On the heels of the September good-but-not-good-enough jobs report, David Altig--senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed--charts how long it will take for the US economy to recover all the jobs lost since the start of the recession:

The chart is from the Atlanta Fed's Macroblog, where Altig writes:

Payroll employment growth has averaged about 110,000 jobs a month since February 2010, the jobs low point associated with the crisis and recession. This growth level compares, unfavorably, with the 158,000 jobs added per month during the last jobs recovery period from August 2003 (the low point following the 2001 recession) through November 2007 (the month before the recent recession began). One hundred and ten thousand jobs a month compares favorably, however, to the 96,000 job creation pace so far this year.

Are these sorts of differences material? If the economy can find its way to creating jobs at the same rate as the last recovery—which nobody remembers as particularly off-the-chart spectacular—we would be back to the prerecession level of overall employment by spring 2015. If, on the other hand, we can only eke out the sub-100k pace we've seen this year, that date moves out to 2017.

Altig goes on to point out that this chart is for the number of jobs, and not for the unemployment rate.  With the slowest jobs recovery rate of the above chart,the unemployment rate would actually get higher, according to Altig's estimates.  Read the full post here.