It seems that the current contingent of economics reporters are too young to remember a healthy economy. This is the only way to explain the extraordinary celebration of the gain of 216,000 jobs reported for March. While this news is certainly in the “could have been worse” category, this is hardly an impressive rate of job growth, especially for an economy recovering from a severe recession. Remember, job growth averaged 250,000 a month for the 4 years from 1996 to 2000, and that was starting from an unemployment rate that was already under 6 percent.

For those folks too young to remember how an economy is supposed to grow, I constructed a simple chart showing monthly job growth in the two years following the 74-75 recession, the 81-82 recession, and the 91-92 recession and compared them to the 216,000 job growth reported for March. (In making comparisons it is worth noting that the period following the 90-91 recession was known as the “jobless recovery.”) The numbers shown are labor force adjusted which means that I multiplied the number of jobs created each month by the ratio of the March 2011 labor force to the labor force in the month given.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author’s calculations.