To Recover or Not To Recover

The jobs report was recently released and the U.S. is not doing quite as well as we had hoped. The numbers only looked good because census takers were recently employed but were also more recently let go. This basically left us in the same employment situation as before, but time does not stop for the census. People who have given up looking for work actually caused the numbers to change as well. The main flaw in our system for checking unemployment (which causes a small controversy every few years) is that it only counts those people actively looking for jobs and are unemployed. It does not count people who are unemployed and not looking for work and those who are employed and looking for another job.

Some have asked, well why not just add these figures into the unemployment figure. This is a great idea more in theory than in practice. First off, counting these people takes time. By the time anyone can clearly figure out who has or hasn’t found a job for a particular period, the data would irrelevant as the person could have found a job (and/or started looking for another job – temporary work is still an issue). Second, keeping track of changing employment data for much of America consumes a lot of resources. The budget for this is not quite this big, and not many people would find this a good allocation of resources.

So what to make of this? The nation’s employment figures are too high for many people to like but until factors like consumer spending, and bank lending start flowing a little more smoothly (day-to-day changes occur regardless of how good or bad the economy is), it will be daunting to get data that is accurate and (I hesitate to say) makes us feel good enough to think the economy has recovered.