Innumeracy

Steven Pearlstein Is On Fire:
[Via The Big Picture]
The Big Picture has all the links. I’ll just give one paragraph that made me grin:

And then there is Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), complaining in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that of the 3 million jobs that the stimulus package might create or save, one in five will be government jobs, as if there is something inherently inferior or unsatisfactory about that. (Note to Coburn’s political director: One in five workers in Oklahoma is employed by government.)

I just did a quick perusal of the census databases. About 140,000,000 people were employed in the US in 2007. About 24 million worked for various city, state and federal governments. That is 17% which is pretty close to 1 in 5 (It is really 1 in 5.6). So if the stimulus generally affects the entire economy equally, you would expect about 1 in 5 jobs to be in the government.

Now, it might seem odd that 1 in 5 people are employed in a government job but that is because we often overlook many government employees.  Most of the people who work in the government are incredibly important to the daily functioning of our lives. They are people we do not usually think as being government employees. But they are, as far as the Census Bureau is concerned.

Eight million of the government employees in 2007 were teachers. Almost a million were police officers. Almost another million were corrections officers. Another million were hospital workers. All government employees. Wouldn’t we want more teachers and more police officers? More firefighters and hospital staff?

Over half of all the Federal employees (total = 2.7 million) are either postal workers (770,000) or in National Defense/International Relations (698,000). Another 12% (338,000) are involved in health and hospitals.

Only 25,000 Federal employees are government administrators. That is one percent of all Federal employees. That is what most people think of when they think of government employees, More bureaucrats,

They are not the ones getting the money. Teachers are. Police are. Hospitals are. I’m glad 1 in 5 work for the government since they are the ones who make sure our towns are safe, our houses are protected, our children are educated and our sick are healed.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Politics

Really, Really Different

This Is Different:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Via memeorandum, this:

Sweet jeebus.

As mentioned in the original article, this is ‘realtime’ data, not extrapolated. It is from the current data from the government about job losses. While the previous two recessions were already showing a slowing curve at this point, the current one is still showing an accelerating curve which is not even close to bottoming out.

As a side note, I’m not sure why but the curve looks to me like it was done in Pages (the Apple program) rather than Excel. The colors, fonts and the shadows on the lines just look similar to default values in Pages charting features. Anyway, it was designed by somebody who has an understanding of how to easily display data.

Here is what a typical government representation of similar data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The top graph displays the same data, just as a cumulative change instead of month to month. Look at the plunge in the data.

Job losses in either of the last two months would have been almost twice as great as any other month i the last 20 years. We have had TWO months in a row of this, with little sight of any change.

We will be telling our children about 2008-2009 for a lot more than Obama. This is rapidly turning into a once in a century event.

Technorati Tags: Economy, General, Government, Politics