http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/27/economy-added-386000-more-jobs-last-year-than-we-thought/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

Source Data:

http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesprelbmk.htm

Once a year the BLS pours over tax records from businesses to see how many people were actually working over the course of the year. This takes quite some time to do (about 10 months) so it's only done once a year.

As the article points out, the month to month report is a smaller sample size of businesses than the tax records provide. But what I do find interesting is how much focus there was on the bad employment report from August.

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Terrible-August-Jobs-Report-Shows-the-Recovery-in-Tatters

There's a million articles like that.

But no fanfare for this.

Essentially, economy created more like 200k jobs on average in the last year. Bumping each month a little more than 30k each. And that is why unemployment primarily, has been coming down. Because if the economy is creating 2.4 million jobs a year, that is enough to bring unemployment down. Population growth is much slower, boomers are retiring at high rates, etc, etc. The economy demographically doesn't need to create as many jobs as in the past.

Based on calculations of population outside the labor force, and working age civlian population growth, and a 66% participation rate (which is 2 points higher than current) we should be creating around 110k-120k jobs a month to tread water. Obviously, creating almost twice as many on average as that is going to bring down unemployment. By about 0.7% per year.