The statisticians who occasionally cough up data on employment posted two new sets of numbers today. The first was the traditional monthly report from the BLS called “The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary”.  Job openings at the end of January in the public and private sector rose by 173,000 to a seasonally adjusted 2.7 million the highest the figure ,has been in 11 months.  Nearly 14.8 million people are unemployed in America according to the report, but the chances that people can find work improved. The single most important figure about the labor situation—the ratio of jobless people to job openings—was 5.45 jobless people to each open job. That number was 6.03 in December and a record 6.25 in November. The figure is the only government statistic that measures the real opportunity that people without work have to find it.

It was a coincidence, but The Spectrum Group issued its annual figures on the number of millionaires in the US. People in households with a net worth of over $1 million, excluding the value of their primary residences, rose 16% to 7.8 million. That seems like an impressive number at first pass; until Spectrum points out that the number of millionaires decreased by 27% in 2008. The new 7.8 million millionaires number is barely better than it was in 2004, and it is only moderately better than the 7.1 millionaires that the country had in 1999.

The BLS and Spectrum data have something in common. The numbers look good in a vacuum, but when compared to historical data, both reports are depressing. The fact that there are five unemployed people competing for each job in the US presents a nearly perfect sense of these desperate economic times. There is no reason to think that it will not be years until there is a reasonable balance between jobs and those looking for work. The numbers may seem to get better over the next several months, but that could be due to people dropping out of the labor force completely although they are capable of working. Too many people have just given up hope.

It is crass to compare the out of work to the population of millionaires, but when the two sets of numbers are placed side by side it does show how little progress even the wealthy have made since the beginning of the recession. The United States lost 2.5 millionaires in 2008. The number of households with a net worth of $500,000 or more fell by 4.4 million during the same period.

Joblessness in America is still nearly as bad a problem as it was at its depth last year. Affluence, once a goal for so many people in the US, is not only harder to attain, but harder to keep.

The sense of malaise among the employed and unemployed is barely better than it was a year ago, which is considered to have been the nadir of the recession by most economists. The US was still losing over a half a million jobs a month then. Monthly job loss is closer to zero now, but there does not seem to be any additional optimism in the market, and, in fact, people may be more hopeless because so many have been out of work for a year or more. So many have been out of work so long that their benefits are gone and they must hope that Congress will extend them now and perhaps extend them again.

Someone once observed that being a millionaire is overrated. A million dollars is not enough for most middle class people to retire on. Most millionaires are not corporate executives. They are gas station owners and proprietors of other small businesses. They are the people who used to have a few employees, and now have a few less. Their own net worth has plummeted, but the people who were their workers have no net worth at all.

The recession was bad for the rich and poor alike. But, at least there are still 7.8 million millionaires who can probably send their children to college and retire before they are 75. Tens of millions of other people cannot say the same.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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