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.

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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.

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Income Share by Top Fractile (continued)

Or, why it was so important to keep top marginal income tax rates constant for millionaires.

Figure 1 depicts the income shares accruing to the top 0.5 percent and top 0.1 percent of households (including realized capital gains). It is clear that their shares have declined going from 2007 to 2008; for the top 0.1%, their share has declined from 12.3% to 10.4% of total income.

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Tales from the GDP revisions

Or things got a lot worse in 2008Q4 than we thought

 

The 2011Q2 advance release and revised estimates [0] contained many unpleasant surprises (see Jim’s assessment; also [CR1] and [CR2] [John Taylor] [Izzo/WSJ RTE]). The below consensus growth rate, and downward revision in Q1 growth, have been discussed elsewhere. I want to focus on the implications of the revisions to the data going back to 2003 (with particular emphasis on data back to 2007).

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“Sex Ratios and Exchange Rates”

From a paper (Ungated/Scribed version here) by Shang-Jin Wei and Qingyuan Du:

China and several other economies in Asia are experiencing an increasingly more severe relative
surplus of men in the pre-marital age cohort. While the existing literature on the sex ratio has examined
its social impact such as crime, we aim to explore neglected implications of the sex ratio imbalance for
the real exchange rate. …

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