Most of the job numbers, even when they look good, are still not even close to what they were before the Great Recession, which officially began in December 2007.
The unemployment rate fell to 7 percent in November, the Labor Department says. It was 5 percent in December 2007. The total number of jobs rose 203,000 to 136,765,000. That is still 1,271,000 less than the peak, reached in January 2008. The number of unemployed workers fell below 11 million for the first time since late 2008. It was 7.6 million at the end of 2007.
But one indicator is back to pre-recession levels. The number of people who have been out of work for less than five weeks fell to 2,461,000. That is the lowest figure since April 2007. As I noted in my Off the Charts column last week, it is long-term unemployment that is the biggest problem now. The number of people out of work for more than six months is 4,066,000. That is down 2.6 million from the peak, but before the Great Recession the figure had never been as high as three million.
Through all the recessions of the post-World War II period, the share of unemployed who had been jobless for at least six months exceeded 25 percent once, in 1983, prior to this cycle. Now it is 37 percent, down from a peak of 45 percent.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics
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