May 08, 2010
Apparently our news stories are being written by people too young to remember the 90s and unable to find anyone with the competence to look up the data. The economy added 290,000 jobs in April. It is important to note that 66,000 of these jobs were temporary jobs associated with the 2010 census. There is nothing wrong with census jobs, but the point is that these are temporary and have nothing to do with the underlying strength of the economy. So, we can ignore that fact and boast about 290,000 jobs, but if we are then going to be consistent, we should be sure to ignore the loss of these temporary jobs in July and August.
Of course, ignoring that these are temporary jobs generated by the census would give us a poorer understanding of the economy, but would at least be consistent. What is not consistent is ignoring that these jobs are temporary now and then highlighting their loss in July and August. We’ll see.
But, back to the fundamental issues. Is 290,000 jobs in a month (224,000 excluding the census jobs) strong job growth coming out of the worst downturn in 70 years. Well the economy created more than 250,000 jobs a month in the years from January 1996 to January 2000. If we adjust for the larger labor force, it generated 400,000 jobs a month for the year following the employment trough of the 74-75 recession and 420,000 jobs a month for the year following the 81-82 recession. Put another way, if we assume an underlying rate of growth of the labor force of 100,000 a month, then it will take 80 months (6 2/3 years) to make up the job deficit from the downturn at the current rate of job growth. Now, let’s go celebrate!
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