Mankiw of CEA in NYT

[struggle4progress]

Mankiw is the Buishista who famously called outsourcing "a good thing," and his CEA is by now well-known for its gloriously optimistic economic forecasts. Unfortunately, since the record now clearly shows that these prognostications lack any real predictive value, some observers have begun to suspect that the forecasts serve only nonscientific goals, such as swaying public opinion in an election year.

Here, Mankiw has an opportunity to clarify matters. Instead, he simply derides critics without providing meaningful evidence for his argument: for example, to discredit the assertion that "the economy is so bad that people have become discouraged and given up looking for work," he triumphantly cites the U-4 statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics, which he says "peaked in June 2003 at 6.6 percent and has since fallen to 5.9 percent."

Mankiw, of course, does not regard such balderdash as proof. Rather, he hopes the public, confronted with a technical reference, will be intimidated: its eyes should glaze as a fear of numbers seizes it. But the data is easy to obtain in readable chart form, and all the U rates tell the same story: a steady and sustained decline of the unemployment indicators during the Clinton era and the sudden rise during the * reign.


Not a Hooverville in Sight
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
Published: August 22, 2004

<snip>
Wait, the pessimists tell us. Although economists have long viewed the unemployment rate as one of the best measures of the labor market, we are now supposed to ignore it. Unemployment has fallen, they say, only because the economy is so bad that people have become discouraged and given up looking for work.

But that also does not square with the facts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a little-publicized alternative measure of unemployment, called the U-4, which includes those discouraged workers. And what does it show? About the same pattern as the standard unemployment rate: it peaked in June 2003 at 6.6 percent and has since fallen to 5.9 percent.

Then the critics take another tack: yes, the economy is creating jobs, but the jobs are not good jobs. Again, a baseless claim. The truth is that there are no data on the characteristics of the new jobs, only data on employment by very broad industry or occupation categories. Different analysts using these imperfect data can reach wildly different conclusions. Even Larry Katz, the chief economist at the Labor Department in the Clinton administration, concedes the point. "The dirty little secret is that no one is really looking at the quality of new jobs created," he told The Washington Post in June. "We don't know within these broad occupational categories what the new jobs actually are."

Although it is impossible to say precisely what kinds of jobs are being created, we do know that the recovery is broad-based. Over the past year, employment is up in 46 out of 50 states, and the unemployment rate is down in 49. The unemployment rate has declined for people with all levels of education, and among all racial and ethnic groups. As far as anyone can tell, the economy is creating all kinds of jobs.
<snip>

N. Gregory Mankiw is chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22mank.html?th




Bush Administration: Ship More U.S. Jobs Overseas
Feb. 11—With some 15 million U.S. workers unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to continue hunting for work, the Bush administration now is backing moves to outsource more U.S. jobs.

“Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), when releasing the CEA’s annual economic report to Congress. “More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that’s a good thing.”

In the Feb. 9 report, the CEA predicts the economy will generate 3.9 million new jobs this year—a claim that would mean an average 325,000 new jobs each month. Last spring, the CEA said the president’s “Jobs and Growth” millionaire tax cut plan would create 306,000 jobs monthly starting in July. Yet today, the Bush administration is more than 1.8 million jobs short of that prediction.
<snip>
http://aflcio-auth.nisgroup.com/yourjobeconomy/jobs/ns02112004.cfm


FOR THE WEEK OF 8-23-2004
Job growth has considerably slowed in the last two months, with payroll jobs increasing by a meager 32,000 in July, and the June job growth revised down to only 78,000. This leaves employment 1.2 million below what it was when the recession began in March 2001 (private-sector employment is down 1.8 million). Corresponding to this national slowdown in job growth, 22 states lost jobs in July. Most states still have very weak job markets, with fewer jobs in 32 states and higher unemployment in 45 states than when the recession began ... With employment still down 1.2 million jobs since the recession began, and unemployment essentially unchanged since the recovery began in late 2001, many workers lack the bargaining power to claim their fair share of the growing economy; thus, most of the benefits of growth have flowed to profits, not compensation ... According to today’s report from the Department of Commerce, the merchandise trade deficit reached an all-time high of $631 billion in the first six months of 2004, largely due to imports of oil and goods from China ... Although Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan emphasized the importance of educational attainment in a recent speech on the labor market’s problems, a look at the unemployment and employment data shows that education offers scant inoculation in this recovery.
http://www.epinet.org/



Charts obtained from Table A-12. Alternative measures of labor underutilization
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab12.htm
<edit:> Some charts, possibly generated new with each request, seem not correspond to permanent gifs; these are below identified as "link won't work." To generate these charts,

go the cpsatab12.htm page above
check the desired boxes
click Retrieve Data
on the SurveyOutputServlet page that appears
check the box beside "include graphs NEW!" (under Change Output Options)
then click go


Series LNU03025670
(Unadj) Percent Of Civilian Labor Force Unemployed 15 Weeks & over
U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force
<edit: link won't work>

Series LNU04000000
(Unadj) Unemployment Rate
U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)


Series LNU03327707
(Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-4
Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers
<edit: link won't work>

Series LNU03327708
(Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-5
Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers
<edit: link won't work>

Series LNU03327709
(Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-6
Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

[Inland]

1. More of the soft bigotry of low expectations for Bush

"Although it is impossible to say precisely what kinds of jobs are being created, we do know that the recovery is broad-based. "

Wages are down, incomes are down, people losing insurance, defined benefits-but its a broad based recovery. I guess all you have to do is define a broad based recovery as something that effects most Americans negatively, and then Bush is having a broad based recovery. But most people who speak English and try not to use terms deceptively would simply say the economy continues to disappoint, continues to be sluggish, continues to create jobs of the amount and kind that we would expect at this point, and continues to give us more warning signs for the near and far term future.

[salin]

2. Isn't he the admin official who questioned whether work in fast food

burger joints shouldn't be reclassified as "manufacturing jobs"... on the rational that the definition for manufacturing involved putting two products together to form a unique product.

[struggle4progress]

3. Remarks to the National Economists Club and Society of ...

... Government Economists
The Economic Report of the President
Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw Chairman Council of Economic Advisers
February 17, 2004
<snip>
For example, when a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, is it providing a service or combining inputs to manufacture a product?
<snip>
http://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/economic_report-20040217.html