Some good news, but it all has to be put in perspective. As Mark Thoma points out, 120,000 jobs is about what is needed to keep unemployment from rising. In addition, the drop in the unemployment rate was driven largely by the drop in the participation rate, not the rise in employed. That’s going to be greater relevance if the extension of unemployment benefits is further blocked (in other words, there are offsetting employment effects from UI, as discussed in this rejoinder to Mulligan). More discussion at Izzo/WSJ RTE. I’m going to focus on data from the establishment survey.
Category Archives: employment
Decisions, decisions
The U.S. State Department received the application from TransCanada for permission to build the Keystone XL Pipeline Extension over 3 years ago. Today, the White House made a firm decision not to decide just yet, with the State Department indicating that an actual decision is at least another year away.
Nice to see the President is focused like a laser on how to get Americans back to work.
Shovel ready
Some infrastructure spending is more stimulative than others.
Slow growth continues
The stock market has looked scary. But economic indicators suggest U.S. growth is continuing.
What could America be good at?
A vision of what American economic growth over the next decade could look like might also help us address our immediate economic problems.
Recovery, or Replaying 1937 (and 2008)?
The President laid out a series of policy measures in today’s speech which are, by textbook standards, entirely reasonable. And yet, many have been declared by the pundits to be DOA. I’ll leave the assessment of political feasibility to others, but the very fact that these specific measures [0] are so reasonable by textbook standards makes me wonder if we have in fact experienced technological regress in our politico-economic discourse. Maybe those shocks in RBC models are just the fact that so many individuals with influence never took an intermediate macro course, let alone an economics course [1] (I highly recommend Robert Hall and John Taylor’s Macroeconomics, or the later editions, by Hall and David Papell).
Current economic conditions
The economic data arriving during the last week have been deeply discouraging, though are slightly less grim than some may have been concluding.
Where can America find more income and jobs?
In January 2008, ExxonMobil and Norway’s Statoil announced a promising discovery in the Julia Field in the Gulf of Mexico that may contain a billion barrels of oil. In October of that year, Exxon applied for a 5-year extension of the lease for time to develop a suitable development plan. To the company’s surprise, the U.S. Department of Interior denied the request in February 2009, and has continued to turn down subsequent appeals. The company has
filed a lawsuit to have the decision overturned.
Is the Jobs Mystery Solved?
Professor Scott Sumner says “No more jobs mystery. Period. End of story.”. I’m not so certain.
From the post:
If I hear one more discussion of the mysterious lack of jobs I’ll explode. The new GDP numbers are the final nail in the coffin. For years I’ve been saying there is no jobs mystery. That any deviation from Okun’s Law was minor compared to the scale of the output collapse. With the new RGDP figures we now know I was right, there isn’t and never was any mystery as to why there are so few jobs. RGDP is very low. Period. End of story.
Livin’ in a Shapiro-Stiglitz World
I have been wondering why so many seem to be indifferent to the plight of the unemployed. Sometimes, the attitude is not so much indifference, but rather irritation that the poor are exempted from the burdens of society (see e.g., [0]).
Here is a plot of the unemployment rate and the alternative unemployment rate including marginally attached and part-time workers.