Finegan again

Finegan describes data I can use to look for the 1955 increase in labor force.

Given my focus on 1955-57, I found the most interesting bit of Finegan's article to be on page 31 where he writes:

... the 2.5-percent rise in the labor force between 1969 and 1970 was equaled only by the increase between 1968 and 1969; only four other year-to-year increases (1947-48, 1954-55, 1955-56, and 1966-67) were larger than 2.0 percent.

Take another look at the FRED data:

Graph #1: Labor Force Growth thru 1980

The 1956 increase is NOT larger than 2.0 percent. And the 1955 increase is way bigger than 2%. If that one was 2% I wouldn't have noticed it. It would have been like 1959-60 on the graph: No big deal.

Dunno. Maybe there was some revision in the data, after Finegan wrote his article. I have to track that down. I still want to find the explanation of the super-high 1955 increase in the labor force.

I don't want to go to FRED for this. I don't want current data. I want to see the data Finegan was looking at in 1971-72. He identifies the data source at the bottom of Table 1:

Yeah, I'm not finding the "1971 Manpower Report of the President" on the internet. The Economic Report of the President comes to mind. I'll go with Table C-22 of the 1971 ERP.

Finegan's numbers for the total civilian labor force: 80,733 for 1969 and 82,715 for 1970. "Numbers in thousands". I find exactly the same numbers in the "Total" column (to the right of the "Armed Forces" column) in Table C-22. I'll go with that -- for "persons 16 years of age and over".

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It's not so bad, typing the data in, if the data stops in 1970. Less than 25 numbers to type. Come to think of it, that's how I started, paying a quarter apiece at the library to photocopy pages from the Historical Statistics, Bicentennial Edition, and entering data thru 1970.

Entering data? Into what?? Nah, I didn't have to enter the data back then. I did my graphs by hand.

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Here is the "civilian labor force level" data for 1948-1970, a comparison of current data from FRED and 50-year-old data from the 1971 Economic Report of the President:

The ERP data generates the wide blue line. The FRED data gives us the yellow line, not perfectly centered atop the blue, but not far off. The numbers have changed little in 50 years. Hmm.

Okay, so next I need the "percent change" values to see annual labor force growth rates.

I did the figuring, and peeked before making the new graph. Finegan talks of increases "larger than 2.0 percent" for 1955 and 1956 growth. As soon as I figured the growth rates, I looked:

	ERP Data	FRED Data
1955	2.17% increase	2.03% increase
1956	2.35% increase	2.42% increase

Larger than two percent all around, as Finegan says. And no 5% increase in 1955. WTF!

I'm looking at annual data, not monthly. I notice that the monthly data varies: there is a big increase in June for example, at the end of the school year. It's not like debt, where every number is bigger than the one before until you have a crisis.

The annual values -- at least in the ERP -- are "averages of monthly figures". I got the 5% increase for "percent change from year ago" of monthly data. In my case, the default was monthly data. For Finegan, the default was annual, it appears. Maybe this accounts for the difference.

So I still don't know what accounts for the 1955 increase of the labor force. I still kinda think it must have been Korean war veterans returning to a peacetime economy. But I didn't find anything on that, and anyway the Korean war ended in July 1953. What were those people doing for a year and a half ? Apparently not joining the labor force in droves.

Time to look at monthly data.

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I checked every Economic Report of the President from 1953 to 1968, looking for Noninstitutioinal Population and the Labor Force or something like. All of them list data for "persons 14 years of age and over". The 1968 edition was the first where I also found data on "persons 16 years of age and over".

I guess I can just use the "age 14" data, as it covers the mid-1950s. But I didn't know the "age 16" stuff wasn't available. And FRED's labor force data is age 16 and up. So I spent the morning looking at old ERP files. Good thing my head don't spin easy.

Or... Historical Statistics: Data thru 1970, and in particular Table D 11-25, which lists the labor force as age 16 and up, might be just the ticket. There is a note, however.

The introduction of data from the decennial censuses into the estimation procedure in 1953 and 1962 and the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii beginning in 1960 have resulted in 3 periods of noncomparability; see text.

The "text" for Table D 11-25 says in part:

In 1953, population data from the 1950 census were introduced into the estimating procedure, affecting the comparability of the labor force figures with earlier years. Population levels were raised by 600,000; labor force, total employment, and agricultural employment levels were raised by 350,000, primarily in the figures for all persons and for males. Similarly, population data from the 1960 census were introduced in 1962, reducing the population totals by 50,000 and the labor force and employment totals by 200,000.

The inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii in 1960 resulted in an increase of about 600,000 in population and 300,000 in the labor force, four-fifths of which was in nonagricultural employment.

These adjustments are close in time to 1955 but seem to miss it. They are big numbers, big enough maybe to create a 5% increase in the labor force, but ...
anyway I have to look.

If data for 1953 is not comparable with data for 1952 and before, and data from 1960 is not comparable with data from 1959 and before, then we can safely look at data for the 1953-1959 period. That might be just what I need.