Above is the rate at which the economy is adding jobs each month; in red is the revision from the initial data from previous months. It appears to be less variable, but not really show much improvement. A 12 month moving average shows the last 12 months to be the best since early 2012 (not shown, just trust me).
Below is the employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population over 16 that is employed:
It appears to show pretty slight improvement since the Great Recession bottomed out. However, due to an aging population, the ratio was bound to decrease over time as baby-boomers retire. Other indicators show a slightly better but still poor recovery. Below are indicators of long term unemployment.
Above is a graph of long term unemployment. As you can see the improvement has been small. Roughly speaking, the proportion of unemployed over 26 weeks needs to fall around 60%, or 25 percentage points, from its peak to have recovered its pre-recession level. It has fallen less than 20%1.
Additionally, here are the figures for mean and median weeks unemployed:
Both show, as does long term unemployment, that only a minority of the return to pre-recession levels has occurred. But nothing ever stands still in economics; there's no going back to where you were, just striving for the optimal situation in the future. Still, can anyone say "Great Stagnation"?
