January 05, 2015
Robert Samuelson gave his assessment of where the economy stands in his column this morning. At one point he tells readers that if the economy creates 230,000 jobs a month, by the end of the year it will be approaching full employment.
Even if the economy adds 230,000 jobs a month in 2015, by the end of the year it will still be more than 3 million jobs below what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other forecasters projected before the downturn. That would imply that the economy would still be far below full employment.
Of course it is possible that CBO’s projections about the labor force from 2008 were wrong, but this raises the obvious question of when CBO stopped being wrong. It is not obvious that it has learned more about the economy and the labor market in the last seven years, therefore it is not clear that its current assessment of the labor market should be treated as more accurate than its assessment from 2008.
Also, contrary to what is asserted in the article, Japan has been seeing rapid growth in employment under its new stimulus policies. In fact, its employment to population ratio has risen more than twice as much as the U.S. ratio since the end of 2012 when it adopted these policies. It is likely to again see healthy growth in 2015 now that it has put off a scheduled increase in the sales tax.
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