A.  Revisions in the Jobs Numbers

The pace of job growth in 2019 was slower than had originally been estimated.  While such revisions to the initial job growth estimates are not unusual (there is a regular annual process that adjusts them based on more complete data), the result for 2019 was that they now estimate there were 0.5 million fewer net new jobs than had been thought before.  Along with other revisions in the estimates going further back, the result is that the pace of job growth under Trump has slowed down by even more than had been thought earlier.  While this is not surprising (unemployment is low), it does point up even more strongly that Trump is simply wrong in his assertions that the pace of job growth during his term in office is “historic”, “unthinkable” (by anyone other than himself), and far faster than before.  See, for example, Trump’s remarks in January 2020 at the Davos meetings.  It was not true before the revisions – it is even less true now.

There were earlier indications that the jobs figures would be revised downwards.  A post on this blog in May 2019 discussed an inconsistency pointing to this that had developed in two estimates of employment growth in the US.  Both come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), with one based on the Bureau’s monthly survey of households (the CPS, for Current Population Survey) and the other based on its monthly survey of business establishments (the CES, for Current Establishment Statistics survey).  Figures from these two surveys are released each month in the BLS Employment Situation report, which provides updated estimates on the unemployment rate, net job growth, and other such closely watched numbers.

Both the CPS and the CES provide estimates on employment growth, but they arrive at those estimates from two different sources.  And while there are some small differences in how “employment” is defined in the two (as discussed in that earlier blog post, where the impact of those differing definitions was examined), the two series over time will move together.  However, in the two years leading up to April 2019 the two series drifted significantly apart.  The CPS survey (of households) indicated a slower pace of net job creation than the CES survey (of establishments) did.

With the release of the January 2020 estimates on February 7, we now have updated figures.  And they indicate that job growth has indeed been slower than what the earlier CES figures had indicated.  The chart at the top of this post shows the differences, where all the figures are defined in terms of the change in jobs relative to their level in April 2017.  The curves (with the circles or squares) ending in April 2019 reproduce the chart from the earlier post (with the labor force figures removed, for less clutter), with the estimates on jobs as known at that point.  The curves (with no circles or squares) that end in January 2020 then show the more recent, updated, estimates.

The curves in blue, of the changes in employment as estimated from the CPS survey of households, show some revisions, but generally small and with no strong trend.  While there is a much greater degree of month to month volatility in the figures from the household survey, the revised figures basically follow what had been estimated before.  As was discussed in the earlier blog post, the CPS survey of households uses an effectively far smaller sample size for its employment estimates than the CES survey of business establishments has.  The CPS surveys a sample of 60,000 households each month, and a household will normally have only one or two members employed.  The CES survey, in contrast, surveys 145,000 businesses, covering almost 700,000 different worksites, and each worksite can have dozens if not hundreds of employees.

The employment estimates from the CES survey, shown in the curves in black on the chart, therefore show far less month to month fluctuation, due to the lesser degree of statistical noise.  But the new versus old estimates began to drift apart from each other around June 2018, with the discrepancy then continuing to widen steadily over time.  And the new estimates of employment based on the CES survey (the curve in black) now follows much more closely to the trend in the estimates of employment from the CPS survey (the curve in blue).  They came especially close to each other in the figures for October 2019, but have drifted apart by some since then (although not nearly as apart as what we saw in April 2019).

The changes are significant.  For April 2019, for example, the earlier estimates from the CES were that there were 151.1 million employed in the US (employed as defined in the CES).  The new estimate is that there were only 150.5 million employed in that month, a difference of about 600,000.  When looking at job growth, i.e. changes in the number employed over time, that difference is significant.

B.  Job Growth Under Trump Compared to Under Obama 

The updated estimates provide a clearer picture of how the job market has progressed in recent years.  But it is not as Trump often boasts.

With the publication of the January 2020 estimates, we now have figures on job growth for exactly three years into Trump’s presidential term.  These figures can be compared to the growth seen in the final three years of Obama’s presidency:

This presentation of the CES monthly employment growth figures is not original with me.  A number of news sources have presented something similar (although I have constructed the chart here from the original source BLS numbers).  But it makes the point well.

As one can see, there is a substantial degree of month to month volatility, even in these CES figures.  They are estimates of the month to month changes in total employment, and during Trumps’s presidential term thus far have varied from a high of over 400,000 in one month (February 2018) to a low of zero in another (February 2019).  But the average over the 36 months of Trump’s term in office thus far has been a monthly growth of 182,200.

This is well below the pace of employment growth during Obama’s last 36 months in office.  The average then was 224,400 net new jobs per month.  Trump’s repeated assertions that job creation is now faster is simply not true.

Nor was it true even with the earlier job growth estimates.  It is just even less true now:

Under the earlier estimates, job growth had been an average of 225,800 per month over the last 36 months of Obama’s presidency, and 192,000 per month over the first 36 months of Trump’s term.  The difference was 33,800 more jobs per month under Obama compared to the period under Trump.  The difference as estimated now is 42,200 more.

And while these differences in the monthly averages may not appear to be much, over time they accumulate to a quite substantial difference.  The total growth in employment over the last 36 months of Obama’s presidency was 8,079,000.  Over Trump’s first 36 months it was slower, at a total of 6,559,000.  The difference is a not insubstantial 1.5 million jobs.  And it is higher than the 1.2 million job difference in the earlier estimates.

So Trump’s claims are simply not true.  That is important.  Trump is once again making assertions without bothering with whether or not they follow the facts.  But having said that, I would also note that this slowdown in the pace of job growth should not be at all surprising.  The unemployment rate has been low, it cannot go much if any lower, and hence an increase in the number employed can only come either from regular population growth or from an increase in the share of that population choosing to participate in the labor force.  The adult population grew by 150,600 per month during Trump’s 36 months in office, and the labor force by 137,800 per month.  This accounted for most of the 182,200 net new employment over the period.  The rest was from the reduction in the unemployment rate, from an already low rate of 4.7% when Trump took office, to the 3.6% now.  But the unemployment rate cannot go much lower.  Hence one should not be surprised that employment growth has slowed.

Still, it should not be a big request to expect honesty from a president.