« Paul Krugman: Reform or Else | Main | "Enough Posturing Politics. Time to Let the Experts Lead" »

Friday, December 04, 2009

Employment Report Shows Small Decline in Unemployment

The unemployment rate dropped from 10.2% to 10.0%. That's an improvement and that is good news, but the improvement is small, payroll employment was essentially unchanged, long-term unemployment remains a problem, the number will be revised later and could go higher (or lower), and if this takes the steam out of efforts to further stimulate jobs, it will have the perverse effect of making the unemployment problem last longer, and hence be worse.

Un

See also Paul Krugman (who worries this will undermine efforts to further stimulate jobs and the economy), Brad DeLong (who notes that the payroll employment is flat), Justin Fox and David Leonhardt (who break down the underlying numbers and note the long-term unemployment problem), Spencer (who also looks at wage income), and Calculated Risk, Part 2, Part 3 (who shows the numbers graphically).

    Posted by on Friday, December 4, 2009 at 09:18 AM in Economics, Unemployment | Permalink  TrackBack (0)  Comments (27)

    TrackBack

    TrackBack URL for this entry:
    https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b33869e2012876110395970c

    Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Employment Report Shows Small Decline in Unemployment:


    Comments

    Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.