FCK: The Standard vs Farrar vs the facts

by Fiscally Conservative Kiwi on November 9, 2009 · 7 comments

The Stan­dard rips into Far­rar for point­ing out the unem­ploy­ment amongst 15 – 19 year olds is much worse since the abo­li­tion of youth rates, when com­pared to the unem­ploy­ment rate amongst 20 – 25 year olds. They argue that unem­ploy­ment is cycli­cal, and dur­ing the 1990s reces­sion  (funny they call it neolib­eral – there was a global reces­sion at the time) and 1998 Asian Finan­cial Cri­sis the num­ber of 15 – 19 year olds with jobs dipped. This is pre­sented as proof that DPF is wrong. Except that wasn’t DPF’s point – it was that unem­ploy­ment amongst 15 – 19 year olds is now worse, rel­a­tive to 20 – 25 year olds.

To test this for myself, FCK went back to Stats NZ and ran the num­bers. It seems DPF’s ver­sion of the truth was cor­rect – youth unem­ploy­ment for those 15 – 19 year old has got a lot worse since the abo­li­tion of youth rates (the worst since 1993), while unem­ploy­ment amongst the 20–25 year old has plateaued.

youth_employ

Either some­thing has dras­ti­cally changed in the econ­omy to lead to more youth being unem­ployed (e.g. some sort of mech­a­ni­sa­tion at McDon­alds or APN) since Q1 2008; or the abo­li­tion of youth rates has led to this increase. I’ll let you be the judge of that.

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{ 6 comments }

peterwn November 9, 2009 at 8:57 am

Hey1 you are not sup­posed to be giv­ing kudos for DPF’s troll farm in this blog <G>

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FCK November 9, 2009 at 8:16 pm

Umm… that rule doesn’t apply when there’s left-wing non­sense to refute.

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gomango November 11, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Marty’s posts on the stan­dard are gen­er­ally atro­cious from an eco­nom­ics per­spec­tive, he starts from a polit­i­cal view and manip­u­lates data to fit his view. I sus­pect he is either a first year eco­nom­ics stu­dent or some­one who once did an eco­nom­ics paper before drop­ping out of uni. Many of his posts con­tain egre­gious errors, usu­ally from data min­ing or ignor­ing other fac­tors which clearly should not be ignored. I have ques­tioned many times whether he really does have any eco­nom­ics or econo­met­rics training.

Thiis post re far­rar was remark­able in the far­rar said “Look at the com­par­i­son between A and B”. Marty called bull­shit on that by say­ing “I have looked at the rela­tion­ship between A and Z, and it tells me some­thing com­pletely unre­lated, so clearly far­rar is a lying devi­ous manip­u­la­tor of the truth.”

If Marty had handed that analy­sis into me as a Year 1 eco­nom­ics tutor I would have returned it to him unmarked.

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angus November 11, 2009 at 9:17 pm

some­thing has dras­ti­cally changed in the econ­omy to lead to more youth being unemployed

Its not the economy…

There are more peo­ple 15–19 job seek­ers now com­pared to 20–24 than at any time since 1990. The period cov­ered by this graph coin­cides with those 20–24 out­num­ber­ing those 15–19, up until 2005 after which par­ity or very near par­ity occurs. On pure demo­graph­ics we should expect youth unem­ploy­ment rates to surge about now (unless McDon­alds or APN are upping their labour inten­sity) and it does.

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FCK November 12, 2009 at 8:51 am

That doesn’t seem right Angus – I’ll look at the Stats to see what comes out, while you may be cor­rect that there are more under 19 year olds look­ing for jobs, numer­i­cally that may not stack up.

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Pervach November 12, 2009 at 1:57 pm

@angus, is that demo­graphic trend enough to make the gap go from 7% to 14% in 2 quar­ters? is the num­ber of 15–19 yo’s really grow­ing at 12%pa more than that for 20-24yo’s?

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