The American economy gained 210,000 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 120,000 jobs. That's not very good, but headline unemployment nonetheless fell dramatically to 4.2%.
I'll be honest: the employment numbers lately are so strange that I've gotten a bit tired of tracking them. Take November. Job growth was lousy. And yet the unemployment number went way down. Why? One clue is that the number of employed people went up by 1.1 million and the number of unemployed people went down by half a million. That's great! As a result of all this, even with a very small number of new jobs, the participation rate went up from 61.6% to 61.8%, which is pretty good.
I don't understand all this, so instead let's take a look at something easy, like earnings. In November, hourly earnings grew at an annualized rate of 3.2% while weekly earnings grew at an annualized rate of 6.8%. If we assume an inflation rate of 6.1%, real hourly earning were down -2.9% while weekly earnings—thanks to an increase in average hours worked—were up 0.7%. Here are the numbers for a bunch of individual categories:
As you can see, hourly wages in retail were flat, but hours were way up, leading to an increase of nearly 20% in weekly wages. The leisure and hospitality category was also up, but nearly everything else was down when adjusted for inflation.
At the onset of the Biden administration, there was a optimistic theory:
- pass a large COVID relief bill...check
- manage COVID better than Trump ...check
- pass a large infrastructure bill...check
- pass a large social spending bill...work in process
With the aforementioned accomp[liments, the economy would be robust, Biden would be very popular and the midterms/perhaps reelection was looking very promising.
Clearly, something has gone wrong. Being honest, the economy is mixed, with job growth but we are still way below the pre Covid employment levels. Further, inflation complicates the potential victory lap on the economy.
Clearly there are external issues (new variants of Covid, supply chain challenges etc): however, the above listed Biden plan appears to be falling short.
Errr, Biden's approval with Indies is back to where it was in june. Beware poor takes.
Spadesofgrey - Biden's approval, 42% per Realclearpolitics, is very poor: in the the modern era of polling/post WW2 only Trump has had worse poll numbers at this point.
While Biden might become more popular, perhaps with the passing of the social infrastructure bill, at present things are not looking very optimistic for the Democrats and the midterms.
I could care less what his total approval is by bean counters. His most ardent supporters are indies. Got it bub??? Do you need a nostril grab and rip???
Spadesogrey - here is what I am reading
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-has-lost-support-across-all-groups-of-americans-but-especially-independents-and-hispanics/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/politics/independents-biden-losing-fast/index.html
Nope, they are wrong. His surge the last month with Indies are large.
Do you have creditable, third party data to support your point of view?
There is nothing credible with respect the polling strength or weakness of a Democrat shitlib like Biden when the pollster or poll aggregator is Loq Qabin Republiqan Nate "the Baseball Hipster" Silver.
I know you enjoy trolling, but that South African Omicron surge is going to be massive -- https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/
Like I said last week, you could see the start of the surge, and now the slope appears to be the steepest yet, implying that Omicron is much more infectious than Delta.
Nope. Nonmassive
The unemployment rate is now 4.2% and coming down on average almost half a percentage point a month, compared to 3.5% before the pandemic. That's not a big difference, and all economic indicators suggest the gap will soon close. The reasons for Biden's slump in popularity are debatable and probably unknowable, but it's hard to see how he could have performed significantly better on the economy.
This NYT graphic does the job nicely of tracking job gains by industry, as a result of the pandemic -- https://is.gd/6JLfYV
Wait a few weeks, they're revise them sharply upwards.
I've just assume this "announce low, revise high" is one of many continuing attempts by Democrats to ensure they get zero credit for anything.
This sounds right. Overall employment growth under Biden looks pretty good.
More likely the Trump appointee leading Bureau of Labor Statistics is slow walking the release of numbers to make the reported figure low for page 1a while the revised figure in two months on page b6 will be ignored.
That almost certain to happen. Just this afternoon Austin Goolsbee was on Andrea Mitchell’s show explaining this is “a tale of two numbers”. The number being reported comes from the survey of businesses and that shows weak job growth; the second number comes from an unemployment survey of individuals. That number shows “a blockbuster month, one of the best in a very long time”. That survey shows almost a million jobs were added to the economy; the survey of businesses showed only 200,000 jobs added.
Goolsbee explained that the discrepancy is likely because there is a record number of people starting new businesses and that doesn’t show up yet in the survey of businesses but does in the unemployment survey. He expects there will be a major upward revision of the lower-than-expected jobs numbers just as there was the last time. The media mostly ignored that revision, preferring the weak jobs growth story. They seem to be deliberately trying to lower Biden’s approval ratings.
