South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Rortybomb describes what a “good” national employment report would look like.

First of all, there would have been job growth that gets us back to full employment instead of job growth that is slightly around the rate of population growth. There would be well over 150,000 jobs created a month, ideally above 200,000 and even beyond that — there’s a lot of catching up to do. The key indicator to watch is the employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the workforce that has a job. As unemployment only indicates the number of people actively searching for a job, and many are dropping out of the labor force and giving up on finding a job, the unemployment rate tells us less and less. And if the population is growing faster than the number of jobs created, we are losing out. The employment-population ratio tells us the actual rate at which we are employing people. It is currently at 58.4 percent, the same it was in January 2011.