01 February 2013

BLS Reports 755,000 New Jobs Today

Today, the Bureau of Labor announced that 755,000 new jobs had been created. Well, not exactly new, just new to their data set. Their best estimate for January was that 157,000 new jobs were added but they revised numbers from the last couple of years upwards as well.

At the end of each month, the Bureau of Labor announces how many jobs were created. It obviously doesn't really know, not exactly. It's a sprawl of an economy in which about 12.3 million people don't have jobs and the bureau is reporting job changes in the thousands, an amount that's pretty much a rounding error on the total. Further, the Bureau is estimating based on sampling. But then more substantial numbers eventually come in and from that the Bureau does two things: it adjusts past numbers that had been calculated from sampling and it tweaks its estimation processes for on-going sampling.

All that to say that - by my count - today the Bureau announced an extra 755,000 jobs. In addition to the 157,000 jobs for January, they bumped the 2012 numbers up by 335,000 and the 2011 numbers up by 263,000. That totals 755,000 jobs more jobs than had been counted just a week ago.

So once again, things were better than we thought at the time. It turns out that you were happier, thinner, and better looking than you realized in your past. So it is, apparently, with the economy. Except, of course, none of this lowered the unemployment rate. Go figure.

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