Saturday, April 03, 2004

FromToday's Papers, by Michael Brus--on the increase in job growth this month:

The WP and LAT both note, far down, that the number of part-time workers increased from 4.4 million to 4.7 million. An economist quoted elsewhere in those articles, Sung Won Sohn of Wells Fargo, notices in his online report what none of the papers do: Those part-time gains account for most of the 308,000 jobs.

Gee, you'd think that would be important information to point out. The second sentence does seem obvious from the first sentence, but economic numbers are confusing enough to most people without opaque reporting.