Employment Charts in Thirty Seconds

I just came across a really cool application, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page. There, you can quickly assemble charts and graphs on a number of labor and economic measures collected by the BLS, broken down by a variety of demographic categories. Just to try it out, I thought I’d take a look at the seasonally adjusted number of people looking for full-time work, and within seconds I had a table (then select the “include graph” box for a graph.) My only complaint is that exporting the graph doesn’t work well — it looks great on the BLS page, but there’s no convenient export function. In any event, here it is:

Series Id: LNS13100000

Seasonal Adjusted

Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level – Looking For Full-Time Work

Labor force status: Unemployed looking for full-time work

Type of data: Number in thousands

Age: 16 years and over

The number looking for full time work climbed by by 2.5 million from 1/01 to mid-2003, before falling by 500k. Notice any similarities between 1993 to 2003? (In fairness to the younger Bush, the population is larger now than in 1993 by about 20 million, so his 7.5 million isn’t as bad as Bush Sr.’s 7.5 million looking for full time work.)

AB