I told him that we were standing in line with the 91.7% of the folks who are employed, not the 8.3% who are unemployed (U-3 unemployment measure).
I should have told him that we were standing in line with the 85.2% of folks who are fully employed, as opposed to the 14.8% who are not (U-6 unemployment measure).
The blue line shows the average number of hours worked by people with jobs in the private sector. It shows that those of us who are working are doing fine.
The red line in the chart below is a monthly index of the employment-to-population ratio, normalized to a value of 100 in December 2007, when the recession began. The lack of an uptick in the redline since 2009 is, we think, the essential tale.
Regardless of how one chooses to explain it, the fact that it has not improved is the critical issue.
We recall Dicken’s opening line from A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Sobering fact: Long term unemployment, defined to be 27 weeks or more out of work climbed to 5.4 million, or 41.3% of unemployed(U3) people.