Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,misc.headlines,alt.activism,sci.econ
Subject: <None>
From: demon@desire.wright.edu (Stupendous Man)
Date: 27 Aug 92 10:26:22 EST
Organization: Demonic Possesions, Inc.

In article <92Aug26.114413edt.416@neuron.ai.toronto.edu>, radford@cs.toronto.edu (Radford Neal) writes:
> In article <1992Aug25.230848.3747@desire.wright.edu> demon@desire.wright.edu (Stupendous Man) writes:
> 
>>>>  If you want accuracy, the unemployment (or rather employment) shoud be
>>>>  measured as "full time equivalent" positions.  With positions without 
>>>>  benefits being worth only .7 of the same position with benefits. (Or 
>>>>  some other mulitplier.)
> 
>>> The last provision seems pretty silly. I was once offerred the option
>>> by my employer of receiving certain benefits, or several thousand dollars
>>> more in salary. I took the later. Did that make me 30% unemployed?
> 
>>	Not exactly.  Several thousand more won't help if you have no insurance
>>and get AIDS or inoperable cancer or need a marrow transplant.
>>
>>	No benefits indicates a hidden risk associated with the employment. 
>>Thus the attempt to gauge "quality" of employ.
> 
> Well, this was in Canada, so your example isn't relevant. Even if it
> was in the US, I might well have decided to purchase my own insurance,
> rather than use the company plan, though, if I recall correctly, US tax 
> laws discourage this, for some inexplicable reason.
> 
> In any case, the whole idea of judging the quality of the job seems based
> on the idea that unemployment figures are some sort of "score card", to
> use in deciding whether to re-elect the government. This is ridiculous.
> You can't hope to put everything into one number. 

	Politicos will always use economic numbers for their own purposes.  The
primary goal for such a statistic would be to measure the strength of the
economy.  An economy with a lot of full-time jobs is stronger than one with
many part-time jobs.

> What is useful about the unemployement numbers is that they indicate
> the amount of person-hours of labour being wasted. Counting someone
> with a half-time job as half-unemployed therefore makes sense,
> PROVIDED THEY WANT TO WORK FULL TIME. Switching to a system where
> someone with a half-time job counts as half-unemployed even when they
> only want a half-time job would be just as misleading as the present
> system.

	[Un]employment should never be used to measure capacity.  It's simply a
number indicating how many people are [not] working.  Wages are a better
inidication of capacity, although even those can run contrary to the economy.

	For example, the capacity of a company to employ workers is based on the
demand for product, and not by how many people they currently employ.  Wages
paid would give a better measure.  Higher wages indicate increased capacity
that needs to be filled while lower wages indicates decreased capacity.
	Of course the supply of workers wanting to get a job affects the wage
rate also.

Brett                                                      
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Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc