The May employment report is another disappointment.  Nonfarm employment fell another 49,000, marking a 324,000 decline (0.23%) since the peak in December.  That headline will likely be overshadowed by the large increase in the unemployment rate, from 5.0% in April to 5.5% in May.  Note that these two statistics come from different surveys--nonfarm employement is from a survey of establishments and the unemployment rate is from a survey of households.

What's behind the unemployment rate increase?  The unemployment rate is the ratio of those unemployed to the civilian labor force (the sum of those employed plus those unemployed).  Recall that you can be out of work but not counted as unemployed--to be unemployed, you have to be looking for work.  When interpreting the numbers, we also have to be careful to acknowledge that these are net flows from the survey.  For example, in May, according to the household survey:

Here's one thing you haven't read about Alan Greenspan's book: It confirms the death of microeconomics.

That's obviously a bit too strong. As Steven Levitt and his blockbuster book Freakonomics and Tyler Cowen and his recently published and wonderful-to-read Discover Your Inner Economist have shown, there still is some role for microeconomic analysis when thinking about individual behavior, especially if the goal is to entertain and sell books.

But the second half of Greenspan's book, the part that, as CNBC's chief economics correspondent Steve Liesman first reported on the day the book was released, will have a far greater impact, seems to put to bed the notion that government policy is based on microeconomics. Macro appears to be, and over the past 40 years have been, much more important.