Something doesn’t quite add up in this year’s economic data, and economists studying it aren’t shy about saying so. The unemployment rate has been falling — meaningfully, by nearly a full percentage point over the past year. Economic growth, by contrast, has stayed sluggish and uneven, nowhere close to the pace textbook models say should…
Behind this month’s national unemployment rate — 9.7 percent, the highest since 1983 — sits a set of numbers considerably worse for some Americans than the headline figure suggests, and a demographic pattern that would only get starker as the year wore on. The Headline Number, and What It Doesn’t Show The national rate on…
The math doesn’t seem to add up, and economists are the first to admit it. In January, the U.S. economy lost 20,000 jobs. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, dropped — from 10.0 percent down to 9.7 percent. Ordinarily, those two numbers move together, not in opposite directions. A Drop Economists Themselves Call “Inexplicable” The Economic Policy…
9.7 percent. That’s where the unemployment rate stood after the Department of Labor’s latest release — the highest level the country had seen in 26 years, since the early days of the Reagan administration. A Rate Not Seen Since 1983 The August jobs report, released the first Friday of September, showed the economy still losing…
247,000. That’s how many jobs the U.S. economy shed in July — a brutal number by any ordinary measure, and yet the smallest monthly job loss the country had recorded in a full year. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, ticked down slightly to 9.4 percent. Both figures beat what economists had been bracing for, and both…
Since Mexico’s government sent the military into the streets to fight drug cartels in 2006, at least 140,000 people have been killed. Cartel leaders get arrested or killed with some regularity, and the violence escalates anyway. Canadian journalist Dawn Paley spent years asking why the standard cops-versus-cartels story never seemed to explain what she was…
The nation’s unemployment rate edged higher in November, the Labor Department reported this week, with the official jobless rate climbing to 9.8 percent and a broader measure that captures the full scope of the labor market’s weakness holding steady at 17 percent. A Report That Caught Economists Off Guard The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported…
California’s fight over same-sex marriage is headed to a federal appeals court, after the state’s top elected officials declined to defend a voter-approved ban that a federal judge struck down as unconstitutional last month. A Sweeping Ruling, and a Governor Who Won’t Appeal It Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled in August that Proposition…
Arctic sea ice has shrunk to its smallest extent ever recorded by satellite this year, scientists announced this week, shattering the previous record by a margin so large it has surprised even researchers who have spent decades watching the ice cap steadily decline. A Record Broken by an Unusually Wide Margin Satellite data analyzed by…
What began in April with a handful of Standing Rock Sioux tribal members camped on a small piece of land has grown into one of the largest Indigenous-led demonstrations in decades — and with no resolution to the underlying dispute in sight, the encampments along the Missouri River watershed show no sign of winding down….