What the new unemployment numbers mean

I had a fast first take on the numbers on Friday at Fox News (available here). Using the Household Survey numbers, the numbers used to calculate the unemployment rate, there were 31,000 fewer people employed but at the same time the number of people "not in the labor force" rose by 33,000 million. Look at the raw numbers over the last six months. The unemployment rate fell from 9 to 8.2 percent during that time. The number unemployed fell by 616,000 and the number of people in the working age group increased by 2.5 million. So what happened with those 3.1 million people? Well, 910,000 of them got jobs and 2.24 million left the labor force.