The Numbers Crunch: Mixed Returns for California’s Middle Class

For instance, the statewide jobless rate declined to 5.8 percent in October, down from 7.2 percent in October 2014. Total employment in the state grew by more than 380,000 over the previous year, accounting for more than 20 percent of the entire country’s employment gains, according to the latest employment report from the California Center for Jobs & the Economy.

A significant portion of the decline in unemployment, however, is because many Californians have given up looking for work. Labor force participation in October was barely 62 percent, below the historic low in 1976. For those not around way back then, those were the dark years of “stagflation” – the triple whammy of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising prices.