- Over at the NYT Economix blog: looking at the signal-to-noise ratio in the latest jobs report.
- On the December employment report: previewing the numbers on Jobs Day Eve and highlighting a jobs report that shows we’re not out of the economic woods yet.
- Pointing to a piece by my CBPP colleague Chris Mai on the loss of jobs in local education over the last few years.
- Joining the conversation about a Bob Rubin oped on the changing budget outlook.
- On unemployment insurance: agreeing with the Washington Post editorial board on extending UI and debating my old friends Larry Kudlow and Art Laffer on the extension.
- Detailing how Senator Rubio proposes to kill the countercyclicality of the safety net.
- Explaining that Robert Rector’s we-lost-the-war-on-poverty oped was designed to mislead rather than inform.
- Looking at what kids from different countries said about the importance of education.
- Congratulating Janet Yellen, new Chair of the Federal Reserve.
- Noting that legal penalties in the War on Drugs fall disproportionately on minorities.
- Answering a question that’s kinda important these days: what is the unemployment rate?
Music: a Polar Vortex musical interlude wherein Ray Charles tries to get Betty Carter not to leave–cuz baby, it’s cold outside!
what’d you miss? i dont think anyone has noticed this:
there’s been an ongoing discrepancy between the unadjusted employed number from the two surveys since July…from July to December, the unadjusted count of the employed from the household survey fell by 690,000, from 145113000 in July, to 144423000 in December…over the same time frame, the unadjusted non-farm payrolls rose by 2,176,000, from 135577000 in July to 137753000 in December…
here are unadjusted payroll jobs monthly (000’s):
2013-07-01 135577
2013-08-01 136002
2013-09-01 136612
2013-10-01 137523
2013-11-01 137999
2013-12-01 137753
here’s the raw unadjusted count of the employed from the household survey (000’s):
2013-07-01 145113
2013-08-01 144509
2013-09-01 144651
2013-10-01 144144
2013-11-01 144775
2013-12-01 144423
here’s what the two look like next to each other on a chart:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=144994&category_id=0
focus in on those last five months; the red line is well above the blue one for the first time in years