Doing the Math on a Jobless Recovery; President Obama has urged us to be patient, but must we wait until 2018 to get back to full employment?
Author: Brad Schiller</br></br>The latest employment reports have not been encouraging. At the rate of 36,000 new jobs a month--the number gained in January--we will never get back to full employment. Even if we keep adding jobs at the December rate of 121,000 new jobs, we wouldn't achieve full employment in this millennium.</br></br>President Obama has urged us to be "patient" with this jobless recovery. But it's worth asking how long it will take to get back to the employment levels we experienced before the recession of 2008-09. How patient will we need to be?</br></br>Consider the math of full employment. We now have a labor force of 153 million people, of whom 14 million are officially counted as "unemployed," defined as not working and actively seeking a job. Were we fully employed (defined as 5% unemployment) there would be 7.7 million unemployed workers. So our "excess" unemployment currently hovers around 6.3 million workers.</br></br>That number is our initial target for job creation. The trouble is that it's a moving target.