Once again, business reporters are wrong



Yahoo! News - Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth: "Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth

Sat Jan 31, 8:39 AM ET
By Andrea Hopkins

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - According to the most widely accepted measure of U.S. employment, public-speaking coach and consultant LeeAundra Temescu was not among the 130 million Americans who had a job in 2003.

But don't try telling her that.

'Was I working?' the Los Angeles resident said. 'In terms of speaking and writing and marketing and doing all that sort of stuff -- yeah, I was working.'

Because she is one of more than 15 million self-employed workers in the United States, Temescu is on nobody's payroll -- and thus does not show up on the Labor Department (news - web sites)'s employer survey used each month to assess the strength of the job market."


I wonder where they get the figure that there are 15 million self-employed workers. I'm looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics page detailing these, and I see 9,412,000 in nonagricultural industries, plus 870,000 in agricultural industries. This is in table A-22 of the Employment Situation. This is the household survey, that calls households and asks them. Look it up. But I find this next quote even more appalling.

For much of 2003, she was one of 60,000 surveyed for the household report. Trying to categorize herself as "employed" or "unemployed" was tough in a week when she had no paying clients but was busy marketing. And she said the Census Bureau (news - web sites) questioners were just as confused about her employment status.


That's just not true. If a person is self-employed, and is "busy marketing", she would be considered employed. However, if she considered herself unemployed because she wasn't working, and was seeking full-time employment, she would not be considered employed. It's that simple. Only someone deliberately obtuse would find it otherwise. And because of the other errors in this article, I have to find the author deliberately obtuse.

Of course, this kind of deliberate obtuseness plays right into the hands of the Bush Administration, who want to make the American public think that its not that hard to find a job. But re-read the article, and you realize that this person doesn't have enough work, and wants a full-time job. Otherwise, she would have been included in the self-employed every week.

What I don't understand are: 1. Where did the 15 million number come from? 2. If there is a problem with the household survey with respect to the self-employed, why didn't they pick a stronger example?

Popular posts from this blog

New post-convention poll Results look good to me. Now, we have to keep them coming. Further down in the article, there is discussion of how Kerry is gaining ground as a person who understands the needs of people, and a person of character. Key problem is going to be keeping these issues in front of voters, when the Kerry campaign will have a finite amount of cash to campaign on. Bush won't have a finite amount until the Republican convention at the end of August. Other people are going to have to step up and start hammering the Bush administration. Kerry Leads Bush in Post-Convention Poll (washingtonpost.com) : The new poll shows Kerry now claims the support of 50 percent of all registered voters, compared with 44 percent for Bush, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 2 percent. On the eve of the convention, Bush led Kerry 48 percent to 46 percent. Among those most likely to vote, the race is tighter: Kerry holds a 2-point advantage over Bush in the current po...
Read more
Sometimes headlines just write themselves Like this one from the Washington Post today: Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm Michael Brown certainly has shown he can plan a disaster. Look at how awful Hurricane Katrina was. For preventing or fixing things afterwards, he's not so good.
Read more
Reading List It is a good thing to be married to a librarian. Our local system has a web-accessable catalog where I can put a book on hold. Depending on how many people are waiting for the book, in a few days to a few months, my wife comes home with the book I've requested. I was reading "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market" by John Allen Paulos. It is the kind of book that makes mathematics of investing accessable to non-mathematical types (and some of us mathematical folks as well), even as he tells the story of his failed love affair with Worldcom stock. Of course, I set this aside as soon as I got in "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason. This book takes all of the distortions of the right-wing media, the Bush-Cheney administration, and the Republican "conventional wisdom", and proceeds to refute them, citing facts chapter and verse. I think this book is great. But I've g...
Read more