Short answers: economists were baffled. You were more attentive than usual. And months after a slew of headlines disappeared, the employment situation has quietly improved.
Confuses? Do not worry. Almost everyone is. We will guide you.
“Obviously the expectations were much higher, but when you look at 2021 as a whole, the president’s economic plan is working,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told CNN on Friday.
And Americans have returned to the workforce en masse: the labor force participation rate soared to 61.9% in November and held steady in the last month of the year, also marking a new pandemic high. This is a number that economists pay close attention to, because it indicates whether people are actively looking for work or if they are so disappointed that they will stop looking for work altogether.
Women, who had dropped out of the labor market at alarming rates in 2020, in part because of childcare issues, also returned in 2021. The participation rate of women aged 20 and over rose to 57.8%, also a peak during a pandemic.
And companies’ frantic search for personnel meant workers received larger enrollment bonuses and paychecks, especially at the lower end of the income scale.
Forecasts and be wrong
Month after month, however, 2021 didn’t feel so good. That’s because economists consistently set high expectations for the Jobs report, only to be disappointed with a much lower number than expected.
So last year has been a bit disappointing, if only because the expectations were so high.
How can economists get the process wrong all the time? Ultimately, the pandemic made their jobs much more difficult.
“A lot of [economists’] models are always informed by the demand for labor and find it difficult to grasp that there are jobs there but not enough workers, ”said Sarah House, economist at Wells Fargo, on the difficulty of predicting monthly job gains.
Economists are not bad at their jobs; they just have some unusual factors obscuring their crystal balls.
For example, the Employer Survey that is part of the Jobs Report repeatedly underestimated job growth over the past year, which is visible in the sometimes significant revisions that have been made over the past year. months later.
Amid the difficulty of forecasting activity, it also didn’t help that the jobs report became a point of interest outside the economic community during the pandemic: we were paying more attention to it. narrow than usual, which exacerbated these bad feelings.
Not finished yet
But here’s the problem: Wall Street economists weren’t the only ones confused. Government economists extrapolating the data for the monthly jobs report have also been thrown on a loop.
December’s worst report of the year could also be revised upwards.
Yet, this is not all good news. The recovery is still not over – although 2021 has been a great year for jobs,
At the end of the year, the country was still down 3.6 million jobs from February 2020. And that doesn’t take into account jobs that would have been added in the past two years without Covid.
There is still a lot of work to do for the New Year. The highly infectious variant of Omicron could give this a rough start.
