Justin Fox, Columnist

The Jobs Statistics Trump Should Be Worried About

There is a "mess with jobs," but it's been decades in the making.

March 29, 2017 at 6:23 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

The pain is there if you look in the right place.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

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President Donald Trump says lots of nutty, made-up things that invariably generate lots of appalled reactions from the news media and the wonkocracy. His statements about the unemployment rate have generated lots of appalled reactions, too. But, as I've written before, they're not entirely nutty or made-up. In fact, they address -- albeit in exaggerated Trumpian fashion -- a real measurement problem.

Here, for example, is the president in his much-discussed (and yes, in parts quite nutty) interview last week with Time's Michael Scherer: