EYE ON THE PIE: Don't blame me; the media made me do it

"It's simple," Harry the Hipster tells me. "You guys, and most economists are guys, make this stuff so complicated. So much of this is connected to that, with this exception and that caution, like maybe nobody can understand. You get my drift?"

Harry is no youth, but still a youthful oldster. His duck–tail haircut, all black thanks to Just–for–Men, frames his wrinkles, giving testimony to years of smoking and sunbathing.

"Now you take, for example, those monthly labor force figures. You got November of '11 as your latest for the states, so we'll take them. Now I'm going to compare them with November of '07. You know why?" he asks.

"Because that was when things were still going well," I answer.

"Bingo, Buster," he claps me in the shoulder. "So back then we had 209,000 more Hoosiers employed than we have today. And what has happened to those people?"

"Tell me," I challenge.

"We don't know," he grins maliciously. "We don't know if the 2.9 million Hoosiers holding jobs now were among the 3.1 million with jobs in '07. It's likely many were, but we don't know. We don't have no reports where we track who was doing what back when and what they are doing now. All we got are numbers from now and from then."

"And you are contesting these numbers?" I say with defiance.

"No way, José," he says. "I'll take the numbers. I just want to bring out what you guys don't when you talks about them. 'Cause you go on and say that 64 percent or 133,000 became unemployed with the balance (76,000) just disappearing."

"That's a lie," I insist with more vigor than necessary. "We report that 76,000 left the labor force."

"Wrong!" Harry says. "What you have is a number for November 2011 that is 76,000 fewer than you saw in the same month four years earlier. You don't know if 200,000 left the labor force while 124,000 entered. All you got is a net figure, a difference between two unknown numbers.

"You guys tell stories without actual facts to back them up. And it's not just that the public believes you, it's that you believe your own stories."

"So what would be your way of telling the story?" I ask.

"Don't tell no story," he responds with a double negative that sets my teeth on edge. "Just tell the facts: Indiana was one of 23 states that saw a decline in its labor force and the number of people employed between November 2007 and 2011. Only seven states had a rise in both their labor force and persons employed ... states as different as Texas and Vermont. Another 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) experienced rising labor force numbers despite a fall in the numbers employed."

"Yes," I cry in frustration, "but people want to know why."

"Do you know why?" Harry asks.

"No, but I can make an educated guess," I reply.

"Yeah," he smiles that evil smile. "Your guess is workers retire, die or move. You imagine that workers leave some place to go somewhere else for better opportunities. You fall back on immigration when you become desperate for an explanation. But you have no direct evidence."

"Well, be that as it may," I say, "but it's the media that makes us do it. All those reporters asking economists for answers, inviting speculation. We try to provide reasons for what we see based on what we understand. It's the best anyone can do."

Opinions are solely the writer's. Marcus is an independent economist, speaker, and writer formerly with Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.