thanks for the post. Can someone please explain how, with these figures, can anyone claim that they’ve ADDED jobs? Hasn’t there clearly been a huge net job loss, including people who’ve dropped out of the labor market?
Similarly, every week they announce 370,000+/- new unemployment claims. At the same time, they say the economy added 69,000 jobs. How can this be? Doesn’t this indicate a net loss of 300,000 jobs? What am I missing?
Actually, it’s 69,000 jobs “added” for the entire month of May with, as you state, new claims for unemployment around 370,000 or so EVERY WEEK.
Those aren’t really numbers you can add up. There were 383,000 (IIRC, and probably revised upward next week) people who filed for unemployment for the first time last week. While that does tend to indicate that THOSE 383K jobs went away, it doesn’t say anything about, for example, how many people already on unemployment got (newly created) jobs. If there were 383K of them, then our net job change would be zero, even though there were 383,000 new unemployment claims (IOW, the number of unemployed didn’t change, just the people), right?
Well, no. We also do not know how many new jobs were created and taken by immigrants, people entering the work force for the first time, and people returning to the work force. And we don’t know how many people left the work force without filing for unemployment.
IMO, new unemployment claims are more of a measure of volatility. High numbers mean there were a lot of changes. Probably negative changes for most of the people involved, but not necessarily bad for the economy, since it only measures one piece of the job pie.
The dismal 69,000 new jobs is what is terrifying. While “new jobs” sounds good, that’s not anywhere near the around 400,000 (IIRC) we need to keep up with our growing population. IOW, the number of people without jobs went up by about 331,000 in May. Ouch.