gweran.bsky.social
Mostly posting about Economic statistics and surveys. Any posts or opinions are strictly my own.
83 posts
38 followers
50 following
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BLS has several surveys that differentiate between full and Part-time workers
www.bls.gov/web/empsit/c...
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Trying to get my rule to stick, so I’m just leaving it here. Thanks!
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We actually are no longer at 2 Mass Ave, we have been relocated to the Suitland Federal Center in Maryland. 2 Mass Ave is now just the Postal Museum and Senate offices.
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If you could list them for me, that would be great.
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I believe that is actually from the book “Snow Crash,” and hopefully was a joke. Then again, there are some things from Snow Crash that seem pretty prescient. Either way, I was a water club member for years, but I refused to join the refrigerator club.
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U-6 includes those people, the survey is one of the largest and most representative in the United States. There simply isn’t better data available.
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No, they use a list updated quarterly based on residential addresses as well as new construction. They then weight each of those households based on the make up of the country from the Census. You can find all of the methodology they use on the website.
However, I know because I work there.
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I’m not sure what you mean by incomplete, the fact that it is a survey rather than a census?
It is an estimate, but I would say that it is a very good estimate that does reflect reality.
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Sure! This has the most easily accessible data we publish. A frequent question is price per item, or even just quantity of items for each expenditure, but unfortunately it isn’t something the survey captures well.
www.bls.gov/cex/tables/t...
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That’s an interesting estimation, but it already has serious issues. First the $1,866 figure is per household, not individual. So it would be closer to 38 items.
Second, it includes items such as shoes, jewelry, and accessories, which I feel like would drive up the average cost of an item.
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Yes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys American residents to determine the unemployment rate. There are figures published based on unemployments claims, but those are separate measures from the unemployment rate.
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If you link enough BLS webpages you might get someone to show up here.
Either way, employment data is subject to revisions due to benchmarking every January, this isn’t new, though Census did have a relatively large adjustment for 2024 populations.
www.bls.gov/web/empsit/c...
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BLS changed to a secure website, if you use www.BLS.gov you should not receive this message.
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Metropolitan areas are not being excluded from the index (the CPI is still only for urban consumers), however those indexes are no longer being published for each individual metropolitan area.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics is under the Department of Labor, though we do work closely with both BEA and Census, who are both under the Department of Commerce.
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Erika McEntarfer is currently the BLS Commissioner, who still has 3 years left on her 4 year term. Eugene Scalia was the Labor Secretary under Trump in 2019, but the current nominee is Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
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It should fall under “Distilled spirits, excluding whiskey,” though the Field Economists might be too embarrassed to be seen asking for the price for it.
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Employees who continued to do so have been put on administrative leave, and funding has halted.
www.politico.com/news/2025/01...
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This is a great visual, I would note that this is expenditures and not what we call outlays. Outlays would include items such as mortgage payments or other loan payments, which a household might include in their budget, but are not considered expenditures.
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I was responding directly to your quote, “older people (higher unemployment).” They have lower labor participation, not higher unemployment. That’s all I was trying to point out. Thanks.
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They might be pulling down labor participation rates, which is why people usually look at 25-55 for participation. Either way, age doesn’t affect the unemployment rate, if they are retired they are out of scope regardless.
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BLS isn’t the input for those adjustments, mostly likely it was data coming out from the decennial census that caused those adjustments. Also age wouldn’t have an impact on the unemployment numbers.
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Yes, they limited their scope in order to control for specific variables. But please feel free to publish your own research paper addressing these concerns and if it shows new construction actually increases prices, I’ll be happy to read it and adjust my opinion accordingly.
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But there are several other papers looking at and confirming the same results:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/mar...
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
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Perhaps you’d rather start with this paper, which is a companion piece of sorts: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
The paper uses real housing data to show how prices are affected. The other paper then uses real data to model the impact in-migration has on affordable housing in general.
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In this paper the model is based on actual housing data, so I’m not entirely sure what you mean. If you are looking for a case study, first you’d need to find a city to increase supply more than the increase in demand.
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research.upjohn.org/up_workingpa...
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None of that is actually in BLS’s job report. Unemployment had no change at 4.1% and there are roughly half a million more people employed in December of 2024 than in 2023. So I am very curious as to their source of these calculations.
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Sorry, this sounds more like an American Community Survey question, so I’ll have to refer you to the Census Bureau.
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It will in the time use survey.
www.bls.gov/tus/
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Sadly we aren’t there anymore, but you can visit the U.S. Postal Museum, which I personally enjoy, great for all of the philatelists out there.
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Sadly we don’t live there anymore, we have shacked up with Census over in Suitland.
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Quite a bit of employment projection mixed in with measures, but since I believe this technically falls under the purview of the New California Republic Bureau of Labor Statistics I don’t think I can give notes.
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Hey, feel free to ask how about the Consumer Expenditure Survey is conducted, but you should know that we changed how we ask to get better data from respondents, then the data is weighted to ensure that it is representative of the U.S. population.
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That is a wild way to think of unemployment, but if that’s the case labor participation for those 15-64 is higher than it has been since the Great Recession.
fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC6...
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That’s not entirely true, for most surveys BLS categorizes postal workers as federal employees. They also have a separate set of benefits (though comparable to Federal Employees).
www.bls.gov/oes/current/...
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Looking at table 1, there have been a few shifts since 1998. Food, Owned dwellings, Apparel, and Entertainment have dropped while Rented dwellings, Health care, and Education have increased.
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You’ll have to compete with my upcoming 2025 series entitled “Real BLS employee watches Any Austin and cries.”
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The federal reserve’s target for inflation is 2%, this means that the CPI typically increases and is always at a historical high, that is how the index is constructed. What you may want to look at the is 12-month change, which at 2.7% is a bit lower than the U.S.’s historic average of 3.6%.
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I’d still take $1,000.
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There isn’t a specific survey that asks about job separations due to automation as far as I know. However, you will see this factored into the employment projections for occupations, so that is probably the best place to look, aside from research papers such as this one:
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NBER has several papers on the topic, though you might need to sort through them.
If you’d like to look into the raw data, BLS, specifically Consumer Expenditure, collected data on stimulus checks.
www.nber.org/search?page=...
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There is a more recent report, and while the number has dropped some, there are still nearly a million Americans working for minimum wage or less.
www.bls.gov/opub/reports...
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Chat GPT is already wrong, you can find the latest SHED data easily and 63% of adults said they could handle an unexpected $400 expense.
www.federalreserve.gov/publications...