EXCLUSIVE: Elizabeth Warren on Barack Obama: “They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. And it happened over and over and over”
“There has not been nearly enough change,” she tells Salon, taking on Obama failures, lobbyists, tuition. So 2016?
High-Stakes Musical Chairs: Fixing the Downward Bias in the Unemployment Rate
By Jared Bernstein
October 10, 2014
Ever since the JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) came into existence, labor market analysts have looked at the ratio of unemployed to job openings. In fact, the BLS publishes that very metric monthly (see chart 1 here). My old EPI colleague Jeff Wenger used to call it the “musical chairs” number, as when it goes up (high levels of job seekers per job), you can envision a bunch of folks trying to get the one seat/job when the music stops.
One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine. Well, duh, you may say. But, before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.
Shahien Nasiripour
