Jobs and Context
So CNN reports that the Labor Department's employment report for March 2006 is now out, and it shows that the economy added 211,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate has dropped to 4.7%. Hmmmm… those are nice facts in isolation. Makes for a nice little story on page B3 of the business section.
But imagine…. what if CNN would have reported the following additional facts to put the story in some historical context:
1. The 211,000 jobs in March means that, in the 2 1/2 years since President Bush's tax cuts in the summer of 2003, the economy has created more than 5 million new jobs. That's right, this month's jobs report pushes the job creation figure for Bush's tax cuts past 5 million. That's a pretty newsworthy milestone, don't you think? But I guess you can't expect the CNN reporterettes to actually go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' webpage and look up a statistic like that, can you?
2. The 4.7% unemployment rate is exactly the same as the unemployment rate in March 1998, i.e., at the same time in Bill Clinton's second term, when my memory is that the media was full of stories about how great the economy was booming. Again, the BLS has the data.
Meanwhile, Gallup on February 17, 2006 reported that "[t]he attitudes of the average American consumer toward the economy remain relatively dour. Majorities of Americans rate economic conditions at the moment as 'only fair' or 'poor,' say economic conditions in the U.S. are getting worse, and perceive that now is a bad time to be looking for a quality job." Do you think that maybe the reason most Americans have this opinion of the economy -- which is demonstrably wrong, as wrong as if they thought that 2+2=5 -- is because the news media has either intentionally or negligently misrepresented the economic news to them for so long?
It's one thing to report the numbers. It's another thing to put them in context so that readers understand that, relative to basically every other time and place in the history of man, being alive in the USA in 2006 is as good as it has ever been for human beings.
But imagine…. what if CNN would have reported the following additional facts to put the story in some historical context:
1. The 211,000 jobs in March means that, in the 2 1/2 years since President Bush's tax cuts in the summer of 2003, the economy has created more than 5 million new jobs. That's right, this month's jobs report pushes the job creation figure for Bush's tax cuts past 5 million. That's a pretty newsworthy milestone, don't you think? But I guess you can't expect the CNN reporterettes to actually go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' webpage and look up a statistic like that, can you?
2. The 4.7% unemployment rate is exactly the same as the unemployment rate in March 1998, i.e., at the same time in Bill Clinton's second term, when my memory is that the media was full of stories about how great the economy was booming. Again, the BLS has the data.
Meanwhile, Gallup on February 17, 2006 reported that "[t]he attitudes of the average American consumer toward the economy remain relatively dour. Majorities of Americans rate economic conditions at the moment as 'only fair' or 'poor,' say economic conditions in the U.S. are getting worse, and perceive that now is a bad time to be looking for a quality job." Do you think that maybe the reason most Americans have this opinion of the economy -- which is demonstrably wrong, as wrong as if they thought that 2+2=5 -- is because the news media has either intentionally or negligently misrepresented the economic news to them for so long?
It's one thing to report the numbers. It's another thing to put them in context so that readers understand that, relative to basically every other time and place in the history of man, being alive in the USA in 2006 is as good as it has ever been for human beings.
posted by PDB at 6:56 AM
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