Jan
21
Tis the seasonal adjustment
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Hawaii unemployment rose from 2.9% in November to 3.2% in December, the first time in years the rate has topped 3%. But unemployment actually fell.
How can unemployment fall and yet rise? Easily. It fell in reality. It rose in the seasonally adjusted numbers that the Labor Department uses. So I thought I would explain that in this post.
Economists try to track uptrends and downtrends in the employment picture, but know that some changes are not trends at all. They’re just seasonal fluctuations.
Retailers hire extra help for the Christmas holidays. Other employers take on summer help to cover the vacations of their regular workers.
Unemployment goes down from November to December every year as stores recruit part-timers to help rake in the sales on their busiest month.
We could use nothing but real numbers, and simply explain every year that December’s increase is an annual phenomenon rather than a permanent uptrend.
Instead, the Labor Department made up formulas to account for seasonal fluctuations, to dial them out. What’s left, in a perfect world, is the actual longer term trend.
We don’t live in a perfect world. The seasonal adjustment is never totally right. So instead of giving the number and then explaining the seasonal factor, we give the seasonally adjusted number and they try to explain what factors made the seasonal adjustment too great or too small.
From my point of view as an explainer, the inventors of the seasonal adjustment have cleverly concocted a way to make the number even more erroneous, requiring an even more complicated explanation, than if they had left the numbers alone in the first place.
What happened in December is that there was less seasonal hiring that the seasonal adjustment tries to compensate for. So it overcompensated.
The unadjusted unemployment rate was 3% in November and fell to 2.8% in December. Two islands saw actual increases — Kauai and Lanai — ironically both rose to 3.2%, the same number as the seasonally adjusted statewide jobless rate.
But the Big Island fell one tenth to 3.6%, Molokai fell six tenths to 6.2%, the island of Maui fell one tenth to 3.3%, and Oahu, home to three quarters of the state population, fell two tenths to 2.5%.
Hawaii economists uniformly predict higher joblessness this year. But it hasn’t actually begun in any major way yet.
Jan
18
You say Nevada, and I say Nevada
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You may have heard about it by now, but one of the network news anchors — not Katie Couric, a talented second generation journalist who anchors on CBS, but one of those miscreants on a good for nothing Brand X network — had the temerity to pronounce “Nevada” as if it rhymed with “Prada” and got inundated with one or two complaints from people with time on their hands in Nevada, a desolate place, mostly unsurveyed, which actually pronounces its name to rhyme with “data.”
Unless, of course, you pronounce data with a “day”.
It’s a funny thing, but I find that readers, listeners and viewers can be very forgiving about serious mistakes, but mega-persnickety about stuff like this. Of course the reason is, it’s not the same readers, listeners and viewers. Different people are motivated to break radio silence by different issues. Helpful, kind people want to help; others like to scold.
The persnicks are correct, however: the correct pronunciation is precisely what they say. The “ah” version of a Nevada is a regionalism, and the state itself isn’t in that region.
Regional pronunciations can be muy tricky.
The Arkansas River is pronounced like Arkansas in Arkansas but is pronounced like Arkansas in Kansas. (It flows through both states.)
Missouri is a special case. Many Missourians turn the trailing “i” into “uh,” and in my youth I tried to emulate that, but most people who say it that way will still tell you that the “correct” pronunciation is “ee”.
New Madrid, Mo., and the infamous New Madrid earthquake fault are pronounced “MAD-rid,” nothing like the capital of Spain.
A much misunderstood case is the Appalachians, the eastern U.S. mountain range. In the South it’s pronounced with “latch” in the middle, and Southerners love to insist that this is the only correct way to say it. But the prevailing pronunciation from Maryland north is “laysh,” and when Aaron Copland composed Appalachian Spring that is how he said it. Which is correct? It depends on where you are.
Sometimes pronunciations change. The Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna was pronounced with “vie” at the beginning when I was a kid, but as more people moved into the area from elsewhere, it gradually came into conformity with the capital of Austria (or rather, the capital of Austria as pronounced by the British, since the Viennese say something else and even spell it differently, “Wien.”)
Moscow, Idaho, has not always been pronounced the same as Moscow, Russia (which the Russians spell “Moskva” when they’re using our alphabet, but let that pass) and Montivideo, Md., has “video” at the end instead of “vih-DAY-oh,” as is the case in Uruguay.
The British have different pronunciations and spellings from Americans, though we do not always realize it. During the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, the mostly British reporters covering the conflict referred to the Argentine government, pronouncing “Argentine” with the tine of a fork at the end. In American English it would be said “teen” or even changed to Argentinian, but for a couple years after the war over the Malvinas (what Argentinians call the Falklands) it seemed everyone tried to say it the British way. This is part of the American love of British accents and British sentence construction, never mind the fact that the British have a long history of bungling the pronunciation of almost everything, even their own words (”Featherstonehaugh” is pronounced “Fanshaw,” to give one infamous example.)
Linguistic civilians like to believe there is one right way to pronounce every word, but often this is not true, and even dictionaries can disagree. If I mispronounce something I am happy to hear from you, but we can profitably keep the conversation light, I suspect.
P.S. Ryan Ozawa says this brings up the pronunciation of Honolulu now. So I guess I’ll weigh in one that. I think we should try to pronounce Hawaiian words properly as much as possible, though very common non-standard pronunciations are so common everywhere in the world that we can afford to be gentle about correcting people. I also think there is, and perhaps ought to be, a double standard. I had an auntie who lived in Moiliili who pronounced it “Moi-Lilly,” because that was once common. I would never have dared correct her, but it doesn’t mean I should say it that way.
Even Hawaiian words can be tricky. I live on Ena Road and some very respectable Hawaiian language experts say it should be said like “Enna.” However, to my mind this is not correct. John Ena’s family name was Hawaiianized from “Ing.” I pronounce it “Eena.” I say the problem is not that it is mispronounced, but that it is misspelled.
But that is a very, very unusual case where I actually understand the background of a word. On most words I need all the help I can get (including the ones in English).
Jan
18
I got a couple emails from people asking about a story in the Star Bulletin about HMSA jacking up its large employer premiums more than 9% this year.
Yeah, I can explain that.
Two things are going on. One is normal and understandable, but the other one should anger you.
The normal and understandable thing is that HMSA regularly, but not annually, negotiates with doctors and hospitals on what it will pay them for specific services. As you might guess, these fees go the same direction as everything else — up. The higher fees represent, to put it simply, however much inflation there has been since the last negotiation.
But that’s not all they represent.
The second thing that is going on would come under the heading of your tax dollars standing about smoking cigarettes instead of helping keep the nation healthy.
The federal government determines how much Medicare-Medicaid pays for the services that doctors and hospitals provide. But instead of negotiating a fair rate like private sector insurers do, it just announces what it will pay. Years ago it began to pay less than the actual cost.
At first it wasn’t that big a deal. Doctors and hospitals easily made up the difference by slightly overcharging private sector insurers. There was some squawking but everything worked out in the end.
Over the years, however, the gap has steadily widened. Now private sector insurers like HMSA are heavily subsidizing Medicare-Medicaid. It’s like a hidden tax on businesses. It represents incompetence and sloth on the part of federal bureaucrats and members of Congress. And the bigger the gap gets, the harder it becomes for Congress or any administration of any political stripe to suck it up and fix what’s broken.
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