Toying with numbers: Employment

I was thinking, as I frequently do, about the unemployment rate. People see the unemployment rate at 10 percent, and conclude that the United States is in a very bad position, worse than many other points in our country’s history.

But are we, really? Does a ten percent unemployment rate mean that there were more jobs out at times where there was a lower unemployment rate? I wanted to take a serious look at this presumption.

We look at the unemployment rate now, and can point to times one, five, ten, or twenty years ago where the rate was higher. But this ignores a lot of information. How well did these jobs pay? What sorts of goods could be purchased with the money from these jobs? What was the quality of life that these jobs provided?

But perhaps most importantly, we have to ask this: how many people were really employed? People seem to ignore that the unemployment rate is just that: a rate. The number is measured as a percentage of the population. And the population has grown considerably over the course of the past century.

So I decided to attempt to estimate the number of jobs that have really existed since the 1940s, and see if we really are worse off than a decade or two ago.

First, here is a graph of Unemployment in January of each year:

According to this graph, unemployment now is almost as high as it has been since 1980. This is true when you go purely by percentages. For this next graph, I attempted to incorporate population. To do this, I took the population(according to the U.S. Census) and subtracted a percentage of this population equal to the unemployment rate of that year. Presumably, this gets us close to the numbers of people working in the United States.

I’m sure anyone with knowledge of statistics is crying foul right now, so I explained a couple of problems with the data after the jump below. I should emphasize that this was an amateurish quick number-crunch, not very serious research.

What does this data mean? This chart is effectively the opposite of Unemployment – higher numbers imply more people working. And what do we observe? A steady increase in the number of jobs available over time. Even in this recession, there are approximately twice as many jobs in America now as there were in 1950. Employment has more or less kept up with the rapid increase in population, and the variations of the unemployment rate are almost negligible in this context.

Yes, there are a lot of people unemployed right now – probably more than any other time in U.S. history. But imagine if 3 million people lived in the United States in 1950. Unemployment would be well over 50 percent. We have progressed as a nation, creating the most efficient and most wealthy economy in world history. This long-term success is being overcast by short term problems, and too many people are jumping to the conclusion that we are worse off than we were in the “good old days.”

I don’t mean to ignore the problems of others. In fact, I hope this sort of data inspires them. America is continually advancing and improving its economy, and historically even the largest setbacks have only been temporary. If history repeats itself we will evolve, and we will expand.

(Statistical disclaimer follows)

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Why do people read politicians’ books?

In my life, I have purchased three books by politicians: Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, and The Truth(with jokes) by Al Franken. I only finished two of them(Hint: it was the ones that were funny).

Yet I must be in the minority of people who don’t read many books released by politicians. Right now, the number one selling book is by Sarah Palin. Books by Obama, McCain, and several other politicians have reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. When you factor in books by pundits like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter, there’s a lot of money in telling people what you think.

But why do we read them? Is because we’re simply drawn to people we’ve seen on TV, and buy their book due to recognition? Is it a way to show our support for politicians we like?

I can’t answer for everyone else, but I’ll tell you why I don’t read them: I already know what they’re going to say. I haven’t read Palin’s book, but I guarantee she says the following: taxes are too high, government does too much, media coverage during the campaign was unfair to her, and she loves her family. If you’ve read the book and think there’s something important I missed, leave it in the comments.

Maybe my expectations are unrealistic. I’m a policy junkie, so I’d love for their books to contain 200 pages of detailed policy proposals, data, and their understanding of the political climate at this point. No intelligent politician would sell this book; it would give your opponents your playbook years before the election. But without any substantiative data, I don’t expect to get much out of a book filled with things we’ve already heard.

But if detailed policy isn’t what people want, it seems as if the only real reason to read one of these books is to spend time with these candidates as people. Politicians bombard the airwaves every day, and people inevitably attach to politicians as people as much as they attach to policies. If we’re not reading their books to understand candidates as politicians, we’re probably doing it to relate to them as people. But, if this is the case, do books help a candidate’s political chances, or do they just preach to the choir? How many uncertain voters will be turned on by Palin’s book?

I know I’m not the target demographic for most of these books. I don’t care about a politician’s human interest angle, I just want to know what they expect to do, and the odds of them doing it. Most politicians are pretty close to a partisan line, and that line can be more easily found via a Google search or a stump speech than a diatribe about their lives.

If you regularly read books by politicians or pundits, I want to hear from you. Let me know why you do it, and what you’ve gotten out of it. Am I presuming too much in expecting these books to be anything other than entertainment, or have you really learned something from them?

Identifying bias within ourselves

How often to we sit back and ask “Why do we believe what we believe?” For practical reasons, we don’t do it much. If we questioned our thought paradigm every day, we’d spend so much time sorting out our fundamental desires and priorities, we’d have no time to act upon them. We have to presume certain things about ourselves and the world in order to make it through the day.

But this is the question I’ve been trying to ask myself more often, especially with my political beliefs. It feels like a lifetime ago(although it’s closer to three years) that I blogged for the Detroit News. In retrospect, a majority of what I said was lock-step with the stereotypical liberal teenager. And that’s because that’s what I was: an 18 year old trying to sound intelligent on issues where he was way over his head. So I relied on some cognitive shortcuts in the form of opinions found on sites like Huffington Post and MediaMatters.org.

This is not to say I plagiarized. I did my own writing and research, but my influences were clear. I didn’t do my own research on issues like affirmative action, climate change, or tax policy – I wouldn’t have known where to begin. So I trusted the op-eds and the commentators, subconsciously adopting their views as my own because they were all I really knew.

