Friday's employment report was a bit of unalloyed good news: The Labor Department estimated that 192,000 new jobs were added during the month of February. More importantly, the private sector added 222,000 jobs, while the public sector lost 30,000. All told, the unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent, the first time it has been below 9 percent in almost two years.
The trajectory of the unemployment rate is very heartening. It was at 9.8 percent for November before falling to 9.4 percent for December, 9.0 percent for January and now 8.9 percent in February. That's a drop of 0.9 percentage points in three months. The last time we saw a drop that precipitous was in 1983 - exactly the moment when the rate dropped for good at the end of the early-1980s recession.
And the official numbers may be understating the recovery. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times points out, while the businesses surveyed have reported average monthly job growth of 102,000 for the past three months, the similar household survey reports it's actually been 221,000 jobs added per month. It's possible that the business survey is missing a significant number of entrepreneurs and small businesses that have been generating jobs over the past quarter. So the employment news may be even sunnier than what's being widely reported.
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