Continuing Catherine Rampell's series charting the employment recession, here are some more graphs from a new paper by St. Louis Fed economists Kristie Engemann and Howard J. Wall. What's interesting about Engemann and Wall's approach is that besides just tallying job losses, they also try to take into account foregone jobs, or those job gains that would have occurred if there had been no recession:
Typically, the effects of a recession on employment are seen as simply the difference between the levels of employment at the start and end of a recessionary period...This assumes, though, that there would have been zero employment growth even if there had been no recession. However, the recession not only causes a drop in employment from the pre-recession level, it also prevents employment growth that would have occurred. This “foregone” employment is also an effect of the recession and needs to be accounted for in an analysis of the recession’s total effects on employment.
As it happens, the upshot of this approach is to make some of the themes of the current recession a little less newsworthy. For example, this chart shows that the much-discussed mancession is less extreme than the raw numbers suggest:
