Now that December numbers (released by DWD today) destroy the thesis that half of year-to-date cumulative employment is accounted for by government jobs? Here’s Michael Lucas’ graph running up through November, from this article:
Source: Lucas (2024).
Here is my cumulative growth graph, decomposed into private and government components, for revised data running up through December.
Figure 1: Cumulative change in total nonfarm payroll employment (black line), private nonfarm payroll employment (green bar), in government employment (orange bar), since 2024M01, in 000’s, s.a. Source: BLS, DWD, and author’s calculations.
By my counting, by December 79% of employment growth since 2021M01 is accounted by private jobs.
Lessons: (1) Don’t impute too much to a single observation (2) beware of data revisions. I’m just thankful this time around Mr. Lucas realized that it’s hazardous to look at first differences in seasonally unadjusted numbers (compared to this post).