In baseball it’s called a hitting streak. In basketball it’s a scoring spree. In pool the expression is running the table.
More high performance in the job market
In the American economy it’s called the job market, which has outperformed expectations for job creation once again – 38th straight month, in fact. But not only did the job market grow again, it did it – as has become usual – in grand style: 275,000 jobs created, considerably dwarfing the 200,000 consensus projections by economists far and wide.
It has become a monthly ritual: the Bureau of Labor Statistics releasing an eye-opening jobs report followed by widespread reactions of surprise, astonishment, and awe.
Then there are those of us who are not surprised, me included, as you know if you’ve been reading my posts over the last three years plus.
Here we go again. Again.
There can be only one reason that the multitudes of pundits and prognosticators continue to project low while the job market performs high. They apparently are not seeing the big picture, the fact that this is more than just a lot of trees but is actually a forest.
Then there are those – I get their emails every month – who are looking for signs of weakness so they can pounce, usually in support of their agenda of some sort. This month it was about the unemployment rate jumping from 3.7% to 3.9%, the highest it’s been since January 2022 (4.0%).
Yup, I saw that, too, but harping on it is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. An unemployment rate under 4.0% is historically so low that it’s considered full employment. Of course, that’s no consolation to those who are unemployed, but unemployment, too, is a dynamic thing; the real nature of unemployment is the length of it, and while long-term unemployment (27 weeks or more) is up from a year ago, it dropped by 6% last month. The typical worker experiences involuntary unemployment between four and six times during their prime working years. This is not yet anywhere near a problem, let alone a crisis, as one commenter put it.
All in all, February was another extremely strong month, perhaps not stellar like January, but one we would have given our eye teeth for back in 2020. This reminds me of an apt sports analogy.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
One of baseball’s most revered records, one that’s considered unapproachable given the way the game is now played, is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. While he went 91 for 223 during that stretch – an almost incomprehensible .408 average – he got only one hit in 39 of those games. Nothing spectacular, if you look at each game’s box score, but he just kept on hitting. And that’s what we remember.
On July 16, Joltin’ Joe collected three hits in a double header, but little did anyone know that would end his magnificent streak. The next game was an oh-fer and the streak was over. So what did DiMaggio do? He simply went on a new 17-game streak, making it 73 out of 74 games in which he got at least one hit. ‘That year, hard to believe, Joe was outhit by 50 points by Ted Williams’ .406 average – not over 56 games, but the entire year, the last time any player hit over .400.
Who won the MVP that year? Not Williams, although Boston fans still fume over that one, but none other than Joe DiMaggio.
Dig hard enough and look for something small, and you can find something to criticize in the Jobs Report. Bu