Do you want to be able to talk knowledgeably at fancy dinner parties with the ruling class about employment in America? Sure you do! So here are just a few simple graphs from our pals at the St. Louis Fed with a longer view—going back to either 2000 or to the early 90s, depending on data available—that explaining the trending in employment, hiring, unemployment and workforce participation in America. Above: what they call the "U6" number. That's the combined percentage of unemployed and underemployed, essentially. READ MORE

The comments on this Dealbook piece about how Wall Street has reconstituted the notion of employment as bottom-line cyclical churn are 100% mean, as you'd expect. ("I can't help but wonder if any of these laid-off wunderkinds ever ask themselves whether they contributed to the current economic situation," for example. And: "My God these people are pathetic. Even when they're laid off and collecting unemployment, they still sound like insufferable snobs.") But the sheer numbers involved in the way financial firms chew up and spit out young people are pretty bad. These are the very kids who were the children of the subjects of New York magazine parenting articles: we cared about them when we worried they were probably autistic, and then when their young parents were striving to get them into the best preschools, and then again when the kids spent the next sixteen years trying to beat each other on the SATs and the GPAs and the extracurriculars, so why shouldn't we care about them now that they've entered a workforce where they regularly get kicked to the curb because some dickface in management has to sack a quota of analysts to make his now-regular layoff goal? When you're laid off twice by 28, that's rough! And that's tens and tens of thousands of young people who were sold a dream and an expectation about merit, performance and success, and now they're figuring out one by one that it was literally all a lie. Probably half these kids will turn out bitter and evil and scheming, but, if we're lucky, half the kids will figure out that the prevailing corporate system of doing business is utterly screwed. Maybe a few will even do something about it.

This morning's new job numbers: what do they mean? READ MORE

I totally missed this bit of thinking from the other day by open source enthusiast Douglas Rushkoff. He's living in the Singularity already, so he can say that "on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need"—and we're just distributing it wrong, and "we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff." So why do we all want jobs, he wants to know! Why are we all yapping about unemployment? On... a certain level, this is technically true! Even as a world-wide community, we probably have enough "things" (rice, couches, water, fabric) for everyone. Rushkoff seems a little baffled that we're just not earning/sharing correctly. Because maybe he has never met people. READ MORE

The IRS did an analysis of the 2009 tax year, and some interesting and not surprising things happened! READ MORE

What are we to do about the disgusting plan to keep America's unemployment high? Since we're not marching on Washington, the right and the left aren't unifying on this issue on which we both agree and basically no one in the business world cares in the slightest, all we can do is create a few jobs ourselves and also keep putting out there what's really happening, which Yahoo!'s The Lookout is doing admirably. They've created a Tumblr where people tell their stories—lots of people. They got thousands of letters when they asked people to tell them what's really going on. You could just start here at the imposing wall of stories, or maybe you'd like to start with this one and page back.

The June unemployment numbers came out this morning and everyone is like, woof, this is horrible. The Department of Labor can't even make it look all that good in the press release: "The number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks increased by 412,000 in June. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was essentially unchanged over the month, at 6.3 million, and accounted for 44.4 percent of the unemployed." Right. The "underemployment" rate is now 16.2 percent, essentially as high as it was a year ago. 14.1 million are officially unemployed, a rate of 9.2%. And the average unemployment period is basically 40 weeks. READ MORE

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Hey, remember the recovery from the recession? When businesses were going to make money and then the jobs would come back? Paul Krugman looks at the non-recovery of employment today. Above is the graph since 1948. There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.

Would you like to play get the economist? Reading Chicago economics prof Casey Mulligan trying to make sense of job losses in the recession is fun for everyone. READ MORE