The August Jobs Numbers Are Weak. Don’t Blame Trump.
- 7 years ago
The August Jobs Numbers Are Weak. Don’t Blame Trump.
First, the overall trajectory of the economy looks very much the way it did this time a year ago; if you assume some amount
of statistical noise, in broad brush strokes the 2017 economy looks pretty much identical to the 2016 economy.
The United States economy added fewer jobs than analysts expected (156,000, not 180,000); previous months’ job growth was revised down (by 41,000 positions); the unemployment rate ticked up a bit (to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent);
and wages continued growing at only a glacial pace (0.1 percent).
With the economy closer to full employment now — the unemployment rate is at 4.4 percent instead of the 4.9 percent in the
middle of last year — employers looking to add jobs are working against a harder constraint on the number of workers.
Job growth has averaged 170,000 positions a month since February, the first full month of the Trump administration.
That may be a result of some weirdness that has crept into August numbers in recent years because of the challenges of measuring seasonal variation, or it could reflect a job market
that is less vibrant than it had seemed a few months ago.
In that sense, these numbers highlight a widely made mistake in how we have been talking about the economy since Inauguration Day,
and really for long before Donald J. Trump took office.
First, the overall trajectory of the economy looks very much the way it did this time a year ago; if you assume some amount
of statistical noise, in broad brush strokes the 2017 economy looks pretty much identical to the 2016 economy.
The United States economy added fewer jobs than analysts expected (156,000, not 180,000); previous months’ job growth was revised down (by 41,000 positions); the unemployment rate ticked up a bit (to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent);
and wages continued growing at only a glacial pace (0.1 percent).
With the economy closer to full employment now — the unemployment rate is at 4.4 percent instead of the 4.9 percent in the
middle of last year — employers looking to add jobs are working against a harder constraint on the number of workers.
Job growth has averaged 170,000 positions a month since February, the first full month of the Trump administration.
That may be a result of some weirdness that has crept into August numbers in recent years because of the challenges of measuring seasonal variation, or it could reflect a job market
that is less vibrant than it had seemed a few months ago.
In that sense, these numbers highlight a widely made mistake in how we have been talking about the economy since Inauguration Day,
and really for long before Donald J. Trump took office.