Quoctrung Bui

The big jobs report that comes out at the beginning of every month has tons of data on how the job market is doing. But it doesn't tell us much about what peoples' jobs are really like.

Last month, we asked people to tell us what they really do ...

As anyone who has been 25 and not 25 can tell you, spending patterns change over the course of adult life.

We built the graph below to track these changes. It shows how different categories of spending change between age 25 and 75. For each category, spending at age 25 ...

A few weeks ago, we were sitting around the office arguing over this simple question: Who had richer parents, journalists or people working in finance? Doctors or artists? More generally: What's the link between household income during childhood and job choice during adulthood?

After some poking around, we figured out ...

The big monthly jobs report that came out Friday has tons of numbers describing the American labor force. The numbers are helpful as far as they go, but they skip over a whole dimension of work: What it's really like.

So, over the past few weeks, we asked people ...

We don't think of Russia as a petro state in the same category as, say, Saudi Arabia. But we should: Russia is the world's biggest exporter of natural gas, and the second-biggest exporter of oil.

This is worth pointing out at the moment, given the talk of sanctions ...

Yesterday, we crunched thousands of pizza prices from around the country, and argued that you should always buy a bigger pizza. (And in a separate post, we presented the case against buying a bigger pizza.)

And we figured, hey, we've got all this data, what else can we ...

One day last year, an engineer and I went to a pizza place for lunch. The engineer told me he wasn't very hungry, but he said he was going to get the 12-inch medium instead of the 8-inch small — because the medium was more than twice as big as ...

When you are out of work and looking for 27 weeks or longer, you become part of a group the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls long-term unemployed. The share of long-term unemployed workers hit its peak in May 2010, when 46 percent of the unemployed were long-term unemployed. It has ...

It might hard to imagine in this sputtering recovery, but 2.4 million people actually quit their jobs in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's nearly a million more quitters than there were during the darkest months of the recession.

As the graph shows, there's a big range ...

Quick question: How many times do you pay for stuff in a given month? Not how much do you spend, but how many times do you exchange dollars for goods or services — pay a bill, put gas in your car, download a song from iTunes, pick up a sandwich ...

Whatever Friday's monthly jobs report says, it won't change the big picture. There are roughly 137 million jobs in this country. About two-thirds of those jobs are in private-sector services; the remaining third are split between goods-producing jobs (mainly manufacturing and construction) and government work (mostly at the state and ...

The United States has a cultural obsession with manufacturing. When policymakers stump about job growth and job creation, they often focus on manufacturing jobs.

But for more than 60 years, the number of manufacturing jobs has been stagnant, while the number of service jobs has exploded. Service jobs now account ...

Today on New Year's Eve, let's look at the last big economic release of 2013: consumer confidence.

Consumer confidence ended the year on a strong note. The index grew to 78.1 points for the month of December, a nice rebound from the big hit it took in October.

The consumer ...

The economy grew really quickly this summer. At least, that's the government's best guess for now.

The BEA said Friday that GDP rose at an annual rate of 4.1 percent between July and September. That's the highest it has been in years. But in its previous estimate for ...

Over the past 50 years, both the way the federal government spends money and what the government spends money on has changed a lot.

It used to be that most spending was what wonks call "discretionary spending." This is money that has to be approved every year by Congress.

Today, ...

The developed world is getting old, and Japan is the poster boy.

The graph below shows how, over the course of a century, Japan shifts a from nation where children predominate to a nation of senior citizens. (The population figures and projections for the coming half-century are from the ...

When the big jobs report comes out Friday morning, we'll hear a lot about what happened in November in the job market.

But whatever happened last month, it won't change this fact: The job market is still terrible.

The official unemployment rate — which includes only people who are ...

A town near Seattle may raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Massachusetts is debating raising the hourly minimum to $11. And in the nation's capital, Senate Democrats are pushing a bill that could raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10.

With all that talk ...

We made a graph today that we found interesting. It's the distribution of home sales prices from September of this year from the National Association of Realtors. It shows that most homes sold for prices that, to someone living in an expensive, coastal city, seem pretty affordable.

We weren't sure ...

The federal government is sitting on $18 billion in unclaimed money — money that's owed to ordinary people and businesses who never swung by to pick it up. This is a tiny fraction of the federal budget. But it's still, you know, a lot of money.

A few notes on ...