The New York Times today engages in a little revisionist history and plain old bias:
A Dreadful Jobs Report Recalls the 1980s Today’s jobs report was dreadful – much worse than economists had anticipated – and you will be hearing a lot of comparisons that try to put it in context. This one may be the most telling: The share of adults who are working – 61.8 percent – is at its lowest level in 15 years. And even that, arguably, understates the depth of the problem. Fifteen years ago, women were less likely to be in the labor force than they today. The share of adult men with jobs, which has been gradually falling for much of the last few decades, is now at its lowest level since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1948. Just about every economist thinks that the labor market will continue to get worse, which means it’s on a path to be in its worst shape since the painful recession of the early 1980s.
Here’s the graph of the U.S. unemployment rate from 1980-1991, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You’ll note that the central feature of the 1980s is not a dreadful jobs situation:
The high unemployment rates of the 1980s came in the first years of the Reagan administration, while the economy was still recovering from the Carter recession of 1979. As the Times is probably aware, the economic expansion that began in the early 1980s marked the beginning of the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history. I understand that the Times is simply trying to lower expectations for the Obama administration, but inviting comparisons to the 1980s won’t help Barack Obama — at least once people look at the data.
