Friday’s jobs report was a disappointment even though it showed
unemployment falling to the lowest level since shortly after President
Obama took office. The trouble is that job creation is abnormally
sluggish and nowhere near enough to keep bringing down the unemployment
rate.
This is hardly news, of course. For months economists have been
talking about a jobless recovery. And they point to certain factors as
having contributed to the problem — from the severity of the recent
recession to the so-called skills gap, a shortage of workers with the
training needed to fill the jobs that are available. These factors do
help explain why job losses were so bad in the first place and why the unemployment rate reached 10% in 2009, the highest level since 1983. But they don’t explain why job creation continues to be so weak.
