Yet employment, measured by the count of persons who are working rather than by the count of jobs, has been rising 2 percent a year since 1995 despite the acceleration in the growth of output per hour.
The gap between employment growth and population growth, amounting to about 1.2 million a year on average, has been made up, in part, by a decline in the number of individuals who are counted as unemployed -those persons who are actively seeking work -- of approximately 700,000 a year, on average, since the end of 1995.