy and thanks for being deferential. I believe you mangled the English there in the last sentence.

I read it over and I thinks it's spot-on.

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

There are stay at home Moms, early retired and students who head back to school that would work if there were jobs.

If I could control time and space, I'd transport back in time to 1971 and fuck Angie Dickinson. You want to (and I don't mean you, per se, Bruce) want to criticize economic models for their assumptions, but an assumption beats the shit out of a "what if?" on the logic scale. What if my aunt had nuts? She'd be my uncle.

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

So I call these '' unemployed''. A professioanl economist might argue, be shy of claiming some student were just the unemployed, but the man in the street gets the point. In Canada, the USA and the UK there are cities were there is or was full employment and the employment rate went significantly above what is normally considered full employment. So you can approach the deficit, the deficit in the Western countries, by getting more people working rather than by tax increases. I get rather a lot of attention for this suggestion, but so far not from the top bananas.

And I don't know why you can't just accept that the reason they aren't working isn't a lack of jobs but a lack of willingness to trade leisure for the offered wage-rate? Laymen might call it the human trait of 'lazy'. Was "The Dude" lazy or unemployed? It's a rational choice among alternatives, not a statistical flaw.

[Bruce_the_vii]

In the work place you hear all the time my job is to stressful. Lots of people don't accept harder jobs. This is definitely going on in every workplace.

I see that Lemmy has an interest in municiple mismanagement. Miller has expanded the Toronto budget from $5 billion to $9 billion. No one has any idea why, no one said boo. Things like this are simply going unreported, unrecorded. There is lots going on in our country that isn't reported.

[Bruce_the_vii]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

Stay at home moms have never been part of the unemployment statistics. In fact, if personal tax burdens were a lot lower, you'd find that there would be more people who would want to be stay at home parents.

My wife, with a M.Ed, chose to do this for our kids until they were 3 years old, then she returned to teaching/administration part time for another year. She didn't consider herself unemployed during that time and most other full time parents don't either, nor should they be considered as such. It's a job that unlike most is 24/7. The pay may suck, but the pay off is the best. She was continually asked(begged at times) to return to 'work' during these periods, but she refused to.

4 - 5 % unemployment has traditionally been referred to as full employment because there are always those who are in between jobs, quitting or being fired. There are also those who choose to be unemployed

This is all perfectly true. And I respect that bringing up children is crazy hard work. However there are a some Moms that would go back to work if there was better jobs available. I call these unemployed. It's socially acceptable to do so. Everyone understands fiscal pressure on the household budget.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

In the work place you hear all the time my job is to stressful. Lots of people don't accept harder jobs. This is definitely going on in every workplace.

I see that Lemmy has an interest in municiple mismanagement. Miller has expanded the Toronto budget from $5 billion to $9 billion. No one has any idea why, no one said boo. Things like this are simply going unreported, unrecorded. There is lots going on in our country that isn't reported.

And Lemmy, thanks for posting. It's good to have an economist here on CKA. I don't pester you with questions out of deference for your busy schedule. I also don't ask you for your Statistics Canada account number just to be prudent.

[Lemmy]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

This is all perfectly true. And I respect that bringing up children is crazy hard work. However there are a some Moms that would go back to work if there was better jobs available. I call these unemployed. It's socially acceptable to do so.

Yeah, those housewives would go to work if a job existed at a high enough wage rate to draw them out of 'homemaking'. But those jobs don't exist. Those same housewives would also fuck Brad Pitt if they could. But we're still talking about "What ifs" instead of "What is's". Statistics is the realm of "What is", not "What if", and when you call people unemployed on the basis of "What ifs", you're not operating in the realm of rational and objective statistics. That's the first time I've ever used the word "realm" twice in the same sentence.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Well, all I say is the economy improved in some cities and we know by this track record how many people would go back to work at prevailing conditions. It's 8% more than the Canadian national average currently. The trick is to get the 8% working and paying taxes going forward rather having immigrants come in and take the jobs as Statistics Canada would suggest. That 8% would fix the current fiscal deficit. You get Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver up to Calgary and Edmonton's level and, boom, the federal structural deficit goes away.

[Lemmy]

Generalizations lead to poor conclusions. Our economy benefits more from hardworking immigrants than home-grown dumbasses. The problem is the existence of dumb-asses and lazy fucks, not their origin.

[Bruce_the_vii]

That's not scientific.

[Lemmy]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

That's not scientific.

Sure it is, unless the percentage of "useless/lazy people" is greater among immigrants. Even that would be scientific, I suppose, in a human genetics kind of way. I'm maybe a little higher than I thought I was going to be before I smoked that.

[Bruce_the_vii]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

$1:

This is why I'm known in Parliament.

Still sending nude pictures of yourself to MPs??

Actually I've learned to take the foul language out of my letters.

I have significant support in Parliament for the idea I'm posting here. Getting more people working would, for one, cure the structural fiscal deficit. It's pretty straighforward. On the Liberal side I have the Chairman of the Election Platform Committee, Navdeep Bains, and the Deputy Leader, Marlene Jennings, just waiting for Michael Ignatieff and Finance Critic John McCallum to pay attention to to them. On the Conservative side I have Cabinet Minister Joisee Vanier and former leader Peter McKay just waiting for Prime Minister Stephan Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty to come down from their daily power high and listen to other people. They have leaked this information to me, it's sort of a political key. In both camps there's debilitating communication problems.

[PostFactum]

So wifes go to work,children alone or with unknown someone, and we will have a generation of dumbs, cool.