The jobs report for September was a tale of two surveys.  The survey of employers was lousy: it showed only 46,000 private jobs added and downward revisions from previous months.

But as the chart below shows, the survey of households shows more than 400,000 added Americans in jobs.  The truth is probably somewhere in the middle of these estimates.

The one piece of very good news is that since July, 1.1 million new entrants into the workforce means the big slide in the workforce of recent years has reversed course. That is VERY good news and especially because hundreds of thousands of these additions were young men – whose labor force participation had been falling at a very troubling pace. Men without jobs is a bad thing economically and socially.