Unemployment Stats

Currently unemployment rate is 9.7% in this country which represents 14.5 million people. California is at 11.6%. This and many other stats come out once a month from the BLS. (Bureau of Labor Statistics) I recommend taking a peek at their site at www.bls.gov/ They have some crazy data there. The unemployment rate is based on 60,000 Americans from 2200 census workers phone calls. Many people lie and say they are employed and can't be reached because they are out looking for a job. The other flaw with the data is that if you have been out of work for more than 1 months you are no longer considered a worker. Plus, if there are people in college in need of jobs or older people who want to go back to work they aren't counted as unemployed.
I think that some hybrid of unemployment and payroll should be developed. Paging Nate silver, paging Nate Silver. The numbers above are only a sliver. Somebody from MIT should be able to figure out the true information because the data above isn't correct. Hopefully in the next week I can track it down, but for now only a post about my dissatisfaction with the data out there.