E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post can be a bit Keith Olbermann in his rants, so read with a step back:
The Last Labor Day?
But he makes a great point: People too often view the stock market as the real measure of the economy. He notices that the President addresses it, that many news shows hold him and Congress accountable to it, and that many news stories treat a major turn in the stock market as though it were indicative of the entire economy.
He goes on to make the obvious point that this is not the case - the fact that less than 10% of the US population capable of seriously investing in the stock market are doing better or worse on average isn't very relevant to the economy as a whole. And if you take bubbles into account, the stock market can jump up and down with no relevance to the economy - it can even say things are going well when they're really falling apart.
What matters is employment as a whole - are people working, and what are they doing?
He points out that the stock market is used instead because it's available in real-time.
It seems ridiculous but I think he may have found a simple truth. Why DO we use the stock market, and not jobs numbers, as indicators of how the economy is doing? When we get stock numbers we can all check them in real-time, whether you're a citizen, reporter or the president: finance.google.com. But getting jobs numbers is a lot murkier, never real-time, and your access to those numbers varies based on where you work.
So it's time to pose a challenge to the American public. Who among us can build a real-time indicator for employment in the US?
Giving it some thought, the first step is reporting. The most obvious approach is to ask people to report they took or lost a job, but it's not likely to succeed. On the other hand, employers already do report in with several governmental agencies when they hire a worker. There's a significant amount of paperwork that generally has to be filed within a tight timeline of when the worker is hired. So there's your source of data.
The remaining steps are accessing it in aggregate, and offering it in real-time. What's the best way? Do we ask the Obama Administration to offer their existing numbers up over an API? Is there an existing database we can ask for read access to? What's the best way to do this?
Update:
Monthly isn't real-time, but Google has monthly US Employment in millions, and with a lag time of 2 years, the US population.
If you assume the US population is now 314 million, some math for August:
140 million employed / 314 million = 44.6% employed, or put another way, 55.4% of the population of the US does not work.
There's a pointless number provided by the US Dept of Labor on the size of the Labor Force, but they don't count those not actively looking for work/those who have given up, which is ridiculous. Not a useful statistic. If you did use that number you'd get what you occasionally hear on the news: 9% unemployment, or put another way, of the <50% of the US that seeks work, 9% of those aren't finding jobs.
