This one should not be all that hard but the papers have numbers all over the place. Let’s turn to our old friend, arithmetic, to shed some light on the topic. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that the labor force is growing at the rate of 0.7 percent a year. The current size of the labor force is 153.9 million. This implies that we need about 1.1 million jobs a year to keep even with the growth of the labor force. (The number would be a bit less if the 6 percent share of self-employed in the labor force held constant.) That translates into a bit over 90,000 a month.
The 151,000 jobs reported for October is about 60,000 more than is needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising. At this pace it would reduce the pool of unemployed workers by 720,000 over the course of a year. With a gap of about 10 million jobs at present, this rate of job growth would fill the gap in around 14 years.
In order to fill this gap in a reasonable period of time, say 3 years, we would need job growth of 370,000 a month. This would bring the economy back to normal levels of unemployment by late 2013, six years after the onset of the recession.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog Beat the Press, where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues. This article was first published in CEPR’s “Beat the Press” blog on 6 November 2010 under a Creative Commons license.
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