Jobs Given, Jobs Taken Away

During the last expansion between 2001 and 2007, the economy added 7.2 million jobs. This morning's employment report -- which wasn't pretty -- showed that the economy has lost jobs for nine months in a row through September for a total decline of 760,000. That means that 11 percent of the positions created during the expansion have been eliminated, or a worse outcome than in the last two recessions since the Great Moderation. Here's how this figure compares to past cycles:

(Note: I combined the 1980 and 1981 recessions. The BLS doesn't have data prior to 1939, so to calculate the jobs added during the 1938-1945 expansion, I took the average monthly gain for the 1939-1945 period and applied it to expansionary months in 1938.)

UPDATE
Dave in the comments makes the very good point that looking at the employment-population ratio as opposed to raw payroll data as I have done above gives a truer sense of the health of the job market. That's because only looking at the raw numbers doesn't tell you anything about the proportion of the population that has jobs. As Dave points out, the current employment-population ratio (62.0 percent) has fallen below the trough reached at the beginning of the past cycle (62.1 percent). This also happened at the end of the expansion that started in 1970 where, following the 1973 recession, the e-p ratio was 0.2 percent below the 1970 level. The short 1981 cycle saw the e-p ratio fall 1.5 percent after the 1982 recession. But if you count the '80-'82 double-dip recession as one, then there was a 1.2 percent from the expansion that started in 1975.

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