This path is typical for most people, whether or not they realize it. When we’re young we don’t know how to do our own research, so we trust our families and what they say. That’s why so many people’s political beliefs are nearly identical to those of their parents. We seek out politicians that match these opinions, and then essentially fill any holes in our paradigm with that they say. We do this because we simply don’t have time to intelligently formulate every opinion; like the liberal blogoshphere during my Detroit News days,  political parties are used as cognitive shortcuts. The longer we hold these beliefs, the more entrenched they become, and the more inconceivable reversing these decisions become.

Think about whatever candidate you wanted to vote for in the last presidential election. Think about their policies, and why you voted for those policies. Now think about the other candidate, and try to imagine voting for them. For almost all voters, the idea is nearly impossible to wrap your head around. Yet roughly 50 percent of the country made the decision you find so hard to believe.

Now, what makes these people so different from you? Are they stupid, misguided, or coerced by some evil media conspiracy? Are they out of touch with the world today, and voting the way they are solely because they do not know what you know? And if you think so, wouldn’t they make the same accusation of you?

The fact is, regardless of whomever you voted for, someone far smarter voted for the other guy. Voting behavior isn’t solely a product of intelligence, it’s a process based on beliefs. There is no “rational” choice for president, and certainly no party runs on a “rational” platform. Our alignments, endorsements, and votes are reflections of values instilled in us that most of us never really bother to question. We end up with beliefs that we haven’t really thought about leading to decisions about parties that attempt to appeal to those values, which in turn nominate the people we choose to represent us. Our leaders are determined by subjective beliefs we may not even be aware that we have.

So this is the challenge I present to you: figure out what those beliefs are. Ask yourself the question I posed at the beginning of this post: “Why do we believe what we believe?” Check the constructions you have placed around yourself against the world outside – do they hold up? Have we deliberately ignored certain information simply because it’s too difficult to integrate it into our current framework? Or worse, have we relied heavily on constructions that, when checked, don’t really make sense?

There are hypocrisies within almost everyone’s beliefs, myself included. We intake biases a lot more frequently than we sort through them. We pick a side and stick with it, with no new evaluation as our values and priorities change. If we all challenged these beliefs more frequently, conversation between sides stops being a yelling match and turns into a search for greater understanding. And greater understanding leads to a smarter population and ultimately smarter policies. By seriously asking if what we believe could be wrong, we take the first step towards determining what is right.

Oh yeah, I exist

It’s been about six weeks since I last posted. Apparently my summer of no work, no school, and no girlfriend in town has left me with absolutely no time for the maintenance of a blog.

I’d like to say I have some super-awesome project in the works, and that you can expect me to announce something grand in the coming days. I’d like to, but I can’t. I haven’t even edited together the vacation footage I took over a month ago. I’ve written nothing, recorded nothing, and performed nothing. For the past six weeks, I have in effect failed to justify my existence. And it’s been awesome.

But like doing anything, doing nothing gets tiring after a while. I find my mind wandering and fantasizing about future projects I want to get off the ground. I’m getting actively interested in the start of grad school. I’m even looking forward to starting work again.

Downtime is nice, but too much gets old quickly. The sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something worthwhile is addicting, and I’m going through some sort of withdrawal. The ambitious part of my personality that has been burned out since finals is finally growing back, and I want to do something with it.

Now if only I could get off twitter…

Yammering on about my new toy

The other day, I purchased a Flip Ultra HD, primarily because I’m headed to Paris next week and I thought it would be fun to be able to put together a video while I’m there. I wanted to test it out, so I went around campus taking some shots of the Michigan State campus in summer. I slapped it all together using the video editor that came with the Flip, and embedded it below :

Before I say any more about the Flip itself, I just have to comment: why the hell do they make all the students go home over the summer? MSU’s campus was basically made to wander about aimlessly on a summer afternoon. I suspect half the students at MSU don’t even realize how beautiful the campus can be. If you’re a student, make sure to spend some time in the summer up here. Also, visit me. I’m lonely.

As for the flip, I have to first say that the video above doesn’t fully capture the quality of the footage taken by the Flip Ultra HD. Youtube downgrades the quality even when watching the high quality version, so the footage I shot is sharper than what you can see. The camera films in 720p, and it comes through amazingly on the uncompressed video.

The quality is high but, as you can see in the video, it is hard to keep smooth and steady. The camera isn’t really solid enough to keep the image stable when freehanding it, and the video gets very jumpy very easily. Once I got used to the lack of weight I managed to get it to work well enough, but it’s a concern I hadn’t thought too much on before purchasing the camera. 

Editing with the Flip was also easy, but limited. Maybe I was spoiled by learning how to edit footage with Final Cut before being subjected to weaker programs like Windows Movie Maker, but the lack of options to edit were irritating. All I could to was alter the starting and end points of each clip, then put them in order with cross fades, with the option to add titles, credits, or music. I really wanted there to be an image stabilizer, or at least different types of transitions between clips. Nonetheless, it is functional and easy if you’ve never edited before. 

Ultimately, the Flip Ultra HD is a relatively cheap(about $200) camera for the quality of footage it yields. The mic onboard isn’t great, but passable for video that you don’t expect to be seen anywhere but youtube and its contemporaries. I’d imagine it wouldn’t work great for recording concerts or live music, but I haven’t tried it myself. For the price I paid, I’m satisfied and look forward to using it in Paris. But that may just be because I’m freakin’ going to Paris.