When it comes to jobs, Jack Strauss thinks of St. Louis as a tortoise.

Most of the time, swifter creatures leave the tortoise behind. When the going gets tough — as in a recession — the hard-shelled reptile starts to catch up.

"He may walk slower, but that turtle can weather the storm better," says Strauss, a professor of economics at St. Louis University. "The hares, symbolized by Las Vegas and Arizona, may have got struck by lightning."

Strauss has noticed something in the employment statistics that might surprise many St. Louisans. On a percentage basis, our job losses are significantly less severe than the nation's. The metro area has lost 3.8 percent of its jobs since the beginning of last year, while the U.S. has lost 5.2 percent. The raw numbers show 52,000 fewer St. Louisans working and 7.1 million fewer Americans.

Nationally, the biggest job losses have been in construction, manufacturing, financial services and retail. In all four, the percentage loss in St. Louis is below average.

We've lost just 5.6 percent of our construction jobs, for example, versus 22 percent for the U.S., and 2.7 percent of our finance jobs, versus 6.4 percent nationwide.

That's partly because we didn't have a housing boom, so we didn't have a disproportionate number of people building houses or making and packaging mortgages. "We weren't hit by bank failures, and we weren't hit by the wreckage of Wall Street," Strauss notes.

In manufacturing, Boeing and other military contractors have been stable even as Chrysler and several auto parts plants left the scene.

The trouble is, once the economy starts to grow again, St. Louis' tortoise economy is slow to leave the starting blocks. After the recession of 1990-91, the nation took nearly two years to regain the lost jobs. St. Louis needed more than three years.

After the 2001 recession, the jobless recovery was even more pronounced. Getting back to peak employment took a little more than three years for the U.S. and more than five years for St. Louis.

Strauss isn't sure why the local economy is so sluggish during recoveries. He thinks it might have something to do with a dearth of small, fast-growing businesses.

Various studies have found that St. Louis has a low rate of business startups or lacks an entrepreneurial culture. Since small business creates the majority of jobs, perhaps those studies have identified what separates the tortoises from the hares.

"Unless we do something pretty quickly, the historical pattern is going to repeat itself," Strauss says. "Small business is an engine of growth, and St. Louis ranks poorly, so we're very likely to suffer unless we reverse that."

Unfortunately, some anecdotal evidence suggests that the tortoise will, once again, be slow to come out of its shell. In the Federal Reserve's beige book survey released last week, the St. Louis and Atlanta regions were the only parts of the country to report that their economies continued to deteriorate. Other districts reported that conditions were mixed or showed signs of improvement.

Thomas Garrett, an economist at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, said we shouldn't read too much into the language used in the survey, which isn't scientific and is based on interviews with businesspeople. But, he confirmed, historically the region lags the rest of the country during recoveries.

And we may be about to enter one of those periods when it's not so great to be a tortoise.