Why do they let Cokie Roberts get on NPR and say such things? (Sorry, it's not posted yet.) Yes, the numbers may have been worse than what the experts whom NPR relies upon expected, but it was not a big surprise to people who follow the economy closely. (My forecast was 150k. The March jobs number, plus upward revisions for the 2 prior months, was 149k.) 

Roberts also claimed that President Obama's budget proposal, with its big cut to Social Security, is an effort to appeal to centrist voters. There is no polling data that show cuts to Social Security are popular among centrist voters. In fact, polls have consistently shown that cuts to Social Security are hugely unpopular across the political spectrum.

The Washington Post seems to have a quota for pieces that spread misinformation on manufacturing. Today's piece by Robert Samuelson fills the quota for the day.

The gist of the piece is that manufacturing employment has been declining in importance in the U.S. for decades and also everywhere else around the world. Therefore we should not expect any substantial boost to manufacturing employment.

This is the sort of three-card Monte story that people expect from the Post when discussing economic issues that are relevant to working people. Yes, manufacturing has declined in importance everywhere and yes, it has long been declining in the United States. However the issue is the rate of decline.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 1973 to 1989 manufacturing employment declined at an annual rate of 0.3 percent. By contrast, it declined at a rate of 1.7 percent annually between the years of 1989 to 2012. If we had simply maintained the earlier rate of decline we would have another 4.7 million manufacturing jobs. 

These years are business cycle peaks, however we get an ever sharper picture if we put the break in 1997 when Robert Rubin was able to put muscle behind his high dollar policy through his control of the IMF's bailout of the East Asian countries from their financial crisis. The annual rate of decline from 1973 remains the same at 0.3 percent, however the decline since 1997 has been 2.5 percent. If we had maintained the 1973 to 1997 rate of decline through 2012 we would have 4.9 million more manufacturing jobs today. That would be more than a 40 percent increase in manufacturing employment.

In the same vein, we have the comparison with other countries. As Samuelson's colleague Dylan Matthews showed us last month, the manufacturing share of employment in Germany fell by roughly a third between 1973 and 2010. By contrast, it fell by 60 percent in the United States. If the U.S. had seen the same pace of decline as Germany we would have another 8 million manufacturing jobs.

Gretchen Morgenson reports on limited progress in reining in excessive CEO pay. Here's the promotion for Director Watch, CEPR's entry in the area.

This simple point is shown nicely in a graph in Catherine Rampell's Economix blogpost. The point is simple. Restaurants always want to hire people at low pay and with few benefits. In a weak labor market they can. When we have periods of low unemployment, like the late 1990s and 2005-2007, workers have better options.

The Post had a good piece noting the large number of people dropping out of the workforce, presumably because they can't find jobs in the weak economy. However the problem is likely worse than the piece indicates.

There are a large number of people who do not respond to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey (CPS), the standard survey used to measure labor force participation. In recent years the non-response rate overall has been close to 12 percent, as opposed to just 5 percent three decades ago. The non-response rate varies hugely by demographic group. For older white men and women it is 1-2 percent. By contrast, for young African American men it is close to one-third.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics effectively assumes that the people who don't get picked up in the CPS are just like the people who do. This assumption may not be plausible. The people who don't respond may be more transient or may have legal issues that make them less willing to speak to a government survey taker. For these reasons they may be less likely to be employed than the people who do respond to the survey.

My colleague, John Schmitt, examined this issue by looking at the 2000 Census (which has a 99 percent response rate) and comparing the employment rates overall and for different demographic groups in the CPS and the Census for the months when the Census was conducted. He found that the overall employment rate was 1.0 percentage point higher in the CPS. For groups with high non-response rates the gap was larger, with a gap of 8 percentage points for young African American men.

It was easy to see that the economy was not growing rapidly long before Friday's jobs reports. The economy grew at just a 0.4 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. While this weakness was largely attributable to unusual factors, even averaging in the prior quarter the economy only grew at a 1.7 percent rate in the second half of 2012.

It's not clear what someone would have had to have been smoking to expect a marked upturn from this pace. Did they think the ending of the payroll tax cut would spur growth? Did the fact that new orders for capital goods (excluding aircraft) in February of 2013 were virtually unchanged from February of 2012 lead them to expect an investment boom? Perhaps the fact that job growth over the  5 months from October to February averaged just 40,000 less than in the same months a year ago was the basis for predictions of acceleration?

