Job Creation Has Been on a Downward Slide For More Than Two Years

Membership Ticker

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you—especially at a moment like this. That's really it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a much shorter than normal three-week window, by November 5, so we can keep right on doing it. Please pitch in early to help us get there.

$250,000

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.

For some reason I was prompted to create this chart yesterday:

There’s a ton of noise in this series, but nonetheless the fitted trendline is fairly clear. Net new job creation¹ has been on a steady downward slide for more than two years, declining from a monthly average of 140,000 in 2015 to 100,000 in 2016 to 70,000 so far this year. I don’t know how meaningful this is, but it doesn’t really seem like a good thing, does it?

¹We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. Thus, net new job creation is the number of new jobs minus 90,000.