More Jobs Added, Past Months Revised Up

Dave Schuler May 3, 2013

The economy added 165,000 jobs last month and the estimate for the previous two months were revised up:

WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in April, and hiring was much stronger in the previous two months than the government first estimated. The job increases helped reduce the unemployment rate from 7.6 percent to a four-year low of 7.5 percent.

The report Friday from the Labor Department was a reassuring sign that the U.S. job market is improving despite higher taxes and government spending cuts that took effect this year.

The only sectors of the economy that cut jobs last month were construction and government

The government revised up its estimate of job gains in February and March by a combined 114,000. It now says employers added 332,000 jobs in February and 138,000 in March. The economy has created an average of 208,000 jobs a month from November through April — above the 138,000 added in the previous six months.

An additional 210,000 people started looking for work in April, and many of them found jobs.

Well, good. Now all we need to do is keep it up at that pace every single month over the period of the next ten years.

4 comments… add one

TimH Link

Dave, I know you’re skeptical that we can keep up hiring for 10 years – so am I. You’ve often said that the average economic expansion lasts ___ months, and we’re nearing (past?) that number. HOWEVER: I think you may go close to numerology by putting too much faith in that number. Usually part way into an expansion, we’re trying hard to find new qualified workers, a bubble in one way or another is developing, or some other factor that will ultimately end the expansion.

I don’t know that that’s happening yet – although there are still long-term worries about deficits and household balance sheets.
Dave Schuler Link

At one time or another I’ve also posted the standard deviation from the median. As the number of months of expansion grows beyond the median, past the median plus the standard deviation, and farther my confidence that it will continue dwindles.

We’ve never had ten years of expansion. Might we? Sure. There are all sorts of things that might happen but the odds are against them.
AllPraiseTheAlmihgtyObama Link

Looking through the tables, Seasonally Adjusted Full-Time Employment in Non-Agricultural Industries fell by 81,000 jobs. SA Part-Time Employment rose by 356,000 jobs, to make up the difference.

Self-Employed, Non-incorporated rose by almost a quarter million, too. A lot of those jobs are fictional consulting jobs, as people desperately try to paper over holes in their resumes.

This would be a shoddy report in good times. The headline numbers are pure cheats. Even the New York Times is starting to notice:

The federal government counts 11.7 million Americans as unemployed. The real number, it follows, is more like 17 million. [Note: They are adjusting for declining participation, factoring in some decline for an aging population. The are NOT quoting the U-6 numbers.]

There is always some unemployment. Millions of Americans are out of work at any given moment even in the best of times. But the economy is still roughly 10 million jobs short of returning to normal levels of unemployment and labor force participation. Thatâ€™s a lot of missing jobs.

Some of those losses may be permanent. The number of Americans receiving disability benefits has increased by 1.8 million since the recession began, and people on disability rarely return to the work force, even if they would have preferred to keep working in the first place.

And as the economy improves, it is likely that labor force participation among older workers will finally begin to decline.

But the evidence suggests that the majority of the 10 million are just waiting for a decent chance.
Ben Wolf Link

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/graphs/2013/04/us-unemployment-rates.jpg