> The Economy Is Growing, Jobs Aren’t.

For the past year, two prominent indicators have told opposite stories of the economy’s health: The economy itself grew in 2025, but despite a solid March, jobs didn’t.

This puzzle could have an encouraging explanation: Productivity, which means workers are producing goods and services more efficiently, has revived at just the right time.

There are two main ways to grow the economy. The first is to add workers. This, though, has become harder since President Trump’s policies brought most immigration to a halt, while an aging workforce and a decadeslong drop in birth rates have sapped growth in the native-born labor force. That leaves the second channel: Make the workers you have more productive.

In the year through March, immigration crackdowns and continuing, large-scale retirements among the baby-boomer generation mean the labor force—people working or looking for a job— declined by 554,000.

Outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, the last drop of that magnitude occurred in late 2013, as baby boomers retired in large numbers. The longer-term outlook remains bleak, with the U.S. fertility rate at a record low.

With fewer new entrants to the labor force, the number of new jobs needed to keep the unemployment rate stable, called the breakeven rate, has also fallen, which helps explain why the jobless rate hasn’t risen much over the past year even as job creation flatlined at just under 22,000 a month on average, the lowest outside a recession since the year through March 2003.

“Zero job growth just doesn’t map into any kind of stability in terms of employment and whatnot,” Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at an economics conference in late February. “This would be the first time in my career, my life, that I saw an economy growing like this and zero job growth. I don’t even know quite how to think about this because I’ve never seen it before.”

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/the-ec … =djemITP_h