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I just saw on President Biden's Facebook page that he's averaged roughly 550,000 new jobs per month, more than double than the next highest, Bill Clinton. A lot of the people in the comments are saying that these are just people returning to work after losing their job during the pandemic. Others are saying these figures take COVID-19 into consideration and that they're new jobs that didn't exist before.

Here's the chart in question:

Jobs created by president, average per month

Searching online, I can't find proof that the jobs are just people returning to work after COVID-19, but at the same time, I can't find proof that the jobs are new jobs.

So has Biden created ~550,000 new jobs per month as his chart shows, or have ~550,000 people a month been finding employment after losing theirs due to COVID-19?

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    This doesn't seem like a good Q for Skeptics. We can find the chart showing the #'s (says it's roughly correct -- total employment went up by ~7 million). But accounting for anything else is a matter of opinion, economics, politics, etc... . I think your real Q is something like "Given the end of COVID, what would be a baseline jobs recovery?" in Politics or elsewhere.
    – Owen Reynolds
    May 7, 2022 at 4:27
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    I hate the premise - it is a loaded question. It assumes that job figures are entirely attributable to the President.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    May 9, 2022 at 5:04
  • Presidents are often blamed for bad circumstances that happened to have occurred during their time in office but were completely out of their control. It should not be surprising that Presidents take credit for good things that happened to have occurred during their time in office but were in fact also completely out of their control.
    – David Hammen
    May 9, 2022 at 9:52
  • @DavidHammen: But the frame challenge -- it's not the President "averaging X jobs per month" -- needs to be part of a good answer.
    – DevSolar
    May 9, 2022 at 10:05
  • @DevSolar Per thelawnet's answer, employment currently is up by over 12 million since 2020. Divide by 16, roughly the number of months Biden has been in office, and you get 750 thousand. The 550 thousand figure is consistent with the fact that some of that employment recovery occurred while Trump was still President. The answer to the question "So has Biden created ~550,000 new jobs per month as his chart shows, or have ~550,000 people a month been finding employment after losing theirs due to COVID-19?" is yes. It's a loaded question.
    – David Hammen
    May 9, 2022 at 10:28

1 Answer 1

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Biden became President in January 2021.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

The unemployment rate remained at 3.6 percent in April, and the number of unemployed persons was essentially unchanged at 5.9 million. These measures are little different from their values in February 2020 (3.5 percent and 5.7 million, respectively), prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. (See table A-1.)

The charts show a huge fall in employment in April 2020

enter image description here

and steady recovery since then.

In terms of the claim 'jobs created', this is not a very meaningful metric to start with, because if there is high birth rate (in the middle past) or immigration then you can have many more jobs, but worsening job market.

Unemployment is largely cyclical, and since WW2 has never gone below 2%, whereas the unemployment rate seen at April 2020, was the highest since WW2 (unemployment was even higher in the 1930s).

enter image description here

Under Trump total employment was rising until covid-19

enter image description here

so the initial bar chart for Trump actually represents 'steady growth in jobs', followed by 'a huge drop caused by covid'.

In terms of 'what are these jobs', functionally we can see that the labor market has essentially recovered, in terms of unemployment rates, to the pre-covid position. So we could say 'these are new jobs', in that some businesses went bust, and new businesses are created, we could look at other countries' employment rates before/after covid, etc. e.g., 'have other economies suffered a permanent reduction in jobs?' in order to assess whether this performance is good or merely average, but fundamentally the job market 'has returned to its pre-covid state', and graphs about 'new jobs' probably aren't as useful as 'unemployment rates', in any case, because you can still have 'more jobs' and 'rising unemployment'

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    "middle past"? What does that mean?
    – Laurel
    May 8, 2022 at 14:49
  • it means e.g., if you had a baby boom 20 years ago, then you would have lots of people entering the workforce today, whereas a baby boom 5 years ago would not cause that effect
    – thelawnet
    May 8, 2022 at 14:50
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    It sounds unnatural to me and I thought it was a typo. I would use "recent past" instead (or rephrase entirely).
    – Laurel
    May 8, 2022 at 14:53

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