Last Friday, the Department of Labor issued its monthly jobs report for October and reported that the U.S. economy lost another 190,000 jobs in October (a number that will certainly be revised up or down in future months). October’s losses represent the 22nd straight month of monthly job losses, and unemployment rose from 9.8% to 10.2%, the highest level since 1983. Accounting for people who have given up looking for work or who want full-time work but have settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is 17.5%. The total number of jobs lost since the Great Recession began in December of 2007 now totals 7.3 million.

There were, however, some mildly positive signs in October’s Department of Labor numbers. Hourly wages increased during the month, the number of hours worked in manufacturing rose, and temp/staffing hiring is rising. As well, the job losses in September and August were revised to show fewer job losses than initially reported. All of these statistics demonstrate that there are slight hints that the job market has bottomed out and that while recovery will likely remain anemic for months to come, we may have seen the worst. (Lest anyone get too excited, however, unemployment will likely rise for most of 2010 as monthly job losses will not only have to turn positive, they will have to turn positive to such a degree that monthly job gains actually outpace new entrants into the job market).

In any event, LinkUp’s October jobs report showed that the U.S. jobs market is improving ever so slightly. New job listings on LinkUp rose by 4% during the month and total job listings were flat from September. On a state by state basis, 33 of 50 states reported a decrease in new job listings (34 of 51 counting Washington, D.C.) and, on a slightly more positive note, 27 states showed a decrease in total job listings.

In terms of the best and worst performing states, Illinois, North Carolina, and Connecticut reported the largest increases in new and total jobs, while Massachusetts, Ohio, and West Virginia experienced the largest declines in the actual number of new and total job listings.

LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to recent ComScore data, only indexes job listings that are found on company websites. The October jobs report was based on a comparison between September and October job listings from 16,967 corporate websites around the U.S. As a result of this unique data source, LinkUp’s job listing data includes no duplicate job listings, no classifieds from recruiters or headhunters, and no phishing or scam ads. Even more importantly, the jobs data is based on actual job openings that companies list on their own company website rather than the openings that companies are advertising for on other job boards or in newspapers.

Go see No Impact Man.

In story after story about the current economic meltdown over the past 5 months (or 12 depending on your point of view), the media and the country as a whole are taking great solace in the belief that the current unemployment rate of 8.1% (as of the end of February) means we’re not even close to being in a depression. This delusional relief stems from comparing today’s unemployment rate to that during the 30’s which reached a peak of 25%. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate that everyone cites in every article I’ve seen, the primary figure released every month by the Department of Labor, grossly understates the real unemployment rate of the country. As was excellently detailed by Kevin Phillips in an article entitled ‘Numbers Racket’ in the May ‘08 issue of Harper’s (and summarized here), every administration since Kennedy’s has manipulated key formulas for calculating the economic health of the country to paint a more positive picture of our economy than was actually the case. I will quote Phillips again at length because his warning back in May of 2008 has proven to be extremely prescient:

Since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing the official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past 25 years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.

If all the manipulation of the unemployment rate is removed, by calculating the actual number of people that are seeking but not finding work, today’s unemployment rate would be far closer to 20%. There’s a great graphic of the manipulation and the true number in a blog post on Mint.com (which was written in January so the 17.5% cited there is even higher today). Even more alarming, as the blog post points out, is the fact that the peak unemployment rate of 25% during the Great Depression did not occur until 4 years after the market crashed. Just one year after the market crash of 1929, unemployment in the U.S. was only 8.9% or less than half of what our actual unemployment is today.

What sparked this post was an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday entitled ‘How A Modern Depression Might Look – If The U.S. Gets There.’ The article looks at GDP, inflation, and unemployment, the exact same three manipulated economic indicators detailed in Phillips’ article in Harpers. Purportedly a bastion of economic savviness, the WSJ article cites the grossly understated unemployment rate of 8.1% and makes no mention whatsoever of the real unemployment rate in the U.S. today. While there is no firm, widely agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a depression as opposed to a severe recession, the WSJ article states that many economists define a depression as an economy where unemployment has risen above 10% and stayed there for several years. Placing aside the fogginess surrounding the chronic discrepancies between the household survey and the employer survey in determining unemployment, not to mention whether or not that classic economist definition of a depression refers to the manipulated or real unemployment rate, the fact is that a real unemployment rate today of somewhere around 20% (not to mention applying similar treatment to GDP and inflation) puts us far closer to (or even in the midst of) a depression than anyone in the mainstream media is willing to admit. I’m certainly not an economist, and I have no better definition of what constitutes a depression than anyone else, but it’s disingenuous (and lazy) at best and egregious at worst to compare the current economic indicators to those of the Great Depression given the manipulation of those figures that has occurred over the past 40 years.

