A Break in the Clouds
By ALAN ABELSON | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
November's jobs report was a stunning and welcome surprise.
OBAMA CAME DOWN FROM the summit carrying a tablet, and said, "Let there be jobs." And, lo and behold, there were jobs. When his trusted aides at the Blessed Bureau of Labor Statistics finished perusing the inscription on the tablet and dutifully did their sums, they discovered, alas, there still weren't quite enough jobs. Obama glowered and his faithful minions promptly returned to their task and uttered all the proper intonations, like "abracadabra," "seasonal adjustment" and "birth/death model," but still came up somewhat short. He thought of going back up whence he had come, but after a glance at that towering peak shrouded in clouds, he shrugged and with a beatific smile, said, "Why quibble?"
And we'll take those wise words as our gospel in discussing the November employment report, which showed a job loss of a mere 11,000 when the guessing gang on Wall Street had hazarded roughly 10 times that number. So we won't even bother to mention the birth/death hocus-pocus that conjured up 30,000 jobs or that the drop in the unemployment rate to 10% from 10.2% was, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, the likely result of a measurement error. The 10.2% rate originally reported for October, up 0.4 of a percentage point from September, was an exaggerated calculation, and November's change was simply a correction of the sampling error.
And while we're ticking off stuff we won't bother to mention, we might as well include, as the Liscio Report's Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood note, that the median duration of unemployed rose to a record high 20.1 weeks, as did the mean in mounting to 28.5 weeks, while a formidable 38.3% of the unemployed have been idle for 27 weeks or more, also a record and three times the average for the 61 years the counters have been tracking this stuff.
But, hey, there is always a snippet of shadow on even the most resplendent report. And however welcome the shrinkage in job loss it displayed, November's report was far from resplendent. Rather, in Philippa and Doug's deft phrasing, it was mildly negative, not robustly positive but, then, they remind, "flat is the new up."
Among the noteworthy pluses were sharp cuts of a combined 159,000 in the previous two months' estimates of job losses. And according to Doug and Philippa, the revisions were "clean," not a product of what they call "seasonal-adjustment funniness." Temporary employment shot up by 52,000, and if the past is a reliable guide, which in truth it hasn't especially proven to be over the past couple of years, this might be a favorable portent for the months ahead.
In any case, before you break out the bubbly, you might keep in mind that the most inclusive measure of unemployment is still at 17.2%, an extremely elevated level. And even at the more commonly used yardstick, the ranks of the unemployed have swollen to 15.4 million souls.
We can only hope that Obama will find time in his busy schedule to make another trip up that magic mountain, and soon. |
