July Jobs Data: Slight Improvement, but America Still 21.4 Million Short

This morning, a couple of minutes after 8:30 Eastern Time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released last month’s employment statistics.  The headline story was the unemployment rate’s drop from 7.6% to 7.4%, with a net gain of 162,000 positions.  These seasonally adjusted figures continue a several-month trend of mild improvement, and are, in fact, favorable.  But how good are they really?

Behind the scenes, the picture is much the same.  After two much larger mostly seasonal monthly gains, the American Job Shortage Number, or AJSN, decreased 112,000, to 21.46 million, as follows:

AJSN JULY 2013	Total	Latent Demand %	Latent Demand Total
Unemployed	12,083,000	90	10,874,700
Discouraged	988,000	90	889,200
Family Responsibilities	210,000	30	63,000
In School or Training	194,000	50	97,000
Ill Health or Disability	122,000	10	12,200
Other	899,000	30	269,700
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year	3,804,000	80	3,043,200
Not Available to Work Now	644,000	30	193,200
Do Not Want a Job	81,698,000	5	4,084,900
Non-Civilian and Institutionalized, 15+	6,694,213	10	669,421
American Expatriates	6,320,000	20	1,264,000
TOTAL			21,460,521

 

The largest change was the number of Americans reporting they did not want a job, up 387,000.  The counts of those officially unemployed and those wishing to work but not looking for it for a year declined, 165,000 and 127,000 respectively.  On the non-seasonally-adjusted side, the unemployment rate dropped from 7.8% to 7.7%, and the tally of employed people in the United States was up 272,000 to 145,113,000.

The other released measures of employment trouble were uniformly unchanged.  There were still 4.2 million officially unemployed for 27 weeks or more and 8.2 million working part-time for economic reasons, and the shares of labor force participation and employment over the entire population stayed at 63.4% and 58.7%. 

All in all, we have little drama in jobs this month.  We added about 30,000 more than the population increase requires, but the larger fall in the unemployment rate means that, yet again, people are leaving the labor force by giving up trying to find them.   As long as these fully non-recession times continue, we will see months like this one.  But that should not be confused with progress on the jobs crisis, which is not happening.