U.S. employers added 531k jobs in October, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.6%.
Full coverage: nytimes.com/2021/11/05/bus…
Labor force grew by just 104k, and the participation rate was unchanged.
September's disappointing number was revised up to +312k. August revised up too. Net gain of 235k from the revisions.
Average earnings up another 11 cents/hour in October. Up by $1.44 from a year ago. In leisure and hospitality, specifically, hourly earnings were up 18 cents in October, up $1.92 over the past year.
October job gains look pretty broad-based. Leisure and hospitality led the way at +164k as the impact of Delta eased, but it wasn't just leisure. Manufacturing +60k, retail +35k, transportation & warehousing +54k, professional & biz services (including temps) +100k.
Want a sign that the economy is edging back toward normal? The share of people working from home because of Covid fell to a pandemic low of 11.6% in October. Resumed its decline after stalling out during the Delta wave.
Notable drop in work-from-home among professional workers. Which is a good place to note that I'm tweeting this from the office.
What I teach my students @newmarkjschool is that the data should determine the anecdotes, not the other way on. So if the data says older workers are retiring early, we should go find people retiring early and talk to them about why.
Where possible, we should disaggregate the data -- is the increase in early retirements being driven by college-educated workers? By women? By Black people? There are limits to this in practice, but we should aim to have our anecdotes be as representative as possible.
We should also be clear that even representative anecdotes are still anecdotes. "Real people" in stories provide nuance and color, and can help readers understand a trend. But they aren't evidence of a trend or what is causing it.
Income/spending/inflation data for September:
Personal income (nominal): -1%
Consumer spending (nominal): +0.6%
Consumer prices: +0.3% m/m, +4.4% y/y
Core consumer prices: +0.2% m/m, +3.6% y/y bea.gov/news/2021/pers…
September Employment Cost Index, *three month* change:
Total compensation: +1.3% (vs 0.7% in June)
Wages and salaries: +1.5% (0.9% June)
Leisure & hosp. wages/salaries: +2.6% (2.8% June) bls.gov/news.release/e…
The drop in income in September was driven by the end of expanded federal unemployment benefits. Wage and salary income actually rose faster in Sept. than in August.
Economic output grew 0.5% in the third quarter (2% annualized). That's a sharp slowdown from the 1.6% (6.7% annualized) in Q2, as supply chain woes and the rise of the Delta variant constrained growth. nytimes.com/live/2021/10/2…
U.S. GDP surpassed its prepandemic level in the second quarter, but it's still well below the prepandemic trend.
But inflation is a big part of the story here. Nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) GDP is back on its prepandemic trend. But real (inflation-adjusted) GDP is below. Fits with the story of demand outstripping supply, so some of it ends up as higher prices, not more production.
I'm busy with other stories today, so won't be delving into the numbers in depth, at least right away. But a few charts to update my earlier reporting on the impact of cutting off UI benefits. nytimes.com/2021/08/20/bus…
The short version: Still no evidence that states that cut off benefits early have seen significantly faster job growth than states that kept the benefits. The two groups have seen essentially identical job growth since April.
Couple follow-up charts to this, as I continue to dig through the data. (I'm still working through all this, so no big conclusions/takeaways here -- mostly just datapoints and a few observations.)
First, the surge in job-switching is heavily concentrated among younger workers. Among older workers, switching is still below prepandemic levels. Among prime-age (25-54), it's above, but not by that much. But job-to-job transitions are WAY up for workers under 25.
Before you start complaining about "job-hopping Gen-Zers," though, note that: a) job turnover is *always* highest among younger workers, and b) young workers, prepandemic, were changing jobs *less* often than prior generations.
cc @graykimbrough