Unemployment Rate, Labor Participation Rate, and How Many Jobs it takes to Keep Up With Population Growth

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People are often confused with biased media reports that "unemployment" is going down, and that's supposedly a good thing. There's much more to the picture - but you'll never hear it from the media.

The number of jobs needed per month to keep up with population growth depends on the rate of population growth, and the labor participation rate.

CBO estimates show we need 260,000 new jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth (new Americans entering the labor force).

It would take 187,000 jobs added per month over the next year to hold the unemployment rate steady if the participation rate rises to 64.6%. If the participation rate stays steady, it will only take 95,000 jobs added per month.

If the economy does start adding more jobs per month, one would expect more people will then join the labor force - keeping the unemployment rate elevated. Of course more people could give up, and the labor force participation rate could fall further pushing down the unemployment rate - but that wouldn't be good news. In other words, a declining unemployment rate only tells a small part of the whole story.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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