News has a problem with economic reporting

News, whether web or paper, needs a story.  It's extremely hard to transform very slow processes into an interesting story, and even harder to explain complex slow processes.  Unemployment is an example.

All of the economic reporting that I see on unemployment tries to bring some excitement to the story.  Big news.  Sudden change. Get people scared or excited.  They present as complicated a diagram as possible, or find some chart that looks really bad or suddenly good.  But there is rarely any effort to take apart the complex system and show the separate parts in a way that can be understood.

This diagram illustrates the problem with using a clearer presentation.

Click on graph for larger image.
It separates out one important component in employment from the others. This shows how many people are working, and in a way that lets you compare it with other recessions.

There's no exciting story here.  It shows that this is a really severe recession, much worse than anything since World War Two.  It also shows that all the fuss and excitement over this plan or that change has made no difference.  You don't see changes due to elections either.  The one and only government driven change is the employment bubble from the 2010 census.

You also see an interesting evolution in the nature of recessions.  The last three have been very smooth and without the sudden jumps of previous ones.  They are also lasting much longer.

There are probably some very important lessons to be learned from this that would help in making decisions.  But there is no story.  There is no cause for sudden joy or sorrow.  There is no reason for panic and fear.  It's a long slow process that needs understanding.

As a result, it does not make the general news.  They need big excitement like "Unemployment reaches X".  A difficult to explain slowly changing increase in the number of actual jobs is not "news".

Graph from Calculated Risk.

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