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Article Artículo

More on the Continuing Weakness of the Labor Market

The November jobs numbers were unambiguously good news. The economy is moving in the right direction and at a faster pace than we had seen in years. But we have to realize how far the labor market has to go before it makes up the ground lost in the recession.

The simplest and best measure is the employment to population ratio (EPOP), which gives the percentage of the adult population which is employed. This stood at 59.2 percent in November (unchanged from October). This is 1.0 percentage points above the low of 58.2 percent last hit in the summer of 2011, but it is still more than four full percentage points below the pre-recession peaks and more than five full percentage points below the all-time highs hit in 2000.

Many people have dismissed these comparisons by pointing to demographic changes, specifically the aging of the baby boomers. With much of the baby boom cohort now in their sixties, we would expect to see more people retiring, but if we look at prime age workers (ages 25-54) we get a similar story. The OECD reports that the EPOP for this group was 76.8 percent in the third quarter of this year, compared to 79.9 percent in 2007 and 81.5 percent in 2000. People in their thirties and forties have not just suddenly decided that they want to retire. This drop in employment is almost certainly due to the weakness of demand in the labor market.

Some other measures of slack are also useful to note. Some reports have noted the upturn in quit rates as reported in the Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey. The most recent data puts the quit rate at 2.0 percent compared to a low of 1.3 percent at the trough of the recession. This means that more people are prepared to quit a job with which they are unhappy. But this figure is still down from 2.2 percent as a year-round average in 2006. (We should remember that even in the pre-recession period, the labor market was just getting tight enough to see some wage growth.) The quit rate at the end of 2000 and start of 2001, when the survey began, was as high as 2.6 percent. (When considering these numbers it is important to realize that the shift in employment over this period from low quit sectors like manufacturing to high quit sectors like restaurants would have added at least 0.1-0.2 percentage points to the quit rate.)

Dean Baker / December 06, 2014

Article Artículo

Economics for Economic Reporters Lesson 34,721: Monthly Wage Data Are Erratic

Okay boys and girls, today we learn about the erratic pattern of wage data. Ideally the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) would tell us exactly how much hourly wages rose each month. Unfortunately, BLS doesn't have that ability. It has a very good survey of establishments that gives a reasonably close estimates of current hourly and weekly wages, but these numbers are not exact. And, since each month's wage estimate includes a component of error, the changes from one month can contain a very large component of error.

To see the logic, imagine that the 95% confidence interval is +/- 0.1 percent. (I haven't checked this, but 0.1 percent would be pretty good.) Suppose that one month it underestimates the average wage by 0.1 percent. Suppose the next month it overestimates the average wage by 0.1 percent. This would lead to a wage growth number from one month to the next that was 0.2 percentage points above the true number. In a context where monthly wage growth has been averaging less than 0.2 percent, this would be a very large error. That is why it is always advisable to take a longer period than a single month to assess wage growth. (My preferred measure is taking the rate of change for the most recent three months compared with the prior three months.)

Many foolish comments about the November employment report could have been avoided if reporters recognized the erratic nature of the monthly data. The 9 cent gain (0.4 percent) reported in the average hourly wage for November was widely touted. Unfortunately, reporters did not bother to note that BLS reported a gain of just 0.1 percent in October and 0.0 percent in September. As a result of the weak wage growth the prior two months, the average wage for these three months grew at just a 1.8 percent annual rate compared with the average of the prior three months. That is somewhat below the 2.1 percent increase over the last year.

When we look at these numbers we have two choices. One is to take the monthly data at face value, as almost all the reports on the November report did, and believe that wage growth virtually stopped in September and October and then surged in November. Alternatively, we can believe that the slowdown in September and October and the surge in November were both driven by measurement error.

