THE unemployment rate is low. The jobless rate is high.þþThose two seemingly contradictory statements are especially true for American men in what should be the prime of their working lives. Those facts may help to explain the stark pessimism of Americans about the economy, and shed some light on the rise of illegal immigration as a political issue.þþMen in the prime of their working lives are now less likely to have jobs than they were during all but one recession of the last 60 years. Most of them do not qualify as unemployed, but they are nonetheless without jobs.þþThe unemployment rate paints a less gloomy picture. Among men ages 25 to 54 — a range that starts after most people finish their education and ends well before most people retire — the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. That is not especially low, but it is well below the peak rate in all but one post-World War II recession.þþOnly people without jobs who are actively looking for work qualify as unemployed in the computation of that rate. It does not count people who are not looking for work, whether or not they would like to have a job.þþBut there is another rate — called the jobless rate in this article — that counts the proportion of people without jobs. To be sure, some of them do not want to work. Some are raising families on a spouse’s income, or are disabled, retired or independently wealthy. But others may be discouraged workers, who would take jobs if they thought any desirable positions were available.þþIn the latest report, for March, the Labor Department reported the jobless rate — also called the “not employed rate” by some — at 13.1 percent for men in the prime age group. Only once during a post-World War II recession did the rate ever get that high. It hit 13.3 percent in June 1982, the 12th month of the brutal 1981-82 recession, and continued to rise from there.þþTo be sure, employment is a lagging economic indicator, and rates higher than this have prevailed after recessions ended. But this rate has arrived at a time when the government still hopes that a recession can be averted.þþAs can be seen in the accompanying chart, there has been a long-term decline in the proportion of prime-age men with jobs. That decline has been masked by rises in the number of older people with jobs and by a steady rise in the proportion of women working outside the home. But even among women there has been some slippage. The proportion of women ages 25 to 54 without jobs was 27.4 percent in March, a figure that is higher than it was during all but one month of the 2001 recession.þþThe negative trend can also be seen in the other chart, which shows the annual change in the number of working men in the 25 to 54 age range, using a three-month moving average to smooth the figures.þþIn the last half-century, that figure has turned negative only after recessions have been going on for at least a few months, although it has often stayed negative well after the recession officially ended. The lags have ranged from four months after the start of the 1960-61 and 2001 recessions, to 15 months after the beginning of the 1973-75 downturn, with an average lag of eight months. This year, the figure turned negative in January.þþThe government breaks down the figures by race, and those figures show that over the last year almost all the jobs lost by men in the 25 to 54 age group have been lost by whites, with most of those losses affecting men ages 35 to 44. There have been just a small number of losses by black men in the 25 to 54 age group, and employment for Hispanic men is still growing, albeit at a much slower pace than it was a few months ago.þþThe unemployment and jobless rates for white men are still lower than for black or Hispanic men, but this downturn stands in sharp contrast to the 2001 recession, when the number of black men with jobs began to fall months before the employment rate for white men dropped. þþFloyd Norris comments in his blog at norris.blogs.nytimes.com.þþ
Source: NY Times
