(Roughly) Daily

With last Friday’s announcement that nonfarm payrolls in February fell by 92,000 (compared with the earlier estimate of 50,000– the third time in five months that the economy lost jobs), unemployment is back in the news. But, as the redoubtable Nathan Yau illustrates in one of his typically-elegant interactive infographics (drawing on data from the January 2026 Current Population Survey via IPUMS), “unemployment” can have a variety of causes…

About eight million Americans reported being unemployed, based on the Current Population Survey from January 2026. Why they were unemployed varies across groups…

… For those in their younger years, it’s a lot more common to be entering the workforce as a new entrant or coming off a break after working previously as a re-entrant. Once people are in the middle of their work career, getting laid off is the most common reason for unemployment.

I expected that people who quit a previous job would be a more common reason, but the rate never goes over 20%. Maybe this rate is partially dampened by those who have a new job lined up and then quit, so they are never unemployed.

Education, which correlates with age, shows similar rates as you go up in levels. Although the rates for being laid off an a re-entrant are flipped between those with a Master’s degree and those with a doctorate or professional degree. The high rate for laid off for Master’s level workers is interesting. I suspect this is related to the type of occupations for this group…

Explore unemployment in the U.S: “Unemployment reasons, by age and education,” from @flowingdata.com.

* Harry S. Truman

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As we rethink redundancy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Congress enacted the first piece of legislation in newly-installed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “100 Hundred Days” program. Following the crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, real GDP had fallen 29%, unemployment had risen to 25%, and 7,000 banks (nearly a third of the banking system) had failed. A few days earlier, FDR had decreed a “banking holiday” (closing all U.S. banks) and called a special session of Congress. The first piece of Roosevelt’s program, passed by Congress on this date 93 years ago, addressed that lattermost issue: the Emergency Banking Act (which stabililized the banking system). Over the next two-and-a-half months, they passed 14 other pieces of landmark legislation:

• Cullen–Harrison Act (enacting the end of Prohibition, March 16), modifying the Volstead Act
• Economy Act (reducing federal salaries and pensions in order to reduce the deficit, March 20)
• Civilian Conservation Corps (a work relief program, March 31)
• Federal Emergency Relief Act (a job creation program [that became the Works Progress Administration] May 12)
• Agricultural Adjustment Act (relief for farmers, May 12)
• Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (oversight of llending to farmers, May 12)
• Tennessee Valley Authority (rural electrification [and job creation], May 18)
• Securities Act (securities trading regulation to prevent the sorts of excesses [and malfeasance] that triggered the Crash of 1929, May 27)
• abrogation of gold clauses in public and private contracts (elimination of the right of creditors tp demand payment in gold or gold equivalent, June 5)
• Homeowners Refinancing Act (home mortgage assistance, June 13)
• Glass-Steagall Act (banking reforms and the establishment of the FDIC, June 15)
• Farm Credit Act (loans for farmers, June 15)
• Emergency Railroad Transportation Act (protecting interstate commerce, June 15)
• National Industrial Recovery Act (authorizing the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices to stimulate economic recovery, June 16)

And with these action, the tide began to turn. That said, here is no consensus among economists regarding the motive force for the U.S. economic recovery that continued through most of the Roosevelt years. The common view among most economists is that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies either caused or accelerated the recovery, although his policies were never aggressive enough to bring the economy completely out of recession. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes, while he approved of Roosevelt’s actions, didn’t think that the New Deal went far enough: “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case—except in war conditions.”