As I warned last week, job growth in October was likely to be less than the experts were predicting because the September hurricanes in the past have had an effect on more than one month’s statistics.

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that it was weak. October officially came in at 261,000 new jobs — not the 310,000 to 330,000 that the experts were expecting.

Labor did, however, revise upward the growth for August and September by a total of 90,000 jobs.

If that isn’t confusing enough, consider this: In the survey of households, employment declined by 484,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate — which is derived from the household survey — declined by 0.1 percentage point, to 4.1 percent, because a lot of people stopped looking for jobs.