Predicting Double Dips: Bad Induction

David Leonhardt does some seriously bad induction when he tells readers that:

"Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one."

The problem in this story is that over most of this period the underlying rate of labor force growth was close to 2 million a year. It currently is around 1 million a year. The reason for the falloff is t...