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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: JohnM who wrote (200916)9/10/2012 8:52:55 PM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (1) of 542649
 
Krugman on getting government employment numbers for those who wish to quarrel with him. My bold.
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September 10, 2012, 5:17 pm
Getting Employment (And Other) Numbers

There were some odd reactions to my posts on the Rand Paul affair: a fair number of people wanted to question the numbers. So maybe I should just mention for newbies to this blog where to find such stuff.

Employment numbers ultimately come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; by drilling down into the databases there you can get quite a lot of detail. However, the BLS site isn’t that user-friendly — not that it’s bad, but the graphics are pretty lame and even persuading it to provide data in a form that’s convenient for your spreadsheet takes a bit of work.

So when I can, I usually go to FRED, which has much (not all) of the same data in a beautifully convenient form and produces nifty graphs on demand. FRED also has lots of other data.

So if you think I’ve said something wrong, or alternatively if you want to explore some alternative, go to FRED before posting. It will make you a better person.

PS: One thing you’ll learn immediately if you look at these numbers is that government workers are overwhelmingly employed by state and local governments; the federal government accounts for less than 3 million of a total of more than 20 million. That’s because the federal government is an insurance company with an army, delivering relatively few services directly; it’s lower-level governments that employ the schoolteachers, police officers, firefighters, and prison guards that make up the bulk of public employment. So nobody who’s serious about this issue focuses on federal employment.

krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
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