5 Comments

Love the breakdown of wealth change chart in particular

Expand full comment

Matt - I really love your graphs! But one thing that I consistently struggle with is your usage of "Contributions to change in ....." graphs

Whenever I see these graphs I always end up asking myself "But what are the contributions of each category to the current makeup"?

e.g. You have a graph here on "'Change' in Payroll employment since February 2020" which shows "Leisure" as a separate category. And I am asking myself how much do "Leisure" payrolls currently make of total payrolls as of today? - I think its relevant because a category making up 20% of the current structure causing a 5% change in total is very different from a category making up 10% and causing a 5% change in total. Hope it makes sense!

Expand full comment

very helpful - can you explain a bit about how you tease out misclassified unpaid absences? or of course point me to where you already did?

Expand full comment

Thank you! Basically I just look at the reported number of people saying they were employed with an unpaid absence in a given month and compare it to the pre-pandemic average for that month. In 2000-2019, there were about 1.5 million people who said they were employed with an unpaid absence in each October. The average was 1.7 million in 2017-2019. In October 2020, there were 1.9 million people who said they were employed with an unpaid absence, and in October 2021 there were 2.1 million. That implies there could have been around 400,000-600,000 people misclassified in October 2021. There were officially 154 million people who were employed in October 2021 compared to 158.7 million in February 2020. So the current employment shortfall (ignoring expected labor force growth) is somewhere between 4.7 million and 5.3 million.

Expand full comment

thanks! were you at all surprised to not see a pickup in hirings in JOLTS? or should that pickup in quits be thought of as next months hiring? I am surprised by quits not weakening showing signs of slowing

Expand full comment