Economix Blog: The Recovery Spreads

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

A year ago, the jobs recovery outlook was gray. From October 2010 to October 2011, the economy added 1.2 million jobs, according to the non-seasonally adjusted figures from the household survey. All of the net gain, and a little more, was in the over-55 age category.

There were also gains among the youngest workers, 16 to 24 years old. But the number of people with jobs in the prime working years — 25 to 54 — actually fell, by 683,000.

Over all, more than two-thirds of the added jobs went to people over 60. It should be no surprise that there was a lot of doubt about whether there really was a recovery.

Over the last 12 months, the story has been different. First, the recovery has accelerated. There were 3.1 million more jobs shown in the household survey released Friday than in the October 2011 survey, and one million of them were in the prime-age category. Workers over the age of 60 still got one-third of them, but two-thirds went to younger workers.

People get older every year, of course, and the size of each population group changes as people who were 59, for example, turn 60 and move into a different bracket. You can control for that by looking at the employment-to-population ratio for each bracket. Compared with a year ago, it is up for every five-year bracket under 65, but level for the brackets above that age.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/the-recovery-spreads/?partner=rss&emc=rss