David Brooks and the media are wrong about the "structural changes" in the economy (updated)

David Brooks on PBS' News Hour, gave viewers the incorrect picture of what's going on, and Ruth Marcus wasn't helpful either.  Marcus said that the U6 alternative measure of labor under-utilization was at 14%, but she failed to explain the context of that number to the height of the recession and the U6 in relationship to Bush's presidency.

The context of U6
This really is all about policy.  I love using the Bush and Obama presidencies in comparison to each other, for the simple reason because Obama inherited the deepest recession since The Great Depression and Bush inherited a slowing economy from a dot-com bubble bursting right as he took the reins of the office.

So what we see here, is that in both cases -- Bush and Obama -- they saw the U6 rate increase.  However you can clearly see that under the stimulus, the U6 started to drop much sooner than under Bush.  In fact, Bush's economy never brought down the U6 below that which he inherited, meanwhile Obama has brought the U6 down to below that from when he first took office.

If Marcus doesn't explain the context of the data she presents, she's allowing viewers to assume false equivalence between Bush and Obama, Republican and Democratic economic policies.  Furthermore, if there was structural employment issues, why is the U6 number going down as fast (if not faster) as during the Bush years?  I can understand conservatives trying to deflect blame of their own economic policies, but why is Marcus failing to challenge the false narrative?

Structural employment issues
And then Brooks conflated structural job issues with government structure (taxes, rules, etc) issues.  He sought to address structural employment issues by talking about the need to fix government structure.  That alone is sad, but instead, let's just focus on structural employment.

It is often written and talked about, that lower-wage retail jobs are at the core of a false recovery; that good-paying jobs have been permanently (structurally) affected.  So, if this were true we should be able to see it in the data.  Yet that's not what we see, exactly.

If you look closely, Retail has barely edged upward, relative to the start of Obama's presidency.  Now clearly, IT has suffered some sort of structural employment shift.  Educational / Health jobs was exactly the opposite: these jobs are booming -- no structural problems there! And if you look at both Professional and Educational / Health areas, they are outperforming Retail job growth by a significant rate.

Now, as I showed in my previous post, in fact Obama's presidency has shown faster, sooner total job growth than under Bush.  So, while there are some structural issues -- IT jobs -- we're most certainly not seeing a flight to retail jobs, nor are we seeing a sluggish recovery.  The reason why the recovery feels sluggish, is because so many people lots their jobs, not because hiring is slower than it was under Bush or other presidents.

So, while David Brooks keeps pushing the false narrative of growth of low-paying retail jobs as the core of the Obama recovery, the facts speak otherwise.  Even the local TV newscasters have been using this false narrative to color the recovery as weak.  It's just embarrassing that so few people in journalism do their homework anymore.

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Update: Krugman and Baker got on the case of Brooks and Marcus and PBS News Hour this weekend.