An Andrew Sullivan Compilation on the Economy

Jobs Report Reax: A Durable, Slow Recovery:

Jared Bernstein summarizes today’s jobs report:

Payrolls increased by 165,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.5%, in a jobs report that painted a considerably brighter picture than last month’s version.  In fact, the disappointing 88,000 payroll gain for March was revised up in today’s report to 138,000, and in February, new revisions show a large increase of 332,000 jobs.
That means employers added 114,000 more jobs in February and March than we thought, bringing the monthly average payroll gains over the past three months to a healthy 212,000 per month.  Job growth at that pace, if it persists, should be enough to gradually, albeit slowly, bring down the unemployment rate.  In fact, the decline in the jobless rate from 7.6% in March to 7.5% in April was due not to a shrinking labor force (i.e., people giving up looking for work) but to more people getting jobs.

Neil Irwin’s take on the state of the economy:

This isn’t a good economy. By a lot of measures it’s terrible. Still, we should note what we have achieved: a durable kind of recovery that, if it can go for several more years, will eventually get us out of the muck. But it is also slow enough that the human toll of the crisis will be long and enormous.

Binyamin Appelbaum looks at the percentage of Americans with jobs:

The American economy continues to add jobs in proportion to population growth. Nothing less, nothing more. The share of American adults with jobs has barely changed since 2010, hovering between 58.2 percent and 58.7 percent. This employment-to-population ratio stood at 58.6 percent in April. That is about four percentage points lower than the employment rate before the recession, a difference of roughly 10 million jobs. In other words, the United States economy is not getting any closer to recreating the jobs lost during the recession.

Floyd Norris focuses on the plight of the long-term unemployed:

There are still 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for at least six months. That is down from the peak of 6.7 million, but it is still very high. And that number does not include people who have given up looking for work.

Bloomberg’s editors also worry about unemployment duration:

The average unemployed person has been out of work for 36.5 weeks. That’s not much better than the December 2011 duration of 40.7 weeks, which was the longest since World War II. Long-term unemployment at the start of the recession in December 2007 was 1.3 million people, and the average duration was 16.6 weeks.
Terrible things happen to people when they are out of work for long periods, numerous studies show. Beyond a sharp drop in income, long-term unemployment is associated with higher rates of suicide, cancer (especially among men) and divorce. The children of the long-term unemployed also show an increased probability of having to repeat a grade in school.

Daniel Gross examines wages:

The jobs growth is good. But wage growth is less impressive. One of the major—and frustrating—features of this recovery has been that capital is beating the living daylights out of labor. Companies have been able to rack up record profits and are demanding that employers work harder and more productively without necessarily paying them more. Why? There’s a lot of slack in the labor force, unions have declined in power, and there’s a pervasive sense among CEOs that they just don’t need to pay more. This trend continued last month. “In April,” BLS noted, “average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $23.87. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 45 cents, or 1.9 percent.” That’s weak. And we are nearing a point where we will really need companies to start giving it up if the expansion is going to continue.

Yglesias compares public and private workforces:

The big story of the recovery that continues to be clear and not subject to small revisions is the rebalancing of the American economy out of public-sector employment and into private-sector production. There are 89,000 fewer people employed by the government than there were one year ago, and almost 2.2 million more people employed in the private sector. Given sequestration, I would expect that trend to continue.

Greg Ip is relatively pessimistic:

There is little reason to expect the economy to accelerate in the near term. Barack Obama desperately wants to scrap the sequester, but unless Congressmen heard a groundswell of protest in their districts during this week’s recess, they are unlikely to return to Washington motivated to fix it. The Federal Reserve had expected to start tapering off quantitative easing (QE), under which it buys $85 billion of government bonds a month with newly created money. The March air pocket prompted it to reconsider, and this past week it opened the door to ramping up QE. But the April report does not show the sort of stall that would prompt the Fed to pull the trigger. The year 2013 has so far held less economic drama than 2012, 2011 or  2010, but nor has it given any reason to expect the final result to be different.

And Leonhardt puts the employment numbers in perspective:

For the last year and a half, average 12-month employment growth has hovered around 1.6 percent, precisely where it was in the 12 months ending in April. That’s faster than most of the last 12 years, which included two recessions and a mediocre recovery. But it’s far cry from the growth rates of between 2 percent and 3 percent, and briefly above 3 percent, in the mid- to late 1990s.

Chart from Calculated Risk.