Thoughts About U.S. Employment

As I've been listening to all the commentary and arguments about unemployment lately, the numbers seem confusing and hard to get a grasp on. What does it actually mean to have a 10% unemployment rate in actual jobs?

The current Census Bureau website indicates that the total population is just about 310 million people.   Of these, there are large numbers (approximately 38%) that are either too young or now retired to be in the workforce.  This interesting graph shows the relative breakout of the US population (from the 2000 census) based on age and gender.

This brings us to a total potential US workforce of maybe 180 million people, although this does not include disabled or people otherwise out of the job market. From numbers I can find, it seems that full employment would be about 150 million people.  This graph from Economagic shows the growth of the non-farmer employed labor force over a 60 year period, topping out about 2007.

This chart below shows a comparison of  "official" unemployment rates since 1975.

However, the work of John Williams, of ShadowStats.com, tracks statistics according to former calculation models used up until the mid-1990s. His data indicates that the real unemployment rate once we consider those people who have dropped out of the labor pool and are underemployed is probably much higher at close to 22%!

This means that rather than the almost 15 million "officially" unemployed, there are actually almost 33 million people without jobs currently.  That is almost 1 in 4 of people in the US who are willing and able to work.  Well, perhaps given the many government subsidies, a certain group of these may not be "willing" anymore.

A very frightening situation, and one kept well hidden with media focus on either "doctored" macro statistics or focus on micro cases.

And, in any case, those who are employed? What are they doing these days? The chart below shows the greatest percentage of current top 10 job types... about 26 million people  in total.  Probably to be expected -- these jobs (other than some customer service reps) cannot be outsourced to Asia.

Special thanks to Casey Research for the creation of some of the charts above compiled from government data sources.