On Friday we learned that the U.S. added another 195,000 (seasonally adjusted) non-farm jobs in June. That was a bit better than expected, and another sign that the economic recovery may be, ever so tentatively, gaining speed. But it will take 12 more months like June just to get non-farm employment back to the level of November 2007.
That's when employment peaked before the onset of the Great Recession at more than 139 million non-farm jobs; the fact that it's going to take close to seven years, if all goes well over the next year, just to get us back to that level is an indication of how bad the recession was and how weak the recovery has been. And getting back to the 2007 level isn't getting back to normal; the U.S. will have added about 17 million inhabitants between 2007 and 2014, a healthy labor market thus requires millions more jobs.
No other U.S. recession since World War II has been nearly this devastating to employment, as Calculated Risk's Bill McBride documents every month with the chart that Business Insider dubs "The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever."
But just because the Bureau of Labor Statistics' official employment numbers only go back to 1947 doesn't mean there isn't data available from before then. In the National Bureau of Economic Research's Macrohistory Database, one can find a series of monthly non-farm employment numbers running from 1929 to 1939, compiled by the BLS. And guess what: they make for a much scarier jobs chart than the current recession:
What lessons can one draw from this? Basically, if you think this downturn was comparable in origin and inherent severity to the other recessions since World War II, then we've been the victims of economic-policy bungling of epic proportions. If, on the other hand, you think the proper comparison is the Great Depression, the last U.S. downturn brought on by a severe financial crisis, you'd have to say the White House, Congress, and most of all the Federal Reserve have done an absolutely brilliant job relative to their early-1930s counterparts. I'd lean toward explanation No. 2 ? we did actually learn something from the Great Depression, although probably not enough.
A note on methodology: There are a few caveats about that 1930s data, the main one being that back then much more of the workforce was still on the farm, so the same percentage decline in non-farm employment might not have had quite the same impact on the economy. When I made versions of this chart during the Great Recession, I sometimes attempted to account for this, but it doesn't seem worth the effort here. Also, because the numbers from the 1930s weren't seasonally adjusted, I've used unadjusted jobs numbers for recent years, too, which explains why the chart is a little jumpy (without seasonal adjustments the June jobs gain was 422,000, for example).
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2013/07/one-difference-between-a-great.html
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