The August Jobs Numbers Are Weak. Don’t Blame Trump.<br />First, the overall trajectory of the economy looks very much the way it did this time a year ago; if you assume some amount<br />of statistical noise, in broad brush strokes the 2017 economy looks pretty much identical to the 2016 economy.<br />The United States economy added fewer jobs than analysts expected (156,000, not 180,000); previous months’ job growth was revised down (by 41,000 positions); the unemployment rate ticked up a bit (to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent);<br />and wages continued growing at only a glacial pace (0.1 percent).<br />With the economy closer to full employment now — the unemployment rate is at 4.4 percent instead of the 4.9 percent in the<br />middle of last year — employers looking to add jobs are working against a harder constraint on the number of workers.<br />Job growth has averaged 170,000 positions a month since February, the first full month of the Trump administration.<br />That may be a result of some weirdness that has crept into August numbers in recent years because of the challenges of measuring seasonal variation, or it could reflect a job market<br />that is less vibrant than it had seemed a few months ago.<br />In that sense, these numbers highlight a widely made mistake in how we have been talking about the economy since Inauguration Day,<br />and really for long before Donald J. Trump took office.
