The Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal for December 6-7 features a front page story headlined "Job Losses Worst since '74: 533,000 Shed in November." As the Journal reported, nonfarm payrolls declined 533,000 for the month, which was the largest one-month drop since 1974. The newspaper went on to say that revisions to earlier figures showed that employers shed almost 1.3 million jo...

The October increase in industrial production gives a misleading picture of the overall state of the economy. According to the Federal Reserve, production increased in by 1.3% in October, after decreasing by 3.7% in September. Often, the overall level of industrial production can be affected by large output swings in only a couple of industries. In this case, the fall in September output and th...

In the recent presidential and congressional elections, special interest groups spent tens of millions of dollars to influence the outcomes. Among the leading big spenders were the nation’s major labor unions, who expect a payback now that many of their favored candidates have won. For decades union membership has been on the decline. In 1945, more than one out of every three workers in the...

The construction industry saw the largest overall job loss in a bleak employment picture. that has resulted in the highest unemployment rate in 14 years. The 6.5 percent jobless rate as of October 2008 rose from 4.8 percent a year ago. And, as the table below shows, out of the 2.7 million new jobless workers in the past 12 months, 437,000 came from the construction sector. Increase in the ...

The Congress has passed and the President will sign a new increase the the number of weeks that the unemployed workers may collect state and federal unemployment compensation. Lost in the shuffle is something very important: Subsidizing the unemployed may very well result in those without a job staying out of the labor market even longer. Economists have long pointed out that if you subsidize pe...

The unemployment rate has been rising steadily for more than a year, and in September, it stood at 6.1 percent. The last time the unemployment rate rose above 6 percent was in 2003, in the aftermath of the 2001 recession. Nonagricultural employment fell by 159,000 in September 2008, bringing the decrease so far this year to 760,000, a level previously experienced only in recession years. In t...

Over the postwar years, the civilian labor force participation rate (the percentage of people aged 16 and older  who are either employed or are looking for work) has gradually increased from about 59 percent to about 67 percent. Currently, it stands at 66.1 percent. However, this smooth trend in the aggregate labor force participation rate hides substantial differences among the age groups. ...

Civilian non-agricultural employment in the U.S. fell in five of the last seven months. Job losses, however, have not been uniform across sectors of the economy.  Manufacturing employment has been trending downward since the beginning of 2001, though the pace of losses has slackened. Between January 2001 and January 2004, more than 2.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost. From January 2004 to ...

As of April 2008 there were 7.6 million unemployed people in the United States, out of a total workforce of 153 million people. Of those unemployed, roughly half are classified as “job losers,” people who lost their job or completed a temporary job, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The remaining half is made up of “job leavers,” people who have left their job voluntarily and are searchi...

Millions of people around the world gather every May 1st to celebrate the social and economic achievements of the labor movement. Sadly, those societies that were organized in the name of workers and the equality of all individuals were forced to create a new class of individuals responsible for enforcing equality. This new class not only made themselves "more equal" than the workers they were su...

In many ways, today’s prevailing economic conditions are unusual given the signs of an economic slowdown. Interest rates are far below historical averages, real productivity growth remains strong, credit appears to be widely available – the “credit-crunch” notwithstanding, and the national unemployment rate is well below its post-WW II average. Is this low unemployment rate reading masking...

"Capitalists" (which seems to have become a dirty word - if your grandmother owns any mutual funds she is rightly called a capitalist) are accused of exploiting workers in the sense that firm owners/shareholders receive the bulk of the value that its employees create leaving employees with very little of the fruits of their own labor. One way to assess the validity of this claim is to measure th...

Are Communist rule and the trampling of peasants’ rights compatible with prosperity? Considering that real Chinese wealth has doubled since 2000 one might be inclined to make this assertion.     To appreciate the magnitude of this growth, the U.S. economy has grown by 18 percent since 2000. Had the U.S. grown as fast as China, per capita income would be over $20,000 higher than it ...

“How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?” by Alan Blinder, Princeton University CEPS Working Paper 142. Professor Blinder has estimated that up to 29 percent of all U.S. jobs are or will be susceptible to "offshoring" in the next one or two decades. Offshoring is the migration of employment from the U.S. (and other rich countries) to other (mostly poorer) countries. In a workf...

Lagging indicators of economic activity are given the least attention by the media.  Lagging indicators are those that turn consistently after turns in business-cycle activity. For example, a lagging indicator will reach its peak after the business cycle has peaked (i.e. after a recession has begun) and will reach its trough after the business cycle has reached its trough (i.e. after an expans...