Some Interesting Economic Tidbits

I'll start this by linking to something relevant to my audience of mostly high-tech people: a very interesting article summarizing what I'm sure is an even more interesting McKinsey report (I'm not a McKinsey subscriber) about trends in IT spending. I strongly recommend this one for all. Those of you with no interest in matters outside of technology can click on that little "X" up above now ;-)

Next, on to the more general economic issue of US employment/unemployment figures. This week's reports indicated disappointing job growth last month. Not mentioned in any of the articles that I saw about it however, is that the baseline growth required to maintain the current employment percentage is around 150,000 due to the month-to-month increase of the employement age population. In other words, it's even worse than the numbers look. It's a net loss in percentage terms. On top of that, a friend of mine, Andy William Affleck. addressed the blatantly false assertion coming from certain people that unemployment of 5.5% under President Bush is really no worse than it was at 5.6% under Clinton. As the Department of Labor chart posted by Andy shows, the 5.6% under Clinton was at the midpoint of his term, after three and a half years of a clearly downward trend, whereas unemployment has been trending upward for the majority of the Bush Presidency. Next, via Ross Mayfield, I found my way to Dave Pollard's comparison of President Bush's campaign claims for job growth versus projections based on what has really been happening since growth started to pick up early this year. And from there, I found my way to billmon's deconstruction of the validity of the household survey data that the Bush administration's economic advisors have been relying on, showing that the extrapolations of employment data based on that survey are subject to errors in Census Bureau population estimates, whereas the payroll survey that has consistently shown worse numbers than the household survey is not subject to this source of error. An even more important fact gleaned from this article, IMHO, is the fact that even Ronald Reagan kept noted liberals (e.g., Paul Krugman and Larry Summers) on his Council of Economic Advisors, whereas George W. Bush chooses to only listen to people who will say what he wants to hear.