Month: April 2022

The American economy gained 431,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 341,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate fell yet again to 3.6%.

This is yet another strong jobs report. However, wage growth was terrible: adjusted for inflation, weekly earnings declined at an annualized rate of about 5%. This continues to be puzzling since (a) employers are still complaining that they can't find workers and (b) the labor market is genuinely tight. Here's the participation rate for men and women:

Men are within one percentage point of their pre-pandemic level and women are within a few tenths of a point. And the numbers are even better if you look at the prime working-age population:

The participation rate among prime-age workers went up 0.3% in March and has all but caught up to its pre-pandemic level. This is a level at which employers should be offering higher wages to coax nonworkers into the labor force, but they aren't. So what's going on?

The CDC released its biannual survey of teen suicide today, and the results are mixed. Here's a look at actual suicide attempts:

Overall, suicide attempts were flat compared to 2019, which is heartening considering all the stresses of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. I would have expected to see a noticeable increase.

On the other hand, 26.3% of gay and lesbian students attempted suicide, up three points from 2019—though this is still a lower rate than in 2015.

As usual, girls were far more likely then boys to attempt suicide, 12.4% to 5.3%. However, with the exception of American Indians, differences between racial groups were fairly small:

• Asian: 7.4%
• Hispanic: 8.4%
• White: 8.9%
• Black: 10.0%
• American Indian: 20.1%