globalization & Pynchon?

[Jane Sweet]

calbert at tiac.net wrote:
> 
> Very true, and unemployment rates are notoriously unreliable
> (fundamental problem is that it exludes a category - the discouraged
> job seeker)...but if you look at the direction of wages (still enjoying
> "upward pressure") you get a more accurate picture of a labor
> market.....


Right. It's not only the discouraged not being counted it's
how the data is collected, but, a very big but, the numbers
are not taken at face value by economists or any fool like
me who reads the FT and WSJ and swears by every word. There
is new job data, hours worked, over-time, and then capacity
utilization, industrial production, cpi adjusted wage
figures, Union statistics, cars built and sold, and all
sorts of widgets are counted, factored in, help wanted adds,
telephone calls, surveys, oh the numbers are crunched and
crunched and even prison population, teens working, retired
persons working, the black market, the "illegal immigrant
labor" and all manner of phenomenon are pushed into the Lane
calculator and fed into the Bloomburg by bean counters and
"gurus" and economists from every corner of the globe and in
the end they argue it out and adjust them retroactively and
compare them to short and long trends and blah, blah, and
when they post the numbers, the facts are the facts and
employment is full and while the chief economist at Short
Brutish and Avarice may say the figure is 4.2 because he
says new applications at the dpt of Labor are down .001 and
the White house press person may say the figure it 4.1
because the W is in his first hundred days and they want to
establish a good and deceitful relationship with the Press
corp., the facts are the facts, the US economy is
booooooooming, is hot, is dipping a bit here and there, but
is 
a locomotive with a full head of steam and full employment.