Absolutely.  The 1983 recovery was quite a bit stronger than what we have seen so far.  We had six or so quarters of strong GDP growth and the jobs growth was a bit quicker than it is now.

The other thing to remember when we are talking about recovery – what does it mean and what does it feel like – is that having a recession end and a recovery begin certainly does not mean that we are recovered.  It is very plain that we have lost seven million jobs, and if we add 100,000 or 200,000 jobs a month it will take a long time – years – to gain those jobs back

We have leading indicators that look at overall levels of employment.  Looking out a couple of quarters, we will have jobs growth.  It may be a little stronger than expected.  It may be somewhat surprising on that count. 

There are some drags that are fundamental to the current job market.  One is that it is very difficult to get strong growth in manufacturing employment because of a structural shift that has been eroding those jobs permanently.  Some go overseas and some are lost to productivity increases.  So much so that, ten years ago, we had 18 million people in manufacturing and today we have just under 12 million people.  Those jobs are never coming back. That trend of a decrease in manufacturing employment isn’t cured by the recession ending.  We might get a little bounce here and there, but it’s not something we can build on.  Even though the jobs market is going to improve overall, it has to come from outside of the manufacturing sector – from non-manufacturing employment.

There are two places within non-manufacturing employment that, after a bounce, will remain weak. They are related to the bubbles that burst.  One is in construction – where it is hard for me to imagine a new bubble forming right away.  Therefore, construction employment, which is a relatively small part of overall employment, won’t be the engine behind jobs growth.  The other is in finance, where you might get a bounce-back from the job cuts, but it won’t be a job engine because of all the issues associated with the credit bubble.  The jobs growth will come in the areas that are non-manufacturing and not construction or finance.

The non-cyclical areas like healthcare, defense and education are not terribly discretionary, so they will continue to grow.  The less discretionary you are, the less susceptible you are to the business cycle.  Business services, consulting, retail and some consumer-related jobs will come back.  We’ve seen already in the November numbers that the non-manufacturing sector added some 30,000 jobs, and 91% of us work in that sector.  A decent chunk of those additions were in business and temporary services.  That is where we are looking to get some jobs growth back, because employers in the non-manufacturing sectors, reacting to the severity of this Great Recession, probably overdid it a little bit in terms of their firings, and now they’re trying to adjust.

We saw the work week come off some record low readings.  In the last report it moved 2/10 of an hour.  That sounds like a little, but it is actually a pretty big move.  It seems to be normalizing, albeit at a low level.  We’ll have to see where it goes from here.  In a cyclical sense, in the next few quarters, the news may be better than expected. 

My concern on employment goes beyond that.  It’s the long term where you have quite bad news.  With unemployment at 10%, our economy, even when everything is going right, on average can reduce unemployment by about half a percentage point per year.  This is something that is true going back over many decades, not just recently.  If you do the math, and you want to get back to 5% to 7% unemployment – it was lower than that before this recession started – you would need roughly a 10-year expansion to get the unemployment rate down to what we desire it to be and to what it was just a couple of years ago.  That ten-year expansion is likely to be very elusive.  I don’t see that as being a high-probability event in the coming decade or so.  Rather, you will see more frequent recessions in the coming decade than in the last two or three.