The Weak Jobs Recovery: Whatever Happened to“the Great American Jobs Machine”?

[...]This paper examines the operation of the U.S. labor marketin the 2001 recovery. Because the United States is in the middleof the recovery, ours is a real-time analysis; thus, someconclusions could change if the recovery stalls or employmentgrows suddenly. For instance, since August 2003, nonfarmpayroll employment increased by 2.5 million, for a monthlyaverage of 146,000, while the household survey showed acomparable increase of 2.6 million.2 However, seventeenmonths of job growth that barely kept pace with civilianpopulation growth does not gainsay the surprising U.S.inability to generate jobs for so long in this recovery. It wouldtake employment growth of some 300,00 per month over thenext year and a half to bring the employment-population rateto the 64.4 level it held during 2000.