meg
365stairs asks,
“But is 96K jobs added a bad # in today’s fragile economy?”
IDK, is 50k bad, 70k, etc? How bad is a net loss?
Here’s what I think is the bigger problem with last month’s 96,000 number. With only 96k jobs added, that 8.3% unemployed number would have risen. Instead, it went down because 368,000 discouraged workers Stopped looking for work.
So, for a different unemployement picture, take those 96k jobs and add 368k workers back into the unemployed pool (because they are still unemployed tho’ very discouraged). Then, add the nearly 200k who join the workforce each month.
Being able to trash-can those 368,000 discouraged people just makes the weak 96k job number look better, artificially. So we have to look more deeply to see the net jobs number is still declining.
And to some of your other points…the bigger picture is the economic reality is getting ‘worse’ (I put that in quotes cuz I’m not convinced about the money-makes-my-reality meme). Jobs are, and will be, paying nominally less in wages than your previous generations earned. Of course there are many exceptions, but I think more numbers of future american workers will not own a home, a car, and some of that other stuff they collected. And some of us will share more & live together, out of economic necessities and our greater needs for mobility. It’s not a frightening picture, unless we insist on gripping to the old folks’ paradigms, not shaking loose ideas that we have a right to inherit a so-called american consumer lifestyle and their supposedly high standard of living.
So, in the end jobs will pay what jobs will pay. And, we will craft a different standard of living from that. As everything does.