The American economy gained 559,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent.
There's nothing special to report about the May numbers. The size of the civilian labor force stayed roughly the same and about half a million people transitioned from unemployed to employed. That's a decent number, though not overwhelming. We still have more than 7 million jobs to go before we reach pre-pandemic levels, so we should do better over the next few months.
Average hourly earnings were up in May by about 3% after you account for inflation. That's good!
That's very good news!
I think in the long run, you want real wages to rise by the same level as average productivity per worker. But in the short run we have a lot of ground to make up with slower-than-before wage growth.
Inflation fears rose as job growth fails to meet expectations; evidence of an economy not overheating demonstrates overheated economy.
See Larry Summers, page 15, Opinions.
Supposedly Summers has been secretly advising Biden.
You really need to look at net jobs, not just new ones. We are still very low in employment/population, scarcely above the 2019 level:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
Net jobs isn't that helpful. Permanent lost jobs is barely below early 2000's levels. The problem is poor sampling, seasonal adjustments and other lazy calculations due to mythical adjustments that don't and shouldn't exist.
Why would we need to be at those levels? We have fewer people in the prime earning age brakets.
We still have more than 7 million jobs to go before we reach pre-pandemic levels...
We should have as many headlines about this as we do about fears of inflation. Or stories about the elite consensus that the relief act was actually too big.
There's this emerging narrative that the employed are a bunch of moochers sitting on the sidelines because it's easier to sit home and invest in Dogecoin with their too-generous UI benefits. The solution to that: let's end benefits early!
That probably won't work out so well:
BLS Supplemental: "In May, 7.9 million persons reported that they had been unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic--that is, they did not work at all or worked fewer hours at some point in the last 4 weeks due to the pandemic."
https://twitter.com/calculatedrisk/status/1400831536056856579?s=20
A good example of anti-worker stupidity here:
https://twitter.com/DRHegedus/status/1400805186826911746?s=20
The problem is, this part is bogus. The said employer is probably lying.
It is actually only 4-5 million jobs. These numbers are trash and the revisions will be immense over the next few years.
Here is another view, in terms of total jobs:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=EuRE
As Kevin says, there is a gap of about 7 million jobs from the pre-2020 trend, and at the rate of the last 6 month it would take years to close this.
Nope, Pandemic relief programs account for 6-7 million jobs themselves. This, not the piddly extra unemployment insurance accounts for the distortion. You need to be careful. Almost all job creation the last 2 months were new jobs.
So...just over year to get back to "normal"?
I think several million are content to stay away from low wage dead end jobs at the Taco Bell. Good for them.
How long before most convenience store and fast food jobs are replaced by robots?
Once it happens it will seem like it happened overnight.
"Siri, play 'The Distant Future' by Flight of the Conchords..."
Tomorrow Never Knows.
When the robots get cheap enough but it depends on the job.
For example, custodial work has a lot of different fine movements, stairs, and a relatively novel set of tasks (i.e. always some new way someone made a mess). Since the fascilities needing to be cleaned are designed for human use they won't change much. You'd need a robot that can plunge a toilet but also gently wipe a mirror, lift trash cans to empty, refill paper towels etc.
Except for floors, replacing janitors with robots that can do all that is expensive! It'll be cheaper to hire a human for quite some time.
I'm assuming everything about those environments will be designed to accommodate how the robots do things and that can be promoted as a novelty, and by the time that wears off they'll be sophisticated enough to do most anything.
I am going to frame my discussion around the idea that Biden is doing a great job so far under real unusual circumstances
But - this great job he's doing is also going to UN-do the need for the go big infrastructure plan. Not because it's NOT NEEDED - certain parts are desperately needed - but because you don't need to rush into it because government programs don't provide too much short term relief. DEMAND for goods does but big government projects do not
Take a look at this
https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506
FDR signed the NEW DEAL in 1933 yet it took 8 years until Dec of 1941 for unemployment to dip into the single digits. People want to believe it happened quickly but nothings is further from the truth
When you go through the yearly data it's apparent that wars impact UnEm more so than government investment in projects do.
But after reading about our population growth going negative it occurred to me that in the long term we will be facing this exact problem for years. Lower numbers of working aged people, rapacious appetite for new things and not enough workers to make those things.
This will take years to unfold but it seems to me if we want a quicker turn around on jobs we need to start a war..............
Wars get the economy going because they usually involve deficit spending on a scale that politicians are unwilling to contemplate in peace time. For instance, suppose that in 1933 Congress had authorized economic stimulus spending equal to the output gap, about 20-25% of GDP, as they did in 1942.