The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its unemployment situation report for the month of October 2015. A whopping 271,000 jobs are reported as having been added in October, far more than were expected:
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 271,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, food services and drinking
places, and construction.Household Survey Data
Both the unemployment rate (5.0 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (7.9 million) were essentially unchanged in October. Over the past 12 months, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 0.7 percentage point and 1.1 million, respectively. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.7 percent), adult women (4.5 percent), teenagers (15.9 percent), whites (4.4 percent), blacks (9.2 percent), Asians (3.5 percent), and Hispanics (6.3 percent) showed little or no change in October. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially unchanged at 2.1 million in October and has shown little change since June. These individuals accounted for 26.8 percent of the unemployed in October. (See table A-12.)
The civilian labor force participation rate was unchanged at 62.4 percent in October, following a decline of 0.2 percentage point in September. The employment-population ratio, at 59.3 percent, changed little in October and has shown little movement over the past year. (See table A-1.)
Well, good. Another couple of years of months like that and we’ll be showing some headway.
Several things of which note should be taken. First, that number is 50% higher than expectations. 50% is a lot. Either the last couple of months’ worth of unemployment situation reports have been off or this one is. Or maybe it’s just an anomaly.
Second, the labor force participation rate remains at its 38 year low. That’s not good.
Third, to my untutored eye the biggest gainer seems to be in temp jobs (not a particularly good sign) while manufacturing, wholesale, and warehousing, the real bread-and-butter sectors, are still in the doldrums. Healthcare is a major gainer, too, but I’ve expressed my opinion of that often enough in the past.
Finally, August’s figures were adjusted up slightly while September’s figures were adjusted down. The August-October average was right about 187,000 or, said another way, just about the rate of natural increase—another way of saying that we’ll need a lot more months of major increases to start putting the long-term unemployed back to work.
Well, the subsidized sectors and bars are open for business.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-06/who-hired-october-full-breakdown-industry
About that meme that the declining labor force participation rate is due to retiree/baby boomer demographics…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-06/most-surprising-thing-about-todays-jobs-report
Keep away from sharp objects, ice.
Presumably because those 24-54 are less materialistic. Or so I’ve been told.
Thanks for the warning, Drew! Ice cream for dinner, then….
I actually think there will be a fascinating case study in the change in living standards for younger people. Renters vs home buyers. Uber vs owning. Etc etc. not signing up for health insurance….oh…..
Since living standards are a value judgment I leave it to others to opine as they see fit. My personal perspective is that younger people will not have it as good as those commenting here.
My personal perspective is that younger people will not have it as good as those commenting here.
If you mean they’ll be worse off than I am then they’re completely and totally fucked.
…
Looking at Drew’s ZH link about dropping participation: That’s easily explained away, Drew. The reason that 119,000 men aged 25-54 dropped out of the work force last month isn’t because they’re losing jobs, it’s because they’re dying faster. So, not really a reflection of a bad economy, and thus not a problem at all!
Yes, the line of argument in my previous post is specious, as the actual participation rate for that age group is down. I’d actually say that ZH’s numbers are probably LESS depressing than reality, as they haven’t broken out the FT job situation. Been a while since I did that (not an easy task – for some reason they make it hard to figure that out), but 25-54 yos are getting killed on full time jobs. Part timing for Uber is now supposed to be the sign of a strong economy. I imagine that if a Republican manages to win the WH that this will become an epic disaster of Holocaust-type dimensions and that it will be all the Republican President’s fault round about, oh, call it March of 2017.
Best comment (so far) at that ZH link:
“I’m 53 now, another year or two and the job market is really going to open up for me. YEA!”
You need to attend re-education camp, ice. Go over to OTB where you will learn that after Obama single handedly saved the economy, he is stewarding it to perfection, and the only reason for stagnant wage growth is miserly Republican business owners.
Get with the program, get a bartending job, buy a car with a subprime loan…… or face jail time, denier…….
Ellpises, the increase in mortality of non-hispanic white middle-aged men might be an artifact of the Baby Boom making the 45-54 age goup basket gradually older. Link
It still appears that this group is unique in not having a declining mortality rate (it’s flat), which appears to be due to increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.
The millennials set out on The Hunting of the Snark, and in 2008, they elected the Bellman.
They have been diligently Hunting the elusive creature.
They have found many Snarks, and they proudly display them on their Facebook pages. At some point, they will find a Snark that is a Boojum, and then, they will softly and suddenly vanished away.
