• +223,000 jobs added
• U3 unemployment rate fell -0.1% from 3.9% to 3.8%
• U6 underemployment rate fell -0.2% from 7.8% to 7.6%

Here are the headlines on wages and the braoder measures of underemployment:

Wages and participation rates

• Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  up 68,000 from 5.115 million to 5.183 million
• Part time for economic reasons: down -37,000 from 4.985 million to 4.948 million
• Employment/population ratio ages 25-54:  unchanged at 79.2%
• Average Weekly Earnings for Production and Nonsupervisory Personnel: rose $.07 from  $22.52 to $22.59, up +2.8% YoY. This is the highest nominal YoY gain for the entire expansion.  (Note: you may be reading different information about wages elsewhere. They are citing average wages for all private workers. I use wages for nonsupervisory personnel, to come closer to the situation for ordinary workers.)

• the average manufacturing workweek declined -0.2 hours from 41.0 hours to 40.8 hours.  This is one of the 10 components of the LEI.
• construction jobs increased by 25,000. YoY construction jobs are up 286,000.

• temporary jobs decreased by -7800.
• the number of people unemployed for 5 weeks or less decreased by -81,000 from 2,115,000 to 2,034,000.  This is a new post-recession low.

On May 15 I posted here on “Overhyping the Happiness Curve,” a critique of the recent book by Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. After it was linked to on Marginal Revolution, author Jonathan Rauch wrote a Response to my post on May 25, which was also linked to on MR. I did not immediately reply as I was in Santa Cruz and did not have my copy of the book. I shall now comment on his reply.  He makes three main points.

The first is that he says I made a false dichotomy between unadjusted and adjusted studies of the age-happiness relation, and that I failed to recognize his discussion on pp. 69-75 of how factors besides age affect happiness.  Certainly he recognizes that other factors impact happiness, even as his focus is on the particular effect of age, which requires focusing on adjusted relations taking account of the impact of those other factors. He cites Blanchflower and Oswald (the apparent originators of the U-curve idea and among its strongest advocates) to the effect that going from age 20 to 45 reduces happiness by as much as a third of what becoming unemployed does, which is a lot.  Some other studies along such lines are cited.  Then a formulation from psychology is brought in that says that happiness is a function of one’s “set range” (basically one’s general happiness propensity), of circumstances not under one’s control, and of things under one’s control.  While he cites Martin Seligman, this argument has been widespread in psychology, with a common finding being that 50% is the set range, 10% is circumstances, and 40% is under one’s control, although Rauch does not mention this finding.  As it is, he proposes time as a separate variable, although offhand it would seem to fit in the category of those things we cannot control, “circumstances.”  (I have some serious questions about what is under our control and what is not, but let us leave that aside.)

This is all well and good, more or less, but it does not deal with the point I made that a quite a few of these other things that can impact happiness tend to be pushing one towards being happier in middle age than not, which can easily lead to a finding that age makes one unhappy in middle age when one pulls out the estimated effects of these other variables.  Again, we are talking about employment, income, marital status, health, and broader social relations, among others.  Rauch simply never notes this, although it is implicit in his contrasting a global finding that shows unadjusted happiness tending to gradually rise from 20 to 64 with a global finding adjusting for non-age factors that shows the U-curve bottoming at 50.  So, yes, he talks about how other factors are important, but he never addresses their own relationship with age, which is what makes this so difficult to parse out.