If we are creating jobs, why is unemployment so high?

Workout note
Yoga, then an easy 1:07 run (I’ll call it 10K): the river course near the riverplex plus 3 goose loop laps and the out and back under the I-74 bridge. I tried to keep a reasonable turn over but my legs were a bit heavy. Cool and damp.

Economy
The jobs report shows that we are adding jobs.

(from here)

Still, unemployment is stuck at 9 percent or so. Why? Answer: the population is growing and we need enough new jobs to keep up for new work seekers.

For comparison, look at the jobs chart over a long period of time (starting at January 1990):

You can see the job loss periods and what healthy growth looks like. The fact is that we had a huge period of job losses that the stimulus stopped but…not enough of a rebound to make up for all of the jobs that we should have been adding.
The Bonddad blog presents this chart:

If this seems confusing to you: the first two charts show the jobs added or lost per month; the bars above the zero axis indicate jobs are being added; bars below the axis mean that they are being lost. In mathematical language: these are the graphs of the derivative of jobs at a given time.

The last chart is the total number of jobs. We see that the number of jobs drop (this is where the jobs created/lost graph shows a bar below the zero axis) then a jobs gain…but the job gain doesn’t get us to the previous peak (strike one). The next strike is that the number of job seekers have also gone up during this time (strike two). So, for a good employment situation, we need to be ABOVE where the previous peak was…and we are still pretty far below.

Advertisement