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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-08-05

Not To Reveal Too Much Ignorance, . . .

but since I've admitted before, on a number of ocassions, to not understanding economics, I guess I can wade out into it again. So . . .

How is it possible for the following lede to be real?

Hiring slowed in July as employers added just 113,000 new jobs, propelling the unemployment rate to a five-month high of 4.8 percent . . .

Now, here's where I get stumped, I guess: how is it possible to add new jobs, but at the same time have a noticable jump in the number of people without jobs. Logically, that's not possible.

And, of course, that's the problem: logic and economics DO NOT work together comfortably.

Now, I know there is always the actual mathematical formulation which says that if the number of actual workers in the market increased by an amount greater than the job creation number, the unemployment percentage would jump. But, some quick math, using as a baseline the projections for these numbers (145,000 jobs, unemployment unchanged at 4.6%) would point to the number of workers in the country as . . . let's see . . . cross-multiply . . . carry the one . . .

16 million.

Which, of course, for a country of 300 million, is a phenomenally small number.

In other words--completely unrealistic numbers, with no grounding in anything real or actual.

Welcome to economics.
Posted by: Michael / 8/05/2006 12:58:00 AM

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