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The latest jobs news, watching the recovery in action (updated)

Larry Kummer, Editor

Summary:   Corporate profits are strong.  Spending by the rich is skyrocketing (look at art prices).  The Republican’s top objective is extending the tax cuts for the rich and cutting social security and medicare benefits for everybody else.  So the economy must be doing fine, with excellent jobs growth.  But let’s check the numbers just to be sure.

Contents

  1. The Recovery!
  2. The Current Numbers: November 2010
  3. For more information

(1)  The Recovery!

(a)  Wall Street and the media obsess over tiny changes in the monthly employment reports, which are often statistically insignificant.  Like the November gains.  These surveys are not that accurate, and changes of a few thousand mean nothing among 300 million Americans.  Instead we should watch the levels and trends.  What improvement in jobs has this recovery brought us since it started in June 2009?  Here are the results for the past 12 months (November 2009 – November 2010, seasonally adjusted, in thousands):

(b)  What about unemployment?

The Census provides six measures of unemployment, depending on definitions of the labor force and unemployed.  The four most widely used (U-3 to U-6. None are easily comparable to those of the great depression (the government began measuring unemployment in the 1940′s; earlier numbers are rough estimates). October 2009 are the two

HOUSEHOLD DATA — Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization [in Percent]
Measure of Unemployment

Seasonally adjusted
Oct 2009 Apr 2010 Jul 2010 Aug 2010 Sept 2010 Oct 2010 Nov 2010
U-3:  Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.  The official unemployment rate. 10.1 9.9 9.5 9.6 9.6 9.6 9.8
U-4:  U-3 plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force 10.6 10.6 10.2 10.3 10.3 10.4 10.6
U-5:  U-4 plus other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force 11.5 11.3 11.0 11.0 11.0 11.1 11.3
U-6:  U-5 plus total employed part time for economic reasons,
as a percent of the civilian labor force		 17.4 17.1 16.5 16.7 17.1 17.0 17.0
NOTE: 
Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.
Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.
Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

(c)  Check your work!

As my teachers said, always check one’s conclusions with different methods.  First, look at the Social Security employment taxes in October:  down 0.7% year-over-year.  This is a reliable measure of American wage income. 

Second, look at new claims for unemployment:  the 4 week average is 431 thousand new claims per week, down from the average this year of roughly 463 thousand/week.  That’s accurate real-time data, and indications of a possible recovery.

(d)  Conclusion

Do we have a recovery?  Not in jobs.  Not in wages.  A wide range of economic data still suggests that the recovery stalled in May and June 2010.

(2)  The Current Numbers:  November 2010

Some aspects of employment are leading indicators, some are lagging indicators.  Broadly speaking, employment is one of the major metric’s of the nation’s health, both economic and social.

These are the numbers from the Census’ Household Population survey (tables A and A-1) for October, released 3 December 2010.  IMO the household survey gives a more reliable real-time picture than the establishment survey (CES).  After the benchmark revisions, 18-plus months later, the CES provides the definitive historical record.  Unfortunately, the initial results bear only a slight resemblance to the final results.  They’re largely modeled from a few early responders.  And the early responses do not include small businesses, the center of the current downturn. 

Here’s the story for November.  All rounded to the nearest million.  It’s almost identical to the numbers for the past few months.

The median duration of unemployment is 21.6 weeks; the mean is 34 weeks (table A-12).  The mean is large due to the six million workers who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more.  The level of long-term unemployment during this downturn is a post-Depression high .

Much has been made of the declining ratio of workers to population.  For example, the fraction of men over 16 who have jobs is a post-Depression low.  Get used to it.  This ratio can only fall further as the boomers age.

(3)  Other posts about employment

  1. America passes a milestone!, 20 January 2010 — More jobs in government than manufacturing
  2. Yes, it is a “mancession”, with men losing more jobs than women. Just like all recessions., 5 October 2009
  3. Update on the “mancession”, 2 December 2009
  4. A look at the engines of American job creation, 12 January 2010
  5. An ominous trend: number of Americans working for the government vs. those making things, 5 March 2010 — Update to the Oct 2009 post.
  6. The coming big increase in structural unemployment, 7 August 2010
  7. The coming Robotic Nation, 28 August 2010
  8. The coming of the robots, reshaping our society in ways difficult to foresee, 22 September 2010
  9. Economists grapple with the first stage of the robot revolution, 23 September 2010
  10. Arithmetic of decline: America’s lost decade for jobs, 27 November 2010
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