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by dahart 6 days ago
Why does the unemployment chart show a slow rise in unemployment for a year or more before covid started? This does not agree with the data from the BLS, which showed unemployment spiked very suddenly in March 2020. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

Also, what is “AI exposure” in 2015? LLMs hadn’t been invented yet. I did just read some of the cited paper. Essentially the quintiles boil down to use of computers, not really use of AI as we know it today. I know LLMs aren’t all AI, but the thing that’s missing is the distinction between “AI” that can play chess and LLMs that can actually do your job, which have only existed for maybe a year.
1 comments
jvanderbot 6 days ago
They cut out the peaky-peak (16%), and then fit a time-lagged smoother, it looks like. The dots are more like bls.
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dahart 6 days ago
Ah, you’re right.. the dots! I still don’t understand why the smoothing makes covid symmetric when the underlying data is asymmetric. A too-large smoothing window, I guess. They must have been trying to smooth out the seasonal job unemployment rates for the labor-heavy jobs.
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jvanderbot 6 days ago
If you drop the peakiest peak, the data is quite symmetric. Zoom in on 2015-2026 on bls chart. It's pretty symmetric.
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dahart 6 days ago
Hmm, I’m not seeing what you are, unless you mean ignore all data from Apr 2020 to Dec 2021. It took almost 2 full years for unemployment to return to the pre-covid norm. The spike is immediate in apr 2020, then it falls quickly for 6 months to Dec 2020, and then falls more slowly for the next year. That lump from Dec 2020 to Dec 2021 is very asymmetric, compared to Mar 2020 and the preceding year. I’d think even a year-wide smoothing window would capture that asymmetry.
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jvanderbot 6 days ago
https://x.com/jodavaho/status/2081416737883353417?s=20

(shame x is the easist way I have to post two images quickly)

dots seem to fit bls pretty well. Just to bound the effect of the spike, that is a +10% jump, so over a 3 year window it would produce a +3% bump. If they do a backwards only, it'd lag by up to 3 years. So, it's plausible/feasible, maybe not definitive.

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