Feelings, woe woe woe feelings....

Have you wondered why, if the economy was improving so much with all those brand new jobs, it feels no different on the street? That even though things might be looking up for the bosses, it doesn't seem to be any better for the rest of us? There may be a reason for that feeling beyond your own shameful lack of good old American forward-looking optimism.

Atrios tips us to this column by business writer John Crudele in the May 11 New York Post:

Don't get too excited about all those new jobs that were supposed to have been created in April.

I'm not going to waste a lot of my precious space on this, but the bottom line is that most of the 288,000 jobs that the Labor Department says were created last month may not really exist.

The problem, as Crudele explains, is that the government uses a standardized "birth/death model" that makes unverified (and unverifiable) assumptions about seasonal changes in employment through the creation of new businesses. For example,

in the March employment report, the government added 153,000 positions to its revised total of 337,000 new jobs because it thought (but couldn't prove) loads of new companies were being created in this economy.

Then for the April report, the Labor Department assumed an additional 117,000 such new jobs came into existence.

In other words, of the 625,000 jobs supposedly created in March and April, as many as 270,000 of them - 43% of the total - may not exist.

Back to the want ads.