The lesson lads and lassies is to meet nonsense with nonsense.
PD, I’m not convinced that Gelman is doing anything but bullshitting because it is ideologically verboten to allow that maybe white men might have something bad happening to them systematically.
For one thing, if the problem is that the group is getting older because of boomers passing through this age group, this should have happened across ALL cohorts that experienced the baby boom. It should also diminish as they pass through and effect older groups. That hasn’t appear to have happened.
Secondly, he admits there is a problem, because this isn’t happening anywhere else in the developed world.
Third, he claims to not understand why Case & Deaton were interested in comparisons by educational attainment level. That’s obvious, as is the fact that the biggest impact has been on the group with high school education or less. This is among the groups getting hit hardest by globalization, as they’ve had their quality of life impacted greatly. And unlike blacks (the hardest hit on the working class end), who are coming from a bad baseline that can be significantly improved upon, this group has a good deal of room to fall.
UPDATE: As I write I see that Case and Deaton have replied by putting out a detailed breakout of changing death rates by individual age. They’re looking at it at a very granular level. Gelman is likely going to have to try again.
Still waiting for the inevitable “DEATH RATE OF WHITE MEN ON THE RISE: WOMEN, MINORITIES HARDEST HIT” headline.
Thanks, I’ll take a look. I think the reason Gellman’s critique seemed plausible is that the real story would be about increased suicide and addiction, which might be age-specific. People aren’t dying of liver disease until they reach a certain age. (Note also, Steve Sailer in Gellman’s comments making the case that this cohort is uniquely susceptible to life-time drug abuse problems, including from painkillers, due to their age in the peak Drug era in the 1970s)
I thought Gellman had sort of hand-waived the critique in the comments that the Baby Boom was not an American-only phenomena. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I don’t think one can compare Gellman’s reconfiguration of U.S. data with West European countries without the same reconfiguration.
There’s an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning castigating the Baby Boomers for having destroyed the economy. Sort of The Spoilers as applied to the modern day U. S. I don’t think the Boomers are guilt-free but I think he’s leveling his fire on the wrong target. I think the real culprits are the Silent Generation. There were so many fewer of them than the cohorts that preceded them or succeeded them. By and large the Boomers have bought high and will sell low.
@Dave, I googled “baby boom” yesterday to double-check the timeframe and noticed there appear to be a lot of recent articles castigating baby boomers.
Without having read them, I think the obvious problem with a generation analysis is that I think there are a lot of differences between the older and younger. The oldest Boomers enjoyed the post-war expansion, the youngest hit the job market in the late 70s and early 80s.
Gellman now writes that he didn’t breakout men from women. “All these graphs are for non-Hispanic whites, both sexes.” That seems a bit worthless now.
I’d say that pretty soon the Millennials won’t have the Baby Boomers to kick around any more but it’s not true. I strongly suspect that the Boomers will continue to run the show for the next 20 years ago or. It’s still their circus and the Millennials are just the monkeys. We’ll soon have a test. The next president will either be a member of the Silent Generation (Bernie Sanders), a Baby Boomer (Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul), or a Gen-Xer (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the next two presidents were both Baby Boomers.
As I’ve pointed out before, at each stage of their lives Boomers have had higher real incomes than the Millennials have had. Decent jobs were a lot easier to come by than they are now.
On the other hand no Millennial has ever been drafted into the military and very few have died in war or are likely to. I think it will be a century before balanced analyses will be done.
If the Millennials wanted to change things, they could stop buying iPhones because they’re made in China and stop shopping at Wal-Mart. It would be a start.
Reihan Salam makes two comments about the WaPo article: (1) those that followed the Baby Boomers are far more likely to be first generation immigrants; and (2) the Baby Boomers are expected to transfer $30 trillion to their heirs over the coming decades.
44% of the U.S. workforce without a high school diploma is foreign born, so at least some portion of the generational disparity is likely the result of immigration policies taken in the 1960s. To whatever extent there is a generational wealth transfer, it will not be even, and particularly the foreign-born are unlikely to benefit.
Not just that. I think it’s hard to imagine a workable policy anywhere that could deal with that level of immigration without resulting in income inequality and social stratification.
I’ll admit to ignoring Millennials, but in my experience they seem to blame Gen X for everything sucking. Exactly when me and my cohorts have been in charge of anything is unclear to me, but it’s our fault.
Don’t care, though. Millennials are generally worthless and prone to vapors if their spaces aren’t safe.