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Comment by mbfg | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to the clueless among us (me) how you can increase jobs, but not decrease unemployment? ----------------------------------------------------------

POINTS December’s jobs report showed employers added 216,000 jobs for the month while the unemployment rate held at 3.7%. That compared with respective estimates of 170,000 and 3.8%.

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Also, isn't this just the most american thing ever?

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Markets reacted negatively to the data, with stock market futures sliding and Treasury yields sharply higher.

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In addition to population increasing, the number of people in the job pool can increase in other ways. Unemployment generally looks at the number of people looking for a job, which can change based on people deciding they want a job / don't want a job in a given month.

More details at BLS: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

And re: market response, continuing strength in the job market means the Fed is likely to keep rates higher for longer, which the markets hate.

Denominator changed - more people in the workforce through participation, immigration or not being dead.

As for analyst expectation, they are often mathematically inconsistent - quarterly revenue estimates can mismatch the 1y number etc.

The expectations are a simple average, and not necessarily everyone contributes to both estimates. Analyst A might stick in a +1 mil monthly number, Analyst B sticks in a -2% unemployment rate. (+ there are many analysts that like to stick in stupid numbers so they can claim to be a genius on cnbc if there is an outlier result)

only people who are actively looking for jobs are considered unemployed, so the "jobless working age population" is a larger group than people considered unemployed. so, you can have a person who is unemployed get a job and another person who is jobless but wasn't considered unemployed because they weren't actively looking then become unemployed because they began to actively look for a job.

The official unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by surveying a representative sample of US households, not a literal count of people "on the job hunt": https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

So while you should expect the numbers to broadly track together, there can and will be some variance month-over-month in the impact and durability of new jobs' contribution to the overall level of employment.

Young people join the workforce every month, and also some who have been sidelined for one reason or another can re-join. Who counts as unemployed is a bit more detailed than just people who aren't working.

i would expect that more people are retiring than are first time entering tho, right? Given demographics?

What demographics are you looking at? The US has tremendous immigration so I believe the population is still growing at a respectable clip.

ah ok. immigration. that would be true.

What's the most American thing ever? I don't believe the financial markets are really an American thing but a global one. At any rate the markets did not react negatively to the news.

The participation rate changes.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Year cohorts are not uniformly big. Immigration.

In addition to what others have said I’d say that your claim that unemployment did not decrease is not necessarily correct. They’re only reporting on the tenth of a percent, the rate could’ve gone from 3.78% to 3.71% for all we know based off this. With a labor force of 170 million one hundredth of a percent is still 17,000 people.

the population increased

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