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April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: The U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Both the unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 7.1 million, saw only incremental changes in April. The new data follow disappointing results from March, when the Labor Department initially said less than 100,000 jobs were created. In April, some of the biggest job gains came in leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, financial activities, and mining, the agency says.
What about the 92 million unemployed Americans who are waiting for new coal mining jobs?
https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
Yes, unemployment is open to interpretation and yes, there are different ways of presenting the data. The "usual" figure is U4, but for others U6 might be more meaningful. I think U6 is probably a better estimate, but that's just my opinion. What ISN'T my opinion is that no matter what number you use, unemployment is creeping downwards.
U3 numbers are complete bullshit. Everybody who is paying even the slightest attention knows they are complete bullshit. They are so full of bullshit that they're not even useful for comparative / trending purposes. They have literally only two forms of utility: political propaganda, and targets of mockery. It doesn't matter if it's a Democratic administration or a Republican administration. Even U6 is extremely sketchy: surveys multiplied by guesswork.
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So happy to see these numbers. President Trump is a truly worthy successor to Lincoln and Reagan. Keep up the good work, sir!
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Too many people work without paying taxes, therefore count as unemployed or they are too comfortable living with mommy, daddy or sugar daddy.
You got too many alternative facts mixed up in that statement. Just focus on one. No need to do three at a time.
is Obama got the blame for post-Bush recession (which to be fair was caused by deregulation started by Clinton) and now Trump gets the credit for Obama's work fixing things.
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U-6 is not "the true unemployment"; it's a measure including people who are underemployed, who are unable to get jobs because of their economic situation (e.g. single mothers who couldn't take a job if you begged them, because they can't afford daycare and you're not willing to pay enough), and so forth.
Each unemployment measure has its uses. We're used to U-3 largely because it tells us how much competition is out there for a job of any sort; U-4 tells you how many people are out there actually unemployed, though. Underemployment (included in U-6) is another important statistic nobody looks at. The U-5 addition (people who can't take a job even if offered one, but wish they could) is fairly-unimportant in terms of unemployment measures.
U-6 still doesn't tell you about a few interesting things, like how much employment is actually available versus your participating labor force. Unemployment includes the people in U-5 because those people are interested in working, thus are part of the participating labor force. Because of that, U-6 plus employed persons equates to all participating labor force. Thing is, U-6 includes underemployment; that doesn't tell you about whole jobs.
If you have three underemployed working 20, 15, and 23 hours per week, you have 58 hours or 1.45 whole jobs between three people. A measure of whole jobs is useful; also useful is a measure of whole jobs counting part-time employment of people who want to be part-time employed as "whole jobs" (that is: if a working spouse has a 12-hour weekend job, that's a whole job because said person neither needs nor desires 40 hours of employment).
So that gives you three whole-employment indicators we don't track: WE-1 (number of whole jobs, including all full-time workers plus the fraction of full-time hours worked by hourly-paid part-time workers); WE-2 (WE-1, plus part-time workers not seeking full-time jobs are counted as whole jobs instead of partial jobs); and WE-3 (WE-2, plus full-time workers and workers with multiple jobs exceeding full-time hours have their total hours counted and fractioned, such that a person working 60 hours per week counts as 1.5 whole jobs).
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It's much worse than that. The unemployment rate is a jiggered number. What's significant is the labor force participation rate. (I'm not sure what it's currently called.) The way unemployment is figured you can have been out of work for a year and not be counted. And if you see the labor force participation rate, try to determine what population that the figure is based on. And who gets counted as participating. (E.g., if an H1B worker is counted as participating, is he also counted as a part of the population used in calculating the rate.)
Governments play all sorts of tricks with their economic numbers to make them look good. Even when the numbers are honest you can't trust them without looking at the details.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is still mostly Obama economic territory, but that's shifting, and will be affected by the recent budget deal. By October, it will be pretty squarely in Trump's court, especially if a new budget can get passed before then. Presidents don't have a lot of ability to affect the economy upward, but they can do a lot to send it downward.
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It's the lowest unemployment rate since before the Great Recession. That's pretty exceptional in my book.
That might be exceptional, but it isn't true. It is the lowest level in a decade. Here's a graph of the unemployment rate since the 1960s:
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/560e8af3ecad046c04212250-1200-900/sept-2015-unemployment-rate.png
where you can see the rate dropped below 4.4% many times.
Here's a graph (from six months ago) looking just at the last 15 years:
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/560e8af3ecad046c04212250-1200-900/sept-2015-unemployment-rate.png
and you can see the rate was below 4.4% right until the 2008 economic crash hit. You can also see that 4.4% is nothing exceptional, simply the continuation of the trend.
I wasn't a big Trump supporter, but you have to admit the guy is coming thorough 'bigly.'
Since he's only been in office a hundred days, it's unlikely that any economic effects of his presidency have hit yet. From the graph, I'd say that this unemployment news is "more of the same, nothing exceptional."
It's not a "trick"... it's exactly how Unemployment is calculated, always: 100 * (# people with jobs) / (# people in the workforce). This is not a number that requires you to look at the details at all, just the most basic understanding of what the hell it actually means.
To be in the "workforce" you have to be actively looking for a job (it's not just "after a year"). If you spend 3 years actively looking for a job but remain without one, you will still be counted as "in the workforce". If we didn't do this, then "Unemployment" would be calculated much higher than it really is, with all the children, people in school, stay-at-home parents, retirees, etc. who shouldn't be counted as part of the workforce.
The Labor Participation Rate is a different number, with a different meaning, and is not a "replacement" or "better version" of Unemployment. In the same way GNP is not meant to "replace" GDP, they represent different (albeit related) things.
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You're partially right (you can have been out of work for ten years but if you were actively looking, you're considered to be unemployed), but underemployment numbers have been declining, too. The U-6 number is down to 8.6%, the lowest it's been since November 2007. The lowest it's been on record (going back to 1994) is October 2000, when it reached 6.8%. The unemployment rate (U-3) was 3.9% at that time; most economists consider employment around the 4%-4.5% range to be full without overheating the economy, and the Fed had raised interest rates by about a percentage point since mid-1999.
Note: U-6 is defined as "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force." Basically, everyone willing to work full time but not getting it. (Full time doesn't mean a single full-time job. If you work two part-time jobs that add up to 35 or more hours per week, you're considered a full-time worker.)
The LFPR is pretty clear on who is involved, though you need to understand a few definitions.
I snipped the definitions slightly for space, but they're all at this BLS link if you need more details.
So the H1B worker is counted as participating, as is the illegal immigrant construction worker. It's all persons, not all citizens or all permanent residents. If you're 93 and retired, but living on your own and not looking for and not wanting a job, you're part of the civilian noninstitutional population, so you factor into the LFPR, but not into the unemployment or underemployment rates. If you're 15 and working a part-time job, you're not counted in the LFPR or employment or unemployment status.
The LFPR, though, has a great deal of downward pressure on it from retiring Baby Boomers. That will level out eventually, and the LFPR may begin to climb as they die off, but the highest that it ever got was 67.3% in early 2000. Don't expect to see something above 70% unless there's a mass die-off of old people.
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