April 05, 2010
In the middle of an article telling readers about Alan Greenspan’s (yes, the guy who couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble) assessment of the economy, the NYT refers to the “paradox” that the Labor Department reported that the economy created 162,000 jobs in March but the unemployment rate remained fixed at 9.7 percent.
This is hardly a paradox. The labor force is growing at the rate of about 125,000 workers a month. This means that March’s job growth was just a little faster than what is needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising. There was no reason that anyone should have expected a decline in the unemployment rate. In fact, the number of people reported as being employed in the household survey used to measure the unemployment rate has grown far more rapidly than the number of workers on payrolls as measured in the establishment survey. Given the data reported in the establishment survey, it is surprising that the unemployment rate has not been rising the last four months.
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