Unexpectedly Intriguing!
07 December 2007

The latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and payroll processing giant ADP are out, and that means we can use our tool for finding the weighted average for the monthly change in jobs in the US! Here's the breakdown for the inputs we use in our tool, which is based on math developed by Jim Hamilton to get a better picture of the jobs data:

Jobs Data for November 2007
Jobs Data Values
BLS Nonfarm Payroll Employment Monthly Change +94,000
BLS Table A, Household Data, Civilian Labor Force, Employment, Monthly Change +617,000
BLS Table A, Establishment Data, Nonfarm Employment, Government, Monthly Change +30,000
ADP Employment Report +189,000

Using this data in our tool, we find the weighted average of all these changes in the level of jobs in the U.S. from October to November to be 211,100. Looks like Barry Ritholtz picked the wrong day to bet the under!... (To be fair, Barry focuses on the Non-Farm Payroll number and not the weighted average figure. He has post-news release comments here!)

The Skeptical Optimist has also looked at the jobs report and compared the quality of jobs today compared to those of one year ago. He finds that:

Our economy created more high-paying jobs than it lost in the last 12 months. (Either that, or we imported more high-paying jobs than we exported, which would mean we have a trade surplus in jobs. Presumably, that's great news to Lou Dobbs and John Edwards, so we should be hearing them cheer up any time now, one would think.)

Be sure to see the charts (which the Skeptical Optimist does better than anyone!)

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About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

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