Colorado's job growth has not kept pace with population.

• Author: Adams, Tucker Hart
• Position: The ECONOMIST

A WHOLE PASSEL OF TOPICS IS PILING UP IN MY folder of column ideas, none quite enough for an entire column but all of them things that are interesting and important. So. this month I thought I would comment on several of them.

One thing that mystifies me is the disparity between population growth and job growth in Colorado over the last decade. Between 2000 and 2010, state population grew by 727,935. In 2000, 55 percent of Colorado residents were in the labor force (had a job or were looking for one); in 2010 it was 53 percent. If we split the difference, 54 percent or about 390,000 of our new residents should be in the job market.

But during that period Colorado companies added only 6,300 workers. What were the other 383,000 doing? Surely it wasn't all kids graduating from college and moving in with their parents. Besides, most of those were Colorado residents to begin with.

There is another measure of employment by-place of residence rather than by place of work - that picks up agricultural workers and sole proprietors. The latter are people who report their income on a Schedule C rather than receiving a W2. (I'm not an accountant so I'm sure that explanation isn't precisely correct, but it is close enough.) By that measure we gained 147,520 jobs over the decade, while the number of unemployed grew by 174,886.

'That's 322,406 more people in the labor force, or 44 percent of the population gain. Since I haven't heard of a surge in the number of farmers in the state, most of the new residents are unemployed, working for themselves or filling jobs vacated by people who decided to work for themselves.

And it still leaves 60,000 people unaccounted for. More, actually, because many of the jobs are part-time, and many people worked two or more jobs during the Great Recession when they couldn't find full-time work. It could be retirees - after all, we are getting older but the labor force/population ratio doesn't support that idea.

There are various measures of unemployment. The one we are used to reading about is the U-3, which averaged 8.7 percent in Colorado in 2010, below the nation's 9.6 percent. II we acid in discouraged workers, those who...