Brad DeLong thinks about how employment numbers are spun:
The unemployment rate right now is 5.4%–up relatively little from the 4.1% or so that it was at the start of 2001. In a normal business cycle we would expect such a small increase in the unemployment rate over four years to go with an increase in payroll employment of about 3.9 million: the rising adult population would add 6 million to the trend labor force, and most of them would find jobs even over a period in which unemployment rises.
But we haven’t added 3.9 million jobs: we’ve lost about 0.6 million. The trend labor force has grown by only about 1.5 million over the past four years.
Where are the other 4.5 million? Republicans, anxious to see Rosy Scenario, believe that they have found better things to do than go into the labor force — that they have decided it is a better use of their time to go to school, or raise kids, or windsurf. Democrats, equally anxious to see Dismal Scenario, believe that the missing 4.5 million have given up hope of finding a good job.
I see myself in both the Rosy and Dismal scenarios: I gave up my last job, ugly as it was, to stay home (though I am not home all that much) with my kids and backfill the stuff that makes family life livable. Prior to that and currently, I would count my self as a discouraged worker.
So how does that work figure into the economy? Working with kids in school, managing the dropoff and pickup times at school, running PTA functions, etc., — how does that get counted? There are lots of people doing this kind of work, if you call it that, though not as many as there back in the day when families could live on one income: if society, ie the policy makers and the politicians they direct, don’t value these efforts, what does that say about us? Are we better people than our parents and grandparents?