Scenes from the October employment report: full employment?
Last Friday the household jobs report - the one that tells us about unemployment, underemployment, and labor force participation - has been particularly strong in the past three months. This has driven some impressive gains in labor force participation and the unemployment rate.
To begin with, gains in employment as measured by the household survey (red in the graphs below), as opposed to the larger (and, yes, more reliable) payrolls survey (blue), have totaled 1,222,000 in the last three months:
One month ago this gave us the