The employment report was basically more of the same and was very discouraging.Even though the headline number reported a large 431,00 increase in employment, most of this was temporary Census jobs. Private employment only increased 41,000, significantly less than in the previous few months. The unemployment rate fell, but that was just as much a […]

So there was this big snowstorm that hit the East Coast a couple of weeks ago. (Not the one this weekend, that dumped about 2′ of snow on Upstate New York and a little more than a foot here in suburban New Jersey; the one that wiped out D.C. and gave the Party of No […]

Let us see if we can translate my previous post on job selection into an economic model.  Start with a basic formula: (1) AcceptOffer = a(1) + a(2)*w + a(3)*b + a(4)*oa + a(5)*t where a is a constant, w is wages, b is benefits, oa is “opportunity for advancement” and t is treatment received […]

Even more than Digby on CalPERS, the one piece everyone should read today is Charlie Stross on International Travel. Since this is an economics blog, let’s pull a key section: Here’s the rub: security is a state of mind, not a procedure. Procedures can’t cope with attackers, because they’re inflexible. If you search passengers for […]

Even during the last “jobless recovery,” people did not continue to become discouraged. Things have changed.

While I applaud the cautious optimism of Spencer and Tom, I’m more inclined to quote Joseph Brusuelas: [T]he January payrolls added a dollop of Zen like logic to a recovery that is shaping up like no other. An additional 111,000 workers entered the labor force, yet the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% while private sector […]

Via (what else?) Alea’s Twitter feed, John Taylor defends himself against Ben Bernanke: “The evidence is overwhelming that those low interest rates were not only unusually low but they logically were a factor in the housing boom and therefore ultimately the bust,” Taylor, a Stanford University economist, said in an interview today in Atlanta. It’s […]

With all the talk of “Detroit,” you would think that Michigan would have lost the most employees, as a percentage of same, on the year. After all, the scariest graph of the U.S. MSAs isn’t scary for nothing. But the Regional and State Employment data is out for October (h/t CR), and there’s a different […]

Robert Waldmann Larry Summers, who is very very good at provoking debate, said “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” Paul Krugman responds here True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount […]

First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]