Tufte’s Short Post # 25: The employment sector has bifurcated

The employment sector has bifurcated. JOLTS data indicate that the job market has been recovering normally for almost 4 years, and that in many ways is back to where we should expect it to be in mid-expansion. Except we’ve left about 5 million people out. Somehow we’ve put an (invisible) scarlet letter on a small, but not insignificant, chunk of the population. The data and the reality will not be pretty until we figure out what’s wrong with this group.

There’s an arthouse film called Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. You’re getting Twenty-Six Short Posts from Dr. Tufte. :) These are on why it’s difficult to understand the current macroeconomic situation. Joe Baker is not a macroeconomist, but we all do a little bit of everything at SUU, so he has to teach principles of macroeconomics sometimes. The other day he asked for pointers about summing up for his students why we can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with the economy. I came up with 26 reasons, most of which have been discussed in class, and all of which are now required.