Perspective: Unemployment is at a 50-year low, and it might drop a lot further
Job seekers wait in line to apply for part-time, full-time or seasonal positions at a job fair at Dolphin Mall in Sweetwater, Fla., on Oct. 3, 2017. By Matt O'Brien Matt O'Brien Reporter covering economic affairs Email Bio Follow May 3 at 6:25 PM The headlines write themselves: The unemployment rate has just fallen to an almost 50-year low of 3.6 percent, the economy has now added jobs for a record 103 straight months, and while wage gains are still slightly muted at only 3.
That said, though, there were still a few dark linings to this otherwise silver cloud. Chief among them was the fact that while businesses said they added a very robust 263,000 jobs last month, households actually told us that 103,000 fewer of them were working then. These numbers, as you might expect, are usually pretty close to each other, since they’re supposed to be measuring the same thing. .
How is it possible, though, that the recovery might be slowing down when the unemployment rate just fell from 3.8 to 3.6 percent? Well, that makes more sense once you realize that it only happened for the “bad” reason that fewer people were looking for work rather than that more of them were finding it.
The question, then, is whether the whole idea that the economy would slow down once unemployment got below a certain point was wrong, or whether that point is just lower than we thought it was. And the answer is we have no idea. If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, you might point out that not only is hiring still strong today, but also that wages are still low enough that there’s every reason to expect companies to keep adding just as many people tomorrow.
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