Prince Ikari
My guess is the reason unemployment decreased is because more and more people are just giving up. Heck it took me three years to secure my first job, and it would not have taken as long except I was getting very discouraged along the way and just wanted to give up because no places would hire. This is no news to celebrate. What would be worth celebrating would be if we were creating close to a million jobs a month because then people would be actually employed and not giving up and dropping out all together.
You're theory could be supported by the steady decline in the
BLS Workforce Participation Rate, even though Sept. did see a .1 increase in it...
I've been crunching numbers until my head has exploded on this issue (I swear, I'm starting to see in binary code).
So lets break it down (simply first). 308,745,538 people in the United States (2010 Census figures). Unemployment currently sits at 7.8% as of Sept. That equates to roughly 24,082,151 people out of work (this is using the U-3 figure which is what is reported). Now according to the BLS, the economy added 114,000 jobs in Sept.
This doesn't make sense. Because in order do drop by just 0.1%, the economy would've needed to add 308,745 jobs. From Aug. to Sept. the rate dropped 0.3%, which should mean that 926,235 new jobs should've been created. Yet in Aug. only 96,000 jobs were created. Added to Sept. 114,000, we get a total of 210,000 jobs. By this logic, the rate shouldn't have even come close to dropping a single tenth of a point. So where did the other 716,235 people go?
This math can be applied to months past, but I figured a more recent example could help portray my thoughts a little better. I'm still crunching and trying to figure out exactly how our government calculates these numbers, so this is just simple logic.