Hey, remember the recovery from the recession? When businesses were going to make money and then the jobs would come back? Paul Krugman looks at the non-recovery of employment today. Above is the graph since 1948. There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.
Choire….there are underwear pictures to look at and a giant bus carrying a bump-it to avoid. Get your priorities straight.
Maybe its better to say that the jobs aren't coming back at the pace that they were expected to. We are still adding jobs on net as an economy, but not at the rate they are needed.
And that brings us to…the EMRATIO. One of the cleanest looking stats, but still sort of cloudy. The stat excludes the incarcerated, those in the military, teen workers, and makes assumptions about just what percentage of the elderly want to work. If you take into account the fact that:
-we have a great number of people employed in the military that would otherwise be here looking for work
- the elderly who did not/could not save for their own retirements, and will be delaying retirement
-teenagers looking for jobs to help support families.
-the increasing percentage of population locked up.
we have the situation where population growth has been outstripping jobs growth for about ten years now.
Leaner. And very, very meaner.
And of course it looks like the last non-recessionary period never even came close to bringing back the jobs lost in the '00-'01 bust. Ugh.
Though it is ALSO worth noting that this is a fairly zoomed in Y-axis, and the chart would look a lot less dramatic if the bottom were zero. Also the supposedly perfect '50s were apparently a series of three quick boom-bust cycles? Who knew?
@jfruh: All those hats and suits threw us off.
@jfruh: Don't blame me, I voted for Stevenson.
i finally got my slip and fall settlement for $20,000. i'm not going to work another day in my life.
@roboloki When you finally blow through the money, let me know. We'll meet up at the Trump Tower on a rainy day and let gravity have its way with us. That'll put you back on easy street.
And don't forget that the quality of remaining jobs is declining.
Economics: the art of justifying any claim using any data set.
so you mean to tell me based on this graph we have 42% unemployment right now? That really doesn't sound right to any other numbers.. Which makes me not trust this graph at all