Yes, housing construction is up. That's good news. Residential construction is 2 percent of GDP. Get out your calculator and figure out how much impact this has.

In short, any serious look at the data would have told people that the economy was weak before the March numbers were released yesterday, nonetheless the Post tells us:

"The economy added a paltry 88,000 jobs last month, less than half the number expected. The healing housing market, resilient consumers and record highs on Wall Street had fueled hope that the recovery was finally taking off. That momentum was seen as essential to helping the economy overcome the drag of automatic government spending cuts known as the sequester over the next few months."

The Washington Post has a lengthy piece discussing the new Office of Financial Research that was set up as part of Dodd-Frank. The purpose of the office is ostensibly to prevent another financial crisis. The article focuses on the supposedly brilliant people who are staffing or advising the office and sophisticated tools that they intend to use on their job.

In fact, it was only necessary to have someone familiar with basic arithmetic and economics to prevent this crisis. It was easy to see that house prices had become grossly out of line with economic fundamentals during the bubble years. It was also easy to see that this bubble was driving the economy as residential construction rose to record shares of GDP and the wealth from bubble generated housing equity pushed consumption to record shares of disposable income.

The collapse of this bubble was the basis for the crisis. If we had seen all the same crazy financial schemes without the bubble, the consequences of their implosion for the economy would have been minimal. By contrast, if the bubble had grown to the same level without crazy financing, its collapse would have still led to a severe recession.

There are many people in positions of power and authority who like to focus on the financial aspects of the crisis because it makes it appear complicated and gives them an excuse for having failed to recognize it in advance and taking steps to stop it. The reality is that it was all very simple and the people in positions of responsibility were simply too incompetent and/or corrupt to do anything to prevent this disaster. 

Can it be a requirement that major budget pieces include at least two sentences on the budget's impact on growth and jobs. This may not be important to balance budget worshippers, but this does matter to the people who have to work for a living.

I hate to be partisan here (seriously -- I criticize the Obama administration all the time), but this map showing declines (blue) in mortality rates for women and increases (red) looks a lot like voting patterns. There is a lot of red across the south and Republican Midwest. The blue tends to show up in Democratically dominated states like California and New York and to be most highly concentrated in the Democratic parts of Democratic or mixed states, such as the Chicago metro area in Illinois or the Detroit metro area in Michigan.

Of course there are many factors that determine life expectancy and some of them will not be easily affected by state policies, especially in the short-term. But the relationship shown in the map is striking. Needless to say, if the color pattern were reversed we would be hearing this as the lead news story for the next century.

In a piece on the new initiative by Japan's central bank to raise its inflation rate to 2.0 percent, the Washington Post told readers:

"The risks are known but impossible to quantify: of inflation remaining tame until it roars out of control, or of asset bubbles creeping into unexpected parts of the economy as investors take advantage of cheap money worldwide to make ever-riskier bets."

While central banks, like the bank of Japan and the Fed, have displayed an enormous lack of competence in recognizing and countering asset bubbles, there are no known instances of inflation remaining tame until it "roars out control," apart from countries victimized by war or natural disaster. This horror story seems to be entirely an invention of the Post (or its unnamed sources).

In all the standard models inflation is a process that builds up gradually over time once an economy is hitting capacity constraints. Economies do not just jump from being severely depressed to having soaring inflation. For this reason, serious people would view this prospect with roughly the same concern as an attack from outer space.

It is also worth noting that this piece places an excessive emphasis on deflation. Japan has occasionally seen modest deflation (a drop in annual prices of less than 1.0 percent annually) over the last two decades. There is no particular importance to having deflation as compared to an inflation rate that is too low.

The issue here is that it would be desirable to have a lower real interest rate given the weakness of Japan's economy. (The real interest rate is the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate.) Since the nominal interest rate can never go below zero, the only way to lower the real interest rate is to push inflation higher.

For this reason, deflation is harmful, but only in the same sense that a lower inflation rate is harmful. A decline in the rate of inflation from 0.5 percent to -0.5 percent is no worse than a drop in the inflation rate from 1.5 percent to 0.5 percent. There is no magic about crossing the zero line. It is unfortunate that the Post and other news outlets have fostered so much confusion on this issue.