Poor Job Growth Underreported by the Mainstream Media

 

Despite false White House claims and poorly researched media reports during the last seven years, job growth in the United States has consistently failed to meet population growth.

Population growth between 2000 to 2007 was:	14,400,000
job growth from 2000 to 2007 was:	8,382,000
population growth (2000-2007) minus job growth (2000-2007) was:	-6,018,000

Economists estimate that the country needs to add at least 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Job growth figures have consistently failed to meet population growth estimates for the last seven years.

Job growth has always been significantly larger than population growth on average for most of the last century, with the exception of the Great Depression. As you can see from this graph, the feeble job growth numbers as compared to population growth in the last four years (2004-2007) do not begin to appreciably offset the huge overall downturn of the previous three years (2001-2003). These figures are not significantly larger than population growth as has been the average for a healthy economics periods during most of the last century.

Perhaps part of the reason that the media has only reporting job growth in terms of financial news is that traditionally the benchmark used to describe the state of jobs in the nation are unemployment figures. Although unemployment figures are almost invariably used to describe labor issues, they are not the only overall indicator of employment nationwide.

People who are unable to find a job by the time that their unemployment benefits run out simply drop out of the statistics. Despite the media's constant usage of unemployment figures as an indicator of the economic health of the country, unemployment figures are only one statistic - and do not accurately reflect the number of jobs in the country.

The White House (and the press) have consistently denied the truth on this matter, spinning rhetoric that promotes any job growth as a positive factor in the economy. Right now the White House website touts job growth as a major success for the administration:

"Our economy has a solid foundation, but there are also areas of real concern. Our economy has seen the longest uninterrupted period of job growth on record – 52 months of job growth – but job creation has slowed recently. Consumer spending has been growing, but the housing market is declining. Business investment and exports are still rising, but the cost of imported oil has increased." whitehouse.gov [02/19/08]

"Longest uninterrupted period of job growth on record" - I have no idea how the White House economists are able to pull that rabbit out their collective hat, the post gives no explantion as to how they arrived at that particular conclusion. The fact of the matter is that job growth for the last five years has not even kept up with population growth.

To decode this message, we have to actually extract job growth numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor. During college I was on the school newspaper for a semester, and I wrote a story about job growth for the paper because I was interested in the many graphs that I found circulating on the internet. I soon discovered that compiling job growth data is a fairly daunting task.

If you go the bls.gov website to find data on job growth, you hit a wall of meaningless information. The bls.gov search engine is useless, and job growth figures are not mentioned in the A-Z index. After some research, I found out that job growth figures are called "nonfarm payroll employment".

Even then, the bls.gov search engine and A-Z index is useless. You can find pdf files that mention nonfarm payroll employment, but usually they only give you figure for one month, or one year, and the data provided on these different reports is all compiled differently. It is almost impossible to find consistent information from one report or another.

I finally found this link, which has links to archived news releases for employment figures, but they only go back to 1994. They are not compiled in a usable fashion, you have to go into each press release and find the individual nonfarm payroll employment figures month by month.

It's interesting the colorful language used to describe these figures when they are lower or higher than the previous month. Also, nonfarm payroll employment figures are always listed on the first paragraph, except in a few cases when the figures were especially bad - in which case they are sheepishly buried on the second page of the press release.

Here is the job growth story that I wrote for the school newpaper:

When I submitted this story to the school newspaper, I had to explain it to the editor. She could not believe that I had gone to all of the trouble to compile the figures from the Department of Labor. To her credit, she did run it on the first page (below the fold), but the graph I made was not run to save space. I don't think anybody actually read the story anyway, which is understandable. It was a college newspaper after all.

These are the figures that I compiled for the story, updated with the most recent figures. (All of the figures that I used to compile the table below are the initial, unrevised nonfarm payroll employment figures found in the U.S. Department of Labor press releases.)

Hoover days are here again!