There is such a desire for good economic news that the press and others plant the good news at the top of the story and then hide the details in plain sight in paragraph 3, where they know no one will find it.

Friday's unemployment report did just that. So excited were the talking heads in their gasping for breath that unemployment was 9.4%, that they neglected to apply the principles of simple arithmetic. There were 422,000 people who left the workforce last month. Had they stayed, the unemployment rate would have been 9.6%. Those workers, now part of the discouraged who have stopped looking for work, kept the unemployed, discouraged, and underutilized rate at 16.8%, the same as last month. Since May, there are 529,000 fewer people working, and the number of people characterizing themselves as “not in the labor force” has swelled by 995,000. Last I heard, that was almost a million.

Those same talking heads were making a big deal about the fact that the average work week went from 33.0 hours in June to 33.1 in July. Yet in the first quarter, when GDP was still in steep decline, the workweek was 33.2 hours. I guess I have too long a memory to be a talking head. One must have a short attention span to get such a job, I suppose. Maybe I'll be reincarnated as a gnat or as a dog that chases each squirrel as it comes into view.