Unemployment Rate Falls to 7.7 Per Cent: But Where Are All the Other Workers?

What a difference a month makes. Five weeks ago, the entire country was focussed on the October jobs report to see, four days before the election, if there would be a nasty surprise for President Obama. There wasn’t. The payroll figure came in at 171,000, and the unemployment rate stayed under eight per cent. Mitt Romney was left to face the voters unaided by the Labor Department.

The November jobs report, which once again was broadly positive, was greeted with much less fanfare when it was released this morning. By eight-forty-five, just fifteen minutes after the numbers came out, the talking heads on CNBC had moved onto the troubles of Reed Hastings, the Netflix C.E.O. A payroll number of 146,000, broadly in line with what’s been happening in the past few months, isn’t a big talking point—neither, evidently, is the fact that the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.7 per cent, its lowest point since December, 2008, when the financial crisis was at its height. But it’s still significant—and somewhat surprising—news.

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