Neil Irwin: "Officials may want to focus not on job creation but on the quality of those jobs"
Neil Irwin explains what the numbers behind low jobless rates really indicate.
❝ Before diving into the instant analysis of the latest jobs numbers that we routinely provide on the first Friday morning of the month, it’s worth pausing to think about a milestone the United States economy has passed at long last.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent in April — the first time it has come in below 4 percent since December 2000. Before those few months at the turn of the century, you have to go back to January 1970 to find a jobless rate in the United States that started with a “3.”
This is, to use a technical economic term, fantastic. And it is a fact that should shape how people think about the broader economic moment.
Even a few years ago, getting to an unemployment rate below 4 percent would have seemed an implausible, unattainable goal. That was certainly true at the recent peak of the jobless rate at 10 percent in 2009, and still true five years ago. In 2013, the rate drifted downward from 8 percent at the start of the year to 6.7 percent at the end. [NYTimes.com]
| NEIL IRWIN is a Senior economic correspondent at the New York Times and the bestselling author of The Alchemists. Watch him talk about understanding the economy below, and learn more about booking Neil for your next event today. |
