Paul Krugman engages in some negative speculation on December 4th:
The economy is falling fast. We’ll see what tomorrow’s employment report says, but we could well be losing jobs at a rate of 450,000 or 500,000 a month.
Remember, that number was Krugman attempting to be pessimistic. Then, only a week later, after he’s read a fresh report on unemployment claims:
So are we now losing jobs at the rate of 600,000 a month? 700,000?
I’m not criticizing Krugman; I don’t think anyone has done a better job of talking about the economic crisis. I just find it notable: even a pessimistic, liberal economist can’t be pessimistic enough.
Are you terrified? I am.
A chart of our plummeting employment, provided by yet another Krugman post:
It’s really bad, it’s just getting started, and it’s worldwide. I hope all “Alas” readers have stable jobs and a supportive community, because it’s going to be a lousy two years to be out in the cold.
UPDATE: In comments, Penny writes:
Definitely all kinds of reasons for serious pessimism, but starting the graph in 1999 maximizes the drop; here’s the long view since the late 1940s.
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Definitely all kinds of reasons for serious pessimism, but starting the graph in 1999 maximizes the drop; here’s the long view since the late 1940s:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO/
Thanks, Penny! I’ve updated the post.
I’m pretty sure the big jump in jobs ca. 1980 had to do both with more women entering the paid marketplace as a result of the women’s movement and Ronald Reagan forcing a recalculation in how the US govt figured unemployment so that it would look better for his administration–once you were unemployed long enough you stopped being counted. So if the chart is based on those govt. figures it remains pretty scary, I think. …
There are also a lot of other forces in play — this is the start of the Baby Boomer retirement era. Yes, WWII has been that long ago. I’ve been watching my older-than-me colleagues beating a path to retirement for the past few years and it’s only going to pick up.
It also doesn’t help that the bottom of the scale in the first graph is 61% and the top is 65%. That’s a great way to make a 4% swing in employment look positively horrible …
— Julie.
In some ways, the long-view graph makes things even scarier. The long period of low E/P before 1980 was with fewer women in the workforce, but it was also a time when a single median wage-earner could support a family (more or less). The climb in E/P to its new level over the past 30 years has been partly about feminism and equality, but also about everybody earning money being the only way to survive. (If it were just about feminism, you’d see much more stability as marginal men dropped out of the workforce or took part-time work.)
So the sharp drop now comes when we have far less margin.
Paul, just a nit to pick:
I think prior to 1980, there were fewer women in the white collar work force, not the work force in general. Everything I’ve seen (outside of tv shows from or about the era) indicates that, just like today, single income families were mostly located in the upper wealth classes.
Ali:
Not according to BLS. They say that E/P for women has gone from about 40% in 1973 (the first year tables were easy to find for) to about 57% in 2007. (I was wrong about men, though — the E/P there has gone down from about 75% in 73 to about 69% in 2007, although it’s not entirely clear what this reflects.)
So yes, being able to support a family on a single income has never been universal, but it’s even rarer now than it used to be. That’s tens of millions more families where if one adult loses a job the other one can’t look for work to help make ends meet because the other one already is working.
Things have gotten a lot worse in the three years since this post.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO/
Holy shit.
Actually, if I’m reading the graph correctly, things have gotten considerably worse in the 1-1.5 years after the post, then they stopped getting worse and just didn’t get better, either.
Yes, I think that’s basically correct. The economy appears to be (slowly) recovering but it is another jobless recovery. Business is picking up but employment is not.
It’s always interesting to me to see the macro picture because sometimes it jibes with what is happening in my business and sometimes it does not. (For example I just got some new client work which I promptly subcontracted, so for me business is up and so is employment.)