Dean Baker / December 06, 2014

Article Artículo

Labor Market Policy Research Reports through December 5, 2014

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Center for American Progress

Economic Snapshot: November 2014
Christian E. Weller and Jackie Odum

One Strike and You’re Out: How We Can Eliminate Barriers to Economic Security and Mobility for People with Criminal Records
Rebecca Vallas and Sharon Dietrich

State Disinvestment in Higher Education Has Led to an Explosion of Student-Loan Debt
Elizabeth Baylor

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Boosting Disability Insurance Share of Social Security Tax Would Not Harm Retirees
Kathy A. Ruffing and Paul N. Van de Water

CEPR and Janine Duffy / December 05, 2014

Article Artículo

Chris Rock, Ezra Klein, and the Second Great Depression Myth

I have to take some issue with Ezra Klein in his criticisms of Chris Rock. Ezra is upset with Rock's suggestion that Obama would have been best off letting the financial industry and the auto companies collapse, and then picking up the pieces. Rock argued that Obama would have gotten more credit from this path than he is getting now for having bailed out firms and effectively muddled along.

Ezra responds that Rock's plan is:

"morally odious: it would have meant putting millions of Americans through harrowing pain in order to help Obama out politically."

He then argues that it would have given us a second Great Depression.

On the first point, I completely agree that putting millions of people out of work for political ends is morally odious. However, if we flip this over for a moment and make the question one of putting millions of people temporarily out of work for the ostensible longer term benefit of the economy, it would be much more difficult to call the choice morally odious. At least if we did, then we would have to say that most of the central bankers in the last century and the politicians who appointed them were morally odious.

It is central banking 101 that you raise interest rates to slow the economy and throw millions of people out of work in order to head off inflation. Paul Volcker is a hero in elite Washington circles precisely because he raised interest rates and threw millions of people out of work in order to bring an end to the inflation of the 1970s. To his admirers (which do not include me), the longer term benefits to the economy were worth the pain suffered by the millions of unemployed and their families. So the idea of throwing millions out of work to advance important economic ends is widely accepted in policy circles, even if most of us may agree that it is unacceptable to deliberately throw large numbers of people out of work as a campaign strategy.

Dean Baker / December 04, 2014

Article Artículo

Affordable Care Act

Edsall and Obamacare: More Confusion

Thomas Edsall used his column today to agree with Charles Schumer that the Democrats made a mistake by pushing through Obamacare and should have instead focused on the economy. As I've noted previously, this is wrong on both sides.

On the economy side, what does Schumer think the Democrats would have accomplished if they had never said a word about health care? Would they have gotten another $20 billion a year in stimulus spending, $30 billion, $40 billion? Plug in your number, but it doesn't have to get too high before it doesn't pass the laugh test. Of course any additional spending would have been good both for creating jobs and the longer term benefits, but if Schumer is claiming that barring a whole different political world (i.e. doing a lot more than skipping health care reform) we would have seen enough stimulus to make a qualitative difference in the state of economy, and the public's view of the economy, then he's been smoking something strong.

There is a plausible alternative economic story, but it has nothing to do with Obamacare. Instead of using Big Government to protect the Wall Street gang from their own greed and incompetence, Obama could have let the market work its magic and put most of the Wall Streeters out of business. (Left to the market, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup certainly would have gone bankrupt.) He could have used the Justice Department to put the Wall Street felons behind bars. (Knowingly putting fraudulent loans in a mortgage backed security is fraud. Selling an investment grade rating for a mortgage backed security is fraud.)  And, he could have tapped into populist sentiment to impose a Wall Street sales tax that would tax financial speculation. Even the I.M.F. has recommended increasing taxes on the financial industry, recognizing it as an undertaxed sector. 

In short, there is a populist economic path that Obama could have pursued that would have put the economy and the Democrats in a very different position. But nothing about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prevented them from going this route. Furthermore, it's unlikely that Senator Schumer has any interest in following this path, unless the NYT neglected to cover his endorsement of a financial transaction tax and the jailing of Wall Street bankers.

Dean Baker / December 03, 2014