Coosje van Bruggen, the artist (or at least half of the collaborative team along with husband Claes Oldenburg) that created one of Minneapolis’ most identifiable landmarks, died yesterday. If Minneapolis is any indication, she had a significant impact on the civic aesthetic of many communities around the world.

In anticipation of the day that the Minneapolis Star Tribune stops publishing (which could happen any week now), I’ve decided to take steps to prepare for life without a local daily. I am also interested in determining how hard it would actually be to wean myself off of an increasingly irrational addiction to a local newspaper. It should prove to be an interesting exercise (most likely for no one but myself, I am fully aware).

I currently read 3 newspapers every morning (Strib, NYT, WSJ), and I am only contemplating the elimination of the Strib. As a result, my daily national and international news will continue to come from the New York Times and the Wall Steet Journal, supplemented by news from the Economist, Harpers, the New Yorker, and about a dozen other magazines. Despite that fact, I have subscribed to daily emails from the two leading national, online-only news sites – Slate.com and the Huffington Post. The daily emails from slate provide the lead stories from the NYT, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post, while The Huffington Post email provides the top stories and columns from that site. (Already, in just a day or so, I’ve read one of the more interesting columns on Caroline Kennedy in which Steve Clemons opines that she is not qualified to be Senator and that Obama should throw her a life raft in the form of the Ambassadorship to Great Britain. I also read last night a great column by David Sirota on how patently absurd Fox News has become with such nonsense declarations as ‘Historians pretty much agree that FDR prolonged the Great Depression).

On the more frivolous side of the content delivered by the local daily, it took virtually no effort to find ways to replace the only two comic strips I read – Dilbert and Doonesbury. I have added an RSS feed from Dilbert.com to my RSS reader to get the daily Dilbert cartoon, and I signed up for a free email on GoComics to get Doonesbury sent to me via email every day (the first comic is delivered for free and more than one comic can be sent by paying a fee). Interestingly enough, there was an article in Sunday’s New York Times about how cartoonists are adapting to (or perhaps thriving in) a new world in which distribution is no longer solely dependent on the newspaper.

For local news, columns, and political coverage, I have also subscribed to a daily email from MinnPost (whose coverage of all things local is far better than the Star Tribune’s anyway) and Politics in Minnesota. Between the two, I am more than able to stay current on what is happening in the Twin Cities. I will be searching over the next few weeks for additional local content that I expect will delivered by local blogs (including restaurant reviews, arts, culture, entertainment, and miscellaneous local stuff, etc.)

So far so good.

Even worse than expected, today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor was dismal, with the U.S. economy shedding 240,000 jobs in October. This was the 10th straight monthly decline, and the nation’s unemployment rate now stands at 6.5%, a 14 year high. So far this year, 1.2 million jobs have been lost, with more than half of those losses occuring in the past 3 months.

What I am having trouble reconciling, however, is the data from LinkUp.com which shows dramatic increases in the number of job openings from over 9,700 company web sites that post jobs. While certainly not representative of the entire U.S. economy, LinkUp aggregates job listings from enough companies around the country, large and small, to provide some indication of what is going on in the broader economy, and yet there is a complete disconnect. As I pointed out yesterday, the total number of jobs for the almost 10,000 employers rose from 1 million to 1.3 million in October, with gains in virtually every state. Just as surprising, the job openings by vertical showed gains in almost every industry except Banking & Financial, Real Estate, and Restaurant & Food Service.

Again, these are real jobs from companies that are posting job openings on their own corporate web site. They are current, available, and often unadvertised anywhere else in print or online. But they are job openings, while the jobs numbers are actual jobs lost. And perhaps that is what explains the apparent discrepancy. Thousands of companies are laying people off in areas where they need to cut back given the current business climate, while some portion of those same companies, and/or thousands of different companies, have job openings in other areas of their business or are trying to grow their businesses given their own particular circumstances. At a minimum, the 1.3 million job openings found on LinkUp.com in October might provide some glimmer of hope that the unemployment picture may not be as gloomy over the long-term as some economists are predicting. We’ll see.

