The New Sick-onomy? Examining the Entrails of the U.S. Employment Situation

Author: Daniel Alpert  ·  July 24th, 2013

If you can forgive the following gratuitous self-promotion of my upcoming book, I have a story to tell you about the U.S. employment picture. A story that you may find far more interesting than the media and government-led backslapping that has been forthcoming on “jobs days” in the first half of 2013:

“Economists are notorious for getting worked up by numbers, and these days no data dump triggers a sharper frisson of excitement than the two dozen or so tables of employment numbers released at exactly 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the U.S. Department of Labor.

It’s not just economists who eagerly await—or dread—the U.S. “Jobs Day,” as this Friday has become known in Washington. It’s also politicians, stock analysts, policy wonks, and journalists. Amid the worst economic run of our lifetime—a crisis that keeps morphing and whacking us again—everyone is looking for signs of what’s coming next.