Job Growth Numbers: Not Quite a Post-Halloween Fright

Recent job growth numbers have some economists and investors on edge in the lead-up to the U.S. jobs report this week. But the reports don’t exactly tell a horror story.

八月和九月的非农工资增长率下跌150,000。这是因为劳动力下降的参与率，通过越来越多的退休婴儿潮一代来称重，经济六年恢复不会为巨大的就业收益提供发射垫。

“我们看到这些悲观的reports after the numbers for August and September,” says Gary Burtless, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Yes, it was a downer compared to over 200,000 every month. We’re making progress toward full employment — it’s just slower than it was the past 18 months.”

慢但稳定retirement of baby boomersis rearing its head bit by bit. “Pure demographics mean that what would be expected in terms of job growth for full employment is substantially below” the latest numbers, says James Stock, professor of political economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. “This is normal, though not necessarily optimal.” Many economists consider 5 percent unemployment to represent full employment. The economy gained 136,000 jobs in August and 142,000 in September. The rise had exceeded 200,000 in 19 of the previous 21 months. The jobless rate stood at 5.1 percent in September.

The way the math works is this, Stock says: The U.S. population is growing a bit more than 1 percent a year. At the same time, the labor force participation rate has been declining since 2000, hitting a 37-year low of 62.4 percent in September. “The most salient reason for that is baby boomers retiring,” Stock says. That slices about 0.3 percentage point off the workforce per year. So overall, the workforce is growing about 0.7 percent, or, if you take a more optimistic view, 0.9 percent per year. Thus job growth would need to run at a rate of 0.7 to 0.9 percent a year to sustain the present unemployment rate. With total employment at 142 million, that means that monthly job gains of 83,000 to 107,000 are necessary to keep the unemployment rate at its current level.

Or, as Stock puts it, “we need payroll increases of 80,000 to 110,000 for steady-state growth if we’re at full employment and account for new population.”

因此需要调整期望。“人们习惯于150,000至20万到20万次收益，特别是当我们经济增长迅速时，”伯爵说。“我们有一个aging population那就是退休。一旦人们过去62岁，劳动力参与率急剧下降。“

Then there is the economy. With the growth rate averaging only 2.2 percent a year since 2009, “the longer people are out of work, the harder it is for them to reengage,” says Michelle Meyer, deputy head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York. Another factor pulling down participation in the labor force, says Burtless, is a slowdown in immigration. Meyer sees the labor force participation rate slipping to 62.3 percent through the end of next year.

那么工资罗拉的最佳水平是多少？

完美的每月工作增长率应该是创造统治通胀充分雇用的人。据库存，甜点在80,000至110,000的某个范围内。考虑到通胀远远低于美联储的2％的目标，随着美联储最喜欢的通货膨胀率，个人消费支出价格指数，0.3％，“就业过冲是一件好事”。鉴于这不仅仅是将人们推出劳动力的人口统计，他说，更大的工作增益将允许其中一些人回来。

“I don’t consider 130,000 to 150,000 to be such bad news,” he says. “If that continues for a while, people will come into the labor force, and unemployment goes down. A little faster would be terrific: 140,000 to 180,000.”

If the forecast of Bank of America economists is correct, Stock will get his wish. They predict an average monthly payroll increase of 160,000 for the fourth quarter and 150,000 next year.

When it comes to monetary policy, the Federal Reserve should refrain from raising interest rates at the current level of job growth, Burtless says, noting, “All this talk about raising rates: What do people want to accomplish when inflation is so low and the job market has so much slack?”

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