http://www.slate.com/id/2276611/
A Joyless Jobless Report
Those dreadful new unemployment numbers are even worse than they look.
By Annie Lowrey
Posted Friday, Dec. 3, 2010, at 7:05 PM ET
one excerpt:
But the official government jobs report contradicts those numbers and came in far worse than even the most pessimistic economists' projections. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, for instance, forecast that payrolls would climb by 150,000, with guesses ranging from 75,000 new jobs to 200,000. Instead, the economy added about half of the lowest estimate.
The pace of the recovery is obviously not yet speeding up—in fact, the recovery has stalled out for the past nine months, with employers hesitant to hire, consumers hesitant to spend, and the government running out of bullets. Each month of bad data digs the hole left by the recession a bit deeper and increases the time it will take for the economy to return to normal. The difference between how many workers the economy should employ (given a lower, more normal unemployment rate) and how many it does employ stands at about 11.8 million workers.