Get a job

I am not an economist. I think that much has been made clear by my blinkered bafflement with even the most basic of numbers. It's even in my official title: Brutal Overlord of the Northern Hemisphere, Direct Conduit to God, Party Chip and Dip Specialist, and Chief Non-Economist of These Bastards. But even I had to notice something bizarre with the jobs numbers. More people lost their jobs... but the unemployment and underemployment numbers went down. Guh?

The United States economy shed 20,000 jobs in January, the government said Friday, deepening concern that relief from the deepest economic downturn in a generation would be slow to come. But even as the economy struggled to start creating jobs again, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent in December.

As the broader economy gains steam and crucial sectors like manufacturing spring back to life, analysts say the recovery appears to be intact. But the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate remains a persistent thorn in the side of optimists, and economists expect the situation to worsen before it gets better.
...
Many more Americans, even those with jobs, are feeling the pinch. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and those who are working part-time because of a lack of full-time positions, rose for much of last year. In January, it touched 16.5 percent, down from 17.3 percent in December.

It think I have it figured out: it has to do with alternate timelines, a seemingly evil timeless being made of smoke impersonating another man, a secret island existing outside of time and space, and wizards. Don't forget about the wizards.

Lesser wizard Paul Krugman explains that economics in general and the jobs numbers especially are all just a meaningless, confusing crapshoot and that nothing concrete can ever be drawn for the pointless void of numbers and math with which he has devoted his life to. OK, maybe he didn't say that, but he did say that these numbers were derived from multiple surveys and only rough indicators of economic strength. Yes yes, an endless nothing, existence is meaningless... we get it, Paul.

So what next? Will we shed more jobs while unemployment still falls? Will a discernible human ever get a new job in this country? Will these numbers spur or slow our elected betters in the Senate to actually start up on that jobs bill thing that they just had to kill health care reform in order to get to? Or are we all just going to continue to slog through a middling economy with 10% employment as nothing is done to improve the situation of actual Americans and we permanently teeter on the brink of total collapse? According to most economists, it's that last one. Oh well, good luck finding a job! It theoretically got easier, supposedly.