Telling the real story about unemployment is tough. Anna Marie Smith’s piece in Zmag is excellent on the complexity, but really hard to summarize (although the cartoon, right, captures one angle very nicely). Paul Krugman’s July 6th op-ed in the NYT focusses on one measure – the percentage of adults who have jobs. In Salon, J. K. Galbraith discusses the “Manchester index”, which “multiplies the number of unemployed by the average duration of their unemployment. In this way, it captures one of the most important features of being without a job: that the situation gets worse the longer it lasts.” 
And not all jobs are equal: as the EPI points out, real wages have been falling for the last six months. All of these articles tell a part of the story, but none of them clearly supports the kind of memorable slogan that is essential in political rhetoric.
Maybe Kerry’s best approach is to stick with the simple words of Reagan: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” For the majority of people, the answer is crystal clear.
Update July 9, 2004: FactCheck.Org has put out an interesting analysis which suggests that the “quality of jobs” issue may not be as straightforward as most people think. Essentially there seem to be two inconsistent sets of data coming out from the BLS. FactCheck normally does good, careful work, so I’m going to watch this. One omission: they don’t mention benefits, which could be a significant factor.