Naturally, the petite bourgeoisie running America's small businesses are GQP to their narrow, so they are likely to underreport their hiring to pwn tha libz.
NFP is trash. Made up BLS hedonics which "guess" seasonally adjusted numbers. Most of the mythical losses are gig/food service workers which they don't have a clue have come back of not. Sorry, but it's true. Then revisions come in showing 1.5 more jobs were created in 2021 than expected in 2024.
NFP is showing its weakness.
Some context from Dean Baker.
"Seems a lot of reporters are missing this rise in hours. It is a huge deal. It fits a story where employers can't hire workers, so they increase the workweek of the existing labor force."
"The index of aggregate hours in the private sector increased by 0.5 percent in November. This would be the equivalent of more than 630,000 new jobs, with no change in the workweek."
"Nearly every demographic group saw a drop in unemployment in November, but the falls were largest for the groups that face labor market discrimination. The unemployment rate for Blacks fell by 1.2 percentage points to 6.7 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until March 2018 and never prior to that time. For Hispanics, the decline was 0.7 percentage points to 5.2 percent."
Brian Deese, Dir., NEC:
CBO, February 2021:
Unemployment rate will reach 4.2% by Q1 2025.
November 2021:
Unemployment rate reaches 4.2%.
The American Rescue Plan is driving the strongest jobs recovery in modern history.
https://twitter.com/BrianDeeseNEC/status/1466793704933494795?s=20
That still doesn't count which amounts to a 2.4 million jobs gap. Something is off, but we know what that is.
The only difference I would have with Dr. Baker is that we don’t know if employers were unable, or unwilling to hire. The course of the pandemic has been very hard to predict, and given uncertainty about future demand, it is easier to adjust the hours of existing workers than to hire and potentially lay off new ones.
But the increase is certainly a clue that, if Covid can be brought under control, hiring is likely to pick up further.
Lol, it's already under control fool.
Not in this Ohio diner...
See my response above. Austin Goolsbee has another explanation which seems very credible.
There was a story the other day (Inc. magazine, maybe?) that claimed that a lot of the missing workers are ones who have decided that rather than go back to their old jobs, they we're going to take the opportunity to start their own small businesses.
According to Austin Goolsbee there has been a record number of people starting their own businesses recently and the employment resulting from that wasn’t counted in the survey of current businesses that the jobs number was based on.
The survey of people (household survey) showed job gains of 1.1 million people compared to the survey of businesses (establishment survey) which showed a gain of 210,000.
Given that we know the business survey does not pick up new businesses quickly, does not attempt to include self-employed workers and has seen very large revisions.....might be safe to assume that the household survey of 1.1 million is a bit closer to reality than the 210,000 new jobs figure.
But who knows....
KD
Put it in perspective
Our jobs numbers are based upon baby boom generation workers
That number of people is decreasing. When the pandemic hit many took early retirement. When DELTA surged those that held on were then faced with a risky decision - stay at work risking disease or retire.
Sure certain industries were affected more so than others. But the overall math is not that hard
We have a pandemic that drove people away from working, at the same time we have a working aged population that is decreasing while demand for services are increasing.
Now that help you
sure workforce participation improved - some boomers decided to go back to work - but at the first sign of an micron wave here they will retire. So yeah participation improved, unemployment fell so even though the jobs created were smaller than expected for our post baby boom world they were sufficient to keep everyone who wants to be employed working.
I don't see a huge revision to this months numbers either...........
From Josh Marshall at Talking Poinis Memo:
"We have a mere 210,000 new jobs created in November, according to statistics released this morning by the Bureau of Labor statistics. It’s another “disappointing” number, well below Wall Street estimates. But as we noted a couple weeks ago and Philip Bump reminds us this morning, we should expect that the number is actually much higher, probably dramatically higher. So far this year every month but one has been revised higher after the fact, often by magnitudes far greater than in the history of counting this number. September was initially 194,000. Now it’s revised to 379,000. August was initially 235,000. Now it’s revised to 483,000. A number of other months have been upward revised by 100,000 or more."
Right up until 2020, the unemployment rate was the key indicator cited in the media as evidence of the state of the labor market.
But then journalists decided we were witnessing Jimmy Carter's second term. The unemployment rate barely gets mentioned anymore; the important benchmark now is "economists' expectations".
Perhaps they should adopt the same approach to other important issues. Forget about trends in pandemic cases and deaths, for example. Simply evaluate them against "doctors' expectations" to decide whether they were good or bad.
Which doctors? Josef Fauci or Tony Mengele?