There is no shortage of strong writing on unemployment figures these days. Or, for that matter, projections. Nouriel Roubini , for one, is projecting things to get worse: Based on my best judgment, it is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and will remain at a very high level for two years or more. The weakness in labor markets and the sharp fall in labor income ensure a weak recovery of private consumption and an anemic recovery of the economy, and increases the risk of a double dip recession. As a result of these terribly weak labor markets, we can expect weak recovery of consumption and economic growth; larger budget deficits; greater delinquencies in residential and commercial real estate and greater fall in home and commercial real estate prices; greater losses for banks and financial institutions on residential and commercial real estate mortgages, and in credit cards, auto loans and student loans and thus a greater rate of failures of banks; and greater protectionist pressures. The damage will be extensive and severe unless bold policy action is undertaken now. But Daniel Gross has an interesting take at his Moneybox column for Slate . He agrees that "before things get better, they have to get worse more slowly." But he looked at the third quarter productivity numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and saw some hope: In the third quarter, productivity —econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor—rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate. We've just witnessed the fastest two-quarter productivity surge since the first year of the Kennedy administration. Economists can read these omens the way Roman priests read chicken entrails. And here's one of their explanations: Just as investors and businesspeople don't believe things could ever go wrong at the peak of the boom, they have difficulty imagining things can get better at the trough of the bust. And so they respond to rising demand not by hiring new employees but by coaxing existing employees to work harder. But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. "If you look at economies over many centuries, you can't grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute , whose leading employment indicators are looking up. "At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work." Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won't have any choice but to hire, says Michael Darda , chief economist at MKM Partners. "There's an outside chance we could see job growth by the end of the year." Read Coming Soon: Jobs! here .