Full Employment Series, #3: More on the Automation/Unemployment Nexis
Check out this Wonkbook interview with Kevin Drum on the question of whether there’s been an acceleration of labor saving technology in the workplace. I think “maybe.” Drum thinks “definitely.” WaPo: The obvious economic story is that AI reduces the need for human labor, so the demand for it falls and wages fall in turn. [...]
Slides from Tonight’s Presentation
Spoke to the very cool and progressive NYC chapter of NASW tonight in the big city. In fact, here’s me and the renowned musician Victor Lesser at Vinnie’s Clam Bar in Little Italy…if you can take the heat, the shrimp with spicy tomato sauce is as good as it gets. Oh, and here are the [...]
Don’t Tax You, Don’t Tax Me…Tax that Guy Behind the Tree!
Everyone says they want to broaden the tax base and lower the rates. Until you get specific…then it’s “that’s no loophole, that’s my vitally important jobs, investment, savings, and growth, program!” That’s certainly the way to understand the pushback to the President’s very good and very modest idea to limit the amount of tax deferred savings [...]
Talkin’ Full Employment
…over at the NYT. One of OTE’s favorite topics! Getting good feedback on this piece–there are a growing number of folks who recognize that the market can’t always be counted on to provide an adequate quantity of employment opportunities.
More on the Cost of Moderate Payroll Growth
In my last post I told you how a) payroll growth is just moderate, not fast, and b) that means the unemployment rate comes down a lot slower than many of us would like. I noted that if we look at the relationship between the annual change in payrolls and that of unemployment, and plug [...]
Jobs Report, Good News, Less Good News, and a Warning
Now that I’ve had a chance to calm down—these early morning releases get me all atwitter—here are three observations from this morning’s jobs report: Good news: First, April’s payroll number along with the upward revisions of the prior two months should dispel, at least for now, the idea that there’s some kind of spring swoon [...]
April Jobs Report Comes in Better Than Expected
Payrolls increased by 165,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.5%, in a jobs report that painted a considerably brighter picture than last month’s version. In fact, the disappointing 88,000 payroll gain for March was revised up in today’s report to 138,000, and in February, new revisions show a large increase of [...]
Jobs Day Tomorrow
I’m expecting 130K on total payrolls and 135K on private, so I’m below consensus, which Bloomberg puts at 153K for the total. I expect the unemployment rate to maybe tick up a tenth. And that’s all the time we should spend forecasting these volatile monthly numbers. More interesting, I think, is the question of why [...]
Pope Francis on Unemployment, Austerity, and Social Justice
Well, how about that? Here’s another highly influential voice getting on the right side of the austerity debate: Pope Francis on Wednesday urged political leaders to make every effort to create jobs and said unemployment was caused by economic thinking “outside the bounds of social justice.” “I call on politicians to make every effort to relaunch [...]
The Four Noble Truths of Full Employment
[From a talk I just gave…] This wonderful setting has led me to meditate on the four noble truths of Buddhism: 1) suffering exists; 2) the causes of suffering can be known; 3) suffering can cease 4) the path to end suffering exists. It is the way. So it is with full employment: unemployment exists; [...]
Getting Back to Full Employment
Getting back to full employment—not debt, deficits, sequester, debt ceilings—is what we ought to be talking about (along with R&R, of course). I’m happy to say, in fact, that in my travels outside this benighted town (DC), it’s the question I get asked most often (“why isn’t Washington doing anything about jobs!!??”). What do I [...]
A Few Thoughts on Immigration Reform
Here are a few observations on the new immigration reform proposal, with an emphasis on a part that I think is particularly important and largely overlooked given the emphasis on citizenship: the consideration of labor market impacts and the introduction of mechanisms to control them. Before getting into some policy analysis, let’s consider why the reform [...]
Manufacturing, Unions, Full Employment and Other Cool Stuff
Here’s an interesting piece by my pal Lane Kenworthy on lots of stuff I go on about in these parts. Many good insights but a few parts in which I see things differently, one of which is very important to our respective views of the way out of the inequality/wage-stagnation cul-de-sac. His theory of the [...]
Underemployment Is Also the Right Target (Not Just Unemployment)
If we wanted to target the persistent slack in the labor market, though I can’t see any signs that we do, we shouldn’t just target the unemployment rate; we should also go after the underemployment rate. Since it captures the important dimension of not just do you have a job, but are you getting the [...]
More on Today’s Jobs Report: We Need a Friend in the Trend
Today’s disappointing jobs report requires a bit more analysis to put it in perspective. As I noted earlier, March’s 88,000 in payroll gains came in way too low, but February was a relatively strong 268,000, so you’ve got to average out the noise. The figure below does this and provides, IMHO, the needed perspective. The [...]
Jobs Report: First Reaction
Payrolls were up only 88,000 last month, well below expectations, and while the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.6%, the decline in the jobless rate was due not to job gains, but to people leaving the labor market. In fact, the share of the population in the workforce—working or looking for work—fell to 63.3%, the [...]
Jobs Day Tomorrow: It’s A Wealth V. Wages Recovery
How do we know economists have a sense of humor? Because we keep forecasting the monthly jobs numbers. And so, without further ado and with deep humility, I submit that I expect tomorrow’s jobs report to show payrolls up about 170,000 in March, which is below the 193,000 consensus and a deceleration from February’s initial [...]
David Stockman Goes Way, Way Over the Top
He has a featured piece in today’s NYT which, while about 11.8% absolutely and totally on target, is mostly a horrific screed, an ahistorical, dystopic, Hunger-Games vision of America based on debt obsession and willful ignorance of macroeconomics and the impact of market failure. The first sign of a problem here comes from a mash-up [...]
Saturday Night Data Date
I don’t know your idea of a hot Saturday night date, but I just met a cool data source that I didn’t know about (actually, I think I forgot about it). Those stalwart number crunchers at the Economic Policy Institute usefully update some very interesting data series that BLS doesn’t publish, like underemployment by race/ethnicity [...]
Which Of These Trends Bothers You More?
Here’s a simple graph I just made for a presentation this weekend that plots the deficit/GDP ratio and the unemployment rate (CBO data; fiscal years; 2013 forward are forecasts). Unemployment’s stuck at an elevated rate, and expected to stay there (these forecasts assume the sequester sticks, which I fear is correct). The budget deficit, on [...]
Deeper Dive into the Jobs Report: Labor Force Participation and Weekly Earnings
Today’s jobs report is widely being viewed as a sign of an improving job market, a view I share with (of course) caveats. The biggest question is, as I noted earlier, whether the recent acceleration of payroll growth sticks, especially as the sequester takes hold, which is hasn’t yet. So far, both the stock and [...]
Jobs Up More Than Expected Last Month
Payrolls expanded by 236,000 last month and the jobless rate ticked down to 7.7%, its lowest rate since late 2008, outperforming analysts expectations. Hours worked per week increased and hourly pay rose as well, suggesting a potential improvement in employer demand (though, as noted, some indicators in the report point the other way—these monthly reports [...]
Jobs Day Tomorrow
The February jobs numbers will be out tomorrow at 8:30AM–I’ll be on CNBC discussing them in real time before I scoot back here to write them up. My guesses for tomorrow are, FWIW, 160,000 for payrolls overall, 170,000 for private, and unemployment ticks down to 7.7% (all from a simple time series forecasting model which [...]
Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.