I recently came across an amusing and quite insightful story in a book I’m reading at the moment. When B. Dalton was buying other booksellers around the country back in the 60’s and 70’s, a B. Dalton executive traveled to L.A. to talk with Louis Epstein, the founder of Pickwick Book Shops. Towards the end of the conversation, the B. Dalton executive asked Epstein what the secret was to his success in selling so many books. Epstein replied, “If you put a hell of a lot of books in front of a hell of a lot of people, you will to sell a hell of a lot of books.”

It constantly amuses me when I hear founders, entrepreneurs, and executives describe their business in a way that implies they possess some magical secret(s) or have mastered some phenomenal complexity. Even more pathetic are the business people who are in constant pursuit of this perpetually elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that will bring them instant fame, fortune, riches, and marketplace dominance.

While there certainly are a small percentage of businesses that depend heavily on real trade secrets, intellectual property, and/or incredible complexity, the vast majority of businesses do not. Typically, the factors or ingredients for business success are, or at least should be, really simple. Deliver a great product or service that meets a real need in the market. Hire smart people and let them do their job. Out-service the competition. Delight your customers, etc. And while the plethora of business adages might seem trivial, overly simplistic, and trite, they always have and always will remain true. The formula or strategy for business success is usually quite simple to understand. It’s the execution that creates so many challenges.

The icon to the left will appear on anyone’s iPhone homepage if they bookmark this blog through safari on the iPhone. (Pretty cool, huh?). I will send a Sweet Land DVD (phenomenal movie – see here and here) to anyone who emails me a picture of the Diggings icon on their iPhone.

It’s a shovel in the D, by the way. (Some people don’t see it right away).

Driving to lunch yesterday listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, I heard a great story from the author of a recently published biography on Franklin Roosevelt relating to the power of communicating effectively through mass media.

One week after being inaugurated in 1933, FDR spoke directly to the American people through the first of his now infamous his ‘Fireside Chat’ radio addresses. Most major metropolitan daily newspapers were severely hostile to FDR’s reformist agenda, and the President smartly decided that radio, a relatively new media channel at the time, was the most effective means by which he could communicate directly with the nation. FDR’s goal on the night of March 12th was to not only outline his policy agenda for the first 100 days of his administration, but more importantly to reassure the nation that the banks would be open the following day, as scheduled, following a ‘bank holiday’ that had been declared to stem the wave of bank runs that had swept the country.

The somewhat risky strategy of leveraging this new form of mass communication was enormously successful. During the next week, the White House received 450,000 letters from citizens who had heard the President’s radio address and felt compelled to write him to express support, provide ideas, offer encouragement, and relate their personal stories. Under Hoover, the White House had employed a single person to handle the mail coming into the White House. Beginning in that first week under FDR and extending throughout his 3 terms, the White House had to employ 70 full-time people in the White House mail room to handle the letters addressed directly to the President from the American people.

While FDR’s temperament and style of communication was vital to the success of his fireside chats, not to mention the content of his public addresses, there can be no doubt that technology and the somewhat new form of media itself gave the President an important new tool to leverage in his effort to lead the nation.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I thought I’d post a Compete.com graph of the visitors to a few state-operated, publicly financed job boards in a sample of states where JobDig operates (JobDig currently serves markets in 14 states, and just announced its 15th state – Indiana – that will launch August 4th). The chart is included not so much to promote JobDig, but to demonstrate what a colossal waste of taxpayer money these state run job boards are. My guess is that the 4 job boards shown are wasting tens of millions of dollars every year in taxpayer money, and to what end? They aren’t drawing sufficient traffic to justify the expenditure, they are not filling an unmet need, they are not serving business that are posting jobs, they offer no assistance to jobseekers that cannot be met online through other sources, they are not generating tax revenue for the state, and they are not making states any more competitive than they otherwise would be. The only purposes these job boards serve are to keep an obscenely large number of state government bureaucrats employed and to give cynical politicians something they can point to, no matter how misguided it might in fact be, as evidence of their efforts to help businesses and workers in their state.