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Over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.
One of the Times journalists who has been covering the disastrous fallout of the crisis is the business reporter Ben Casselman. He regularly looks at the gross domestic product of the American economy and the monthly jobs report showing how many jobs have been created and lost across the country. He is now closely studying the weekly unemployment claims, released on Thursdays, which have become a newly important measure of the health of the economy.
In a recent interview, he described how his job has changed during the pandemic and how hard it has become to write authoritatively about the course of the economy. The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Can you explain how your job is changing as a result of the pandemic?
Ordinarily, the jobs report, which tells us how many jobs were created or lost, is probably the single biggest report that we look at every month.
The challenge that we’re dealing with right now is that things are changing week by week and day by day and, to some extent, hour by hour, which is just faster than most of our economic data is generated.
That has forced The Times’s economics reporters to pay attention to data that we often didn’t pay attention to. Most of us didn’t pay much attention to weekly data on how many people filed unemployment claims, but all of a sudden it’s become probably the single most important report on the U.S. economy, because it’s the most up-to-date.
What’s the difference between the jobs report and the unemployment claims data?
The monthly jobs report is collected by a survey. We can say, “Here’s how African-Americans are doing, and here’s how that differs from how non-Hispanic whites are doing.” You know how many jobs were created for men versus women.
Whereas, I can’t tell you at a national level what the gender breakdown of the recent unemployment claims is, because that data just isn’t produced. It’s basically just states giving us a number. It wasn’t originally designed to be an economic statistic.
What can you do to interpret that number?
One thing we’ve been trying to do is give historical context. I’m sure people can understand that six million layoffs in a week is bad, but how bad, I think, is tricky. So saying that’s 10 times as bad as the worst week we’ve ever seen before — that does start to convey it.
I’ve also talked to a lot of people in the course of this. Many of their stories have stuck with me.
I spoke to a woman named Liz who was offered what seemed like a really good opportunity working for the MGM resort company in Las Vegas. In early March, she picked up her life and moved. By the time she was driving across the desert, we were already starting to see shutdowns. People were canceling conferences.
She spent only two days on the job before her whole team was furloughed. She was briefly both jobless and homeless.
What it illustrated is how quickly the world changed. We went from the lowest unemployment rate in half a century and one of the strongest economies in decades to the worst downturn potentially since the Great Depression — almost overnight.
How does this crisis compare to others you’ve reported on or studied?
There is no true historical parallel for this period. Economics reporters and economists and policymakers are all flying much more blindly right now than we have during past crises.
The Great Recession was, at its core, a financial crisis that turned into a recession in the real economy. The dot-com bust, the recessions of the 1980s and 1970s, and the Great Depression were likewise all fundamentally economic crises.
What we’re dealing with right now is a public health crisis first. We kind of can’t say anything with confidence about what will happen in the economy until we can answer the question of what will happen with public health.
What’s it like to cover something so dire and uncertain?
I’ve talked to people who lost everything after the Great Recession and were still rebuilding years and years later.
I think all of us who covered that had hoped that we would never have occasion to cover something as bad as that again. To be covering something that is not just as bad as that, but in a great many ways worse than that, is shocking.
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How Our Reporter Digs Into Data on Unemployment - The New York Times
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