Tag: statistics

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Workforce at 36-year low

The percentage of American civilians 16 or older who do not have a job and are not actively seeking one remained at a 36-year high in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.imgres

In December, April, and now May, the labor force participation rate has been 62.8 percent. That means that 37.2 percent were not participating in the labor force during those months.

Before December, the last time the labor force participation rate sunk as low as 62.8 percent was February 1978, when it was also 62.8 percent. At that time, Jimmy Carter was president.

In April, the number of those not in the labor force hit a record high of 92,018,000. In May, that number declined by 9,000 to 92,009,000. Yet, the participation rate remained the same from April to May at 62.8 percent.

The labor force, according to BLS, is that part of the civilian noninstitutional population that either has a job or has actively sought one in the last four weeks. The civilian noninstitutional population consists of people 16 or older, who are not on active duty in the military or in an institution such as a prison, nursing home, or mental hospital.

In May, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, hit 247,622,000. Of those, 155,613,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one. Continue reading “Workforce at 36-year low”

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Many ambivalent about marriage

Although about the half the total U.S. population is married and the numbers continue to drop, Gallup today reported that only 5% say that they never ever, ever, ever want to tie the knot. imgresAbout 20% are out there hunting, and the rest are divorced or just disillusioned

These results are based on a June 20-24 Gallup poll, which reports thus:  It is not known whether the percentage who don’t want to marry was lower in previous years or decades. But 5% is a low absolute percentage, regardless of what it was in the past.

“Attitudes about marriage are important in the context of a declining marriage rate in the U.S. The Census Bureau reports that the rate of marriage is down, from 9.9 marriages per 1,000 Americans in 1987 to 6.8 in 2011. In addition, researchers at the University of Maryland found that the marriage rate per 1,000 unmarried women fell from 90 in 1950, at the height of the baby boom, to just 31 in 2011.

“There is significant variation across age groups in the four marriage categories, mainly driven by the increase in the “married” or “previously married” percentage as age increases. Nine percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 are unmarried and express no interest in marrying, but 56% of this group is unmarried and does want to get married. This high level of interest in marriage suggests there is little widespread attitudinal aversion to first-time marriage among the nation’s younger unmarried residents.

“Nonwhites in the 18- to 34-year-old age group are significantly less likely than whites of the same age to be married. But 61% of the never-married younger nonwhites want to get married, meaning that 81% of this group is married or wants to be, only slightly lower than the 87% of young whites who are in these two categories. Continue reading “Many ambivalent about marriage”

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Looking for work with a disability

Five years after starting to keep track of whether people with disabilities are working, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has found fewer people with disabilities in the labor force even as the population has grown, reports the Pittsbugh Gazetteimages-1

“In June 2008 when the bureau started to keep track of the disabled population’s relationship to the labor force, there were 27.3 million people who were disabled and 21.7 percent of them were either working or looking for a job.As of March, that number had grown to 28.9 million, but their participation rate in the labor force had fallen to 18 percent.

“During the same time period, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities in the labor force has risen from 9.3 percent to 13 percent. The trends for people with disabilities mirrors the larger population, in which the unemployment rate rose from 5.6 percent in June 2008 to 7.4 percent in March (without seasonal adjustment) while the labor force participation rate has fallen from 72.6 percent to 68.7 percent. “In this market when there are so many people looking for work, people with disabilities have to outshine everybody else,” said Eric Smith, associate director of the Center for Accessible Technologies in Berkeley, Calif. Continue reading “Looking for work with a disability”

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Gallup’s latest LGBT poll

According to Gallup’s most recent poll of self-identifying LGBT people, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender ranges from 1.7% in North Dakota to 5.1% in Hawaii and 10% in the District of Columbia, according to surveys conducted from June-December 2012.imgres-2

No qualification was given as to the validity of the survey methodology. Statistically quantifying the LGBT population is subjective. And since the days of Kinsey homosexuality and heterosexuality have been viewed on a continuum rather than a binary scale. Studies like the recent Gallup poll pointing to the statistics are estimates at best. That said, the most widely accepted statistic is that one in every ten individuals is LGBT, with gender identification located on a separate spectrum.   Continue reading “Gallup’s latest LGBT poll”

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North Korea’s arithmetic

A new initiative was launched recently to teach statistics to university students and government workers in North Korea, a country with an authoritarian government that many researchers in the region think issues the fewest, and least reliable, statistics in the world. The Pyongyang Summer Institute in Survey

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Science and Quantitative Methodology began with about 250 students last summer, taught by 13 instructors from the U.S. and Europe, reports the Wall Street Journal.  “Soon, organizers hope to have 30 instructors, about 250 university students and 100 North Korean government workers, taught in classes hosted by the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the country’s first private university, opened in 2010.

“’Capacity building in the area of statistics is helpful to governments everywhere because quality data collection leads to informed policy decisions Continue reading “North Korea’s arithmetic”

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Women making (some) more movies

“Claire Danes Flaunts Post-Baby Body” was the headline ABC News chose to begin its Golden Globe online coverage. Then there was all the media fuss about what many thought Jodie Foster was going to say.

But if one looks beyond the headlines to the past year’s statistics, women have been some discernable gains in the notoriously male-dominated movie industry.

Last year nearly 10 percent of the top box office earners were made by women directors, nearly double that of 2011.Similar statistics characterize overall

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employment in the entertainment industry, with UC San Diego’s Celluloid Ceiling report saying that women now account for 11 percent of movie jobs of all kinds.

Obviously it’s going to be a long haul, as discussed in a recent New York Times article:

“The storyteller’s gender matters. When more than nine-tenths of movies are made from the male perspective, Continue reading “Women making (some) more movies”

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What made the news

It’s no big secret that what people think has a lot to do with what they watch and read. While ideologies and other belief systems also underlie public opinion, there is no denying the role of “news” in shaping contemporary worldviews – sometimes in direct opposition to empirical data.

For example, while many parents now fear sending junior off to school each morning, the odds of a child being shot in Sandy Hook fashion stand at less than one in a million, as it has for decades. If anything, schools recently have been getting safer.

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After reaching a high of 63 deaths in the 2006-2007 school year, the number of people killed in “school-associated” incidents dropped to 33 in 2009-2010 – the lowest in two decades, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Continue reading “What made the news”

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U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345

This recent statistic of 345 gun deaths is about the average for a two week period in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The number comes courtesy of Slate.com, which has just started an online project to track gun killings. As Slate announced today:

“Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.

 

“That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

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, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States. Continue reading “U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345”

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Violent crime ends 20-year decline

Violent crime has spiked upward for the first time in nearly two decades, according to a report released yesterday by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. “The report shows the rate of violent crime among teen and adult victims grew 17 percent in 2011 from the previous year, a finding that stopped the historic decline since 1993. The timing couldn’t be worse for supporters of California Ballot Initiative 34, which would abolish the death penalty in the state. Analysts say that statistical crime increases often trigger reactionary “moral panics” resulting in measures such as California’s infamous “Three Strikes” law, also the subject of a ballot initiative to lessen its punitive severity this year.
According to the recently released federal numbers, between 2010 and 2011, the rate of violent victimization increased 17 percent, from 19.3 to 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. The increase in total violence was due to a 22 percent increase in the number of aggravated and simple assaults. There was no statistically significant change in the number of rapes or sexual assaults and robberies. While the percentage change in violent crime from 2010 to 2011 is relatively large, the actual difference between the rates for those years (3.3 victimizations per 1,000) is below the average annual change in violent crime (4.3 victimizations per 1,000) over the past two decades. The low rates make the percentage change large, but crime still remains at historically low levels. Since 1993, the rate of violent victimization declined 72 percent. The rate of total property crime increased 11 percent, from 125.4 to 138.7 victimizations per 1,000 households between 2010 and 2011. Household burglary increased 14 percent, from 25.8 to 29.4 victimizations per 1,000 households. In 2011, 49 percent of violent victimizations and 37 percent of property victimization were reported to police. From 2010 to 2011, there was no statistically significant change in the percentage of violent victimizations reported to the police. The percentage of property victimizations reported to the police declined from 39 percent in 2010 to 37 percent in 2011.”