…this one from Econompic via the touchstone known as Felix Salmon.
These are the kind of underlying data-turned-chart that begin to tell the true story of US unemployment and why the blogosphere is so good at informing. Econompic has delved into the BLS raw data and under that sole 9.8% number that 99.99% of us read last week and found an alarming rise in underemploment in the USA. The chart correctly adjusts for population growth in the 35 year period and shows that at no time since JFK has the population of the USA worked so few hours per capita. Now for sure some of the longer-term trends can be explained by improvements in productivity but the very sharp drop-off we see here can only be due to the more intense fight to get even some kind of work.
Nice site for big picture US data, Econompic. I hadn’t heard of it before and shows the benefit of reading a guy like Salmon. RSS material.