Employment in U.S. Lags Where It Was in 2007

From the New York Times online: 

The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.

Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics....

But overall employment in the United States remained 2.1 percent below where it was at the end of 2007, according to the statistics bureau. By comparison, over the same period, between December 2007 and March 2013, the number of jobs was up 8.1 percent in Australia; Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8 percent gain in employment.

“The United States is way below where it should be,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “We had a massive downturn and a tepid recovery.”

....The fitful recovery that began in 2009 is also different from the trend that prevailed after the deep recession of the early 1980s, said Laurence M. Ball, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. While economic growth has struggled to top 2 percent in recent years, annual gains in output briefly topped 7 percent [Blogger Note: the Ronald Reagan recovery was superior in every aspect] when the economy bounced off the bottom three decades ago.

....Another sign of distress is the persistence of long-term unemployment four years into the recovery. While the number of workers who have been out of a job for less than five weeks is almost unchanged from 2007 levels, there are roughly 4.4 million Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months, a 257 percent increase since 2007.

“As the economy recovers, we are going to see growth,” said Alexandre Mas, a professor of economics at Princeton and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “But we haven’t fully recovered yet.”
----
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/employment-in-us-lags-where-it-was-in-2007.html