Casey Mulligan raises two interesting points:
- If the unemployment is so bad, why is employment still peaking in the summer — when more people are looking for jobs?
- If unemployment is so bad, why are people over 65 having such an easy time finding work?
Here are the charts:
This shows that there are not as many people working in the summer this year as others … but there is still the same spike in employment. How are people getting all those summer jobs if there are no jobs?
This one shows that there are more seniors working now that there were during the peak of the last expansion (before you jump and say that they’re working because they have to, note that this is an index, and we’re only talking about a 2-4% increase — in line with routine population growth).
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution points to the appropriate quote to explain this:
All else being the same, the market tends to create and allocate jobs for those people who are most interested in working.
Funny that.
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