The all-new failure of the new economics: unemployment rates and other useless measurements.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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IF YOU'VE BEEN pinning your job-search hopes on the conventional wisdom that employment gains follow an economic recovery, you have a problem right now. The so-called Great Recession has been over for almost two years, but unemployment remains about where it was before the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) declared that the recovery had begun.

In June 2009, the month the NBER has pinpointed as the end of the recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent. In early 2011, the unemployment rate was 9 percent. To put this feeble recovery into perspective: Just eight months after the job-loss peak in the I948 recession, which saw unemployment increase by 5.2 percent percentage points, all of those jobs had been replaced. Less than a year after the trough of the 1958 recession, the economy had reversed an unemployment spike of more than four percentage points. In 1981-82, job growth more than erased a 3.1 percentage point increase in unemployment within II months, leaving the rate lower than it was before the recession.

The numbers today get even worse when you look beyond the Bureau of Labor Statistics' top-line figures. As of January, the government was reporting a rate of 16.1 percent for U-6, its measure of "total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force." The U-6 number, sometimes referred to as the "real unemployment" rate, has improved since January 2010 by less than half a percentage point, and not in a straight line. In fact, U-6 dropped early in 2010 before ticking back up in the summer-a year after the NBER'S declared end of the recession, when you would expect job growth to be at its strongest.

Even that 0.5 percentage point improvement in official unemployment contains more bad news than good. Much of the increase comes from "discouraged" workers who reach the end of their unemployment benefits and have stopped looking for work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reduced its estimate of the civilian labor force by 504,000 in January, which, along with some changes to its estimates of total population, helped make the unemployment rate look a little better.

The economy would need to be creating about 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Instead, nonfarm payroll job creation...