送交者: xj 于 2005-8-26, 12:54:03:
回答: mango, check out JD Hamilton's blog 由 xj 于 2005-8-26, 12:23:09:
of american family discontent feelings and good national statistics.
What I think is that the calculation of the employment rate has an artificial effect: it incurs both denominator and numerator. If the numerator gets big, the rate will go up, but if the denominator gets small, the rate will also go up. Lots of people are now out of labor force.
Another weakness in employment rate is that it doesn't say anything about the average wages. Now people are apparently working for lower payment than before. On the other hand, the costs of living, ranging from grocery and gasoline to house and rent, are increasing faster than the GDP, or something closes to our lives, our salary. The consumer price index(CPI) increases 2.3% while the GDP increases merely 1.5%. There is a huge discrepency here.
Another indicator I think is very interesting is that you can see cities everywhere are bragging about their abilities to retain or attract several hundred jobs--most are low payment jobs. Apparently they are more people than jobs. In California, 11,000 people applied for 400 jobs in Walmart, even though Walmart is notoriously mean in payment and employee benefits.