Economists once again are praising another strong monthly jobs report, with one calling April’s results “huuuuuge.” Unemployment, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, dropped to tie a more than 50-year low of 3.4%, but it’s the details behind that number that are equally impressive, and some even historic.
President Joe Biden, who rarely takes a victory lap, Friday morning tweeted: “We just learned we created 253,000 jobs in April. That’s 12.7 million jobs since I took office, an unemployment rate that is the lowest since 1969, and the highest share of working age people in the workforce since 2008. My plan to invest in America is working.”
Not only is unemployment at a 50-plus-year low, unemployment for people “often left behind” is hitting historic lows.
“Who benefits from a strong job market?” asked New York Times’ economics and business reporter Ben Casselman. “People who are often left behind in weaker economies. The Black unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent in April, the lowest on record.”
“Another way to put this: Strong labor markets are a force for equality,” Casselman added. “The gap between the Black and white unemployment rates tends to narrow when the economy is strong — and right now, it’s the smallest on record.”
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Wage growth has also been strong.
“Average hourly earnings stronger than expected — up 0.5% from March, 4.4% from a year earlier,” he notes.
Meanwhile, popular University of Michigan professor of economics Justin Wolfers exclaimed, “Holy moly, we’ve got another one!”
He is calling the additional 253,000 jobs added in April “huuuuuge,” and “well above market expectations,” with “no hint of any sort of labor market slowdown.”
Noting the 3.4% unemployment rate is “the lowest level in half a century (equal with Jan 2023, and May 1969),” Wolfers opines: “It’s stunning to me that we hear so much gloom and doom when unemployment is at a 54-year low. Lemme state something radically obvious: This is very very good news.”
Like Casselman, Wolfers also heralds the now-historically low Black unemployment, offering a chart showing the impressive drop.
Former Chief Economist of the United States Department of Labor, now a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Betsey Stevenson cheers the employment increase for Black women: “Black women’s labor force participation is up a whopping 2.2 percentage points over the year. Their employment rate is up 2.5 percentage points. Black women are on fire!”
Joey Politano, who writes Apricitas Economics, the popular Substack newsletter on economics, business, finance, and public policy, adds, “Employment rates for prime-age American women notched a new record high this month!”
“There’s still a lot of ground to cover to catch up with employment rates in peer countries or match employment rates for American men, but it’s an amazing recovery from the pandemic recession.”
He also appears to mock those who claim there’s been a movement of “quiet quitting,” and younger workers who allegedly don’t want to work.
“Nobody wants to work anymore, and in fact they don’t want to work so hard that jobs numbers keep going up by a quarter million every single month,” Politano observes.
He continues: “Nobody wants to work anymore, and in fact they don’t want to work so hard that there are 1M [1 million] more people with jobs than the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] forecasted in January 2020.”
White House Deputy Communications Director Herbie Ziskend Friday morning, seeming to preview the President’s tweet noted, “During @POTUS’ first two years, there was a record number of new small business filings – 10.5 million. Entrepreneurs are launching companies all over the country.”
See Wolfers’ chart above or at this link.