The U.S.- and London-based financial media are agog—and want you to be as well—by the January jobs report of the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that 517,000 net new jobs had been created in January 2023—when in fact, in unadjusted data, it can readily be seen that U.S. employment dropped by 2.6 million in that month, as it does, roughly, every January.
The unadjusted employment data, which can be found on the BLS site easily enough, do actually show something. The U.S. economy lost just under 20 million jobs between January and April of 2020—the “pandemic collapse.” From April 2020 to January 2023, the economy has gained 22.6 million jobs. Thus, over the three years January 2020-January 2023, the American economy gained in employment by a net 2.6 million jobs (not 2.6 persons employed!), in unadjusted data. That’s as if the economy had steadily generated, over that entire three years, an net increase of just 70,000 jobs every month.
The unadjusted data for “goods-producing jobs"—construction, manufacturing, and mining including oil, coal and gas—show something quite similar: the loss of 2.2 million productive jobs in three months in 2020, followed by the gain of 2.6 million productive jobs since then, for a net increase of 400,000 jobs over 36 months, or an average of 11,000 new goods-producing jobs/month.
Given the time lapse of three years, this data has been corrected, overall, several times by the use of six-months-past payroll and other tax data, and records on businesses newly started and those liquidated, all of which is much more accurate than the monthly surveys the BLS takes and the outright guesses it makes.
It’s likely you’re not agog over the “new jobs in January”, as your living standard has probably fallen significantly during the same period of time due to inflation and shortages, despite the bursts of trillions of Federal “stimulus money” printed in 2020 and 2021.
